US Senate Committee Hearings on a 32-hour Work Week Argued that People Cannot Attend Church on Sundays if They Work 70 Hours

ADVENT MESSENGER

US Senate Committee Hearings on a 32-hour Work Week Argued that People Cannot Attend Church on Sundays if They Work 70 Hours

March 14, 2024 by Andy Roman 

The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions heard a speech by Connecticut Democrat Senator Chris Murphy on Thursday, March 14, 2024. [1] The committee hearings addressed the need for a 32-hour work week that would give Americans more time for leisure activities such as family socials and Sunday church services. Speaking to Mr. Shawn Fain, International President of the United Auto Workers Union, Senator Murphy said that the reason for the drop in religious attendance is that individuals are simply too exhausted after their week of work. In response, the head of the union reaffirmed that those who work too much don’t have time for worship on Sundays.

The following exchange occurred in our US Congress between Senator Murphy and Union President Fain:

Senator Chris Murphy: “There’s a pretty wild thing happening in America today: in 2000, 70 percent of Americans belonged to a religious institution, but today that number is 50 percent. There has been a pretty precipitous decline in the ability or willingness of Americans to go to church or to a religious institution on a regular basis. And I think that has lots of broad impacts in our society. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that Americans just have less free time. When you have to work 70 hours to get the same standard of living for your family that 40 hours would have gotten you a few decades ago, you don’t have time to go to Wednesday night Bible study; you might not have the ability to even attend church services on a Sunday. You can talk about church if you want or if you don’t want, but it is just true that some of the leisure time activities, some of the institutions that Americans found value and meaning in, are less accessible when you have to work these long hours. I’d love to just hear your thoughts on that.”

Shawn Fain, UAW President: “One of the biggest, one of the things we talked about was the 32-hour work week when we put that in our contract talks was the fact that we wanted to create work life balance … And as I say when you’re working multiple jobs to live paycheck to paycheck or you’re working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, something else is sacrificed in that, and that’s what ends up happening. You have to sacrifice, you know, the ability to go to church. If it’s something else to do on a Sunday, maybe you get a Sunday off and you haven’t slept all weekend, and you spend the whole day sleeping. I mean that that is a reality a lot of workers face on some of the schedules they work … I do believe Congress has an obligation here, spending priorities and regulations. And that may be an ugly word to some people that represent business.”

Senator Chris Murphy: “Well, listen, I agree with you. I think we should have an interest in leisure time. We should have an interest in making sure that people are able to find value outside of work. A lot of people find value in work, and I’m glad that they do, but a lot of people find more value by the institutions and the social clubs and the churches that they affiliate and spend time with outside of work. But that is just less accessible for people today and that should be a public policy interest of the United States Congress. I appreciate this hearing allowing us to talk about that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.”

A sitting US senator is urging policymakers to get involved in ensuring that people have more time for church and recreation. According to Senator Murphy, the desire for more leisure ought to be considered a “public policy interest of the United States Congress.” This is a call being made in a Senate committee to reduce the work week, and one of the justifications is so that people can get back to church on Sundays. It’s not simply a call, though. A bill to cut the workweek down to only 32 hours has already been introduced. [2]

“The dignitaries of church and State will unite to bribe, persuade, or compel all classes to honor the Sunday. The lack of divine authority will be supplied by oppressive enactments. Political corruption is destroying love of justice and regard for truth; and even in free America, rulers and legislators, in order to secure public favor, will yield to the popular demand for a law enforcing Sunday observance. Liberty of conscience, which has cost so great a sacrifice, will no longer be respected. In the soon-coming conflict we shall see exemplified the prophet’s words: ‘The dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ’.” (Great Controversy, p. 592).

Sources

[1] https://www.help.senate.gov/hearings/workers-should-benefit-from-new-technology-and-increased-productivity-the-need-for-a-32-hour-work-week-with-no-loss-in-pay

[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1332

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US Senator Warns that the Federal Govt is About to Declare "International Martial Law"

The Free Thought Project

Published on Jan 25, 2016


Read the full story here: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/inte...

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The Inquisition: A Model For Modern Interrogators

 

January 18, 2013  10:49 AM

Listen to Story

All Things Considered

38 min 12 sec

An illustration shows heretics being tortured and nailed to wooden posts during the first Inquisition.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

 

This interview was originally broadcast on Jan 23, 2012.

The individuals who participated in the first Inquisition 800 years ago kept detailed records of their activities. Vast archival collections at the Vatican, in France and in Spain contain accounts of torture victims' cries, descriptions of funeral pyres and even meticulous financial records about the price of torture equipment.

"[There are] expense accounts [for things] like how much did the rope cost to tie the hands of the person you burnt at the stake," says writer Cullen Murphy. "The people who were doing interrogations were meticulous."

Murphy's book God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World comes out in paperback next week. It traces the history of the Inquisitions — there were several — and draws parallels between some of the interrogation techniques used in previous centuries with the ones used today.

"A few years ago, the intelligence agencies had some transcripts released ... of interrogations that were done at Guantanamo, and the interrogations done by the Inquisition were surprisingly similar and just as detailed," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "[They were] virtually verbatim."

Eight-hundred years ago, the first Inquisition was initially designed to deal with an upsurge in heretical activity from the Cathars in France. The Cathars' unconventional interpretation of religious doctrine worried Pope Gregory and other Vatican leaders.

