While I have been busy with my newborn daughter there has been a lot of brouhaha over the Obama administration and their infringement of religious liberty due to their position on contraception and health care. I don’t have a strong opinion on that issue, rather, I want anyone who entertains qualms about religious liberty to read Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. In it the author argues that religious liberty for religious systems with an orthopraxic dimension, basically every major religious tradition except a few radical Protestant sects, is always problematic because allowances for those liberties and accommodations are always premised on the authority’s adjudication of what is, and isn’t, within bounds of a given tradition. In other words judges are put in a position of determining whether a given practice is authentically an expression of the religious practices of a given group.

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Religious Liberty · Roman Catholicism

Am I the only one to note the relative lack of salience of the Catholic-Protestant divide in the Republican primaries? Commentators routinely ignore the fact that the two candidates with the greatest appeal to evangelical Protestants are Roman Catholic. Not only that, but one, Rick Santorum, is a staunch Catholic affiliated with an organization which is not ecumenical in the least. But all that doesn’t matter now. It goes to show how abstract labels and sectarian divisions which are stark to those prone to over-rationalize religion melt away in the face of historical forces.

The American Republican party is the faction of white Protestants. And yet currently the only white Protestant candidate, Ron Paul, has no particular appeal to that demographic.

Sectarianism

Islamists Win 70% of Seats in the Egyptian Parliament:

Egyptian authorities confirmed Saturday that a political coalition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old group that virtually invented political Islam, had won about 47 percent of the seats in the first Parliament elected since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. An alliance of ultraconservative Islamists won the next largest share of seats, about 25 percent.

…

The tally, with the two groups of Islamists together winning about 70 percent of the seats, indicates the deep cultural conservatism of the Egyptian public, which is expressing its will through free and fair elections for the first time in more than six decades.

But the two groups have described very different visions and appear to be rivals rather than collaborators. The Brotherhood has said it intends to respect personal liberties and will focus on economic and social issues, gradually nudging the culture toward its conservative values. By contrast, the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, put a higher priority on legislation on Islamic moral issues, like the consumption of alcohol, women’s dress and the contents of popular culture.

The data was there for us to infer that this would be the outcome. Nevertheless I do recall back in the heady days of the Arab Spring some commenters infected by revolutionary fervor would scoff at the purported Islamist sympathies of the people. What this goes to show is that enthusiasm and hope does not translate into reality. If secular liberals in Egypt bow before the principle of popularity, then they accept that it is right and proper that they present their throats to their new overlords. I don’t view this as an apocalypse. It is what it is. But it was predictable.

Islam

It looks like the Left-leaning Center for American Progress is under fire for “anti-Semitism.” The issue at hand is the use of rhetoric such as “Israel-Firster.” CAP’s problem is that it fancies itself a mainstream organization which endeavors to effect policy. That means an honest and candid assessment of America’s peculiar relationship with Israel, and the rather lopsided center of gravity of the American political landscape in relation this issue, is not politic. Over at Salon Glenn Greenwald outlines exactly how CAP and its junior staffers were subjected to a organized campaign by AIPAC and its fellow travelers. He relates the following:

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anti-Semitism · racism

The New York Times reports on a confrontational interaction between Rick Santorum and people who support same-sex marriage:

“If you’re not happy unless you’re married to five other people, is that O.K.?” he asked.

That angered the audience, which booed his answer.

“I’m happy to engage in a discussion,” he continued, saying that he wanted to “give people a chance to answer, but we’re going to have a civil discussion.”

The woman who had asked the first question then persisted, saying that the question about bigamy was “irrelevant.”

“In my personal opinion, go for it,” she said. “But when two men want to marry … ”

Mr. Santorum interrupted, “What about three men?”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” the woman said to Mr. Santorum, who spent close to an hour and a half before the crowd.

The session ended with many of the students booing Mr. Santorum as he left for his next event.

There are several issues here.

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Gay Marriage

A few years ago I listened to Brad Stine, who happens to be a conservative Christian, make a joke to a sympathetic audience about how funny it was that some non-Christians were offended and objected to the image of a cross in a classroom. Stine’s assertion was to the effect that “It’s only a cross people! What’s so scary about that!” But my first thought was this: would Stine’s audience be laughing so hard if their children had to sit in a classroom with a Satanic pentagram? I doubt it.

Symbols are only innocuous when you find them innocuous. As a matter of fact atheists are not the only ones to object to crosses. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc., object to crosses in public places, or in locations which connote state sponsorship, because the symbol represents Christianity. For Christians the Satanic pentagram is a marker of the antithesis of their religion. Some Christians may even believe that the pentagram has a malevolent power! For Christians who hold to the position that Hinduism is a demonic cult standard statuary common to that religion has malevolent implications. Jews in particular have negative responses to the crucifix for reasons having to do with that religion’s history and relationship with Christianity.

