[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Steve,

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

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

Matt:
Sure, why not?  At the theoretically abstract level of demarcating a 
reason as "religious" or "philosophical" or "literary," or any other 
number of abstract categories we might make up, why shouldn't all 
of those demarcated kinds be open to limitations _simply by virtue of 
being abstract_: all of the action takes place in the particulars, in the 
actual measures/suggestions taking place.  It seems to me that the 
notion of "militant secularism" you are using is factitious, because it 
isolates a _problem area_ not a position: as if Rorty thought it was 
okay to justify your beliefs about universal health care with 
reference to Proust, but just not God.

Put it this way: you put out there the Jamesian point that religious 
believers are rational.  I do not think you need to think that religious 
believers are _irrational_ to think that some kinds of religious 
reasons are out of place in political discourse.  All you need is a 
distinction between thinking religious beliefs are justified and 
thinking that religious beliefs can act as public justifications for 
political actions.  It is only on the latter notion that Rorty and Rawls 
have doubts.  

Every particular belief looks in two directions: it looks backward to 
other beliefs for justification and it looks forward to other beliefs 
that _it acts as justification for_.  These are two different 
processes, because when you put forward a reason as a _public 
justification_ for a political action, you are _requesting_ that that 
reason _be affirmed as true_.  A "public justification" should be of a 
kind that _can be used as a reason_ by, ideally, everyone in the 
public square debating the issue.  If you argue in this imaginative 
public square that God teaches to love your neighbor, therefore we 
should have universal health care, I cannot _use that reason in my 
own reasoning_.  And _that's_ what disqualifies it, like reasoning 
from Proust.  Stories about how you were _taught_ to affirm certain 
public positions, like how God taught you to love your neighbor, and 
that figured prominently in your stance on health care, are 
_perfectly_ acceptable: but we are not requested to have the same 
personal histories.  We are only requested to reason from the 
same canonical texts: like the Constitution.  What are canonical 
texts to reason from, or the canonical terms of discourse, certainly 
may fluctuate.  But what secularists argue is that the Bible _not_ 
become a canonical political text because the religious freedoms we 
hold dear requires us _not_ to hold _any_ religious text as 
canonical, because _lack of requirement_ is the definition of 
"freedom" in this context.

To put it another way: you say "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."  This is where you might make the equivocation between 
the two directions a belief/reason faces.  Because the fact that we 
have found no knockdown arguments against religious belief does 
_not_ give you a good reason to think that we should be allowed to 
use them in public justifications.  We haven't found any knockdown 
arguments against farts either, and I think we can agree that bad 
gas wouldn't be an acceptable reason for a politician to use to 
justify his actions in the political arena.

Matt