[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt,

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Steve:
Yep, me too. DMB thinks that that instinct is a straw man, but I know
exactly what it is like from past personal experience to regard
talking about texts from Leviticus in public as not merely unwelcome
but a threat to democracy and a crossing of the Church-State boundary.
It ought not to be done because our freedom _from_ religion is
violated. By the way, there is an organization called the Freedom From
Religion Foundation which boasts Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennet among
others as honorary board members. Harris is absent which doesn't
surprise me since he seems to be the most sensitive to this issue of
the "horsemen."  I doubt that his endorsement is not there because he
wasn't asked or just didn't get around to responding.



Matt:
> 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?


Steve:
You are right that we can't make that case directly. We need moderate
and liberal Christians to make such cases for us. Stout notes that
unfortunately the new atheists have made it clear that there will be
no such alliance between atheists and religious moderates and liberals
since they have condemned not just certain ways of being religious but
rather religion as such. That's what I think we nonbelievers need to
be much more careful about doing in the future.

Best,
Steve