You are Supporting Discrimination
We care more that the chicken we eat lived a good, free-range life than we do about treating our fellow human beings with respect.I finally got around reading End of Faith by Sam Harris as a part of bookclub reading. I can say without a doubt that it has opened a whole new world of understanding for me. The book is Sam Harris’ propaganda against religion and he tries to debate how silly and dangerous it is for us to live in a society where religion is untouchable. I have always known that religion has been the cause of many monstrosities in the world but I have to admit that I didn’t really know the half of it. I had no idea that hate and intolerance were that thoroughly ingrained in religion.
One of my biggest questions after reading this book is why do we have all those unspoken sanctions on religion? Here in Norway, for example, you aren’t really supposed to criticize religious practices, or it is at least horribly politically incorrect. Various groups keep pushing the blasphemy paragraph, and if you dare to utter a negative word about Islam, well then it is of course quite clear that you are a pure, evil racist.
The common understanding seems to be that you should leave religion alone and not discriminate people based on its religious beliefs. Which to me makes sense but only under the condition that they themselves do show the same respect to others and do not discriminate.
An obvious example of a group that is often discriminated against is gay people. While the church is slowly growing more tolerant, Islam still has a very long way to go. While we might not be able to change every individual mind to accept gay people the government could give a very strong signal that we don’t accept intolerance. A strong signal would be to simply cut off government funding to institutions that are not willing to treat gay people on equal level with all other people.
It is really strange that this isn’t already in place or being pushed by all these people out there that claim they care so much about equality and human rights. Every week there are news which encourage us to not buy a particular product because it is made by child labor, to not go to a store because their employers are not treated right, and we are even encouraged to not buy eggs and produce that is not free range. The government claims that they only want to buy stocks in ethical companies. To me it seems that the government cares much more about the Wal Mart workers than they do care about their own country men. I guess it is easier to pretend to be a good person if you only attack cases that don’t involve the people closest to you.
To me it makes perfect sense for the government to refuse any funding to an institution that discriminates based on color of skin, religion, sexual preference, sex, race etc. If an institution chooses to keep their discriminatory practices, well then they are at least not using my tax money to do that. Then we as a society are not saying, “It is all right to discriminate as long as it is because of religious reasons” which is ultimately what we are saying now.
I have only found one example of something like this being done elsewhere. Our friend Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has recently passed a law in California that effectively disallows institutions to discriminate against gay people if they want to receive Government funding. Admirable but I would like to see it taken further, and used to eliminate any kind of discrimination.
Do we all agree that discrimination is bad? Well, at least I do and I am ashamed that my tax money gets used to discriminate people!!
Hæhæh
sá á hérna leslistanum þínum að þú ert búin með Harry Potter og fanginn frá Askaban.. hvernig fannst þér? Mér fannst hún fín las hana reyndar eftir að hafa horft á myndina og held að það hafi skemmt smá.. en langar að lesa hana á ensku :D
Hæ hæ
'Eg er nú enginn rosa fan en les Harry Potter meira til afþreyjingar. 'Agætar bækur til þess en ég held ég sé orðin aðeins og gömul fyrir þær:-). Þessi síðasta sem ég las var ágæt en hún er aðeins farin að endurtaka sig. En jú það er mikið betra að lesa þær á ensku heldur en þýðingu. Las þá fyrstu á íslensku. En annars set ég yfirleitt inn smá komment yfir bækurnar sem ég les á þessa síðu (fyrir síðasta ár) eða þessa fyrir í ár.
Kveðja til allra!
Nah, I don't agree. I am
Nah, I don't agree. I am quite prepared for the state to spend money discriminating against rich people, by making them cough up more tax than poor people. I truly hope that Universities still discriminate against people who are not very good doctors, lawyers, or teachers, and bounce them out of school. And I am happy to deny state funding to people who don't subscribe to some of the basics of my atheist, collective and global ethics, like it is usually very wrong to kill whole people especially in cold blood, but often not so wrong to abort babies. (I don't know if I can rationalise that belief, so if anyone else has a good answer, feel free to try it out).
I am prepared to support some level of privacy, which includes discriminating in favour of certain freedoms and beliefs against certain others. I am prepared to discriminate against people who think it is reasonable to film 14 year olds having sex although I am less interested in supporting discrimination against 14-year-olds who have sex with people "their own age".
I think it is morally wrong to discriminate against people in the provision of medical treatment, so for long-term triage I guess a lottery is as good as anything else, and better than discriminating against fat people, old people, young people, smokers, drug addicts, criminals, or soldiers.
You have a really sound point though, it is easier to be good when it doesn't affect my own back yard. I don't have to make these decisions. Nobody gives me a gun and says "you know, you could just take quick vengeance on the murderer over there" which makes it easier to support the rule of law. And my taxes are automatically deducted from my pay which reduces the temptation to bother trying to find little ways to pay less than I should.
