[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt,

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 9:14 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey Steve,
>
> Steve said:
> Militant secularists (like Rawls and Rorty and probably lots of people
> you know) want to further the secularization of government at the
> expense of religious freedom (and freedom of speech) by promoting
> limits on what is acceptable in political reason-giving.
>
> Matt:
> Hmm, I remain unconvinced that "secularism" is not the label for me
> (and Rawls, Rorty, you and Stout).  Consider, for example, people
> who yell "Fire!" in theatres: should we not promote limits on what is
> acceptable speech in theatres to avoid stampedes?  The argument is
> Stanley Fish's, from There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (and It's
> a Good Thing, Too): "freedom of speech" is a negotiated area of
> discourse in which some things are allowed in and others are not,
> at _all_ times.  Unless you assimilate "freedom" to "chaos"
> (something like a distinction between the Hobbesian state of nature
> from the Millian state of negative liberty), you can only create a
> space of freedom by demarcating it from an area of non-freedom.
> One way we do this is to say that there are some freedoms you
> don't get until you're 18.  Or, by being a citizen.

Steve:
Yes, we do have other limits on freedom of speech. Stout is a big
proponent of the notion that freedom means constraints rather than
anarchy. Militant secularism in particular comes into focus when we
think we need limitations on specifically _religious_ speech.

Matt:
> Should we not promote limits on what is acceptable in political
> reason-giving?

Steve:
Yes, but the question is, would we limits religious reason giving in
particular.  Militant secularists say yes. What do you think?


Matt:
Isn't saying that you farted the morning of Nov. 2,
> 2004, and your bad gas caused you to vote for George W. Bush be
> ruled as unacceptable?  Isn't an area of unacceptable reasons the
> area in which we hope children we train in good reasoning skills do
> not flirt?  This area is always negotiated, but it is an area you _do_
> have to promote, in the form of cultural reproduction.  But if we
> stretch out the terms of description, so that the culture Rawls and
> Rorty are trying to promote looks like a curtailment of freedom,
> doesn't you _not_ teaching your child to believe in God or Allah
> _also_ function as a curtailment on free speech?

Steve:

Good point. Certain reasons are certainly unacceptable. But given that
we have found no knockdown arguments against religious belief in the
past several centuries since the Enlightenment, perhaps religious
reasons can be thought of as justified. James at least thought that
some people are rationally entitled to religious belief. I don't think
that modern pragmatists have found reason to disagree.

Matt:
> I'm not convinced that we've found the right way to handle Rawls
> and Rorty, on the one side, and Harris and Dawkins, on the other.
> I think there's a big distinction between the two.

Steve:
I tend to agree with DMB in thinking that what Harris wants is
conversation. I do see a difference with Dawkins whose rhetoric paints
religious as a virus and religious people as unreasonable. If such
people are unreasonable then exchanging reasons with them is
pointless. Democracy in that light is something we can only give up on
or try to control by imposing anti-democratic limits on speech. We
have democratic license to forbid yelling "fire" for no good reason in
a crowded building, but we have no consensus on the religion question.


Matt:
I doubt Dick and
> Mary Rorty taught their children to believe in God, but I also doubt
> Dick would have tried stamping it out if they had started leaning that
> way.  Rorty's admiration for the Wordsworthian God of Whitehead and
> Hartshorne (that he could never quite find his way to believing), and
> his commendatory explications of James' Will to Believe, need to be
> balanced against Dawkinsian cultural aggression.

Steve:
There are some separate issues here that I ought to clarify. There is
militant atheism which hold that reigion needs to be opposed as such.
I think Harris falls into this camp to some degree but Rorty does not.
Then there is militant secularism where Rorty qualified but Harris
does not. Harris wants religious voices in politics so that he can
dialectically kick ass. Rorty and Rawls thought religious voices in
politics are out of place.


Mat:
> If we acknowledge that you have the right to say anything you please,
> do we also need to take it seriously?  Shouldn't there be a space
> between promoting a culture you want to see reproduced in the
> future and leaving people alone when they're not actively trying to
> reproduce their culture in you and your children?  And shouldn't there
> be a further distinction between future-oriented cultural promotion
> and present-oriented political discourse?  I think the muddiness of
> philosophical discussion on this topic might be clarified if we
> distinguish between these valences: it will still be muddy because our
> troubles revolve around how to negotiate between the areas on both
> sides of the distinctions.  Because if we don't make these distinctions,
> am I then being inconsistent by (eventually) not teaching my children
> to be good Christians and _not_ going out to the street corner after
> work every day and standing on a soapbox urging people to give up
> belief in God?  Shouldn't we _not_ assimilate those two things?  And
> if we don't, isn't there room for thinking that political discussion is
> not best done in certain terms and _not_ also thinking that God is a
> delusion?

Steve:
I think extending the charitable notion that believers are rational
and may be rationally entitled to their beliefs would go a long way to
furthering the conversations we ought to have. Why would Dawkins and
Hitchens want to engage people who are irrational? That idea sounds
irrational to me.

I for one have had enough conversations with believers to have no
desire to get on a soapbox and argue that other people ought not
believe in God. I think that their religious beliefs are false, but I
recognize that I probably also hold a lot of false beliefs. I've
stopped buying into the notion that religious beliefs are "core
beliefs" that have a special status that demands that we get these
beliefs sorts of beliefs right before we can talk about other beliefs.
I am far more concerned with bigotry toward nonbelievers than I am
with convincing others to think as I do about religious dogmas. The
most important idea that we need to get across to theists is not that
Jesus was not born of a virgin or that God is a human construct but
rather that atheists are no less capable of being good citizens as
theists are. That's as far as my own militancy with respect to
religion goes.

Best,
Steve