At least one recent post took this board to task for allowing posts that were said to be overtly political because they addressed a current political event. The post asked how such a topic was related to recovery.

I don't want to address the current event, but I would like a consider the post's question (or complaint.)

A little background may help.

When I joined the mormon church, Ronald Reagan was in his first term. My parents loved him because they blamed Jimmy Carter for economic problems that drove them to bankruptcy. That's a different debate, but that influenced me.

I made a friend while volunteering on a political campaign for a local conservative mormon candidate. He lost, but I was baptized.

Fast forward 37 years.

I am still recovering from the influence of my parents. They did their best, but I didn't learn a lot about critical thinking. My political beliefs were shaped by my social connections at home and at church.

As an aside, my folks went on to vote for two Clintons and President Obama.

But the die was cast for me.

I still need to ask myself multiple times a day if I am thinking for myself or if I am on mormon auto-pilot.

I went from having an instant answer for any political question to having to start from scratch on every social or government issue of any significance. I still lean way to the right if pressed for a quick response, but given time to think I am all over the place.

In short, I make everyone angry from time to time, but that is fine.

My observations about the politically oriented posts on this board -

I need to take care not to assume that people who agree with me on one topic will agree on any other topic.

I try not to alienate others based on our disagreements.

I want to assume respect for others until the kick me in the knee. Then I will need to ask myself if I deserved the kick...

Even people who I disagree with most of the time may have common ground sometimes.

Thinking for myself is a lot of work, but I hope to get better at it.

That is recovery for me.

I just want to say that I like your posts, which are thoughtful, empathetic, and insightful.

Lowpriest Wrote:
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> Thinking for myself is a lot of work, but I hope
> to get better at it.

My problem is the specific thing to think about. Politics, though we might be the political animal, seems like so many opinions that I'm mired in them, and then there is the two party simplification of what I see as a complex problem - governing.

Mormonism was simple in regards to morality but not polity. Drove me nuts that people thought Mormons should be one party and then I read Mormon History after finding out Smith was a sexual predator. Boy, now I know EVERYTHING Mormon is political and being "of one mind." I was totally mislead or misread my "free agency" as a child.

We had friends who would joke about enforced free agency, which is an oxymoron.

Being of "one mind" as a condition of social acceptance seems to contradict independent thought.

Mormonism claims to give a person more freedom in their righteously following a leader unerringly. That is an oxymoron if I've ever read one.

We have the ghawd-given freedom, total and complete, to do what we are graciously instructed to do.

Anything other than that is punishable by spiritual death, unless you have received the Second Annoying.

Well, I don't qualify since I do much evil speaking of The Lord's Annoyings.

Religion is political.

And politics is religious.

Amen.

Certainly in the United States. The established church in the UK can rightly be called the church of the establishment though perhaps less so than when the younger sons of the rich and powerful went into the church as the older siblings went into politics or the military. That said, for a country that has separation of church and state written into its constitution it is surprising to me how large a part religion plays in politics.

That's why it had to be written into the constitution. The US was founded by religious extremists of various sorts, and it has been a balancing act ever since. Without the constitution things would be much worse.

Religion can be all about exercising power, so I can see your point.

There are probably religious folk on this forum who get a lot of peace from religion. It might be about power to the higher-ups, but it I know many sincere believers who get a lot of hope and joy.

That being said, it is not for me.

I was hiking earlier this week and a nice lady coming the other way seemed to be talking to herself. I think she noticed me notice her, and she said, "Don't mind me, I am praying with my sister." She asked if I needed to have her pray for me.

I didn't know what to say. I thought she was sincere, but it's not my thing and I didn't was to be disrespectful. "I think I'm good for today," was the only thing I could think of at the time.

I don't think she was being political.

Lowpriest Wrote:
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>"I think I'm good for today."

That's a perfect response. Kind and low key/non-confrontational while meeting your own needs.

If you don't think she was being political check her voting habits.

Dave the Atheist,

You may be right. She might have been an over-the-top religious-political zealot. I guess I will never know.

