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The Cognitive Dissident

A blog by Ronald P. Thompson, Ph.D.

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July 2016

Abortion: A case of Jesus v. Pope

The other day I watched an interesting documentary about the Pro-Life movement on Netflix.  In some ways it was difficult to watch due to the content, but it was very illuminating as to the methods and mindset of the core anti-abortion activist.  The method of the film maker was not to have a debate, but to let the excesses of this movement’s leaders speak for themselves.   Though I commend this method, particularly for this topic, it left a great many deceptive assumptions lying on the table with no rebuttal.

Underlying the entire argument of those who seek to ban abortion is the assumption that the United States is, or was, or ever has been a “Christian” nation in the sense that Israel under King David was a Jewish nation.  This assumption is critical because the fact that Jesus, the person they ostensibly are seeking to emulate, never once even suggested that the mission of his followers was to sway or change Roman government policy.  In the day of Jesus, the whole of Israel was a province of Rome and it follows that if his message was to change the civil government’s practices he would have said so.   And Roman governmental practices were both brutal and unjust.   Christians today wince at the reality of Jesus’s crucifixion, yet in his day it was just a small but normal part of life, in the good times.  In bad times the main roads were lined with rotting crucified corpses.   For non-Roman citizens, no trial nor evidence was needed to be presented before the victim was crucified, just the capricious whim of a Roman official.   Yet, what do we see Jesus’s model for response to such injustice?  In the gospel of Luke Jesus answered:

“But I say to you that you must not oppose those who want to hurt you. If people slap you on your right cheek, you must turn the left cheek to them as well. When they wish to haul you to court and take your shirt, let them have your coat too. When they force you to go one mile, go with them two.”

Jesus was presenting a way of life for the individual who lived in a brutal and oppressed citizenry.   Not once did he, nor the apostles, seek to implement his new morality of love and compassion via any means of coercion, least of all by the strong arm of the state.   In the end Christianity was created for the powerless individual to find happiness in an unjust world. Continue reading “Abortion: A case of Jesus v. Pope” →

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Of Human Rights and Government

I am an American.  The sanctity of unfettered freedom of speech, assembly, press and religion has been ingrained in me as, it is in all Americans, since my earliest years.  This belief is, in many ways, the heart of who we are as a people.

“We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are endowed by their creator to certain inalienable rights:  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  This we believe as a people.   The political right, center and left know the fastest way to public repudiation is to trample those basic rights.

Americans citizens regularly get in trouble in other countries when they give the authorities the proverbial finger only to find out that they have committed a crime in doing so.  This type of behavior is often seen as American arrogance, but in fact it is not that Americans think they should have that right, they believe every person on earth already has that right. Rather than being arrogant, we tend to be naive to the ways of the rest of the world.

Against that backdrop we look at the execution last year of a women’s rights lawyer for simply stating that women have rights equivalent to men.  We see the Chinese government arrest people for practicing unapproved religions and systemically destroying Christian churches.   We see the a number of governments arrest not only those who practice freedom of the press, but lawyers who defend the journalist. And we hear of death sentences handed out by the governments in several countries on the charge of changing religion or daring to question even the smallest tenant of the official religion.

How can all this be?  Don’t all people know they have the inherent human right to freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion?  It is a puzzlement for us in America. How does a government get away with it?  Such a flagrant violation of the social contract between government and the governed simply must result in the fall of the said government.  Mustn’t it? Continue reading “Of Human Rights and Government” →

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honor killing

Yes, we could always do better, but to often the rhetoric implies that in “The West” women have it worse than in other parts of the world.  That is simply not true. Yes there are tiny societies where women are treated as well as in Western democracies, but compare the status of women in the most populous nations: China, India, Pakistan, Nigeria & Bangladesh.  This list represents 6 of the 8 most populous countries and nearly half the world’s population.  Take a look at women’s political power, women’s economic power and women’s social status, then compare them to the status of women in North America and Europe.

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