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Javier E

It's Time to Stop Rationalizing and Enabling Evangelical Vaccine Rejection - by David F... - 0 views

frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...o-stop-rationalizing-christian

vaccine rejection moral foundation Christian morality framework liberty libertinism rights

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • As we approach nine months of vaccine availability and nine months of flood-the-zone coverage of vaccine safety and efficacy, it is clear that much (though certainly not all) of our remaining refusal problem is not one of information but one of moral formation itself. The very moral framework of millions of our fellow citizens—the way in which they understand the balance between liberty and responsibility—is gravely skewed. 
  • To understand the skew, it’s first necessary to understand the proper balance, and while we have vaccine endorsements from Christian leaders from across the Catholic/Protestant spectrum, we also have guidance from church fathers—individuals who no one can claim have caved to some “establishment” or are motivated by supposed invites to mythical beltway “cocktail parties.” For example, read these famous words from Martin Luther, written during a plague in his own time:
  • Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above. See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.
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  • Christian vaccine refusal not only rejects self-care, it enhances risks to innocent and vulnerable neighbors. Even vaccinated people can catch relatively rare breakthrough cases. And every person—regardless of vaccination status—is vulnerable to the strains placed on a region’s hospitals when COVID runs rampant. 
  • As a person created in the image of God, taking care of yourself is an independent good. Taking care of yourself so that you can care for others is an even nobler good. 
  • The balance is clear. It is incumbent on the Christian to take care of themselves, including by taking medicine “in order not to become contaminated” (a nice definition of a vaccine before vaccines were invented). To the extent that he or she takes risks, those risks should be on behalf of others
  • In addition, my liberty doesn’t extend to materially impairing your ability to pursue happiness.
  • The idea that liberty has limits is inherent in the American social compact
  • Through more than two centuries of controversy and progress, our classical liberal legal system is learning to harmonize these three unalienable rights.
  • I have liberty, yes, but my liberty does not extend to taking or endangering your life
  • I also fear that the relentless right-wing political focus on religious liberty has obscured two realities—that our liberties have limits when they collide with the rights of others, and that the exercise of our liberty carries with it profound moral responsibility. 
  • In March I wrote to warn that Christian vaccine hesitancy was a looming national problem. That which we have feared has come to pass. Indeed, as both the geographic concentrations of unvaxxed Americans and the survey data demonstrate, Christian vaccine refusal is helping sustain this pandemic:
  • Foremost among them are protections for life and health.
  • By contrast, what does the anti-vax Christian seek? The liberty to risk both the lives of others (through the physical danger of COVID and/or the danger of swamped medical facilities) and their pursuit of happiness (through the continued physical, economic, and social strains of a pandemic extended in part but the choices of anti-vax citizens). 
  • let’s be honest and clear. The majority of Christians seeking religious exemptions are using religion as a mere pretext for their real concern—be it fear of the shot or the simple desire to do what they want.
  • I’m quite concerned that long-standing, justified Christian concerns for religious liberty have inadvertently created a sense of religious entitlement that obscures the desperate need for religious responsibility.
  • For the Christian believer, the pursuit of freedom is inseparable from the pursuit of virtue. We do not seek liberty simply to satisfy our desires or to appease our fears. In fact, when we pursue the freedom to make our neighbors sick, we violate the social compact and undermine our moral standing in politics, law, and culture. Christian libertinism becomes a long-term threat to religious liberty itself. 
  • Our founders recognized the threat of libertinism to liberty. “Our Constitution,” John Adams wrote, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.” In fact, a sufficient degree of vice would, Adams argued, “break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”
  • it is increasingly clear that many of the remaining holdouts need their hearts to change before their minds will change. It’s their moral framework that’s broken, and when that framework is broken, reason and virtue have difficulty penetrating a hardened heart.
  • The proper framework is easy to articulate, yet hard to create. Take prudent measures to protect yourself. When you choose to take risks, take risks for others. And always recognize that liberty isn’t license. Believers should seek freedom to pursue virtue, not to indulge their desires or appease their fears. 
  • In more prosaic legal terms, the state is able to regulate even the strongest of liberties when it possesses a “compelling governmental interest” and places those regulations in proper limits
  • Now is the time to take a clear stand. Not in a way that mocks or condescends, but one can be firm while also being respectful. As the Apostle Paul told Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.” The power is not political power, but the power of God over the fears of man. The love is for God and for our neighbor. And sound judgment should help us separate lies from truth and tell us that no argument for liberty should trump our responsibility to spare our nation and our neighbors and finally take the vaccine. 
peterconnelly