It just seemed to me that she was being kind. I wonder if I am just being naive. In spite of seeing a lot of evil in the world, I imagine that people are basically good. I may be wrong, even drastically wrong.

(BTW, I am also an atheist, but I still see things as evil that are intended to harm others in an unjust way. Maybe that is immoral not evil.)

Just like wearing a mask has become political.

I was recently surprised to discover a fundamental difference between two opposing ideologies that form two uniquely different foundations for political thought in the US and likely elsewhere. Having been raised to believe in only one side, I had never even considered nor understood the other side previously. But a significant portion of the population believes in that other side. I'll try not to promote nor disparage either side here as I explain here, that difference. I was shocked at my age to learn something so fundamental and significant and that I hadn't learned (or at least taken seriously) much earlier in life.

One side believes that certain human rights come from god (what I believe and thought that everyone else - more or less - believed). The other side believes that human rights can only be granted by the state (or country). This may seem at first, to be only a difference of semantics. But the implications of these differences are deep and profound as someone I know (an athiest) recently explained them to me. Under one scenario, if the state doesn't grant a right, it doesn't and shouldn't exist, regardless of what that right is or how much we want to believe in it. Freedom and democracy only exist in that scenario because they better serve a majority of the people and not for any deep or fundamental moral reason. If the people were to be better served by the state removing those fundamental human rights (according to this first scenario), the state would have the moral right to remove those fundamental rights from all of us (how I currently see Mainland China). Under the opposing scenario, regardless of the laws of the land, there are certain human rights that can never be justifiably taken from you without good cause, such as incarceration for committing crimes. Liberty is worth more than our lives and we would rather die protecting these rights than to relinquish them to tyranny. When you extrapolate both of these opposing beliefs, many of people's political differences come down to the fact that the individuals involved in the dispute probably subscribe to different beliefs that originated from one of these two different fundamental belief systems. For example, when someone wants to remove the words "under god" from the pledge of allegiance to then say "...one nation" (but not under god) "...indivisible, with liberty...", what I see is that they are trying to take away my primary source of authority to defend my liberties and those of others. It's not just about fighting religious fanaticism. It's that my country will be put at risk if those words are removed from the pledge. Because once those words are gone and no one remembers them, there will be no good justification to oppose government oppression (not if, but) when it comes.

As people leave Mormonism, many of them decide to become atheists. That is okay and I would not suggest that they are wrong. But, with god removed from the equation, the world is a different place. Some foundational pieces are different. Most of us who leave the church look for sources of authority to replace what was lost. If you really don't believe in god, it's probably easy to go all-in to believing that the government should be the sole source of authority, given that no other logical source of authority appears to exist and that without some source of authority chaos would exist.

So in response to the Original Post, I am with you on this learning curve of rational thought and questioning past beliefs. Critical thinking is all we have left after we leave the church. But I haven't entirely given up on god nor on God-given rights either. Whether or not you're religious, it all goes back to religious beliefs again anyway (even for the athiest) when we look back to sources of ideology. Perhaps we just need to remove the influences of Mormonism to better understand the core issues.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 06/20/2020 02:09PM by azsteve.

Azsteve,

I have read your post several times and nearly replied, but I have stopped until now from replying.

In regards to removing "under god" from the pledge, I understand that the phrase was not included in the original 1892 version, but was added in 1954.
See: https://www.ushistory.org/documents/pledge.htm

I mention this because I see religion encroaching on humanism, not the other way around. I don't feel like we need to include a god from any creed to justify or authorize moral or ethical behavior. Indeed, the view that you seem to promote is the same one that attracted me to the mormons - ultimate authority.

With respect, I have my own opinion as to the existence of a god or gods, but in my view that question is not relevant to political discourse. In a pluralistic society we should not use government to promote our religious views.

The Pledge of Allegiance that we know of today was not written until 1892. How on Earth did the U.S. get by before then?

