Religious groups should have the same rights as any other groups of LARPers-the right to congregate, play their games, and believe whatever they want to believe, as long as they don’t bother others.
Sure, why not? Majorities often mistreat minorities, whether it’s a matter of religion, race, national origin, ideology, sexual orientation, gender, etc. I don’t think atheists are some special breed of human that wouldn’t succumb to similar impulses, we’re just people like anyone else. Certainly I’ve spoken to atheists that hold religious people in contempt, and would like religious proselytizing, or even practice, prohibited by law. That said, the presence of strong cultural values of tolerance and freedom, and a legal framework expressing them, can mitigate a lot of potential harm.
Already asked and answered - allow them to follow the tenets of their religion as long as it doesn’t overly burden the common good. Why would it matter which god the person believes in?
Religious beliefs are deemed worthy of special protection only because a lot of people deem them worthy. This is neither a criticism nor an endorsement, but a statement of fact. And they need special protection precisely because they are baseless, and not supportable on the basis of secular reason.
This doesn’t diminish the fact that historically, religions have been the object of persecution and discrimination. I would argue, however, that the meaningful aspects of all such cases have been examples of racism, genocide, and flagrant cultural discrimination that would be illegal under reasonable secular laws without requiring special protection of superstitions.
I agree.
Neither of those are logically persuasive arguments.
Governments in the past have supported lots of very stupid things that were “important to many people” – see below.
The restriction on religious freedom by authoritarian regimes was politics, not anti-theism – see below. You have cause and effect reversed.
Religions have sometimes been restricted in some authoritatian regimes because such regimes banned all forms of opposition and dissent, and they feared organized religion as a political power and an organizational and philosophical basis of dissent, nothing more. The idea that failure to afford religions extraordinary special protection “causes” tyranny is absurd – more typically, the opposite is true – see “theocracy”. And I’m not just talking about Islamic theocracies and Shariah law – there are Christian fundamentalists wanting to drag the Bible into the Constitution.
That’s just a self-evident truism. In the past government also arrested homosexuals, condoned slavery, withheld the vote from women and blacks, and actively discriminated against blacks, because that’s what people wanted. Perhaps in the future we might wonder why government ever condoned irrational superstition as a justification for discrimination and for potentially violating important secular laws, much as we are today in almost shocked disbelief that it ever condoned those other things.
Not if the principle of a secular state was a firmly established constitutional principle.
Your exact words were
There are many gods out there, and many beliefs, and such an approach would lead to a crapload of appeasing going on. Also, why should only the religionists have this privilege?
They don’t. That’s why conscientious objectors and anti-vaxxers don’t have to be religious.
Regards,
Shodan
So, in other words, the status quo. What’s so problematic about the current system that a severe crackdown on religious freedom is the only way to fix it?
Anti-vaxxers aren’t exactly the best example for such an argument. By fucking with the herd immunity effect they do definite harm to the general public.
What severe crackdown?
The one you’re suggesting when you say that the status quo is unworkable because it’s too hard to deal with people believing in more than one religion.
I want to make sure I understand you before I respond to this portion: you are claiming that there has never been an anti-theist state?
I agree.
I disagree. If you make it easy to persecute minority religions, then the government will persecute minority religions. More so than it already does, I mean.
France has already been mentioned as an example, it has a firmly-established principle of a secular state, and still passes laws to screw with religious minorities.
It’s not a coincidence that landmark Supreme Court decisions on religious freedom typically concern minority faiths (Native Americans, Jehovah’s Witnesses (many times, in their case), LDS, the Amish, Santeria, atheists, etc), or efforts to impose Christianity - laws in America aren’t written to antagonize mainstream Christianity, but rather to accommodate it.
Please don’t put words in my mouth-I haven’t suggested any “severe crackdowns”.
The problem will be when two individuals want to do something and their desires can’t be reconciled.
Al owns a bakery and sells cakes. Bob wants to buy a cake from Al. But Al doesn’t want to sell a cake to Bob.
You can’t say “Each of you can do what you want as long as you don’t interfere with what the other wants to do.” Society has to decide whose right to do what he wants takes precedence over the other’s.
It’s understandable OP, we’ve all wanted to do peyote at one point or another.
That wasn’t exactly my claim, though I’d be interested to know what state you had in mind. My claim was that in the authoritarian regimes that I can think of, such as the example of the former Soviet Union that you cited, the primary motivation for the suppression of religion was political and was directed against institutions, not belief systems. Conversely, one of the most repressive regimes on earth, North Korea, permits Christian missionaries to run schools for some of their most valued elite youth being groomed as future leaders, because they don’t perceive it as a threat.
Religious persecution per se isn’t the problem in France, the problem is cultural and racial discrimination and the marginalization of many minorities. You could strengthen their religious-freedom laws all you wanted, and they’d still relegate African immigrant minorities to ghettos and exclude them from mainstream society. The appearance of religious discrimination is only a symptom of a larger cultural problem that religious protections aren’t going to fix.
Well, I see at least a couple of different questions here: what is likely to actually occur at any time in the forseeable future, vs what would be desireable in setting up a government.
As far as the second is concerned, I’d be very comfortable in suggesting that it would be prefereble not to accord special status to one specific set of irrational beliefs, especially when one (of many) aspects of such belief systems has historically been to discriminate against folk who believe differently, and to attempt to force their beliefs upon society as a whole.
Anti-vaxers are exercising freedom of speech, nothing to do with the religion argument at all.
The conscientious objector example is a self-defeating argument. The principle of conscientious objection is historically deeply rooted in religion and would require extensive and persuasive evidence to justify without reference to religion. That’s the whole problem with religious rights – they’re a free pass to exercise what may be the most irrational, lunatic beliefs with no evidence required whatsoever except to show that one is a member of the relevant nutcase religion. And only religionists have that extraordinary privilege.
Several, but I’ll offer one of the most clear-cut: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
Anti-religious instruction began in the first grade (circa 1928). I don’t know how much more directed against belief systems a practice can be than that. Meanwhile, anti-religious propaganda was churned out, with an eye to discrediting religious belief itself.
If you look at what Soviet leaders were writing and saying, their hostility to religion is quite clear. It is true that the Soviet leaders, particularly pre-World War II, were ideologically opposed to religion, and that they saw social organizations other than the state (trade unions, for instance) as a threat to their power and goals.
The harder it is to discriminate, the less harm the discrimination will do. If headscarves weren’t banned, would France’s issues with its Muslim population disappear? Of course not. But they’d be lessened by some non-zero degree. And the example still stands, of a secular government, with a long tradition of being that way, engaging in religious discrimination. So we plainly can’t trust such traditions alone.
The simple solution would have been to simply legalize peyote use for everyone, and not make it a religious issue.
Considering that all three countries have official sytate religions that’s an extremely silly argument.
In fact until recently all children born in Sweden were automatically enrolled in the church or Sweden.