Children and the Elderly in the Secular Society
- Religion assigned absolute values to social life. This ranged from the absolute right of parents to raise their children as they wished to the right of anybody to live forever.
- It is inevitable that our secular society, based on materialistic principles, will eventually use materialistic rules (i.e. economics) to determine what people are entitled to do.
- When a group of religious people from the USA kidnapped 20 children from Haiti, many thought that those people were despicable. However, they were right in their assumption: those children would have had a better future in the USA. Those children may not be grateful that they were "saved".
- It is inevitable that at some point society will start tolerating that children are kidnapped as long as they are given a better life (not child prostitution, of course, but higher education, better health care, etc.). In fact, some governments may even impose a transfer of children from poor families to rich families who want them in order to provide better futures to those children and thereby generally improve society for everybody.
- Abortion will become mandatory if a family cannot afford a child and adoptions are scarce. If you are entitled to decide an abortion based on what you, Sofia, prefer, why shouldn't society force an abortion on you based on what, we, the whole world, prefer? Your child affects the entire society, not just your life.
- Rules for the elderly will also change. Now that birth rates are decreasing everywhere, all societies are facing the problem of an aging population. Much of your income will be taxed to pay for the elderly of your country. It is inevitable that at some point society will start tolerating forced euthanasia, and the definition of euthanasia will be proportional to how many elderly people a country has. A country that has a lot of elderly people and relatively few young people may decide that euthanasia is mandated the first time a person over 80 catches the flu. Eventually society might decide to just kill anyone on their 70th birthday or the moment that they stop paying taxes. Instead of receiving a pension, you will have to pay a monthly fee to stay alive.
- The very fact that you drive a car or watch television is a cost to society. Being alive is not free of charge.
- If the only value that matters is the collective well-being, all of this becomes inevitable.
- Even when our motives are "humanitarian", we tend to focus on economics. You want to heal blind children because otherwise they won't be able to work. You want to send children to school because otherwise they won't be able to get highly-paid jobs. You want to liberate women so they can work and make money for themselves.
- Missionaries did not focus on economics: they focused on saving the soul. Now we aim to save their bodies, not their souls.
- It is telling that a lot of egalitarians talk about the redistribution of wealth but not about the redistribution of happiness.
- We are just postponing the day that everything will be decided based on economics.
- The devil has won :-)
|
