Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
At 07:56 PM 4/25/03 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
I don't think so, not a lot of elections held in the Catholic Church,
How did you think they select popes, then?
The only electors are the red-robed "princes of the church".
while there is a lot of discussion, a priest or bishop who deviates on certain points is soon in serious trouble.
For values of "trouble" that, to a nonbeliever, translate as "may lose his job if he continues to disagree publicly with his employer." I realize that this is a serious matter to a believer--but nobody is required to belong to this organization, and the pope has no prisons. Yes, there's an official newspaper, but the church does not have the authority to stop the publication of dissenting publications: L'Osservatore Romano has the same status as Ari Fleischer's public statements, not as Pravda in the bad old days [1].
The church essentially lost effective temporal power in 1870. There was a dispute in the Vancouver area a few years ago when a Catholic school fired a teacher because in her personal life she was living with somone out of wedlock. At least that much power continues to be wielded. And what could be more authoritarian than the church's attitude on abortion rights where any criticism is seriously discouraged?.
In these declining years of the church the threat of excommunication does not have the power that it once had. Religions tend to maintain a hold on people that is impervious to reason. If a person has been a true believer for many years, expulsion from the religious community can be very traumatic.
Whatever the defects of the United States the situation differs markedly.
If George Bush decides I am a threat to US security, I can be imprisoned indefinitely without trial. If Karol Wojtyla decides I am a threat to the Catholic Church, he can say so publicly, and I can go about my normal occasions. Yes, the situation differs markedly, but maybe not in the way you're trying to suggest.
"Democracy" is often nothing more than a thin veneer that power elites suffer as a means of controlling the masses.
Bottom line, words have established meanings to most of us. Everything isn't the same, some institutions are relatively democratic, some are relatively authorititarian and may fairly be so described.
And now you're saying "relatively"; are you proposing an article that describes China as "relatively authoritarian", and if so, do you plan to give a scale from 0 to 100, with notes of where other nations fall on that scale?
To say that China is "relatively" authoritarian is an improvement for Fred over simply saying "China is authoritarian" It opens up the possibility of comparison with some other state. That's a small positive step toward understanding just what "authoritarian" means.
I do have more of a problem with his "words have established meanings to most of us." The "established meanings" that most of us have are not the smae, and that gives us problems. The thought that the meaning of a word would somehow be established democraticly makes me shudder. Once such a democratic result has been achieved do we then apply de Tocqueville's Tyranny of the Majority to enforce it. Fred's view of language does not appear to be very sophisticated.
Eclecticology