Sure there is. A man’s commitment to be honest with his employer is not inherently immoral. Therefore, if he violates that obligation, he must accept the consequences.
On the other hand, the lie to the government is an unfortunate but necessary step to a challenge of the law. As I pointed out before, unless you make the initial deception, there is no way to challenge this unjust law. Should such laws simply go unchallenged? You seem to say so.
I agree with Liberal. I am appalled that some liberal posters (not all, ahem) are willing to passively accept this denial of freedom. Even endorse it.
I lived 11 years in Saudi…the “Bible rule” was randomly enforced, if you had one probably no problem, if you had dozens that would be a problem. A couple of stories:
A “Special Teacher” in other words a minister hired by Aramco to preach to ONLY the Aramcon Christian staff(worked in Saudi for 20 plus years& knew the rules) tried to ship in Baptisim certificates, Bibles etc. His passport was flagged at the airport and the stuff was confiscated and distroyed. The previous years he had never done anything like this. Lost his job because of it and other minor infracions.
I was entering Saudi Arabia at the old Dhahran Airport(lovely place ) with a **Lonely Planet ** travel book purchased in the Kingdom. On the cover was a picture of a Greek Monestary(with the blue domes) The Custume dude took it and I was to see the head guy. Off I go, my husband demanded he go with me. We go into the Head Guy’s office he had a stack of bibles and put my lonely **Lonely Planet ** book on top. I told him I bought the book here in the kingdom, he said not possible. I went over to show him the store sticker still on it. He thought the book was a bible, but he could not read English. Finally gave me the book back.
spoke-:A man’s commitment to be honest with his employer is not inherently immoral. […] On the other hand, the lie to the government is an unfortunate but necessary step to a challenge of the law.
On the other hand, if the employer has voluntarily pledged to abide by the government’s unjust law, then isn’t it complicit in the government’s injustice? How can you consider it moral to lie in one’s purely voluntary association with an unjust foreign government, but not moral to lie in one’s purely voluntary association with the company that is voluntarily aligning itself with this unjust foreign government? Why should the latter deserve punishment while the former doesn’t?
That double standard certainly is not in keeping with the anti-government ethics of Thoreau, for example, whom Liberal brought up earlier. Thoreau considered that accepting allegiance to any body or institution that was complicit in government oppression was tantamount to directly supporting that oppression.
Again, this is the sort of moral ambiguity that I feel weakens the compelling moral message of civil disobedience. That’s why, IMHO, people practicing civil disobedience should accept its generally recognized obligation to be fully upfront and truthful about their actions.
It seems to me that in this case, civil disobedience would not be in secretly converting Muslims to Christianity – that hardly draws attention to your cause or points out the wrong you might feel in that law. It would be in challenging the Saudi law head on and accepting the consequences therein, and hoping to bring internal and external pressure on the Saudis to change it. The religion angle is kind of clouding people’s thoughts on this one “Why of course my proseltyzing is an absolute good!” but to me it’s no different than any other foreign country’s law that you care to disagree with. It’s the Life of David Gale method of protesting capital punishment, and it doesn’t make any sense to me.
First small point: Liberal suggets Paul is sucking up to the Saudis (BS already!) “like the Bushes,” which is a weird construction, probably from Michael Moore’s half-correct movie Farhrenheit 911. If the Dubya were really taking orders from the Saudis we wouldn’t be in Iraq right now. The Saudis were against the invasion, which is why the command center is in Qatar now.
Major point: I taught English in the Gulf as Paul is doing, in Qatar, the only other (AFAIK) formal Wahabbist state in the world, albeit one that is laxer on adhering to many of its rules. We also had jackasses trying to convert the population (it’s always Evangelical Christians, almost always fellow Americans sad to say) posing as secular English teachers. These people are scum as far as I’m concerned.
They usually just came from a poorer traditional nation that pretty much has to take whatever charity these groups provide along with the doses of radical Christian sectarianism. A lot of them seemed to be fresh from Russia, which is in economic freefall and ripe picking for soul collectors. These people flock into disaster areas like ghouls, seperating people from traditional belief when it looks like the old god(s) failed. They are most certainly not about religious freedom, but conversion to their narrow sect. They would probably allow less tolerance of religious apostasy if (please no!) they ever had charge of their own theocracy. They think nothing of lying to their employers, coworkers and host authorities about their presence in the country. They don’t give a shit about the long-term consequences of encouraging religious differences in tradtional societites, because they don’t think there is a long term; Jesus is comin’ back any day now, and he’s gonna send the Muslims who don’t get converted to Hell.
Most countries aren’t in a position to turn them away. But the Gulf nations are like the Beverly Hillbillies - new wealth and the freedom to deal with their old money neighbors that comes with it. They are getting their feet wet in western commodity culture and picking and choosing what they think will work for them on a timetable they feel comfortable with. A lot of that has to do with local authrorities warming up to the foreign presence, and there’s more success than problems.
