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Dutch church holds 800-hour service to save family from deportation

This rules. I know it is popular to hate on religion on TSR, but plenty of religious groups rank among the most selfless and humanitarian. Look, for example, at religious resistance to the Nazi German regime and their most terrible and ungodly policies.

This is just one recent example of a religious group standing up to defend a total stranger from an authoritarian.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/29/europe/netherlands-church-service-deportation-intl/index.html

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Wow, that's fantastic! What a great example of nonviolent resistance.
Reply 2
Avatar for Bio 7
Bio 7
21
So they have been denied the ability to stay in another country and people are now helping them avoid authorities. This isn’t really a heroic story but more something that is just illegal/bordering illegal.
Subtext: Immigration controls ought to be abolished and everybody on earth should be able to move about it as they please. Source: CNN.
This exemplifies why churches and religions should be stripped of all their privileges in democratic countries.
This will hurt them and other churches in the end. Abusing a privilige like this will probably have consequences.

I also can imagine that not all religious people would agree that this is okay, as they are basically honoring God as means to achieve something else.
Reply 6
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Original post by Good bloke
This exemplifies why churches and religions should be stripped of all their privileges in democratic countries.


Absolutely.
There is no need to go heavy on the Church and religion, sheltering people in need of it is hardly out of character and in this case they are exploiting a legal loophole in their own interpretation of such historically held values. They are operating within the law, at all rates.

What about 'sanctuary cities' in the US and their laws forbidding any assistance to Immigration in pursuit of illegal migrants, even if they are detained for commiting an offence? That is well more 'out of character', for states like California to shield illegals from the law. That is odd.

Has anyone seen the state of LA or the figures on people leaving California? Tyson Fury was so moved by what he saw that he promised to donate his proceeds to the homeless, the big softie. That bad.
(edited 5 years ago)
Surely the church should uphold the law?
Original post by Plantagenet Crown
But the service can’t go on forever, can it? Eventually it’ll end and then the police will swoop in, correct?


It may well go on until the government guarantees that the family can stay. Why not? Now that it is in the international news they'll have plenty of supporters shuttling supplies in. I can't see these men and women of God just giving up on their conviction to save the family just because they got a bit bored.
(edited 5 years ago)
Original post by AngeryPenguin
It may well go on until the government guarantees that the family can stay. Why not? Now that it is in the international news they'll have plenty of supporters shuttling supplies in. I can't see these men and women of God just giving up on their conviction to save the family just because they got a bit bored.

Supporting people who have no right to be in the country? Sigh...
Original post by Andrew97
Supporting people who have no right to be in the country? Sigh...


Why is their right to reside there any less than anyone else's? Just because they were unfortunate enough to be born in what would become a warzone?
Original post by AngeryPenguin
Why is their right to reside there any less than anyone else's? Just because they were unfortunate enough to be born in what would become a warzone?

Because their asylum claim has been rejected. You can’t just rock up and live where you want.
a
Original post by Andrew97
Because their asylum claim has been rejected. You can’t just rock up and live where you want.


Seen as we do not choose where we are born I not too sure about this. Yes I know that the current world society wouldn't work if people could just rock up were they like. But as a person of dual nationality and therefore no nationality in a way, I sometimes struggle to see why one person should suffer and another thrive just because they were born somewhere, a choice totally outside their control.

I'm objecting on a moral basis not necessarily a logical one.
Sometimes I wonder if people take the fact that they were born somewhere for granted, and feel that they are entitled to the benefits that includes but someone else isn't.

Just saying :smile:
Original post by SudanesePrince
I sometimes struggle to see why one person should suffer and another thrive just because they were born somewhere, a choice totally outside their control.


Outside their control, maybe. But we all live in societies that have been formed by ourselves and our immediate ancestors, and that society is shaped according to our own mores and history. Bringing in large numbers of people in that are complicit in the failure and subsequent destruction of one society and who espouse a culture that is foreign and anathema to us here does not bode well for our own future.
Original post by Good bloke
Outside their control, maybe. But we all live in societies that have been formed by ourselves and our immediate ancestors, and that society is shaped according to our own mores and history. Bringing in large numbers of people in that are complicit in the failure and subsequent destruction of one society and who espouse a culture that is foreign and anathema to us here does not bode well for our own future.

That's a fairly nationalistic way to look at things. In my view, we are all human, and that is what should unify us, culture, ethnicity is to be respected and upheld, but if that is the cost of another human being, in my view it's not worth it. I'm being very idealistic here, but hoping for a world state, in a way :smile:

Plus the idea of cultural purity is fundamentally flawed, even ethnic purity. Unless you're proposing the Targaryian model in which things could get sticky genetically speaking. The illusion that cultures remain the same I believe is due to the large numbers that own it and the slow pace that it changes. But that would be like saying that because a process is slowly occurring, it doesn't occur. Cultures constantly shift, we just don't notice it as we are carried in that wave of change.

The principle of culture preservation similar to trying to stop time.
Time may be good now, but you can't stop it changing.
I feel like I've gone off topic, but I hope you can understand what I mean.
Original post by SudanesePrince
That's a fairly nationalistic way to look at things.


Maybe, but my nation state has done a good job of keeping its citizens safe, healthy and wealthy for a long time now. I want to keep it that way, and allowing free movement from one continent and alien culture to another is a terrible way to do so.
Original post by Good bloke
Maybe, but my nation state has done a good job of keeping its citizens safe, healthy and wealthy for a long time now. I want to keep it that way, and allowing free movement from one continent and alien culture to another is a terrible way to do so.


Alien :frown:
Is that how we talk about fellow humans. Nationalism instils a great feeling in man but it also has an older, abusive brother that plays upon the animalistic instinct of man to be territorial etc.
Why must human progress be a zero-sum game, I can partially understand your view if you mean to say that this "alien" culture will somehow destroy the safety, health and wealth of your nation. But to be honest I feel that is down to discrepant, Malthusian economic thought.

How old are you sir if you don't mind me asking, I am 16. The way you talk makes me think you are older.
(edited 5 years ago)
Original post by SudanesePrince
The way you talk makes me think you are older.


Alien simply means not of this place. I am older.
Original post by Good bloke
Alien simply means not of this place. I am older.


I could think of lots of words for that. That do not connotate the same things as "Alien". In one way I feel you should know better due to your more extensive life experience, on the other hand, I could understand your views from the context of being older, maybe 1980s early 1990s I mean the idea that the globe should come before the nation, tribe, state whatever is fairly new in a way. And it could easily see it mistaken for nievity, communism, lack of strength, millennial disease or idealism, and it might be. But I just don't get the whole, we need to protect OUR things, even if that comes at the cost of the OTHER/ALIEN/ILLEGAL etc. Like I don't know, does it not seem counterproductive. I mean in my view it is in the interest of the rich/ fortunate to help the poor not just for moral reasons but even self-interested economic ones (I cite egotistic altruism). I mean are we gonna keep this nation things when we spread to the stars and stuff, it only reverses our progress. Unfortuenly, no matter what your views on capitalism. I am almost sure that this "Culture capitalism" does not produce better cheaper goods for the consumer. Whoever the consumer is in this odd scenario.

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