Freedoms Based on Religion Should Not Exist

Great Debates
241

I very strongly disagree. Policies may not be rational in isolated cases, and they may be systemically irrational in primitive cultures like theocracies, but in modern civilization rationality is the entire basis of governance. Do you suppose the Founding Fathers in either the US or Canada sat around reading chicken entrails to try to divine how God wanted them to set up the country, or did they spend years logically debating the questions, the articles of the Constitution, and the structure and checks and balances of the proposed government? In Canada, the unwritten principles that are so fundamental to the Constitution are all at their very core philosophically and rationally derived. They are not whims, and they are not mystical.

What?? “A whole new system of government?” :confused: I like the system of government we have just fine, thanks, except when anyone can override the law just by declaring that he “believes” something.

It makes perfect sense. Government should stay the hell out of everything by default, and mandate or prohibit actions when, and only when, there is an overriding public interest. Like, for example, in matters of public safety. And when it is thus compelled to act, the resultant laws must apply to everyone.

Because of the principle I just outlined. The laws that exist support the public interest by mandating that the various vehicles on our roads and their drivers conform to reasonable safety standards without unreasonably affecting their fundamental nature and purpose. Having “your hair blowing in the breeze” is not fundamental to motorcycling by any reasonable standard. If this is the main interest I suggest the person so affected sit in front of a large fan. Nor is it fundamental to motorcycling to go about it with your head wrapped in fabric. It may be fundamental to someone’s superstition or tradition, and if so, they need a different hobby.

But if there happened to be some idiot religion whose principal tenet was having your hair blowing in the breeze, well that would be an entirely different story, wouldn’t it? At least in BC and Manitoba. How does that make sense?

Because “X” and “Y” are in no way equivalent.

242

Even if true, that would be entirely different from what Uzi said. Uzi gave a list of eight things which he claimed were “religious accommodations” that imposed “trillions of dollars of burden”. He provided no justification for that claim when asked, and you haven’t provided any either.

Well you’ve said a mouthful there.

First of all, what do you mean by saying “your guy Bush”. Why is Bush my guy?

Second, you seem to have a lot of facts screwed up. For starters, Bush was President in 2003, while Obama was elected in 2008. You got it backwards.

Saying that Bush used the word “crusade” in reference to his Middle East wars scarcely seems relevant. He used that word one time if I recall correctly, and not in a context suggesting anything to do with religion.

So in total, nothing that you’ve said provides any justification for the claim that wars in the Middle East waged by either the Bush or Obama Administrations are a ‘religious accommodation’.

243

This is flatly untrue. There are many categories of tax-exempt non-profits recognized by the IRS. None of them, that I’m aware of, require organizations to “justify their non-profit status as being in the public interest”. Whether an organization does something that the public or any part thereof wants is irrelevant to whether it gets tax-exempt status. Groups such as subsidiaries of the NRA, MoveOn.org, or the Hammer Museum (in Haines, AK), may not get wide public support. They may be bitterly hated by most of the public. It doesn’t affect their tax status.

I’ve heard this claim that tax-exempt status for churches is some sort of special accommodation for religion countless times, but I’ve never heard a coherent explanation for it. Churches are usually 501(c)(3) organizations, which is also the most common category of non-religious charity. The rules for incorporating a church or other charity are exactly the same.

244

Would be happy to debate that in another thread. In this one, I’ll stick to noting that you didn’t even attempt to defend the claim that “education” is a religious accommodation that somehow puts trillion-dollar burden on society.

245

I don’t know why I’m bothering, but here it goes:

Stem Cell research - prevented due to religious beliefs.
Abortion - prevented primarily due to religious beliefs.
Equal rights for LGBT - prevented due to religious beliefs.
Sex Education - prevented due to religious beliefs.
Education in general - Creationism being introduced into schools at every opportunity teaching myth as science to the detriment of the students and the future of the country.
Tax breaks for churches - loss of tax revenue on prime real estate.
Quality of politician elected due to their ‘belief’ in the supernatural rather than their actual capabilities - ‘I believe in the tooth fairy and we should base all our policies upon what he wants us to do’ or ‘I believe in using rational methods of decision making based upon the best available facts and sorry, I don’t believe in your tooth fairy’. The latter is essentially not electable.
Crusades in the Middle East - Trillions wasted in trying to free people who have no desire to be free (most just want their own thug in power). Directly related to the point above.

246

whoooooooooooooosh!

247

Not true. Much research on stem cells is taking place right now, so it obviously hasn’t been prevented.

Not true. Almost a million abortions are performed in the USA each year, so abortion has obviously not been prevented either.

I already asked you this question: “Suppose we compared gay rights in America to a country like China where religion is suppressed by the government. Where would the situation be better?”

