Several reasons why I haven't been responding. (1) Been too busy lately to sit there and compose long messages. (2) Been giving myself time to understand the mentality behind what I'm seeing. (3) Not sure if my responses matter at all.
I'm beginning to think I understand where you are coming from and why sometimes you seem to be in sync with us but sometimes you are not.
I think you are taking the automation approach to these legal and moral questions. This is how automation works. You come up with a line of reasoning that works for some circumstances. You assume that this line of reasoning must work for all circumstances. From this point on, you automatically apply this line of reasoning to all circumstances that remotely resemble the original circumstances you dealt with.
My problem is this. I see each situation as a different situation that requires at least a slightly different approach. Yes, normally I would say that minority "right" must be protected from the majority will. Yes, normally I would agree that we must respect cultural differences even if these differences can be viewed as wrong by the norms. Yes, normally I would agree that freedom of religion requires a hands-off policy in order to ensure freedom of religion.
That said, there are situations where automation (or whatever the hell you philosophers describe it) just doesn't make any sense. A small minority religious group could come up with ways to take advantage of this line of reasoning that would normally work in most cases. They could teach their females from early childhood that being raped by much older men is ok and that it is the only way to heaven. They could teach their females from early childhood that complaining about it or call for help would land them in eternal hell. They could teach them a lot of things from early childhood that (and I know it bothers you when I say this) are just plain wrong and evil. All of this coupled with the fact that children naturally cling to their parents no matter how abusive they are. This is biological!
Going back to what I would call the automation method. Yes, normally I would say that imposing the majority will on a small minority group is immoral not to mention illegal. But this doesn't give immunity to the small minority that does obviously evil things.
Bare with me for a second here. I don't mean to compare you to the inquisition. All I'm about to do is compare your method with just one aspect of the inquision, so please bare with me.
The Vatican at one point declared that the inquisition "could not draw blood". This led to inquisitors coming up with all kinds of horrible ways to torture and kill people without literally drawing any blood. My favorite example was simply burning people alive because that didn't draw any blood at all. There was also the stretcher.
Your method at approaching these issues is like arguing to the world's end that these methods must be ok because the text literally said inquisitors could not draw any blood and since there was no blood drawn the whole torture thing must be ok.
Holmes, I know evil when I see it. I know wrong when I see it. Yes, I am also aware that these are the same lines of words used by christians today to describe homosexuals. We must, however, look at each individual case and ask ourselves if the people involved, mainly the children, have any choice in the matter.
I was raised a fundamentalist christian. I know what it's having been raised and told from very early on about the damnation of hellfire. I can confidently say that when I was 18 I would have done things I knew to be wrong just so I could avoid hell. These 13, 14, etc. year olds were raised to not question the men in power or they'd go to hell. You really want the rest of us to sit back and wait for the remote possibility that they'd break out of that mentality and come to us for help?
Like I said many times before. People like these girls in this religious sect and people like Madeline in households that promote faith-healing never had much of a choice. They were isolated from the rest of the world. How on Earth can we expect them to have any kind of informed say about their own safety? And like I said many times before, we will probably never know what Madeline really wanted simply because she was isolated from the world by her parents. For all we know, she could have been crying bloody murder as she slowly and painfully died from her very curable condition. We don't know.
Anyway, I saw some of Percy's words and realized that I, too, am no longer interested debating this with you and get bogged down in details. You can take this however you want it. Reply if you wish. I guess we will have to simply agree to disagree.
I'm trying to see things your way, but I can't put my head that far up my ass.
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