Being alive doesn’t make you “human”

It’s rare for columnists these days to wade into the abortion debate, so it’s worth noting for that alone.

But this column in the Edmonton Sun got SMU thinking about the cross-purposes nature of the abortion debate. This column represents the “women’s rights” argument. It doesn’t try to argue that a fetus isn’t a human being, it simple reflects the author’s own belief that the woman’s  rights are paramount.

It’s an intractable argument, because it has no rational basis. Simply ascribing one human rights over another is a form of social totalitarianism, without logical support, except perhaps in cases where both lives are in jeopardy from taking a child to term. It’s only logical to remove a fetuses “human rights” if you can logically argue that it has yet to develop into a “human.”

Just as intractable is the “pro-life” — or “anti-choice” — argument that life simply begins at conception, therefore all abortion is murder. It relies on the false premise that “life” is synonymous with “humanity.” And it’s not.

Not everything that has life is considered human, by definition. We separate humanity from other animals because of human traits, including self-awareness/consciouness of existence.

Look it up: most dictionaries will define human as a short form for “human being,” to merely describe the species, to be sure. But they’ll also define it as having the traits of the rest of humanity.

“Life” is not synonymous with “human” because people develop, biologically, in stages. For example, prior to the seventh month, most fetuses haven’t developed a connected parietal lobe in their brain, so they have no self-awareness, no consciousness.

To go beyond that biological reality — to go searching for some earlier, deitically-produced “soul — is to tred into the realm of blind faith, not logic.

Lacking the key trait that separates their cognitive developmental process from other animals, we can still call a second-term fetus “alive”. But it has no “human rights” because it simply isn’t human yet. It doesn’t meet the criteria.

This same cross-purposes argument is raised regarding people who are being kept alive. We recognize these people as human for the life they lived prior to becoming vegetative — but we assign their rights to someone else, because they have no logical way to exercise them themselves. One of those assigned rights is the right to decide if the individual lives or dies.

If a fully developed human who has lost the essential traits of their humanity doesn’t get to “choose life,” why  should a fetus that hasn’t even reached the potential to be self-aware?

Let’s put this another way: if a rancher aborts an early-stage calf fetus to save the mother, we don’t call that fetus a “cow.” We call it an aborted calf fetus. If people want to call the product of abortions “aborted human fetuses,” more power to them. At least it won’t continue the nonsensical notion that human rights begin at conception.

The pope, pedophiles and pragmatic pluralism

There’s a fair body of both social and biological science now to suggest that, however it comes about, most humans are cognitively wired to accept irrational beliefs.

But it often requires a stark level of realism to break through the mental defensive shell erected around that belief, with the end result cognitive dissonance — the emotional quaker a person goes through when they can no longer rationalize having faith in something and suddenly lose its emotional support.

A former mormon bishop once said that realizing his faith was based on lies was like having the world pulled out from under him, like he had no understanding of humanity or his role in it, for months.

Like most intelligent men who are nonetheless capable of becoming captive to faith, he’s happier since living such a strident orthodoxy, although has somewhat lapsed in that he immediately turned to capitalism as a replacement.

People: all systems of faith, economics and politics are created by us. We’re flawed, so none of them are perfect.

The question is how imperfect, or blind to those imperfections, a faithful person is willing to be. This Dallas Morning News article outlines the crisis of faith people around the world are experiencing as it becomes more evident daily that high-ranking Catholics — and quite possibly Pope Benedict himself — helped cover up, or wilfully ignored, years of system child abuse.

This guy, creepy? No way!

The article is crap, replete with specious examples of crises of faith that, regardless of the cause, have long-existed in the church. But the end result is interesting: people don’t lose their faith in a higher power, just their faith in a particular religion.

If you’re a pragmatic pluralist — someone who accepts we’ll likely never understand our origins or which side of the atheism/theism argument is correct — it’s neat to see people realizing they can use the ceremony, community and decency inherent to many moderated religions, and discard the divisive, insulating effects of orthodoxy.

This is not new. Many religions have can thank their lucky starts they embraced religion and reform early on, and consequently are represented by entire congregations of agnostic supporters. For example, there are more than 40 synagogues across North America that are home to “secular humanist judaism,” the practice of elements of the faith, but with an acceptance that religion is created by man in an attempt to understand his origins.

On the judeo-christian front, there’s unitarianism, which is rooted in the Jeffersonian tradition of taking the logical communal lessons from the Bible and applying them humanely …without arrogantly assuming a super being that looks like us (or we like him, six of one, half a dozen of the other) is in charge of everything and created it all.

A few years ago, the author and lecturer Dr. David Wulff told me it all comes down to the same thing: a need for comfort and security.

“In religion, you have a magnet that draws people together: there’s mystery, there’s the promise of a form of immortality, there is hope for solutions to complex problems,” said Wulff.