I point this out because it is often amusing to laugh at the offense others take at what you find innocent or benevolent. But when the shoe is on the other foot you stop laughing. But I do have to admit that those of us who hold that all supernatural systems of belief are fictitious are in a peculiar position: we are taking offense at a symbol which is rooted in something which we think has no coherent basis in reality. This may not matter in a purely cognitive sense. To give an extreme example an atheist who was sexually abused by their priest may have a concrete viscerally negative reaction to symbolism associated with the Roman Catholic church without agreeing to the proposition that those symbols have any supernatural properties, or correspond to something with a supernatural basis.

But atheists are in a different position from those who adhere to religions which are not Christianity. For those people the supernatural domain may be real. And just as Christians may believe that non-Christian religions are fundamentally false, and non-Christians may be in thrall to false idols, so these individuals may have the inverse reaction to Christians and Christian symbols. A Jewish aversion to the cross may not be due to the fact that the cross is a symbol of a false religion, so much as that it is the symbol of a heresy debased with a idolatrous pagan ethos.

This somewhat pedantic exposition is to highlight that these issues aren’t so simple upon further reflection. One person’s offense is another person’s sacred. For atheists our very existence is objectionable, as can be made clear by some of the comments below. Therefore, how we position ourselves in the public debate does matter.

atheism

Will Ron Paul kill the caucuses?:

The most troubling eventuality that Iowa Republicans are bracing for is that Paul wins the caucuses only to lose the nomination and run as a third-party candidate in November — all but ensuring President Obama is re-elected.

The Paul family doth protest their Christianity, so they must know that their deity states that “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me….” If Ron Paul “pulls a Nader” then Rand Paul’s political career is poisoned. Would a father do such a thing to a son? Perhaps. But I’d bet against it. There most certainly is a family “brand,” and I am curious as to why the elder Paul would expend his son’s capital in such a quixotic quest. True, it can be argued that Ron Paul’s run for president in the Republican primaries is quixotic, but he most certainly has affected the tenor of the debate and changed the terms of discussion on many issues. Running as a third party would do no such thing, in fact alienate hard won efforts at outreach to the broader American Right.

Ron Paul

Rod Dreher asks: If same-sex marriage, why not polygamy? I think an excessive legalistic focus in this area confuses. Rather, if we focus on the ends then the distinctions are obvious:

- Same-sex marriage is not the human norm. Polygamy is very common, even dominant as the ideal, across human societies (at least until recently)

- Many men who would not enter into same-sex marriages because they are not homosexual in a biological sense may in fact find polygamy congenial to their biological imperatives!

Legally in terms of liberty I think one makes a good case that there isn’t that much of a difference between same-sex marriage and polygamy when you take normative Western traditions off the table. But when it comes to ends, a moderately liberal friend of mine once observed: “How come polygamous societies are always shitty societies?”

Conventional social conservatives are wont to suggest that gay marriage, and gays more broadly, threaten their way of life. As a generality I think this is wrong, because aggressive anti-heterosexual cultural radicals in the gay community are no longer dominant. And, straight people are born straight. In contrast, I do think that the polygamist is a threat to the monogamous way of life. For elite males serial monogamy is already relatively common. For underclass individuals institutional monogamy is an uncommon part of their lives. A solemnized polygamist alternative may seem attractive to many. But like law school, many males may enter with aspirations, but few exit to success, in these societies.

Polygamy

This is addressed to people who consider themselves fundamentally conservative, and not libertarian, and, also reject the supernatural. By this, I mean that if you do support libertarian policies (I often do) it is not necessarily because you are at the root someone who is motivated by liberty as the summum bonum. By rejecting the supernatural I mean that you don’t accede to the plausibility of gods, spirits, etc.

Sometimes the answer can be somewhat vague and general. For example, by conservatism, as I implied below, is rooted in the social dependence of human flourishing. This necessarily entails that individual freedom is not the ultimate ends, and means that I am opening to diverging from libertarian logic in many specific cases. Or, more precisely, in the case of the United States I think that this nation-state is a good thing, that it has legitimacy, and that it’s coherency as a nation-state should be defended as a long term project. It’s not a mere convenience for the execution of legal prescriptions.

I throw the question out there because I’m wondering how people will take the ideas I’m going to present at the Moving Secularism Forward conference this March.

philosophy · politics · secularism

I haven’t had time to follow up my post below on libertarianism. But my friend Jim Manzi wrote something similar, at much greater length, in 2009: The Paradox of Libertarianism. I endorse it, though you may not!

libertarianism