An Immoral Society

[Prophet 451]

No, I'm not talking about abortion.

I like to think of myself as a moral man, I think most people do. I'm not a Christian (matter of fact, I'm a Luciferian Satanist) but I find it intriguing that a society where roughly 80% claim to be some variety of Christian and about a quarter claim to be Biblical literalists, so often disregards the words of Jesus. I don't think Jesus was divine but he did have some worthwhile things to say.

For example, about the poor. Jesus said the poor would always be with us but he also had quite a lot to say about how we should treat the poor and the alleviation of poverty. Poverty is a moral issue but that phrase means different things to different people. To the fundies, it seems to mean that the poor are poor because of some moral failing and deserve to be poor. To the rest of us, it tends to mean that the existence of poverty is due to a moral failing of our society; that the philosophy of unrestrained greed, while often good at producing profits, leaves a lot of bodies in it's wake. The moral duty of a society isn't to condemn the poor, it's to alleviate poverty as much as possible. That doesn't mean providing for those who refuse to work but it does mean making it a great deal easier for people to haul themselves out of poverty by cushioning their landing, providing retraining and making jobhunting easier.

Homosexuality is a moral issue or, to be more accurate, how we treat gay people is a moral issue. My own faith teaches that homosexuality in itself is just one natural variation of humanity, like having blonde hair or green eyes. In other words, some people are gay, some people are straight and it's all fine. I understand that other people's faiths may teach differently but last time I checked, no-one was giving me the option of legislating my own faith so I figure no-one else gets a chance to legislate theirs either but how we treat gay people is a moral issue. We don't discriminate against people with blonde hair, we don't tell people with green eyes that they can't marry or that they can only marry a blue-eyed person. Somewhere between eight and twelve percent of the population is gay. Taking a middle figure of 10%, that's around thirty million people in the US who don't have a chance of happiness (or at least permanence, depending on your experiance of marriage). Surely, that's a moral issue? When we shut off a chance at happiness from a large segment of the community for no good reason, I would say that's immoral.

Or take war. Again, religious figures had quite a lot to say about war and in response to that, religious leaders formulated the theory of "just war". According to that theory, there are certain conditions that must be met in order for a war to be considered "just". Among those conditions are that the war will claim, under reasonable expectations, less lives than allowing the situation to continue. The invasion of Afghanistan was, initially at least, a "just war". The Taliban were so repressive and brutal that a war to drive them from power would reasonably be expected to cost less lives than leaving them in power. Now, just war theory can't take truly negligent or actively malicious leadership into account, it's a broad framework rather than a detailed prescription but under virtually every criteria of just war theory, the invasion of Iraq fails. Hussein was a monster, no-one is disputing that but as monsters go, he was a fairly ineffective one. Large parts of the country were outside his control and his ability to project power outside his close proximity was pretty much nil. How many lives has the war in Iraq cost so far, both American and Iraqi? Hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more. Does anyone honestly believe that Hussein would have claimed that many lives if he was left in power? But let's say you believe that "life" should mean more than just living, that it should carry some minimum guarentees. Fair enough, I have a lot of sympathy for that view but there were ways to pressure Hussein into providing those guarentees, or some aproximation of them, without bombing the crap out of the country. And that's not even talking about what the war brought with it. Is there anyone who doesn't think that torture is a moral issue? Pretty much every faith and philosophy in existence says that torturing people, for any reason, is a Very Bad Thing.

The fundies are right that our society seems to have disregarded morality. Where they go wrong is in confining moral questions to abortion and not treating gay people like scum.

[Deja Q]

1. It transcends just the gay issue, but you are correct.

[bitchkitty]

2. You lost me at Satanist.

Being an anti-fundie to such an extreme degree is just the other side of the same coin.

[Cerridwen]

4. Too bad because you missed an interesting post.

That can happen when judging messenger rather than message.

[bitchkitty]

9. I read the post.

But that part was completely unnecessary.

[Prophet 451]

6. Not a Satanist due to being anti-fundie

I'm a Satanist because the teachings seem to me to be a correct, honourable way to live one's life and because I believe God is evil and Lord Lucifer is the fairer, more worship-worty leader.

I could be an athiest and I'd still hate fundies.

[stillcool]

3. I don't think Afghanistan was a 'just' war...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/

Afghanistan, Central Asia, Georgia
Key to Oil Profits
by Karen Talbot
Censored 2003, pp148-163


UNOCAL AND AFGHANISTAN
A consortium headed by Unocal had for years sought to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad gas field through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. Later they put together a larger consortium, the Central Asia Pipeline Project, to carry oil from the Chardzhou oil field essentially following the same route.
John J. Maresca, vice president of Unocal, in testimony before a House of Representatives committee (February 12, 1998), spoke of the tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves in the Caspian region and promoted the plan to build a pipeline through Afghanistan as the cheapest route for transporting the oil to Asian markets. He stated that the Taliban controlled the territory through which the pipeline would extend. Pointing out that most nations did not recognize that government, he emphasized that the project could not begin until a recognized government was in place.
Yet a major reason for Washington's support of the Taliban between 1994 and 1997 was the expectation that they would swiftly conquer the whole country, enabling Unocal to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. Pakistan, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia "are responsible for the very existence and maintenance of the Taliban."
In his book Taliban, Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid said: "Impressed by the ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the State Department and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. As recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official..."
Unocal had even secured agreement from the Taliban to build the pipeline, according to Hugh Pope, writing in the Wall Street Journal.
The Washington Post on May 25, 2001, reported that the U.S. government "pledged another $43 million in assistance to Afghanistan, raising total aid this year to $124 million and making the United States the largest humanitarian donor to the country.'' This was less than four months before the September 11 attacks.
In an article in the British Daily Mirror, John Pilger stated: "When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal."

