I think that’s exactly what the OP is intending. But that doesn’t imply “out it goes” for the entire law. Only “out this part goes” for the parts that don’t have a secular justification. Most of the Tax Code and The ACA would remain, and only those parts dealing with religious exemptions would be expunged.
I demanded “compelling interest” for every law, but I’ll take “rational basis” as a good starting point.
I put up with having the King James Bible read to me just fine. It was in a Philadelphia public elementary school where the student population was virtually 100 percent Jewish. This was a experience in learning about the dominant American culture, not an effect to convert us. If that Unitarian fanatic from Philadelphia’s Abington suburb hadn’t forced our teachers to stop reading us from the Elizabethan Bible, when I was age 7 or so, I would have been much better prepared for Shakespeare once in high school.
They’re not to fond of Middle Eastern immigrants and I find the idea of a country which jails people for libel nuts, so I’ll pass.
Beyond that, I thought you wanted to live in a “secular country”.
So then since it’s perfectly legal to refuse to hire or automactically fire anyone you find out believes in things like alien abductions doesn’t that mean that you feel that we should be able to fire or refuse fire Jews, Catholics, and Muslims?
I’m sorry you were less well prepared for Shakespeare than you otherwise would have been. That’s not quite worth trading separation of church and state for, though, at least IMHO. If you don’t believe that that’s a principle worth upholding, then we have nothing to say to each other on the matter.
The fanatics are those in the governments of the four states who passed mandatory Bible-reading laws, not the brave souls who helped put a stop to it.
You do realize there are a large number of people on this message board who believe that there are countries can mandate religious education and still be “secular” aren’t you?
Uh…oh…:eek:
You have great faith in the rationality of the Tax Code. Me, not so much.
Rather than saying that freedoms based on religion shouldn’t exist, I would phrase the issue differently: religious beliefs cannot make one exempt from obeying the law. If one seeks an exemption, there has to be a non-religious basis.
Under a plan like this, Christian Science parents cannot refuse medical treatment for an ill child. Amish parents cannot refuse their children access to at least some high school. Religious beliefs could not be cited in defense of severe corporal punishment or declining to be vaccinated. (This would also throw out religious beliefs as a criterion for conscienscious objection, but I oppose conscription anyway.)
To me, religious freedom signifies the right to belong/believe and the right not to do either. The right to engage in specific religious practices should be weighed against whether said practices violate the rights of others. Withholding a child from secondary school (or from medical treatment/vaccines) in the name of upholding religion and culture can have very negative long-term consequences. All of my examples, I guess, have to do with protecting children from the most undesirable parts of their parents’ beliefs. But my system would also erase any exemptions for discrimination, not providing birth control, etc.
Granted, in this scheme a state could pass abusive laws simply to harass an unpopular religion and then take away any legal defense that religion has. But there would have to be some compelling interest to outlaw a given practice; for example, there’s no secular defense for door-to-door evangelizing, but there also seems no reason to ban it across the board.
Yeah, is that not good enough? See, if we’re not checking to see that our laws actually make any sense, then something is wrong.
When those claims are demanding the representation of law, then yes! You need to have a rational basis for your laws.
I’m against the draft, so this is kind of a moot point, but if pressured, I could make a very strong rational case that it is morally wrong for me to kill someone else without their consent. That’s the neat thing about secular morality - it’s actually based on reason.
Yeah, and this bugs the crap out of me.
If my argument negates the free-exercise clause, it means I haven’t thought it through very well. People should be free to exercise their religious beliefs, so long as those beliefs do not conflict with any legal doctrine. Similarly, legal doctrine should be based on rationality - to take an example I read elsewhere in the thread, if a religion wants to wear black armbands, banning black armbands “just for the hell of it” is not okay. But if a religion wants to take a substance which is banned on rational grounds, such as heroin (whether or not the prohibition of the substance is actually rational is another story), then they’re just shit out of luck.
Yeah, my issue here is mainly the secular basis for laws, and removing religious exemptions. I’m not entirely sure how that would backfire onto secularism.
I think the vast majority of the tax code can be rationally justified. So can Obamacare.
If you believe crazy things, I’d rather not have to hire you.
Ok, since you feel that businesses should be free to refuse to hire people with religions they don’t like, how about serving them.
Since you feel people should be allowed to have as part of job applications “No Jews need apply” how about signs saying “No Jews or dogs served here”?
True, Nazism, Eugenics and Marxist-Leninism were all completely rational.
Not equivalent.
Complain to Budget.
He’s the one who claimed secular morality was “rational”.
I would say that such a belief would suggest having a rather sheltered life.
Maybe. I don’t deny that religions and their believers have frequently been persecuted, most often by other religions, sometimes by authoritarian despots. I also believe that religions can be valuable social institutions, a value that can at least in theory be separated from superstitious claptrap. But my basic thesis is that those aspects of religious practice that are worth defending can be defended on the basis of secular civil liberties. Those aspects that cannot be so defended I maintain are in the category of aforementioned superstitious claptrap.
For instance I may dislike the idea of someone building a synagogue or a mosque down the street, but we have freedom of assembly and if the property is zoned for a public community center then they are free to do so. OTOH, if someone wants to discriminate against gays because God personally told him they are evil, via voices in his head, or thinks that a blood transfusion for their sick child would introduce the spirit of the Devil, then this is not worthy of protection.
That and the rest of post #110 is well written and articulates my point exactly.
That’s an absurdly narrow view of what “rational” means. It means a lot more in this context than simply some crackpot having an alleged “reason” for his actions. A motorist might shoot a fellow driver “because he cut me off”, or kill his neighbor’s kids “because they were noisy”, but that doesn’t make those things rational. Rationality in this context has to be consistent with morality, and morality can be defined not just in secular terms, but in philosophically objective terms, as in Kantian ethics. It makes far more sense to base laws on such rational grounding than, for instance, to ban the meat of animals with cloven hooves, or ban mowing the lawn on Sunday because that’s working on the Sabbath, or to fly jet airliners into buildings because the residents are infidels. Rationality is not only a sound basis for law, it’s the only basis for law.
To be fair, there were never that many Catholic churches in the Soviet Union, or in most of the countries that became part of the Soviet Union. That was never really Catholic territory. Eastern Orthodoxy, in various forms, was the dominant form of Christianity.
The Soviet Union did tolerate the Orthodox Church, to a point. I’m hardly claiming, however, that that Soviet Union didn’t take a dim view of religion in general, or that it didn’t suppress the church (to varying degrees in different periods).
It’s not quite that simple in your example, because Bob’s “right” requires an affirmative contribution on Al’s part. It’s not a simple non-interference with Al.
A more apt example would be my right to have guests at my home and play loud music versus your right to go to sleep without being disrupted.
I think you misunderstood me.
I wasn’t saying they were “rational” though all claimed to be and all insisted they were scientifically proven.
I was critiquing BPC’s claim that “secular reasons” were inherently rational.
They’re not. Some are, some aren’t.