I think this is true, your definition doesn’t seem to include anything about the worship or recognition of a supreme being. Given that most people disagree with excluding God from religion, this is a stumbling point for this discussion.
I will state this as a given, if your “religious” argument doesn’t rely on man’s relationship with God in any way, then I would consider it “non-religious” and would not exclude it from debate.
Religious arguments (when they invoke the will of God) ultimately fall back to being arguments from authority. They are right because an authoritative figure (God) says they’re right.
Religious arguments are also problematic because the following conversation is literally possible for nearly any modern topic upon which religions feel the need to speak:
Person 1 - God says X
Person 2 - God says Y (something that excludes X entirely)
Person 3 - God didn’t say anything about X at all
Person 4 - You don’t even have the right God in the first place
Person 5 - God doesn’t exist and you all are arguing about the fables of some ancient goat herders.
Taking an argument and bolstering it with the input of a recognized authority is valid, but only if the debate participants agree that:
A) the authority figure actually existed
B) the authority is actually an authority on the subject matter at hand
C) the authority actually said the thing you claim, in the context you claim
Okay, 2 of the ten commandments are laws. 20% is not largely reflective.
It’s all about having a shared premise. If I get together with a bunch of other people who can share a premise, then we can agree to laws based on those premises. I don’t want to be killed, and the majority of my community doesn’t want to be killed, so we can agree on a prohibition against killing. This is not a given. I can imagine a situation where I don’t mind being killed, and my desire is to get to kill other people. If there are a bunch of us that share that premise, then suicide would be prohibited (as that would take away someone to be killed), and murder would be legal.
It is not a coincidence that civilization and society grew up around people who shared the first premise, rather than the latter.
Most of us share a premise that we don’t want to be stolen from. We don’t want to be assaulted. That’s why those laws seem rather simple to justify, there really aren’t that many people who want to be murdered or stolen from or assaulted to object to those laws.
Social control is trickier. Half of leviticus reads like the health code manual. They made laws about what you could eat, because if you ate the wrong things, god would get mad and make you sick. This wasn’t based on religious belief, but empirical data. The cause was misidentified, but the effect was correct. “See those worms coming out of your ass? That’s God’s punishment for you eating pork.” (no, that’s not actually the symptoms of trichinosis, but it sounds better that way.)
They also made laws about sexual mores. And it did make sense. With STD’s and no reliable birth control, promiscuity was a threat to civilization. We didn’t understand germ theory to understand STD’s, so they seemed to be God’s punishment as well.
We are still using these bronze age superstitions to continue to inform public policy. Just as we know that if you cook pork properly (or source it from somewhere that doesn’t have trichinosis, you are not going to receive god’s punishment, we also know how to have sex without incurring the wrath of a deity.
Religion forces us to accept these premises based on superstition as true. It is no different than banning walking under ladders or looking over your shoulder at the moon. They are based on premises that are no longer relevant.
Unless you can show how a bronze age superstition is relevant to our society, then it should not be used to inform public policy. If you can show how their beliefs are relevant, then you don’t need to invoke religion to justify them.
One of my favorite writings by President Obama is his speech on 28 June 2006. If you will allow me to excerpt a bit of that: More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical – if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice. Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to “the judgments of the Lord,” or King’s I Have a Dream speech without reference to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny. But what I am suggesting is this – secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
and also,
But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation – context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase “under God;” I certainly didn’t. Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs – targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers – that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.
Transcendence is that which in non-material. It transcends the material. Government by practice if not by nature is completely tied up in the transcendent. A simple example in our own government is the concept of equal protection under the law. There is no physical law or empirical observation that dictates such a stance. There are examples of societies that don’t believe in such a thing that are successful. We take a philosophical, non-material stance that equal protection before the law is an objectively “good” thing. These types of transcendent claims are completely woven throughout governments. Freedom, equality, democracy, value of life, obligation to each other and society, even the ideas of what is best for ourselves and each other is largely transcendent.
It is totally appropriate and useful, and much more than your asinine request deserves. Go to that website, search for the word “abortion” using any of the versions of the Bible available, and you get no hits. What the fuck more do you want?
I saw an episode of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy was a reflection of Harpo Marx…but in real life they had nothing to do with each other. If you are trying to claim that the Ten Commandments are where the idea of stealing and killing are wrong, then you must think little of civilization before those tablets supposed came down that hill.
Is it your contention that people simply didn’t know that it was wrong to kill, steal and lie, until Moses came down from the mountain and administered a dose of moral code in tablet form?
Theists don’t actually try to prove god exists when people demand that they support their arguments. They just insist that their dogma should be followed anyway just because.
So in your statement that was that religion is about our relationship with transcendence, you meant that religion is about equal protection?
Or is this more like “religion is about onions, government is about cake, and they’re both about food therefore religion and government are about the same thing”?
To be fair, they probably didn’t. Not really. What was the consequence of murder, or of theft? These were nomads wandering the desert, even the code of Hammurabi would be probably mostly unknown to them.
How can you say that something is wrong if there is no consequence.
I’m sorry, I don’t buy it. 10 commandments weren’t handed down to every single human being alive in the world at that time. Somehow other civilizations more or less advanced than some direction challenged semites managed to figure out that indiscriminate killing was bad for their respective societies. To say nothing of the fact that immediately upon receiving the commandments, Moses ordered all the idol worshipers killed and then they went merrily on to commit genocide.
I would say that my statement is the government is dinner and some people want pasta and some want hamburgers and they may disagree, but there’s no inherent reason to exclude any from discussion.
Sure. Transcendent ideas though are a subset of all ideas. Specifically ideas without empirical or physical evidence. Some ideas are materialist; eg “I think if I drop this ball it’s going to fall.” Other ideas are not, eg “Humans should be free to choose their own destiny” or “God values us all equally.” Some laws are materialist eg “You can’t hunt deer out of season because it’s dangerous.” (although this has some transcendent roots as well, namely that dangerous things are ‘bad.’) Some are mixes. “You can’t fish for candy darters because overfishing will lead to their extinction and for an undefined reason we feel that a species has inherent value.” Some are fully transcendent. “You can’t use a helicopter to hunt deer because it’s not fair to the deer.”
The consequence is going to be that, between some of you getting killed off and the rest of you getting the hell away from the people who think killing is fine, your group disintegrates and you’re out there all alone. Which a) drastically increases the chances that you’ll also die soon and b) really drastically decreases the chance that you’ll have any descendents.
Nope. You can’t debate anyone who explicitly rejects the foundational basis of debate, which is facts and logic, with facts and logic. That clearly doesn’t work. I can’t tell you that your beliefs are wrong because you reply that they’re confirmed by the voices in your head? Right. It’s exactly like trying to debate someone who is clinically insane.
So you just assert the primacy of a secular society, with facts and logic as the basis of social policy. The religionists get to have the freedom to practice their religion as long as they stay within the law. They don’t get to override the law because of something they read that turned out to be a tenth-generational re-interpretation of an ancient bad translation that become their holy book.
I get that, with an enlightened and educated philosophy. But, try explaining that to a guy that is both bigger and dumber than you. (not saying that you are dumb, but to be fair, the most educated and enlightened of the sages from that time was still far more ignorant than a modern elementary student.)
Even after the 10 commandments came down from the mountain, they still didn’t see anything wrong with killing or stealing.
Killing or stealing from their own community, sure, that was “wrong”, but the bible is chock full of them going out and killing and stealing from others.
Mostly the people that wouldn’t follow the social order went up into the hills and killed and stole from those who did. Even those who did follow the social order never considered a blanket ban on killing or stealing, just not killing or stealing from their neighbors, but other groups of humans were fair game.