General
Religious freedom doesn’t mean breaking laws
There’s a story about a law in Tennessee that was approved this summer that, according to the article, “puts in place a “strict scrutiny” legal rule that makes it easier for people claiming a law or ordinance violates their religious beliefs to win their cases.” I looked into the actual law, here [pdf], and it wasn’t plainly obvious if that was true, but it does have some interesting wording:
(b) Except as provided in subsection (c), no government entitiy shall substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.
(c) No government entity shall substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion unless it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person is:
(1) Essential to further a compelling governmental interest; and
(2) The least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.
Here’s my problem with the precedent that this sets: we’re going beyond being ‘free’ to practice a religion to making special cases for it. Being free to practice a religion comes after you obey the laws that everyone else does. This particular law doesn’t exactly allow you to sacrifice your children for a religion, but it’s a step in the wrong direction.
It reminds me of the story about the Christian churches that were barred from ringing their bells because of noise restrictions, and they ended up suing over it. They had a good point: exceptions were made for the ice-cream trucks, but not for them, and it was overly vague. They also had bad points: “its pastor, Bishop Rick Painter, was sentenced for ringing his church’s bells as a way of praising God.” No, if you read the story it mentions that he was told by city officials that he could not do it, and chose to break the law anyway. It had nothing to do with his choice of method for “praising God” and everything to do with knowing that he would be breaking the law and doing it anyway.
The point is that you are more than welcome to use the same means as everyone else to fight a law you disagree with. But either way it’s the law, and just because the reason behind you wanting to break the law is religious, that shouldn’t give you any special power.
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Re: Atheist Fundamentalism
This comes from an editorial page from a Texas news station, so I shouldn’t be all that surprised. But the sentiments here are not as uncommon as they should be. Rod Dreher writes a collumn entitled, Against Atheist Fundamentalism.
First things first, I’m willing to criticize some atheists he mentions in his post, the Texas Church of Freethought. Now, I don’t claim to know very much about this group, but my first impression is that they are trying to do some ok things in exactly the wrong way. From their home page:
We are a rational approach to religion, offering atheists, agnostics, humanists, and freethinkers all the social, emotional and inspirational benefits of traditional faith-based churches, but without appealing to tradition or superstition.
Guys, atheism is not a religion (which I’m sure they know), and calling yourselves a “Church” is going to hurt your cause more than help it. The article’s writer even says “Texas is so religious even the atheists go to church.” I don’t necessarily think that what they’re doing is that bad, but they open up atheism to so much trouble by calling it a church. Atheism is not about faith.
But let’s get back to the real issue, misrepresenting atheists. Let me pick a gem from his article, and we can all see what boils my blood here. Yes, people apparently still think like this:
Unfortunately, militant atheism in power has repeated all the crimes of religious regimes and, absent ethical restraints, made them vastly worse. Though their ideologies despised Christianity, both the communists and the Nazis justified their own monstrosities as “scientific.”
Oh no. Please, no. We need to squash this one once and for all, but it just will not happen. The Hitler Historical Museum quotes a speech he made on April 12, 1922 saying:
My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.
We need to stop equating Nazism with atheism. It’s a false analogy, and I suspect it began because there’s such a stigma against nazism that mentioning it in the same sentence, even if shown to be false, casts a shadow that is hard to step out of.
Mr. Dreher would like us to accept that religion and science don’t have to be mutually exclusive and, indeed, can each learn from the other. I don’t whole heartedly disagree with that statement, just the second half. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but they do not share any common ground. I know that it’s difficult when the “sphere” of science seems to overstep the line in the sand that religion has made, but we have to understand that science itself is impartial. It’s not trying to step on the toes of what religion claims to know; it just goes where the evidence leads. And if new evidence arises, science takes it in stride. Science can’t learn from religion, not because, as Dreher quotes a speaker, “scientists [have] nothing to learn from religious people, who by definition believed absurd things”. The reason is that the things they believe are not in the same realm. Science builds on itself; each new piece of information must be incorporated and reviewed, tested and retested, peer reviewed and scrutinized. There are few assumptions that science relies on, and the fewer the better. Asking science to just take a little religious wisdom doesn’t make sense, because religious beliefs aren’t purely rational. Notice I didn’t say absurd, stupid, mindless, etc. They are just based on different premises: religious belief is never built from the ground up on rationalism.