I don't have much of a problem if the Norwegian government is concerned for the welfare of employees at Wal-mart, since in general they are either in the developing world and could do with a helping hand, or they are at the bottom of the unpleasant barrel that is working-class America. I don't think it is the only thing they care about - Norway is a tiny country but I don't even pretend I can keep up with everything the government is doing.
For the record, I (anonymously, of course) support the rights of people to have sex with other people who have the same kind of body they do and think that disrimination against them should not be allowed in general, although where that starts to encroach on other people's private belief it gets hairy.
A lawyer who won't defend someone properly on a charge of rape is no better than a member of a lynch mob - and chose to be a lawyer. Does a nurse have to assist at an abortion? Does an unemployed person have to accept a job as a receptionist at an abortion clinic, or the offices of the communist party, or as a driver for a restaurant that raises money for a neo-fascist group? Does a priest have to bless two homosexuals who want to be married? Two people who will thereby claim license for adultery, given that they have living partners already? Do two people need the approval of the state for their partner in order to ensure that person will be given their possessions after they day, and be allowed to continue living in their house? What if they have been living in a household of three adults?
The trouble with Libertariansim is that it simply forces its own vacuous lack of moral structure on others (as a religious person might say). But in fact the real trouble is that it isn't a lack at all, just a name for a different set of morals. If it is alright for your gay friend to bring his or her partner to a social event, what about my nudist friend? Why can't I pay someone to come with me, and then take me home and have sex like the regular couples who turn up?
Which comes back to my belief about state-sponsored killing of people who are born compared to people who are not born. I don't see how I can, ultimately, make sense of it. But then, I don't see a need to do so. We arrive at a consensus as a group or society, where the compromises people make are acceptable as proven by the fact that they are accepted. The price of missing the sweet spot is either revolution (or its small cousin, people ignoring the law - as seen in Frogner any summer afternoon people have a beer with their grill) or the necessity for more action, as wasn't seen sufficiently to stop the governments of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, the Raj, and others from murdering innocent people for no agreed and accepted purpose.
I'm happy to discriminate against any organisation or individual that calls for people to be killed, too. Why should they have money?
(All this before even considering the issue of what it means to discriminate in practice. Because if you are going to make choices about who does or doesn't get something, then you need to be able to measure whether they are discriminatory, and that turns out to be quite challenging...)
Few things are black or white
Some of the things you mention in the first paragraph aren't really discrimination in my opinion. I think most people feel that the richer can pay higher tax (as long as there is still an inititive to work hard). Of course there has to be some requirements and competition in school (even though not all Norwegian political parties seem to believe that). I still believe that everyone has right to basic education and extra help if they have difficulty studying.
For higher educational institutions you have to fulfill certain requirements to get in, such as get good characters. While this is where it starts getting fuzzy (are we discriminating against the ones that have difficulties studying?) I still don't really consider it discrimination. As you say a doctor has to be competent. It would however be pure discrimination if a school decided they only wanted for example white people. Such a school should never get public funding!
It is not discrimination to not allow grown-up to have sex with children. As long as something is set in stone by laws it is simply laws. Homosexuality however isn't banned by law. It is socially excepted by most people that manage to think clearly. It has existed throughout time and we cannot simply keep discriminating people on the basis of it and allow religious people to say it is wrong. And yes if the church receives public funding then they should not be allowed to say no to marrying them if it is allowed by laws. At minimum they have to find another priest to do it if they cannot do it themselves (or public funding will be taken away from them). It is about time we try to remove this stone age thinking from our society. Do we agree that hate of Jews is bad? Well how is gay hate any better?
I generally believe that sex between consenting adults is fine (I really don't care how many there are, that is people's own business not mine). In theory, prostitution is fine with me as long as it is legal and the woman does it out of free will. Unfortunately, many of them are put in situations beyond their control and the question is whether it is ethical? Trafficking of woman was recentely considered modern day slavery by Dagbladet.
You bring up many interesting issues that are really difficult to answer. For example abortions. There is no black and white answer to that one. I am not against abortions but I am not necessarily for them either. I hope I never have to have one myself but it is impossible to say what happens in your life. It would be wrong to judge people that have done them but we don't necessarily have to encourage it either.
I believe everyone should have equal rights to medical treatment but I can understand the dilemna if you have a 6 year old kid versus a 90 year old and you can only save one. However if you have two 40 year old males, one is black and the other one is white, lottery is definately the best solution.
It all boils down to your last paragraph. What is discrimination? There are many borderline cases. I don't have a clear cut understanding of it all. I think we just need to try to learn more about the world and slowly understand more. Society has however come to a conclusion on certains things such as that the color of your skin doesn't matter. That no group of people deserves to get constant death threats (eg. Jews). That women and men are equal... We should not let anyone discriminate on the issues that we reached conclusion on. That I am sure about!