I personally am not a fan of the PoA. I will lead my students in it every morning if required, but will not willingly do it if not required. I think it is overused and unnecessary. I much prefer our national anthem or other patriotic songs.

There are no such things as "rights".

If someone broke in to your house and robbed you, you would have the right to call the police, and to have them arrested and prosecuted out of respect to your rights.... or you could just let the bad guys go and choose not to exercise your rights. Either way, those rights exist.

Those are not rights. Those are privileges.

The courts would side with you to enforce your rights, not your privileges. George Floyd's rights, not his privileges were violated by the crimes that were committed against him. Some of us would like to believe that George's rights were God-given. Either way, a lot of people are unhappy that his rights were violated.

A murder was committed in the Capital Hill Autonimous Zone last night. The Seattle police aren't even being allowed in to investigate the murder. The leads will grow cold and the criminals will likely not be prosecuted. Many people will remember who George Floyd is and what happened to him. How many people will ever even find out the name of this murdered person on Capital Hill, where the police are not allowed to enforce the law?



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/20/2020 02:39PM by azsteve.

This may be too simplistic to be satisfying, but I'm retired and have the time.

It is my perspective that 'Rights' are man-made, while 'Powers' exist, ab initio, i.e., from the beginning. No one gives you Power, but sometimes society allows you the privilege of using your power, or the power it acquires for you to use.

Here is my favorite example: You own a house on a corner and you have a lovely lawn, that extends along the two sides of your house, thus running along each of two streets.

But your house is across the street from a high school and every day, before school, lunch time and after school, little knots of kids hang out on that lovely lawn. You don't like it and you want them to stop.

If you're a big, menacing hulk of a man with a certain reputation, you won't have any problem quickly getting them to figure out that they need to respect your private property.

If you're a timid widow lady, there's only so much the school authorities and the cops can do, no matter how many times you call.

In both examples your right to keep your private property free of petulant teenagers is beyond argument. But where the first example implied an available Power to keep the lawn kid-free, the second demonstrated that if you don't do it yourself and 'society' can't do it or maintain it for you, the Right is useless, and its fictitious underpinnings are quite evident.

No 'Right' exists without the 'Power' to enforce it, and until ghawd gets backs to striking people dead who won't accept the Rights he allegedly bestowed, those Rights only exist in one's dreams...or in the Power of a society to enforce them.

You can argue all you want about what ought to be, but what IS, is what you have to deal with.

The most useless bit of language ever, is, "You have no Right to do that!" shouted at someone who clearly has the Power to do what he is being told he 'can't' do. The only thing that will prevent that violation of a supposed Right is a matching or greater power.

Further deponent opinith not.

Interesting points, then to carry the logic a bit further maybe the 'rights' lie ultimately in the constitution or a nations founding documents. The American one (the only one I've studied) says: "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Ultimately I would say Americans can rely on the constitution for their rights.

Your key word, "maybe", is all you really have to go on.

Faith in a person or a thing lacks a certain je n'cest qua... Which is to say, you will one day be left hanging.

> The American [constitution] says:
> "they are endowed by their Creator with certain
> unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
> Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Yes, macaRomney said that.

You mean INalienable....and that’s the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

Does that mean Saucie has the power in your house? Do your rights come from her or from God? Or from the rights fairy?

As a Lamanite, I haven't much in the way of power. But I can skulk like nobody's business!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/20/2020 09:46PM by elderolddog.

Rights and powers should ideally be connected. But they are often not connected. This is why it is possible to have our rights violated. The point of my post above is that I believe in inalienable rights, but not everyone does. And it appears to me that for those who do not believe in unalienable rights, their system of beliefs can be significantly different compared to those who do believe in unalienable rights. Some people accept circumstances and change their beliefs to match the circumstance.

I think that unalienable rights speak directly to the individual more than to governments. If you were kidnapped and taken to North Korea, you might be the only one in that country that believes in your own unalienable rights. Despite your circumstance and the opinions of everyone around you, your actual rights would not change because they are god-given and can not be taken from you, even when they are violated. Because your claim to them will always be valid.