Quiet church services happen (I even read a positive profile of the local Malayalam community Catholic priest in the paper in Doha), you can get a beer in certain venues, women are newly allowed to drive and go unvelied (non-Qatari women didn’t have to anyway), etc. This is all allowed because the changes are paced and people don’t feel like their culture and religion is going to be flushed overnight. The stack of Bibles crowd isn’t only endangering westerners in the country, but the overall pace of the internal changes that people in the country are considering and warming up to.
I only wish that a lot of poorer nations were able to put the foot down in a similar fashion.
“I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true; and they do not always mean what they say… I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it… It has come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his fate was left to the legal tribunals of the country to be decided. Free men have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case… The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free… Only they are guiltless who commit the crime of contempt of such a court.”
None of my Saudi friends think they are slaves and none of them have expressed any interest in being freed by my intervention. Perhaps you know better?
In any case, I am working to improve the lot of the Saudis. I would propose to you that my eight years of work has done more to liberalize this country than my coworkers eighteen months accomplished. Not every situation requires a grand slam. Sometimes a number of base hits will do.
I suspect that the gentleman in question wanted to get caught in some way. That way he could be seen to be making a great sacrifice for his religion. From talking to him I got the impression that the entire stunt was all about him.
People should be allowed to live as they choose to live Imperialism and Cultural Imperialism are not an unalloyed good. Our way is not the only way. Within limits we should mind our own business.
You seem to have me confused with an Americanist. If there is a poster here who has criticized American government hegemony more than I, I’d like to know who it is. All I’m advocating here is that people be allowed to read what they want to read. Perhaps it is the case that when whole generations of people are forbidden from reading banned books, they eventually forget what slavery is.
In one of Thomas Friedman’s columns in the New York Times, he observed that the most liberal Middle Eastern states are the ones with the least oil wealth. He suggested that the oil wealth is propping up the regimes in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
So one thing we can do to liberalize these countries is to reduce American dependence on their oil through conservation and development of alternative energy sources.
And one way to do that is to end government meddling in entrepreneurship. Stop propping up powerful lobby industries with corporate welfare, special privileges, and pork barrel laws. Let free people compete in a noncoercive free market.
Nonsense. There is a perfectly logical justification for that position – lying to his employer dragged an unconsenting third party into the confrontation, lying to the government did not.
Thoreau same thing about do-gooder socialists and meddling bureaucrats. “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” — Thoreau, Walden
spoke-:lying to his employer dragged an unconsenting third party into the confrontation, lying to the government did not.
Not true. Not if his employer has promised the Saudi government to abide by its laws, including the law against religious proselytization (and as I said above, it’s pretty inconceivable that any foreign contractor would not be required to agree to such conditions in order to do business with the Saudis).
In that case, the employer is voluntarily aligning itself with the government’s repressive policy, and is not merely an “unconsenting third party”. The employer has voluntarily chosen to act as the representative of the Saudi government as far as its employees are concerned.
Just as the official in the Saudi visa office has voluntarily chosen to act as the government’s representative when dealing with visa applicants. You wouldn’t let me get away with trying to argue that it’s immoral to lie on your visa application because the official processing the visa is just a “third party” whose personal views on religious tolerance may be quite different from the government’s repressive stance, would you?
Nope: the official has voluntarily chosen to take this job representing his government and enacting its policies, and he is therefore complicit in its repression. Similarly, the foreign contractor has voluntarily pledged to support the government’s repressive laws, by officially forbidding its employees to break them, and is therefore also complicit.
If it’s moral to lie to the oppressive government, then it is also moral to lie to the employer that voluntarily became complicit in the government’s oppression.
Nothing wrong with civil desobedience, but if you come to MY country I expect you to follow OUR laws and respect OUR customs, same as I do when I visit other people’s countries.
If you tell me “at home we do it this other way”, then I can compare both ways and decide which one I like better. If you say “you fucking moron, that’s the wrong way to do it,” then your lack of respect makes me lose any respect I might have for you and I’m highly likely to refuse to even attempt to see things your way: you certainly didn’t bother trying to see them my way.
Most legal systems have an ingrained mechanism for changing them; legal evolution, as a way to stem off the occasional need for revolution (which is a lot messier, washing away all that blood sucks). Some countries are better at this than others, but in any case change should be effected using built-in mechanisms whenever possible and not be done through bullying.
That is, they have declined to confront the government over the issue – which is what I just said (that they did not consent to get into the dispute between this guy and the government).
Their alleged “complicity” pretty much boils down to “if you want to pick a fight with the Saudi government, we aren’t going to send you there on our dime”. Since one doesn’t have a right to a trip to Saudi Arabia at somebody else’s expense, obtaining one under false pretenses is your moral responsibility, not theirs.
) with a **Lonely Planet ** travel book purchased in the Kingdom. On the cover was a picture of a Greek Monestary(with the blue domes) The Custume dude took it and I was to see the head guy. Off I go, my husband demanded he go with me. We go into the Head Guy’s office he had a stack of bibles and put my lonely **Lonely Planet ** book on top. I told him I bought the book here in the kingdom, he said not possible. I went over to show him the store sticker still on it. He thought the book was a bible, but he could not read English. Finally gave me the book back.