It’s true, I do get loose with my definition. I have plenty of Christian friends and acquaintances, and they are lovely people. But they also are leaving me be and not trying to jam it in my face all the time. They aren’t trying to install the pseudo-theocracy pushed by the Christian Right and the Republican Party.
What I’m talking about here is conservative Christians or any others who want to govern the U.S. as a religiously biased state rather than a multi-faith democracy.
I started writing a big, long reply before realizing the problem is there’s a logical chasm. Until that’s crossed, more words just means more misunderstanding. So the shortened version…
You said: “My point, then, is that asking a particular religious person to leave the discussion because their religious views form some (though never all) of the basis of their political views is all but impossible”
I think you’ve clarified something I hadn’t grasped - it seems some religious people cannot distinguish between their faith and their person. It’s all I can come up with. In all my dealings with Christians I have always been very direct in stating that my goal is true freedom of religion for everyone and that no one should be banned from anything for their religion. But what always comes back is that I either want an atheist country or I think Christians shouldn’t be allowed to participate in governing the country.
You’re clearly bright, so an inability to grasp that must have deeper roots. But I’ll say it again: I don’t want to ban anyone, that would be a direct violation of my basic principle.
“The problem, then, is that by insisting that any particular religious thought that rubs non-religious persons the wrong way be invalidated purely because it is religious, then we are essentially discriminating against a particular religious thought because it is governed by something different than what we are governed by.”
Again, a misunderstanding. It’s not just about what non-religious people think, and it’s not invalidated because it’s religious. Everybody has beliefs and opinions that bump up against others, even within a faith.
Suppose our Catholic majority Supreme Court rules tomorrow that America is a Catholic nation and the Pope is allowed to dictate national policy. Most people would be unhappy about it. I would be, but it wouldn’t change my life that much. America is already the most overtly Christian country in the developed world. It would just be a different boot on my neck, a different group of people telling me what I can and can’t do. Do you not see how Christianity has saturated the entire fiber of the country? Try this: for the next few days, every time you see or hear anything Christian, change it to Islam. Then imagine living in that.
Rather than ramble on, let me suggest two pieces that might be clarifying:
The Holistic Libertarian: Freedom for Grownups - building a notion of “personal liberty” that actually works. (https://medium.com/bigger-picture/the-holistic-libertarian-freedom-for-grownups-475d00b6de99)
It’s not about religion per se, it’s about the notion that you can’t call a society free if some people’s freedoms are respected and others aren’t.
The case of religion is similar: “If we are to truly live by your set of rules, then we must be tolerant of others, I assume? Then we cannot apply this arbitrarily. We must be tolerant of the religious views, too.”
Sure. But ask yourself, can you have a free society that tolerates racism? Of course not. If people are allowed to discriminate – most especially the majority – then others will not have freedom. The religious case is the same: living in a tolerant society can’t mean everything anyone does is tolerated, because some people are intolerant and will take freedom from the people being targeted.
A tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance…because it would not be a tolerant society.
The point is that to have a coherent system of personal liberty or religious freedom means you have to prioritize the health of the system over any one person. Freedom needs a framework in which to function, and preserving that framework is the highest priority.
If you don’t want me setting my freedom above yours, you can’t put yours above mine, either. We can have collective responsibility, or we can have what we have now — some people taking the rights of others away in the name of their own.
America Is a Theocracy With No Official Religion? Maybe it takes a leap of faith to make the leap of logic (https://medium.com/politically-speaking/america-is-a-theocracy-with-no-official-religion-73b8b8216031)
As I try to sort out what the heck is going on in all y’all’s heads.
