Do you believe in any absolute truths?
No. Unless you mean the laws of physics or the like but we're not talking about that.
If
someone holds a political positition based on his or her opinion about
absolute truth would you consider that in a sense to be a religious
opinion even if it is not about the existance, nature, or ideas from or
about a devine entity of some sort?
There are people who "know" that they have the only answer. Some of them get that answer from a deity, some from some other source. I use the term "religious" for the former. I would call the latter "religious-like" or "quasi-religious" as in "religious-like zeal." The former are more worrisome, IMO, because it is socially acceptable to dispatch the later but the former are handled with delicacy.
I also apparently believe that
overcrowding and exhaustion of natural resorces as a problem for
either the US or the world as a whole is less of a problem then you
seem to, but that is a whole seperate conversation.
I don't want to get off track onto the merits of my concern about unchecked population growth any more than you do. Just for the sake of illustration, though, I posit that I feel as strongly about that as you do about abortion as murder. Your approach to your strong concern is to make abortion illegal. So what might be my approach to my concern? Well, I could lobby for a change in the law that requires people to get a permit to have a baby. They would need to meet certain criteria to get a permit. For example, they would have to be able to provide for the child financially, they would need some kind of family or family-like support network with appropriate male and female role models, they would need to be sufficiently free of neuroses, take classes in child rearing, and certify that they are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to raise a child. Becoming pregnant without a permit would result in either a forced abortion or relinquishing the infant to others who had a permit but could not become pregnant.
But I am not a fanatic. I respect the fact that I share this planet with others who, however misguided, have a right to their own truths. So I choose to produce no children of my own, I do what I can to mitigate the effects on society of all the ill-equipped children produced by others, and I occasionally chide people about the error of their ways. I do not try to make it illegal to produce children.
I don't think it is any more right in our society to force a woman to carry to term a fetus that she's ill equipped to bear or to care for after birth because of one person's sense of truth than it is to force her to abort because of another's.
Karen |