“A lot of it is very pragmatic. It’s been argued that religion is what we do when there are no real answers left. And you see that reflected all the time: when people are trapped in a mine and there’s nothing the people trying to save them can do, they pray. The fact that it’s so often ineffective doesn’t seem to matter, given the comfort that it brings them.

“I’m thinking back to a study done in the 1970s by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in which they trained interviewers to go into nine congregations and interview members to find out why the church was important to them and what about it was most important.

“And what the people kept saying over and over again was that it was the sense of caretaking, first towards the congregation by the minister, and then between the congregation itself. Whenever one of the interviewers would suggest there was something wrong with the answers, because they didn’t discuss the church’s ‘justification by faith’ doctrine, or God or Jesus, they would remark that there was no better conversation stopper than the actual theological questions.

“So despite the church’s belief that all of these important doctrines, rules, codes and traditions were important, inevitably the congregation wasn’t concerned with that. They were much more concerned with one another.”

Not that they’re selling anything….

One of the ways in which faith organizations act dishonestly is in their belief-based, self-appointed status as arbiters of fairness.

Here’s a neat example: an article on a U.K. christianity site. Sure, they balance the story with a a quote from the “secularists.”

But that headline? Wow, subtle. Bet they think this is a fair piece overall, too.

Door-to-door spam and Azerbaijan

If someone came to the front door of your house at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning and tried to sell you penis enlargers, viagra and a dating site for older women, would it kinda piss you off?

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Of course. We already get enough spam in our email without it actively seeking us out. Home, castle, that sort of thing.

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So you almost have to kinda hand it to Azerbaijan … not exactly something you hear every day. When Jehovah’s Witnesses started going door to door handing out literature, authorities detained them and fined them three weeks wages.

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Problematically, it was for all the wrong reasons. The charge? “Distributing religious literature without state permission,” which is just stupid.Denying people their right to practice their faith is like denying sheep the right to graze. It’s just mean and unnecessary.

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Not that any faith could be much more deserving. Jehovahs live largely apart from the rest of society, up to and including the political, military and state support systems. Their faith demands that they bother us, door-to-door, because, well, in the age of mass marketing and telecommunications, they’re stupid enough to think that that’s what Jesus would do (if he existed; there’s no actual contemporary evidence to support it.)

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They also refuse blood transfusions and related medical intervention , and  allow their children to die prematurely as a consequence.

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So, basically, they’re walking spam who shun society but bother us on Saturday morning, like so many nasty offers in our Monday morning e-mail. They should’ve fined them for peddling without a license. Or, even better, justbanned door-to-door sales in the entire country. Faith Spam, outlawed.

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Harsh? Not really. Let’s consider the parallels between religious proselytizing ande-mail spam for a second:

1. Both are non-targeted, non-specific mass marketing attempts.

2. Both are playing against the odds, fully aware that the majority of people aren’t

going to be interested.

3. Both can be intrusive and are publicly vilified.

4. Both are most successful when targeting vulnerable or intellectually challenged

individuals.

5. Both shill unwanted literature.

6. Both purport to sell something miraculous with no supporting evidence.

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Unfortunately, you can’t attach a spam blocker to your frontdoor, as proselytizers tend to ignore the “no soliciting” sign on your mailbox.

I recommend nudity. Fight fire with fire.

Ok kids…repeat after me

One of the things it’s important to realize about faith is that the more orthodox it gets, the more likely it is to try and control the adherent. It’s one of the ways sociologists differentiate between religions and cults, which basically have the same methodology in many respects, but typically — as new, non-transformed, non-moderated religions — also use elements of emotional control and mind control to hook people in.

So it’s always interesting to gauge how a religious organization behaves around the question of faith in schools. Moderate and modernized faiths tend to acquiesce to the lack of certainty and agree with the separation of church and state.

And then we have organizations like Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and Jerry Fallwell’s Moral Majority shoving the concept down everyone’s throat with a fervor that’s …well…evagelical, literally.

But sometimes, the push to help orthodoxy survive and thrive is a bit more subtle. Take the case of a pair of day care centres in Quebec, where the provincial government, once heavily dominated by Catholic dogma, now tries to exclude public funding from faith-based initiatives.

Of course, that wasn’t always the case, and three decades ago, a few faith-based daycares cropped up. Now the Quebec government is rightly saying they shouldn’t be fed from the public teat.  Imagine: suggesting that children who’ve yet to even properly learn to tie their shoelaces shouldn’t be indoctrinated with spirituality. Next thing you know, those pesky bureaucrats will be enforcing educational standards or something.

He singled out the Beth Rivkah daycare in Cote-Des-Neiges, a Montreal community, which in turn fired back that it “isn’t illegal” to teach religion in a daycare. The concept of giving their own children a choice at an appropriate age of whether to pursue religion, apparently, didn’t occur to the good folk at the BNai Brith, who are complaining about the decision. Shocking!

The next time you hear someone  spew about government indoctrination,  just remind them that there are religious daycare centres in North America … so indoctrination must be at least somewhat en vogue.