Equating science and religion to us taking a cue from the Eskimos about using all parts of the animals we kill is just silly. Science isn’t saying “don’t use all parts of the animal”. Science is saying “the reason that we should use all parts doesn’t seem to be because they gave themselves to us for nourishment.” It’s explaining our world the best that we know how currently. Religion can take it personally if it would like, but don’t drag science down too. It’s just too impartial to play the blame game.
Oh, and Rod: Don’t for a second act like kids “sitting around the campfire, learning from grown-ups that the world is disenchanted after all” is in on any comparable level with kids going to evangelical bible camps, being broken down with criticism, encouraged into trances and “speaking in tongues”, and taught to laugh at science. A camp where kids are told that they can examine the world for themselves is far from a bad thing.
An atheist’s morality is not disproved by one philosopher. Sorry.
Below I’ve posted a “video” of a response to another video (who knows how far back that goes, I just picked this one up). While I completely disagree with what he’s saying, it wasn’t an offensive video, so give it a quick watch.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bss9T2EJ0W4
He says at 1:05:
While it is true that some atheists can be moral, it is not true that one can be logically consistent and be an atheist and moral realist at the same time.
Uh oh. My B.S. sense is acting up again. Time to set a few things straight. I’ll begin with his first point. He cites the philosopher David Hume’s famous assertion that you cannot derive an OUGHT from an IS, meaning that if your belief system is such that you build up only from what you know IS, there is no way to make the jump to what that implies you OUGHT to do.
I don’t want to detract from Hume’s results or his very influential philosophy career, but anyone that has done more than pick and choose his philosophical quotes will know, the field is awash in extremely different ideas that exist because it’s not a hard science. This is philosophy. So while we’re choosing whatever quotes we want to, it’s my turn. I invite you all to also read one of Plato’s great works, Euthyfro. This is especially apt given his claim that there is no morality unless it is given by God. To paraprase the paradox in terms that make sense for Christianity, does God command things because they are moral, or is it moral because God commands it? It’s a simple question, but opens up quite the can of worms.
Does God command what he does because those things are moral? If this were the case, it seems to imply that God is not actually the source of morals. He may know about the morals, but isn’t the moral authority himself. He just passes the info on down to us. (And it’s a good thing we’ve only got 1 god in the “telephone” chain, as opposed to what Plato had. Have you ever played that game with more than about 3 kids? Who knows what moral commands we’d get!)
Ok, so are things moral because God commands them? Yikes, what consequences could this have? The first word that comes to mind is “crusades”… Are we saying that, assuming that it’s true, if God commanded killing some huge number of people, we would not only be allowed, but morally imposed to go out and do so? And how do we filter out the people that really heard God make this out of the ordinary command and those who just wanted to get away with it, or who were crazy in the first place?
So I think we already have some philosophical issues with assuming that God is the source (or deliverer) of morality. Let’s not put too much trust behind one claim of one philosopher.
But let’s investigate this issue from the side of an atheist wondering how he ought to act. There are huge branches of philosophy that deal with this. The most broad is simply Normative Ethics, philosophy trying to deal with exactly this question. From the vantage point of an atheist who values above all else reason and verifiable reality ( “IS” statements, to use our previous terminology), I would say that consequentialism provides the best theories. We have, in basic descriptions, a few to choose from:
- Utilitarianism – Moral worth is derived by maximizing the good done to the most people.
- Egoism – Moral worth is derived by maximizing the good done to the self.
