Is it us or is it them?

The US-German friendship is stable, right? Or is it? How much is a friend allowed to know and how much of this knowledge is a friend allowed to gain without the other person’s knowledge? Apparently, friendship does not equal friendship and some people have more rights than others. What I am referring to here is obviously the NSA scandal. So much has been said about it already, that I actually did not want to write about it anymore. However, the recent development with regards to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel do make me really angry. I am not angry about the NSA spying on Mrs. Merkel in particular. I do not think it is correct to spy out your own citizens without a good reason, let alone people in other countries. I am angry, because Mrs. Merkel did not say much when the NSA scandal broke several month ago, hence showing that she essentially was in accord with the NSA and saw no fault with the action, but she is bitterly complaining now. But is there a difference in the NSA spying on her or spying on random citizens? Politically there is a difference, and I am well aware of that.

‘After the Catholic Church’ – more MacIntyre for everyone

The US, Ireland and Germany are the countries that now openly struggle with the Catholic Church and the Pope and are trying to understand what went wrong in the institution Church. Child abuse cases in this particular institution should just not happen. And the Pope is coming to Great Britain and many Catholics seem not to know what to think of that. It becomes apparent that the scandals in the Catholic Church lead to questions regarding moral behavior. For a long time religion supplied most people with a moral code. The Catholic Church however is not able to provide this moral code anymore, because too many of those working within the Church did not adhere to it. It lost its believability and hence the code lost its usefulness. A moral code only makes sense if basically all people use it as the premise for moral behavior. The contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre proposes a solution for the problem, and he did so long before the Church lost hers.