So an "inalienable right" is like a religious belief: true even after facts have alienated it.

Unalienable Rights are like dreams come true! Ya just gotta believe!

Come on, everyone in the audience!!! Clap if you believe and bring Tinkerbelle back to life!

"Real Americans die needlessly to prove an asinine point tangentially connected to vague principles they can’t fully articulate. "

lol Politics if you mean acting like little kids at every turn then we have plenty of politics just turn on the news

If you mean rational dialogue between parties of ideological differences, that died after 2012.

There is no two party system anymore.

It's the "both sides do it" argument.

"When American is united, America is totally unstoppable."

Then why do you constantly belittle the arguments of those who disagree with you? Is your beloved union to be achieved through everyone's accepting your view?

When I was 12 years old, some of my classmates started having their Bar / Bat Mitzvahs. The school had a rule about major events, parties, and invitations: If you're going to be sending out formal invitations to some of the class, you have to send them to all of the class. There were about 50 people in my graduating class, so this wasn't a big deal if you're rich enough to throw a humdinger.

My mother encouraged me to go. I found that odd, because Mom was in full-blown Baptist Church Mode, but hey - I was excited to go.

(I'm going to botch this description badly. I apologize in advance, and I welcome corrections.)

I was at my first Bat Mitzvah when I wondered why I believed what I believe, and they believed what they believed. I can't remember if there was a reading or if I was flipping through a book in the slot of the pew in front of me, but whatever it was, it was word-for-word scripture that I recognized. Memorizing scripture was a big deal and yay.

So, I'm sitting there thinking, "These folks love God just as much as we do. Why are they going to hell? I don't like that."

Then...

"I think they believe what they believe because their parents taught them to and I believe what I believe because my mother taught me to."

An atheist is born.

When my daughter was young and asked me what political party I belonged to, I told her, "If I tell you, that will influence you. I want you to figure out as much as you can for yourself.' Okay, sure. Pretty quickly she figured me out, but the thing was that at that moment, I told her that what party I belonged to was none of her business. (Back then in the state where we lived, you had to belong to a party if you wanted to vote in the primary.)

So, yeah. Nae says, "So, yeah," because I do. It's not like I didn't try to influence her. The influence is a given and part of the whole parenting thing. But I also wanted her to try to think for herself which is really hard for a kid when they're in 4th grade.

I was *incredibly* disappointed when she was in high school and didn't see how mandatory drug testing in public high school would be *incredibly* problematic. "Drugs are illegal, so if you're not doing drugs you have nothing to worry about." GACK GACK GACK! This went on for *days* and I think I just let it drop so I wouldn't fling myself off a cliff and into the ocean.

Anyway, blah blah, I miss my kid, blah.

Every single day I have to test my assumptions. Like you ask yourself, I wonder if I'm doing the quick easy fallback answer or am I considering the question. Sometimes you don't have to engage, and you can think about it later. I learn a ton of new things from people who are more moderate than me. I tend to tell them why they're wrong. Ahem. Often I later think about what they've said, and I realize that their comment has merit even if it doesn't comport with my worldview.

I'm trying to say, "That's a good question/great comment. I need to think about it" or I'll ask follow up questions (so hard) before I let loose on someone. (so hard).

Even if I don't agree with someone when I finally understand what they're saying, I've learned something. I can be persuaded, and I can also be like, "Yeah. I've had enough of that person."

You're good, Lowpriest.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 06/20/2020 09:43PM by Beth.

The thing about recovery and politics is that politics is not necessary for your recovery.

Says the person whose politics and epistemology are still profoundly Mormon.

You are in fact the embodiment of the indivisibility of politics and religion.

I’m obviously embodying something from your fantasies, but I don’t need to know more, thank you.

(I think you might be granting me a little too much head space than is good for your health.)

threading, geez

Above a response to LW.

> (I think you might be granting me a little too
> much head space than is good for your health.)

You occupy my mind like a gnat I can't get with my flyswatter.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2020 06:52PM by Lot's Wife.