One of the consequences of choosing to believe in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic* understanding of God is that what moral action is merely an optional lifestyle choice under secular-materialistic-atheist-agnostic assumes a far different and far more urgent character. Under atheist-materialism the choice to accept something which is a logical as well as moral understanding under that understanding of God might be considered anything from an eccentricity to a detested annoyance and more. Under Nazism it was one of the things they planned on wiping out as that understanding of God, indeed, despised as much for its moral consequences as for the fact that it originated in Jews. Under Brit style elite university-credentialed snobs, those who accept that understanding are called "God botherers"
But that understanding and the moral imperatives that it requires can be the source of problems when that morality impinges on what are rightly considered things that secular government should have no right to determine in regard to individual people, such as what a person chooses to do with their own body - their OWN body, when those choices impinge on another autonomous individual, then those choices can, in some instances become the necessary interest of the general society and making laws regulating that can be morally justified.
That is the reason that it is right that governors have the legal and moral authority to impose quarantines on the populations they govern when infectious diseases can be stopped or reduced through a stay-at-home order.** There are other instances when that is justifiable though that is the present most important one of them.
Continuing on with what Hans Kung pointed out about the requirements of the Jewish-Christian understanding of God:
2. A new approach to sickness: If - in accordance with Christian self-understanding - there is a God who does not leave man alone even i the experience of borderline situations, but sustains him in security, both doctor and patient can establish and indisputably justify a new approach to sickness,
- then in the first place the doctor would never regard sickness from a purely chemical or biological standpoint, never merely as an irregular condition of body or mind in need of repair, to be treated solely with a chemical, physical or surgical technique;
I will point out that Kung, in his habit of considering things in a broader context than is usually included notes that this new approach will be something requiring the effort of patients as well as doctors. I wonder which would find it harder to change their present habits.
- then he would be more inclined to see sickness as a reduction in efficiency, as a danger, as a threat to life of the whole, concrete, individual human being, affecting all spheres of human existence;
- the, since suffering of all kinds are part of human existence - times of sickness can be as important as working time to the process of learning of the human person, amounting to a path to human maturity by ready acceptance, endurance, resolution of conflicts and suffering, consciously accepting our finiteness.
Of course that understanding includes the understanding that our lives on Earth are not the end of us at death. What is finite is our present life in this body as was the life of Jesus in his body before his death, before his Resurrection. Which I'll talk about later.
I will point out something else about the Jewish-Christian-Islamic understanding of God, understanding that God wants us to do to others as we would want them to do to us, universal medical care in so far as any society can provide that is an absolute moral requirement of that conception of God. Far more of an imperative than the state nationalizing and regulating the bodies of women and the responsible sex lives of consenting adults. There is certainly nothing an opponent of universal health coverage keeps from someone who cannot be treated or who cannot pay for treatment that they would want denied to them.
Kung's conception of times of sickness as a learning time, a time to come to understandings you are unlikey to come to through other experiences is something I wouldn't have understood before I and two of my siblings had the entire care of our mother during her last terrible month.*** It took me several years after she died to understand the meaning behind what happened both to her and to us. That she had to learn that she could not continue living in her century old body even as she wanted to stay with us. And we had to learn that too as well as lots of other things. It was terrible while it was going on, especially the periods when she was not lucid, when she remembered obscure incidents in her life that none of us had ever heard of - including that she had played baseball in games a boy her age - who she'd never talked about before- organized. I'd never heard her talk about playing sports which she had no interest in.
When I read about near death experiencers talk about a life review, I recognized that as being part of what she was going through that whole month. And there were other things we all learned from that experience. I would certainly not have chosen to go through that or had her go through that, though the final day when she was entirely lucid after a month of deep confusion and fear was a totally unexpected blessing to us even as the end was terrible and dramatic. I won't go into any more detail but this hardly covers it. I think she needed the month she got even though it was painful and terrible in many ways. I don't know if my sisters and brothers would see it that way but it's what I got from it.
* I think that Kung would certainly generally include Islamic understanding of God in his text if he rewrote it today. That isn't to say that everyone who professes to believe in that understanding of God means the same thing by it but the general tradition as that is understood by people of good will. I certainly don't think the interpretation of God the Phelps clan or the KKK hold, that Menachem Schneerson or the leaders of ISIS are covered under that understanding of God.
** But it is not justified when the government bans birth control or abortion because in that case there is no overriding societal interest that supersedes the right of women to decide if they are going to be pregnant or men and women when they need or want to prevent a pregnancy. For those who are opposed to abortion and believe the state rightfully can nationalize a woman's body - something none of the men and many of the women who are anti-abortion fanatics would never choose for themselves if their personal necessity or convenience were proposed to be regulated by the state - the fact is that the most effective means of stopping abortions is the correct use of effective birth control. Even their rightly made advocacy that women choose to carry a pregnancy to term, the limits of their justifiable anti-abortion activity, is not as effective as people knowing how to prevent unwanted or catastrophic pregnancies using contraception and having ready access to it - the entertainment media which encourages irresponsible sex so strongly should be coersed into making it socially unacceptable for men and women to have sex without preventing an unwanted pregnancy AND SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES.
Those who want the law to ban abortion are, ironically, not going to stop abortions, those were common when the ban on legal abortion was at its most absolute. There is nothing more immoral in striking a moral stand than to ignore or deny or pretend that the entire consequences of that stand are completely relevant in judging the morality of what they demand.
What they are doing isn't stopping abortions, it is making them extremely dangerous and, if, as so often, their anti-abortion activity seeks to ban or reduce the use of contraception in an idiotic fantasy that they will stop people they don't think should be having sex from having sex, they are actually guaranteeing there will be MORE ABORTIONS, NOT FEWER ONES. And, even more ironically as I suspect we will soon catastrophically discover, the consequences of their dream come true will be to make more people demand that abortion be made legal. The most effective argument against the abortion ban were the women who died or were seriously and often permanently injured through illegal abortions. Added on that there were the prosecutions against women who were suspected to have had abortions or doctors who provided safe abortions.
*** She had been dumped from a local hospital whose trustees had sold off to a larger corporation, a decision by a new class of doctors called "hospitalists" which I took to mean someone who was there to dump patients out of the hospital if their treatment wasn't going to be maximally profitable for the company. U.S. healthcare is run like a company under a completely acceptable scheme of secular professional "ethics" - you can construct one to come out pretty much anywhere you want it to come out.
Just as you can in law, especially when you don't have to try to find some tenuous excuse for coming out wherever you want to in the law. I'm sure William Barr will do that in a way that Republican-fascists will nod to, even those who have been to Catholic prep-schools.
The American medical-insurance corporate system, I suspect hated as widely among doctors and nurses as with patients, is definitely not covered by under the Jewish-Christian-Islamic understanding of God Kung is talking about.
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