Re: Desertphile fundraiser

On Oct 11, 5:22 pm, Burkhard <b.scha...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Free Lunch wrote:
On Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:06:15 -0300, Nashton <n...@xxxxx> wrote in
talk.origins:

Louann Miller wrote:
Metspitzer <kilow...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:2c81d5ltr54cgaagqmi68oojiahmqu7drm@xxxxxxx:

I just saw a fundraising camnpaign has been started for Desertphile to
be able to buy medication when he gets out of hospital:

<http://www.youtube.com/user/Desertphile>
Not that I like saying this, but sucks to be American sometimes. I.e., any
time you're sick.

Sucks to be an atheist also.
The money raised at our churches fundraisers for someone in need is
phenomenal. And this, over and above the tithing.

In any case, I will be praying for him and I really hope he gets better.
I like to kick his and other atheists behind at every opportunity I get.
It's like taking candy from a baby, with you guys.

OF course, it is pretty bizarre Christianity to be opposed to having
health care for all, but be willing to raise money for some. It's almost
as if they never heard of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Interesting that. My next door colleague, Zenon Bankowski, has written
quite a lot about this. (most comprehensively in "Living Lawfully: Love
in Law and Law in Love" (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001)

In his analysis, the message of the god Samaritan is indeed incompatible
with _universal_ health care (or any other care). If you want a
universal system, you inevitably end up with a law/duty based system
where the direct personal contact between people is mediated by some
type of organisation, and it is your impersonal duty (through taxes,
tithes etc) to contribute to the running of the system.

By contrast, the good Samaritan is not about law, but love, the
immediate, one-to-one relation between two particular people.

The problem is that societies ideally need both, but since law and love,
universalist and particularist ethics tend to cancel each other out,
this is difficult to achieve.

You can see this to some extend in countries like Norway or Sweden,
where the universalist idea has been most rigorously developed, but,
according to many sociologists and psychologists, social cohesion has
suffered because you do not any longer feel responsible or connected to
  individual humans who suffer.(I already pay huge amount of taxes, it
is the job of ...social services, police etc do deal with this - exactly
how the fellow Jews in the parable react)  And despite the investment,
you do find homeless people on the streets of Oslo or Stockholm,
typically because they "fall through the gaps" of administrative care
systems that require a certain degree of functionality (please fill in
form 234.23, pay particular attention to p.465 of the accompanying
booklet with definitions and explanations. But the advantage is that the
recipient is not receiving a charity, but something that is owed to him
by right.

And that in turn explains why often particularistic, religions systems
of ethics are not only unsympathetic, but often even against
universal(ist) approaches - once the recipient is seen as getting merely
what is rightfully his, the notion of "good deed" becomes precarious,
and your "get out of hell" card loses currency. Hence in history often
open hostility to social reform.

Organised religion in the Christian tradition as a result oscillate
between the two extremes. Christianity was (also) a particularist
rebellion against the universalist, law based Jewish social ethics, but
once the revolutionaries became the establishment, they more or less
inevitably returned to the universalist approach - the revival of the
tithe, the tremendously large RC "social care administration" etc etc -
which then triggered the next round of particularist rebellion in
protestantism, which once established etc etc , so the wheel turns.

Thanks for the interesting comment.

.

Relevant Pages

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