I note without surprise that you didn’t answer it.

Not true. Sex education takes place all over the country.

248

As I and others have pointed out numerous times, tax breaks for churches are not a special accommodation for religion since non-religious charities get exactly the same tax status. In response to this, you say …

Well, you don’t say anything, do you?

This is so garbled and incoherent that it’s tough to respond to. If you’re saying that politicians do irrational things and there could be better politicians, I’d agree. Barack Obama, our nation’s most powerful politician, does tons of irrational things. But how his election constitutes a religious accommodation is unclear, and it seems you’re not going to explain it.

I entirely agree with this. If Obama stopped all American military involvement in the Middle East, no one would be happier about it than me. But how are his current military campaigns a religious accommodation?

249

Huh?

I presume from your posts that you are creating a religion/rationality dichotomy in your mind: that explicit appeals to the authority of God(s) is antithical to rationality.

If so, it may pain you to discover that just such appeals were made by the “founding fathers” in both the US and Canada!

It’s a statement of premises, based on a creator god. Not derived from pure rationality. It sure looks they the Founding Fathers “… sat around reading chicken entrails to try to divine how God wanted them to set up the country”, given that they derived their “self-evident truths” in exactly that way!

Similarly, our Canadian Constitutional Charter of Rights starts off with:

Once again, the express statement that the very foundation of the country is "…principles that recognize the supremacy of God … ".

Which isn’t to say rationality plays no part in forming constitutions or laws: just to say that “rationality is the entire basis of governance”. At least, as far as the “founding fathers” were concerned.

You are expressly calling for a “rationality test” for laws - which doesn’t at present exist.

Once again, you are simply defining away the problem.

For clarity, I will restate it: riding a motocycle is a “matter of public safety”. A certain amount of motorcycle-riders will be killed or injured.

So, when does a government decide that something is an activity to “stay the hell out of”?

What is some fellows were enacting a religious ritual that had the same exact chances of injury or death as riding a motocycle for fun? Should it be prohibited under your test, or not?

The point here is that you are assigning a public value to “fun” but refuse to assign such a value to “religion”. My point is that, aside from your personal predelictions, there is no reasonable argument for such an assignment.

250

They’re in different categories, and the paperwork is different.

A charity has to justify its accomplishments, fund-raising, expenditures, and so on. A church just has to be a church.

251

Wolfpup made the same claim. I debunked it; see post #243. What are you hoping to accomplish by repeating false claims that have already been debunked?

Churches are typically classified as 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. This is also the most common category of non-religious charity. Therefore your claim that religious and non-religious charities are in different categories is the exact opposite of the truth.

As for paperwork, most organizations that become 501(c)(3) have to fill out form 1023; churches are exempt from having to fill out this form. As a libertarian I’d be happy if form 1023 was abolished. (And happier still if the IRS was abolished.) But the paperwork has nothing at all to do with money; if churches were required to fill out form 1023, it would have not lead to a single penny in new tax revenue, much less to trillions of dollars.

252

You appear to be contradicting yourself.

253

Without getting back into the argument which I think is now going around the same circles, I just want to comment on the above. Both those beliefs are incorrect and reflect a lack of understanding of social benefits like universal health care.

Amending the law as you suggest is not “an easy fix”, it’s an extraordinarily difficult fix, and for practical purposes impossible. That UHC must be truly universal and coverage must be unconditional in all circumstances is both a moral imperative and a practical necessity. The moral imperative is a foundational principle of why UHC systems were created in the first place, and the practical necessity arises because as soon as you introduce any kind of coverage restriction at all, you need an administrative infrastructure to support it. Private insurance companies have huge bureaucracies that do just that. Public universal health insurance doesn’t do it at all. Which also makes your first point deeply ironic. Public health insurance provides the highest degree of personal liberty for just that reason, and it’s meddling private insurance bureaucrats who maintain huge institutional bureaucracies for the precise purpose of intruding on personal liberties in their never-ending quest to be able to deny a claim.

254

Which means it is a fundamentally flawed document. Which god is it talking about? Not all of them can be supreme. And if it is the Christian god, then why bother catering to other religions when they are so obviously wrong? Rather than accommodating them shouldn’t they be re-educated in the proper god for their own good?

255

That reminds me that I had wanted to respond to this point myself. Yes, I agree, and so does constitutional scholar Peter Hogg, who is quoted as having written in 1982 that "‘supremacy of God’ is contrary to section 2 of the Charter, which protects freedom of conscience, which Hogg felt would include a right to atheism.