The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

Paperback, 310 pages

"The papacy was trying to centralize itself and assert its authority," says Murphy. "So the pope basically deputizes various clerics. ... They would come to a town, announce that they were there. They would begin to question people. Sometimes they would use harsh methods. ... They would conduct tribunals and they would sentence people to various punishments."

The Use Of Torture

Clerics were given authority to use torture in a document issued by the pope in 1252. They were also given advice manuals with instructions for interrogating suspected heretics. Murphy says he was astonished by the similarities between the Inquisitor advice manual and modern-day guides for intelligence agencies and police departments.

"You see that everything that is being suggested now had already been anticipated," he says. "For instance, you want to spook the person you're interrogating. [The Inquisitors] have a whole bunch of tricks they lay out. The person to be interrogated comes into the room and the inquisitor [advice manual advises]: 'Be sitting there. Have a huge stack of documents in front of you. And as the person is answering questions, flip through the documents as if you have more information than this person could dream of. And every so often, shake your head as if you can't believe what they're saying.' It's almost word for word, you find the same thing in modern handbooks."

When Inquisitors needed a confession, they could elevate their interrogations to include torture.
"The basic line here was, 'Has this person confessed or not?' " says Cullen. "The answer is, 'If they confess, it's true. So torture comes into the picture when you need a confession."

But the Inquisitors were aware that confessions given under torture could be problematic, says Murphy.

"If a person confessed to something under torture, the Inquisitors were not prepared to accept that confession as evidence," he says. "They said, 'Now you have to give it some time. Let a day go by. Bring the person someplace else. Then ask them again. And if they still confess, then we'll accept that confession.' But it's not as if the person who made the confession has forgotten the fact that they were just tortured and couldn't be tortured again. [The Inquisitors] were mindful of the flaws of torture, but they went ahead and did it anyway."

Cullen Murphy is the editor-at-large for Vanity Fair and previously served as managing editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

Gasper Tringale/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 

 

More Elaborate Forms Of Torture

A century later, during the Spanish Inquisition, interrogators began using more elaborate forms of torture, such as the rack, the pulley and waterboarding. They also began parading their victims through the streets in elaborate displays of punishment.

"You would invite the diplomatic core to come and watch. The nobility would be there," he says. "People would be lined up in the streets to watch everyone going by. If people who were condemned had in fact already died, their bodies would be dug up and they'd be brought by on carts."

The dead bodies were burned on public funeral pyres. The living were publicly tried, and then tortured for several hours. Some were burned at the stake. Others were forced to become galley slaves or returned to prison for more bouts of torture.

"Technically during the Inquisition, there were guidelines in place that said ... you were supposed to torture a person only once," says Murphy. "But if you wanted to torture a person a second time or a third time, there was a way in which you could simply define the second, third or fourth time as simply a continuance of the first time."

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Interview Highlights

“ The idea that the pope would authorize the use of something as heinous as torture by priests or people working for priests is a pretty astonishing development.

- Cullen Murphy

On accounts of torturers from the first Inquisition

"The idea that the pope would authorize the use of something as heinous as torture by priests or people working for priests is a pretty astonishing development. Ultimately, the justification that it invokes is the same one anyone uses when they're using torture for reasons that are not sadistic and that is, in essence: 'The moral cause that we're engaged in is too important to settle for half-measures.' ... When you read accounts of torture, you get the unmistakable impression that the people doing the torture or conducting the torture — somewhere inside them, they think they are saving souls."

On the number of people killed in the first Inquisition

"There were thousands of people who were killed. ... I think the rough ratio [was] for every person burned at the stake, maybe 50 others who were sentenced to something. But then if you factor in the families of those people and the people called as witnesses, you have a great deal of penetration into society. Everybody was aware that this was going on. It's not hard to see why the Inquisition weighs so heavily on the psychology of people at the time."

On the state-run Spanish Inquisition

"The reason for it was that Jews who had converted to Christianity were reverting to Judaism. That was the charge. And the degree to which it was or wasn't true is one of those things historians debate to this day. These charges were leveled at a time when anti-Semitism in Spain was on the increase. There had been terrible pogroms beginning in the 14th century, forced conversions, continual rounding up of Jews into ghettos. The situation was terrible even before the Inquisition began, and once the Inquisition began, it became worse."

"The pope had control over the Medieval Inquisition and over the Inquisition that came later, but the pope had no control over the Spanish Inquisition. As a result, you had the government — the monarchs — presented with this extraordinary tool that they could use for a variety of purposes. ... The Spanish government did not have the welfare of victims in mind. What it did have was the uses it could put prisoners to. And one of the things the monarchy needed was galley slaves [to row ships]. It's probably the worst punishment that can ever be meted out. Your life expectancy was not more than a couple years."

The Inquisition: Alive And Well After 800 Years


On waterboarding

"Many people in the Bush administration were insisting [it] was not torture at all. The Inquisition was actually very clear on the matter. It obviously was torture. That's why they were using it."

On the printing press and the third Inquisition 

"For a long time, the church had had an effective monopoly on the intellectual life in Europe. Publishing was something that involved copying manuscripts. ... Suddenly, there's a new technology on the block. And the church sees this as a threat. So the church sees a combined attack — from the printing press and the Protestant Reformation — [and that] is really the thing that instigates the third Inquisition. ... This is the Inquisition that puts Galileo on trial. ... It's the Inquisition that starts the index of forbidden books."

Read an Excerpt: God's Jury



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