TALIBAN WANTED MORE
An Argentine oil company, Bridas, was also in the bidding to build a pipeline. The same month Taliban representatives were being given red carpet treatment by Unocal in Texas, another delegation went to Buenos Aires to meet with Bridas executives. There was an intense campaign by Unocal and Washington to outmaneuver Bridas. The Taliban played one company against the other.
The Taliban and Osama bin Laden were demanding, as part of the deal, that Unocal rebuild the infrastructure in Afghanistan and allow them access to the oil in several places. Unocal rejected this demand.
Nevertheless, the Bush Administration held a series of negotiations with the Taliban early in 2001, despite the developing rift with them over the pipeline scheme. Laila Helms, who was hired as the public relations agent for the Taliban government, brought Rahmatullah Hashimi, an advisor to Mullah Omar, to Washington as recently as March 2001. (Helms is the niece of Richard Helms, former chief of the CIA and former ambassador to Iran.) One of the meetings was held on August 2, just one month before September 11, when Christina Rocca, in charge of Asian Affairs at the State Department, met Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salem Zaef in Islamabad. Rocca has had extensive connections with Afghanistan including supervising the delivery of Stinger missiles to the mujahideen in the 1980s. She had been in charge of contacts with Islamist fundamentalist guerrilla groups for the CIA.
"At one moment during one of the negotiations, U.S. representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,"' said Jean-Charles Brisard, co-author of Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Central_Asia_watch/Afghanistan_CAsia_Oil.html

[Prophet 451]

5. Well, opinions vary

I agree that the reasons behind the war were a long way from just but the effort to eject the Taliban was, to my mind, justified.

[stillcool]

8. Opinions vary, as do facts...

which is a real problem in this country. When the truth is unknown, anything can be asserted as true. There is so much I don't believe, and so little I do.

[BeFree]

12. It has been said...

...that efforts to eject satanists is justified.

Who in the hell is anyone to go blow up another country when in said country there be many evils about? 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone'

[Prophet 451]

13. Touche

I take your point, I'm just not sure I agree with it.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

7. Judgementalism is a cornerstone of fundamentalism

whilst tolerance and an open mind are usually associated with liberal belief systems.

Luciferian Satanist, eh? That sounds intriguing! I didn't know there were different branches of Satanism. Would you mind sharing more of the tenets of your faith?

The Sufis have a story about Satan you might find interesting. Satan was talking with a Sufi one day and said, "Mankind blames everything on me, but that really isn't fair. Just watch." Satan stooped down and loosened a peg that was holding a rope where a ram was tethered. The ram eventually wrenched the peg from the ground, and roamed around the field. He came up to the house, where the door was opened. At the end of the hall was a mirror. The ram, seeing his reflection, charged the mirror and broke it. The woman of the house ordered the ram to be slaughtered because it broke the mirror which had been in her family for years. The husband was very angry at losing his prize ram, and threw his wife out of the house. The wife's family was insulted, and came to the house for revenge. In the end, the house was burned and many were killed. Satan looked at the Sufi and said, "They will blame all this on me--but all I did was loosen the peg."

[Prophet 451]

10. Sure

Satanism can be broadly broken down into four categories:

LaVeyan - This is the Church of Satan. It's a system of secular materialism with neo-mystical bolts on. Doesn't actually believe in any deity, called "Satanism" largely because Anton LaVey liked annoying Christians.

Temple of Set - aka Setites or Setians. Have a very complex theology which I don't entirely understand but seems to be based around emulating Satan/Set as a drive for intellectual enlightenment. Try xeper.org to see if you can make more sense of it than me.

Dabblers - aka lots of derogatory nicknames. These are the idiots who really do murder people, torch churches, smash up graveyards, etc. As a rule, don't understand the theology but use the symbols and slogans because they "look cool". Utterly loathed by the rest of us for obvious reasons.

Luciferian - Essentially a form of maltheism that contends that God is evil (or at least uncaring) and that Satan/Lucifer is the fairer, more compassionate deity. We are probably the smallest group, certainly the most varied and definatly the least organised. Believers actually do worship but also believe that prayer is not enough to change the world, actions are necessary as well. We don't have holy books as such but one influential work was a novel called "The Devil's Apocrypha" which sums that part up very well: "If the lot of man is to improve, the seer must be the doer"; it is vitally important to aid one's fellow man because the Big Beard certainly won't. In the shortest form, we choose to damn ourselves rather than give even tacit approval to a God we believe to be a bloodthirsty tyrant.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

11. Thank you!

I find this fascinating! I liked your "prayer is not enough to change the world." That has been my contention for as long as I can remember. Even when I was a Christian I contended that the only way to show you were on the path was by good works, maybe because it is way too easy to say you are saved--and what does that really mean?