let me just get my New Atheism checklist Outrider........ Cultural impact of religion on morality airbrushed out of history CHECK
Do you have a dictionary? Look up 'secular', it does not involve airbrushing either the good or bad influences of religion out of the picture, on morality or anything else.
What has been done by a hopefully representaive group of human beings can be altered by it.....as we have seen in Britain where we are threatening to remove ourselves from this kind of legal morality.
As I said, there are mechanisms for making alterations - yes, there is the option to withdraw entirely or, as some nations have done, to not sign up to it at all.
People voted forthis in Britain IN THEIR DROVES. So whose right? The Forty year old Blairite in 2000 who supported observing these rights and laws or the sixty year old Boris voter he has become in the intervening 20 years?
I suspect that you're referring to the Brexit vote - our signatory status on the European Convention on Human Rights is independent of our membership of (or departure from) the European Union - if I recall correctly it's a Council of Europe membership expectation, and it's why Brexit won't affect our ability to the European Court of Human Rights where it's relevant even if we've lost access to the European Court of Justice.
Again I am not against the laws but their basis in morality seems a fragile thing and a moveable feast
That's the nature of morality - look at, culturally speaking, how quickly it's gone from homosexuality being anathema to publicly acceptable in the UK, look at how quickly racism has become unacceptable in most places, and equally look at how slowly gay marriage is being adopted in the US.
then they turn out not to be terribly good or should I say aimed at at the little people since governments seem immune.
Which part of why that declaration of rights includes the right to take part in government, because it's recognised that the more representative a government is the better it tends historically to accommodate the range of different voices in its midst.
They are also a tacit admission that we are immoral as well as morals and can't be trusted without these instruments on morality.
We are neither inherently moral nor immoral, given that morality is both situational and constructed. We watch ourselves and each other because morality is a constantly evolving understanding.
In my unbelieving days I was one,
And there are none so pious as the converted, right
but are you sufficiently not a fan?
That rather depends on how you look at it. I've never voted that way yet, and whilst I don't how things will change I don't immediately see any likelihood of it happening - but I'm married to a died in the wool blue-voter...
A few decades ago they wouldn't have got a way with suggesting herd immunity even for a minute.
But they could quite easily have implemented different controls for groups; say, 'blacks only' hospitals, or banning women from the workplace (except schools and nursing, obviously) to keep them safe... As it is, whilst some of the fucktrumpets near the top may have whittered about herd immunity at the start, by and large they've followed the scientific recommendations pretty closely.
This level of death in care homes would be a national scandal. Now?
It's getting the media coverage, at least in the places I read. We'll have to wait until it's over to see what comes of the enquiry that's been announced; they may be held to account properly, they may not - I'm not hopeful - but that ability of the powerful to avoid consequence is not new. Blair over Iraq, the contaminated blood issue in the late 70's, it goes back and back. I don't pretend we live in a Utopia - we are still building a better system, and within that journey there may well be steps backward.
A shrug in Bimingham England but uproar whenever american evangelicals do something in Birmingham Alabama.
Whether or not it was right to relieve the burden on the NHS by returning the elderly to care homes is a far cry from mask-refuseniks and an administration publicly contradicting its own senior scientific advisor whilst he's stood at the podium.
Talk about not noticing the plank in your own eye with all that's going on in our largely secular country and your focus is on Shemima Begum? Fucking astounding
Should we be ignoring here because she's not important enough at the moment? Is that the moral stance to take? We've got bigger issues, she can forgo her rights? She isn't my focus, but she's an ongoing case regarding the competing claims to certain rights that's in the news at the moment.
Here we go again....airbrush the role of christianity in the shaping of international law, focus on christians on just giving the bad things......what about the horrendous state of the largely secular UK which is nothing like the USA.
I'm not 'airbrushing' anything, I'm highlighting what's probably the single most significant contribution of Christianity to the moral and cultural landscape at the moment - it's not my fault that it's a sand-paper coated dildo of a contribution.
What about the 'horrendous' state of the UK? Which bit is an issue? Where is Christianity riding to our rescue, where are the evil scientifico-atheist cabals dragging us to next? Britain isn't perfect, we're still clawing our way out of centuries of institutionalised racism for a start in which Christianity and Christians have played significant parts in both the good and the bad.
It has the highest Covid mortality in the world and the people responsible for that are ten points ahead in the polls!
From the context it sounds like you are talking about the UK - we do not have the highest Covid mortality in the world, that's currently the US, and we're also behind Malaysia, Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico, Russia, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Iran, Philippines, Israel and Turkey at least. (July 17th 2020)
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus And that's before you consider that not all the nations immediately around us are measuring mortality in the same way - Germany, for instance, is putting a great deal of time and money into conducting formal investigations to try and establish exactly who is dying from Covid; the UK figures are a more easy reckoning of those who die with Covid, without going to great length to establish singular cause, which is likely elevating our count relative to others who count differently*.
But of course, I digress. What is that makes your stance more moral?
Than what?
O.
* It does raise the question of why the government would seek to implement a counting method which makes things look worse; it's a surely unrelated fact, the cynic in me thinks, that the families of most people who die of a pandemic disease aren't eligible to claim their life insurance policies...