- Situation ethics – Moral worth is derived by maximizing the love of the consequence.
- Negative consequentialism – Moral worth is derived by minimizing bad consequences.
And there are more. I may also add that none of these are inconsistent with atheism. They are completely orthogonal topics. This isn’t the place to get into a huge breakdown of every possible ethical theory, so I’ll just take one as an example.
Utilitarianism – we determine the moral worth of something by the good done to the most number of people. So essentially we are deciding what we OUGHT to do based on what we predict will happen. Here’s where we get into what I think this video’s poster would claim is a sticking point. How do we know something will happen, so that we can make a moral judgement? This question is more or less immaterial. For a reasonably rational person, prediction is at the heart of nearly every action that we make. Science is built upon predicting results. I claim that tomorrow I’ll see the sun in the sky just like I did today. This doesn’t have to be true, strictly speaking, but throwing out predictive power is ridiculous. And if you try to do it, you’ll become an actionless pile of mush on the floor.
We are very experienced with actions and consequences. Using a small amount of predictive power, we can estimate the outcome of our actions, and thus derive morality.
And to dust off a tired old hat: If you’re only not killing your neighbor because your God threatened you with eternal torment, well, that scares me more than someone thinking for himself.
A Church Lottery Scam
First of all, check out this short AP story on a church winning the lottery in Michigan yesterday [here]. It’s just a fluffy piece of semi-news about a church winning the runner-up of lottery prizes. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, atheist blogger, he’s about to rant some way or another about how a church shouldn’t be gambling, hypocrisy…” and so forth. Well, that’s not the case. Whatever, let them play. Let them buy the ticket as an organization and spend the money on whatever they want. Dare I say, let them buy it with donated funds! If you donated to that church, I strongly doubt that you made any kind of legal arrangements for its use. If they wanted to use your dollar to fund vibrating seat cushions for the whole church, they could. But this line kind of put a thorn in my side:
Michigan Lottery officials say the church will receive the full amount of the prize because it is a tax-exempt group.
So right off the bat, I want to say that this is entirely not the purpose behind giving them tax-exempt status. School districts that were promised more funding when they established a lottery and the like are losing out. It’s the letter of the law, but not the spirit. And really, I don’t blame them. Why pay something they don’t owe? But it’s time to revisit the idea of churches being tax-exempt. I’m not here to complain about non-profit organizations getting out of taxes, but honestly not all of a church’s expenditures should count for this. If I donate money to a charity, I get to deduct that from my income tax. If the church raises money for a brand new solid gold Jesus, they don’t. There’s nothing about a brand new solid gold Jesus that has anything to do with being a non-profit organization, but you can’t tell a church how to spend its money. I say, let them pay taxes on income used for non-charitable purposes, and deduct what they use to fund their soup kitchen. If churches are doing things right, this shouldn’t change things very much, should it?
But then I thought, well hey, how can we all cash in on this nice tax dodge? So I’ve come up with a scam. Here’s how it works: I go to a church official and tell him that I have $1 that I’d like to give to the church, to buy a lottery ticket. The stipulation is that of any winnings, I get 80% and the church gets 20%. Why would I, your committed atheist, want do donate to the church? Because it works out to the favor of both of us. I’ll explain: I’ve donated the money for the church to buy a ticket, so they are the rightful tax-exempt recipients, so they get 100% of the winnings, less my 80%. Had I redeemed my ticket by myself, I would be subject to some terrible amount of taxes that would get uncomfortably close to 50% of my winnings. I’ve just made some serious money by using the church to launder my lottery winnings, so to speak. Where’s the problem? The church isn’t risking any money; I wouldn’t give them that dollar otherwise, so there’s no problem for them to join in. And it makes it worth more to me to gamble in the lottery. $1 per ticket for a $1 million jackpot, to me, is really $1 for a chance at $500,000. Now it’s $1 for a chance at $800,000. Same odds.
Any churches want to volunteer?
