{"id":4598,"date":"2010-08-30T21:30:53","date_gmt":"2010-08-30T21:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=4598"},"modified":"2010-08-30T21:35:10","modified_gmt":"2010-08-30T21:35:10","slug":"judge-them-by-their-actions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/judge-them-by-their-actions\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge them by their actions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently on bloggingheads.tv Michael Brendan Dougherty<\/a>, a professing Catholic, suggested that anti-Catholic movements in 19th century America had a point. In this Dougherty seems to be aligning with Ross Douthat’s implication, that American reaction drove American Catholicism to counter-reaction, and through the synthesis emerged a genuine American faith. But, there is one aspect of what Dougherty is saying which I think we should be cautious of: he observes that the process of assimilation of Islamic religiosity into the Protestant-Catholic-Jew trichotomy will result in recitations of unpleasant verses of the Koran, just as Protestants quoted back some of the less liberal declarations of the Papacy in the 19th century.<\/strong> <\/p>\n


\nI think that this is the wrong tack: listen not to what they say, but watch what they do! The reality is that the 19th century Papacy did not just oppose liberal democracy, but that organized Catholicism as a whole was an active force against the liberal democratic order in much of Europe, and that Catholic Europe in particular was somewhat retrograde in the evolution toward a stable liberal democracy. This last was in large part due the opposition which the Church demanded from faithful Catholics in relation to the nation-state of which they were citizens (e.g., Italy). In majority Catholic republics the state which did not have the loyalty of the religious majority would naturally be more fragile.<\/p>\n

Therefore, the Muslim world should be judged in its actions, not scriptures which most of them do not read in any case. So the Lina Joy<\/a> case is instructive, a Malay woman who wants to officially convert from Islam to Christianity, but is being blocked by the political consensus of the Muslim majority. This is the sort of action<\/i> in a “moderate Muslim” nation which makes one wonder as to the separation in values between the world of Islam and Western liberalism. In a classic Jeffersonian mode we shouldn’t care much about the nature of the beliefs of organized superstition, rather, we should focus on the material consequences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently on bloggingheads.tv Michael Brendan Dougherty, a professing Catholic, suggested that anti-Catholic movements in 19th century America had a point. In this Dougherty seems to be aligning with Ross Douthat’s implication, that American reaction drove American Catholicism to counter-reaction, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9,15],"tags":[1128,50],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4598"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4603,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598\/revisions\/4603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}