[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Matt Kundert]

Steve said:
I also don't want to prevent anyone from making arguments in 
religious terms. In fact, if those are the reasons that motivated taking 
the stand in question, I welcome it. Though religious traditionalists 
lament being hamstrung by having to phrase their concerns in secular 
terms, I think (and Harris would agree) that it would be better if we 
could confront the actual reasons that convinced religious people to 
take their view in the first place instead of arguing against the 
secularized arguments that the religious have fabricated in an attempt 
to taylor their discourse to for a wider audience.

Matt:
I am genuinely perplexed by this problem.  On the one hand, I have to 
confront the fact that my instinct when encountering Leviticus-pointing 
is to tell the pointer to keep his Bible out of the American Constitution, 
and yet my instinct when encountering the liberal who says that the 
fact that Jesus is love causes him to vote for universal health care is to 
say, "hey, good for you."  I don't know what to do about that.

On the other hand, to argue with people in religious terms might be a 
taller order than you think, Steve.  Should we really all become 
theologians, just in the off chance that people bring in those terms 
(and that's in addition to being statisticians and legal scholars)?  
There's a point at which being conversable ends, and being a 
specialist begins.  It _would_ be nice to root the problem out at the 
source, but isn't there something insincere about telling believers how 
they should believe when you don't even believe?  Aren't you just 
tailoring your secular views into religious language to get the results 
you want just as much as the religious tailor there's into secular 
language?  How many horses should have in the race before you're 
allowed to dictate the rules of horse-racing?

On this other hand, I don't think the issue is really about religion at all, 
but about what this "thin public political discourse" is that Rawlsian 
liberals commend as the lowest common denominator in which we 
should hash out political problems.  It's about when the thinness ends 
and the thickness that we needn't bother with starts.  Where 
communal discussions end and the idiosyncratic origins of an 
individual's views begin.  I don't have any good answers for that either.

Matt