Anyone Can Be a Fundamentalist

Hate the religious right? Consider the religious right the source of hate?

While I do not have such a strong opinion, during the pinnacle of the religious right’s influence, I could not find anything in the Bible about giving judicial nominations an up or down vote or why God would smite Ariel Sharon with a stroke for dividing Israel’s land.

I actually happen to be a conservative and a Christian, but I consider the two parts neither to be equivalent nor mutually exclusive. I may have wanted an up or down vote for judges as a conservative, but I had no opinion of it as a Christian.

Certainly many reading this could cite more examples of the religious right overstepping their bounds. But is only the religious right or just religion capable of this?

The religious left can display a similar pattern on a different brand of social issues, social justice. Even the non-religious left often advocate for social justice with a religious zeal of their own. Many of them already worship the Obamessiah (who seems quite human these days).

Under the pretext of social justice, universal healthcare and a living wage are incorporated in the doctrine of inalienable, fundamental rights. In fact, the concept of rights does have some deistic roots, as our Founding Fathers cite the Creator as the source of our rights. But did our Founding Fathers envision, for example, a living wage as one of these fundamental rights?

The Declaration of Independence lists life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as rights. Before this, the philosopher John Locke listed life, liberty and property. One cannot ignore that change by the Founding Fathers. Whether it’s property, a living wage or universal healthcare, the point remains the same. People have the right to pursue all of this, but none of it is entitled as a right.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as well as First Amendment rights like freedom of speech, possess an intangible, transcendental quality. Aside from creating a government capable of protecting our rights, liberties such as freedom of speech have no direct cost. Healthcare and a living wage, conversely, have a tangible cost and a corporeal quality.

Already, Cash for Clunkers has expanded [9] from $1 billion to $3 billion. What if the cost of healthcare reform balloons from $1 trillion to $3 trillion? Does it become an inalienable right or fiscal recklessness?

As reported in Newsmax, TennCare, Tennessee’s universal healthcare program, initially worked with half a million uninsured and an initial cost of $2.6 billion, but it then nearly tripled [10] in both enrollment and cost to 1.4 million people and $8.5 billion per year in 2004. Major cuts were necessary to keep the state’s budget intact.

Likewise, Massachusetts’ healthcare program had a similar start but is now only considered a success by 26 percent [11] of people according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports.

Many on this campus can easily turn social justice issues into rights in a way that can grant them a similar level of sanctity to religious doctrine (actually, probably more). Yet such an attitude only poisons the dialogue on these issues and obscures the harsh realities of life on Earth.

One does not even have to be a politician, either, to be guilty of these mistakes. Consider the world of technology and software, in particular open-source software.

To the religious open-source gurus, open-source means that developers can access the original source code for a program as well as modify and redistribute it for free. To everybody else, open-source means the product is free.

I have actually seen both sides. The content management system CornellSun.com uses, Drupal, is open-source. On the other end of the spectrum, I have interned at Microsoft.

One may logically conclude that these two parts of me are, once again, neither equivalent nor mutually exclusive. However, they have to be mutually exclusive, and the reason why has nothing to do with some “evil empire.” It actually is because most open-source software is closed in a way.

Most open-source code is licensed under the General Public License, or GPL, which forces the entire program to be open-source if it uses any part which is open-source. This makes using open-source code untenable not only for Microsoft, but also many Silicon Valley start-ups.

Thus, the GPL (and many members of the open-source community as well) prioritizes the the code’s license over the code’s quality. You either have to live up to their doctrines, or you can have no part of them.

Yet while these issues affect all proprietary companies, Microsoft, of course, receives all the hate and spite from very special members of the open-source community. Even when Microsoft recently released 20,000 lines of code under an open-source license, the distrust and reaction from many open-source gurus prompted this statement from Linus Torvalds [12], the founder of Linux:

“I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease … I don’t want to be associated with the people for whom it’s about exclusion and hatred.”

Such a quote would often be associated with fundamentalists, but in reality, anyone can show that kind of “fundamentalist” attitude. One should be cautious not to adopt a holier-than-thou attitude just because they are not a part of the religious right or religion in general.

Mike Wacker can be reached at mwacker@cornellsun.com.