Hi All, I have a compromise to offer you. The government will guarantee your right to have any religious beliefs and practices you want. No one will be able to impose his or her religion upon you. You and only you get to choose what church you belong to, or if you want, you can even choose to belong to no church at all. You will retain the same rights and voice in government no matter what you choose with regard to religion. In fact, the government will not even tax churches so long as churches don't endorse any particular political candidates.
Nice, huh? In exchange you are only asked one thing, that you agree that laws must be made based on justifications available to all people regardless of whatever other-worldy visions the various religions might have. Our government will be secular, i.e., of this world. It must be in order to enable religious freedom for all where no religious group gets to dominate another religious group. A government is a set of laws and institutions, and for our government to be secular, the justification for the existence of all its specific laws and specific institutions must all be arguable based on premises referring only to this world. It is necessary for a democratic community where we hope to promote the ideal that political power should be shared equally among the citizenry that every citizen ought to be able to ask for and receive justifications for all of our laws that at least could be thought plausible without relying on the other-worldly vision of any particular religion. It's not that religious reasons aren't good reasons. They can be but only for those who subscribe to the religion of which the premises of such arguments are based. It is just that in order to ensure freedom of religion, religious reasons ought to be regarded as illegitimate for the purposes of promoting a government for which everyone only forwards reasons that other people could, even if they do not, use in their own reasoning. That is how we will guarantee that one religious group cannot dominate others by imposing its particular other-worldly view upon those who don't share the same ideas about God or gods. If you yourself happen to have an other-wordly notion that doing or not doing certain behaviors endangers or profits your eternal soul, you of course will be free do to them or not do them as you see fit so long as your actions are within the law. You won't, however, be able to impose beliefs about what is good for other people to do in care for their immortal souls, but in exchange, you will be protected from having other people's other-worldly notions imposed upon you. See how this works out best for all involved? Holding political views that are motivated by religious views is in no way ruled out, but the arguments made for those rules must be done in secular terms and must be arguable and convincing in such terms in order to be made into law. Only laws that can be justified in worldly terms will be enacted. No one is ever asked to leave his religion at the door before entering the public square to debate legislation as is sometimes claimed. For example, if you support a certain bit of legislation and were first convinced that you should based on a quote from Leviticus, but you can nevertheless argue for it in other secular ways, that's great! But if you can only argue for it by claiming other-worldy authority for a passage of the Bible, that simply won't do, because a law isn't just a rule that we need to agree upon. It is also the explication of the reasoning behind the rule since all laws are subject to judicial review where the implicit justification of the rule needs to be made explicit to determine Constitutionality. If the court system reviews a law and the only justification for it they can find is your Leviticus, well, none of us want to see a judge using Leviticus in his official legal opinion, do we? We shouldn't anyway. Even Christians and Jews who see the Bible as the word of God shouldn't, because even if you are religious, you probably have a lot of disagreements with other religious folks about just what authority that particular quote has and how it ought to be interpreted. It is no longer possible to presume a plain sense of Bible texts that everyone agrees upon. I am sure that you don't want the Supreme Court deciding such matters. That would be a threat to your freedom of religion since the government would be putting its coercive power behind a particular interpretation on a religious matter. While the extremist theocrats like to blame atheists for imposing some gag rule that prevents Biblical text swapping in the legislatures and for their being unfairly hamstrung in the ability to argue, that just isn't what happened. It can't be what happened. Atheists are but a small, unorganized, and demonized minority. An un-closeted atheist can't even get elected to public office to day and never could in the past. What makes those theocrats think that militant atheists have ever had the sort of political power to impose a gag rule on Biblical text swapping or appeals to the will of God? The reason politicians stopped doing so much of that Bible quoting as they used to is because there is no longer any consensus even among the religious about what exactly those texts are supposed to mean and what our obligations are with respect to them. In a religiously pluralistic society such as ours it is not only imprudent to use religious arguments (since they tend to only be convincing to those who happen to share the same religious premises) but they also ought not be made because that would amount to an attempt to impose one religious view upon those who don't share that view. Religious arguments need to be restructured in secular terms today, not because the militant atheists demanded it, but because religious freedom demands it. Religious reason-giving in political discourse isn't wrong because religion is wrong, but because religious freedom means we get to have whatever religious background we want without being politically marginalized for it. If a law cannot be justified in secular terms but only with respect to a certain religion, it violates the First Amendment establishment clause forbidding such endorsement of any particular religion. If you still don't see why this compromise is important, that is, why exactly restricting legal justification to secular concerns is a small price to pay for religious freedom, you may need to read some history. This compromise I've outlined here is the moral that Jefferson, Franklin, and a bunch of others drew upon reflecting on the centuries of conflict preceding the creation of the US government. It may be difficult to understand the need for it today without considering the misery caused by religious wars and the sort of religious oppression that drove people to the New World in search of religious freedom to begin with. In fact, secularism probably never should be attempted to be understood divorced from the European history that inspired it. At any rate, in order to protect our religious freedom, we certainly do still need it today. That is why we are fortunate to have this compromise written into the Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights. What do you say? Deal? Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
