I
quite enjoy the Pew Research Center because they are a non-partisan,
non-advocacy data and research organization.
They are principally concerned with the data and statistics rather than
taking or advising a particular position.
Have
a look at http://www.pewresearch.org/
and play around. We quickly get feel that our attitudes and
values on issues of the day are linked to our identities in terms of racial,
cultural and religious groupings. These
identifiers link certain value systems to the group and produce trends that
make value systems almost predictable by such groupings.
You
will find trends in attitudes to gay marriage in the very religious, or among Muslims being different to the non-religious or even the politically liberal
for instance. Sometimes these trends are
common knowledge and sometimes they are surprising, but usually they are
interesting in some way or another.
Taking a position on this issue:
Attitudes
on abortion, contraception, women’s rights, children’s rights, misogyny etc etc
all seem to have links to cultural values.
Botched
circumcisions take a number of lives each year in the coming of age ceremonies,
but no matter, they continue each year due to some cultural values held by
those communities that must be more important than the risk. Infant circumcisions are more important than
an individual’s right to decide on his own body in some societies. Other groups use the same word “Circumcision”
for females, to describe removal of her genitals basically, and feel that to
them it’s pretty much the same thing….
These
values are usually more or less prevalent in groups and certain identities
reflect certain tendencies.
If
a democratic secular society is to be valued, I hope certain things remain non-negotiable. We have fought very hard for racial equality
in South Africa
Europe
and Scandinavia are faced with this clash of
value systems due to the large scale Islamic community emigration bringing
Islamic values with those communities which are in many ways at odds with
Western values. Their children are born into identity crises, which is really
not always fair. How do we reconcile
these values?
What
are the important issues of today? Overpopulation, the environment, global economy,
the energy crises, war, disease, poverty, human rights? Any other ideas to add
to this? I’m sure there are.
Let’s
take these issues head on, and make a case for defining our shared culture of
common consequence around them by contrasting current cultural values and see
which provides the most likely way to find SOLUTIONS.