Abortion, Iraq and binary thinking
I've gotten annoyed with the whole "civil war" issue in Iraq. Not what's happening there but how people talk about it. It seems be part of a bigger problem that religious people have: Tendency to understand things in binary, Good/evil, war/peace, dead/alive etc. Obviously most things don't come in binary and understanding this would make intelligent discussion on certain issues possible. For instance it is clear there is some form of sectarian violence and it is position dependent. Acknowledging this would let them address the positions that are a problem and not try and cast the situation as either 75% of Iraqis are trying to kill each other or everything is fine!
This argument also follows over to the abortion issue. Once you stop thinking of things in dead/alive binary mode you can come to a logical conclusion. When a fetus is growing it is an extension of the host organism because it is completely dependent on it. It is a self-organizing tumor similar, logically, to an organ. The difference is eventually it will develop its own capabilities and become an independent organism. The road from extension to organism is a continuous one and so there is only an alive organism once it can be safely separated. Otherwise it is only an incomplete organism like a hand is to a human.
Why did I say religious people are the one's who have this problem? Well some non-religious people have it too but it's usually a remnant from their religious days. The reason is that religion teaches one to think in binary. You are either devout or a heretic, there's no middle ground in the teachings. Once you have a god you have a "perfect" solution and "good" way for everything and so things can be binary. Get ride of the god and perfect and good become subjective and so you can critically evaluate things. This is why morality is a religious phenomenon, it subjective to the subscribed religion. Ethics on the other hand is much more difficult since it doesn't have a "perfect" anything so a "just war" or "right thing to do" become debatable. Maybe we can decrease the overall misery of humanity if we think about things ethically and not morally (in binary).
This argument also follows over to the abortion issue. Once you stop thinking of things in dead/alive binary mode you can come to a logical conclusion. When a fetus is growing it is an extension of the host organism because it is completely dependent on it. It is a self-organizing tumor similar, logically, to an organ. The difference is eventually it will develop its own capabilities and become an independent organism. The road from extension to organism is a continuous one and so there is only an alive organism once it can be safely separated. Otherwise it is only an incomplete organism like a hand is to a human.
Why did I say religious people are the one's who have this problem? Well some non-religious people have it too but it's usually a remnant from their religious days. The reason is that religion teaches one to think in binary. You are either devout or a heretic, there's no middle ground in the teachings. Once you have a god you have a "perfect" solution and "good" way for everything and so things can be binary. Get ride of the god and perfect and good become subjective and so you can critically evaluate things. This is why morality is a religious phenomenon, it subjective to the subscribed religion. Ethics on the other hand is much more difficult since it doesn't have a "perfect" anything so a "just war" or "right thing to do" become debatable. Maybe we can decrease the overall misery of humanity if we think about things ethically and not morally (in binary).
posted by Eddie | 11:58 AM
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