How Much Haiti's Freedom Cost: Takeaways From a Times Series - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-haiti-reparations-france.html

haiti freedom new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • When the world looks at Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, sympathy for its endless suffering is often overshadowed by scolding and sermonizing about corruption and mismanagement.
  • But few know the story of what happened two decades later, when French warships returned to a people who had paid for their freedom with blood, issuing an ultimatum: Pay again, in staggering amounts of cold hard cash, or prepare for war.
  • For generations, the descendants of enslaved people paid the descendants of their former slave masters, with money that could have been used to build schools, roads, clinics or a vibrant economy.
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  • When a French warship bristling with cannons sailed into the port of the Haitian capital in 1825, an emissary from King Charles X came ashore and delivered an astonishing demand: France wanted reparations from the people it had enslaved.
  • The demand was for 150 million French francs, to be turned over in five annual payments, far more than Haiti could pay.
  • So France pushed Haiti to take a loan from a group of French banks to start paying. That Sisyphean weight came to be known as the double debt.
  • Every franc shipped across the Atlantic to an overseas bank vault was a franc not circulating among Haiti’s farmers, laborers and merchants, or not being invested in bridges, schools or factories — the sort of expenditures that help nations become nations, that enable them to prosper.
  • For a decade, a quarter of Haiti’s total revenue went to paying debts controlled by National City Bank and its affiliate, according to nearly two dozen annual reports prepared by American officials and reviewed by The Times.
  • After half a century of crushing payments tied to the double debt, Haitians celebrated the news that at last the country would have its own national bank, the sort of institution that in Europe had financed railroads and factories.
  • “Isn’t it funny,” one Haitian economist wrote, “that a bank that claims to come to the rescue of a depleted public treasury begins not by depositing money but by withdrawing everything of value?”
  • When the American military invaded Haiti in the summer of 1915, the official explanation was that Haiti was too poor and too unstable to be left to its own devices. Secretary of State Robert Lansing made little effort to mask his contempt for the “African race,” casting the occupation as a civilizing mission intended to end “anarchy, savagery and oppression.”
  • “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” the general who led the U.S. forces in Haiti, said years later, describing himself as a “racketeer for capitalism.”
  • For decades to come, the United States was the dominant power in Haiti, dissolving parliament at gunpoint, killing thousands and shipping a big portion of Haiti’s earnings to bankers in New York while the farmers who helped generate the profits often lived near starvation.
  • “Neocolonialism through debt,” is how Thomas Piketty, one of the economists we spoke with, put it. “This drain has totally disrupted the process of state building,” he said.
  • “They were betrayed by their own brothers, and then by foreign powers.”
  • In an 1875 loan, the French bankers took a 40 percent cut off the top.
  • The double debt has largely faded into history. Generations of French profited richly from the financial exploits of their forebears, but that is rarely taught in classrooms.
  • “This is part of my family history I never knew,” said one sixth-generation descendant of Napoleon’s first wife.
  • Even in Haiti, the full story was long unknown. Then in 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide stunned Haitians by denouncing the debt imposed by France and demanding reparations.
Javier E

The War in Ukraine Is the End of a World - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673197

turning point cold war world order epoch international relations

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.
  • I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.
  • And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse,
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  • I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.
  • the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.
  • I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.
  • It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine
  • I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope
  • I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.
  • Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing.
  • The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity.
  • The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.
  • But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States
  • I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies
  • But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.
  • I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.
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