hadassah89,
I read the 'beliefs' on MTR's website, and it was like reading the latest copy of the Catholic newspaper, only less exciting.
(And yes I KNOW it doesn't matter about at which Christian place she worships invisible beings in the sky!)

Tony Lavis,
nicely put :)

Cheers,
Suse.

"If God made us, then what He says will be in our best interests. The overwhelming evidence is that when you leave the path of his commands, you are living a life that is not in your best interests. You don’t need a religious viewpoint to see this. You just need to go in with your eyes open as the evidence is there: things like abortion, divorce and the sexualisation of women hurt men, women and children in our society. The list could go on and on."

Posted by hadassah89, Monday, 20 February 2012 10:17:48 AM

"If God made us, then what He says will be in our best interests." .. that is an existential fallacy, and a fallacy of an excluded/undistributed middle. Besides, "if God", "if God made us" .. etc

"You just need to go in with your eyes open as the evidence" ... This is a non-sequitur. Besides, go "in" where?? "evidence" for what??

One rule for Christians, one for everyone else. That's getting a bit tired...

I am happy to proclaim what I do, or don't believe, where it is relevant to a discussion. So I therefore expect each other contributor to list their philosophical and political beliefs, in the same way. It is exactly the same thing.

If you doubt this is needed, take the following quote from the article:

"In my early thirties, I ceased to believe in the Christian God and organised religion. A few years later feminism gave me the analytic tools to deconstruct religion and reveal it for the powerfully oppressive force it can be for women."

@Squeers Sorry to have taken to long, to reply,I'm on holidays.
Re bias - as a pro choice woman I believe it's an individual woman's right to obtain an abortion, just as she would any other medical procedure, fully informed. I prefer bias towards choice rather than bias towards prohibition.

more generally: Re Reist ( or anybody else's) religious, ideological views - if I know that someone believes in a system that I find bizarre, repressive, anti feminist and oppressive I'm not going to try to separate the belief system by which they live their lives from the morality they espouse. I wouldn't go to a celibate catholic priest for relationship advice. I wouldn't go to a radical feminist separatist for advice on my male partner.

Reist is perfectly entitled to disclose or withhold whatever she likes. I am perfectly entitled to mistrust her and form an opinion about her. This is not a new debate. These questions were asked about Reist in 2006 by people I'd never heard of until I started researching. They were asked by Jane Hutcheon on ABC TV's One on One in November last year. It's ludicrous of Mishka to attempt to frame this as some odd obsession of mine.

I really do wonder why Reist chose to threaten me instead of the numerous other people who've asked exactly the same questions for years.

What matters as far as I'm concerned is that I know who Im dealing with and where she or he is coming from. This may not matter to everyone, but for those of us to whom it is a matter of concern, it is our right to ask the questions. If someone wishes to conceal their influences, that is their right, and what becomes important to me then as I consider their moral position, is their need for concealment.

The high court of Australia ruled that charlatanism is the price we pay for religious beliefs and that if any religion was asked to prove any of those beliefs all would fail.
Perhaps people that have made a nice profit from religious superstition and are still making a profit from religion, may also not want to be identified with this group that the High court of Australia identifies as open to charlatanism.
To a lot of people, being seen chanting incantations to a mythical and fictitious deity that is open to such charlatanism's to satisfy superstitious delusions. Delusions that were forced onto them with threat and fear as vulnerable young children may well be thought of as career threatening in another sphere, away from other colluding religious cult members. Whether these religious cult members actually really believe in these ridiculous superstitions or just pretend to for profit, like so many do. There have been so many Prophets for profit, how does any religious cult member know who is a fraud and who isn't, its all open to charlatanism isn't it?
As for abortion, no one should say a word until they have seen the Doco, "Abortion cops and corruption", so they can see how bad it was when abortion was illegal in this country and what their religious delusions would again inflict!

briar rose,

I s'pose we could describe you then as a "democratic, liberal feminist"? and MTR as a more conservative, less libertarian version of the same thing? Yet on the issue of porn it's MTR who'd seem the more radical "separatist", apropos a history of exploitative and oppressive paternalism? As intuitively right and irreproachable as your--"I believe it's an individual woman's right to obtain an abortion, just as she would any other medical procedure, fully informed. I prefer bias towards choice rather than bias towards prohibition"--sounds to "enlightened" sensibilities, there's a reckless individualism to it, as well as a sense of the "rights of the consumer" that smacks of s free market, anti-social ideology. In this sense your secular church is more conservative than MTR's Catholicism, since libertarianism is the order of the day.
I don't hold to the notion of the sanctity of choice any more than I do the sanctity of life. Free choice is or should be a privilege, complement to social responsibility and mores, the social contract, rather than supremely vested in egotism. It's an ideological delusion to think choice is ever free--in any qualitative sense--or independent. It was argued on the Science Show that human promiscuity is a social adaptation, rather than biological; in any case it's the very antithesis of "free choice". The topic of pornography bares a great deal more complex discussion than the evocation of individual or human right.

tbc