I would suggest that the reference in the Declaration of Independence doesn’t mean what you think it does, even though, granted, religion was a much bigger thing in those days. But it was for just that reason that references to God were commonplace and were meant to denote a moral authority that was supreme over the institutions of man. And the phrase “all men are created equal” is not an endorsement of Biblical creationism, even for the 18th century when many probably did believe in it – it’s more a formal way of asserting that “all men are equal”. But “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” is an example of what I just said – not so much an appeal to the authority of a particular God as an appeal to a moral authority that no man or government has the right to usurp.

The Canadian constitutional preamble is unfortunate, in my view, because in modern times we should not be using “God” as a synonym for moral authority, but that seems to be what it means, just as in the US Declaration of Independence. If it was to be interpreted literally then, as Uzi asks, whose God does it refer to, and as the constitutional scholar I quoted points out, it would contradict the Constitution itself in respect to freedom of conscience and religion. In the same vein, the Wikipedia article I linked above also quotes a theologian as “question[ing] whether the preamble refers to a specific God (the Christian God or Jewish God) or to a more abstract concept that promotes civic virtue (i.e., civil religion)”, which is just what I think it’s doing. Moreover, it was also ruled to be meaningless as any kind of basis for law (from the same source):
In considering the legal implications of the preamble in the 1999 case R. v. Sharpe, the British Columbia Court of Appeal referred to it as a “dead letter” which the BC justices had “no authority to breathe life” into.

So it seems to me that if you’re trying to make the case that the founders intended to commingle religion with law, you have a very weak case indeed. In the US, Jefferson further clarified that fact with his concept of the “separation of church and state”.

256

Universal health care may be a moral crusade for you, but as your own post admits, it’s a bureaucratic nightmare that would extinquish personal liberties for the sake of uniformity for many others.

Either amend the law as earlier mentioned, which can easily be done provided there’s the political will, or accept the extra cost of Sikhs riding without a helmet as the price of having at least a modicum of respect for a people’s religious and cultural heritage, to say nothing of a person’s choices regarding his or her own well being. Doing anything less smacks of getting your jollies by bending others to your will.

And at root, that’s the premise of this thread. The belief that secularist have things so well figured out that when there’s conflict, their opinion should be defered to.

257

What liberty does a person have when they can’t afford the health care that could make them healthy enough to work?

Price for respect? I have respect for the people, but I have no respect in their beliefs or funny headgear.
As to their heritage, they have a heritage of riding motorcycles?
And if by bending others to my will, you mean expecting that the law applies to all people especially when the law is made in their and everyone else’s best interest? That you may not like this particular the law isn’t relevant to the principle. Unless you are an anarchist and say no laws should apply to people. Maybe that is your definition of liberty?

If you were making an important decision would you even bother to listen to the person casting bones? Of course not. How decisions are made is important. Taking data and determining the best way forward does not involve some mystic art, divination or prayer circle. People who don’t use those methods shouldn’t be deferred to. Yet, even with good decision making, not all outcomes are optimal because not all variables are known. Sticking one’s head in the ground and claiming Jesus did it this way and so should we might end up with the correct result. A stopped clock is right twice a day as well. It still isn’t the best device to determine the current time, though.

258

If you think my post “admits” that, then you completely failed to understand it, much as you apparently fail to understand how universal health care works. It’s getting OT for this thread but I suggest you look into where the bureaucracy actually exists. You might start by reading this article, particularly noting the part about “Reinhardt’s irony”. It’s absolutely true. I’ve lived under public universal health care all my life and I’ve never had to deal with a bureaucrat involved with administering it. With private insurance it’s pretty much all you ever do.

Repeating that “amending the law can easily be done” doesn’t make it true. Not only can it not be done, it’s also morally reprehensible and blatantly unconstitutional since it basically says that someone involved in a motorcycle accident without a helmet should be left to die.

No, the premise of this thread is that we live in a generally pretty sane society that has managed to achieve a pretty good balance between personal freedom and the best interests of society in matters of health and safety. The operative belief here is that those whose lives are dominated by superstitions and religious mysticism have no more legal rights than anyone else.

259

The freedom to live as they wish without their every decision being subject to somebody else’s cost/benefit analysis.

At least you’re up front about being disrespectful.

They have a heritage of wearing what you call “funny headgear.”

Personal freedom means each individual deciding what is or is not in his or her own best interest. So yes, you seem to get your jollies by bending others to your will.

Excluding the middle.

If my decision impacts the way another person leads their life, yes, I would listen to them.

This goes back to the point I made earlier in this thread. You’re essentially wanting to establish a secular theocracy.

260

Contradiction in terms.

If you want to call it a secular dictatorship, at very least you wouldn’t be contradicting yourself. Of course, you would still be wrong, but at least you wouldn’t be wrong by definition, as you are here.