I'm presuming Aaron got very confused by the "ly" which makes that exact string uncommon even if it is made up of entirely standard adjectives.

The problem is not apparent in political decisions grounded in both religious and secular justifications, but political decisions that can only be grounded by religious justifications. Feeding the poor has obvious secular justification, so a religiously motivated decision is not controversial in a secular government (but to be clear, if their motivation was based only on their religion, it should not be considered valid in a secular government).

A better example is Same Sex Marriage. Those against the policy are almost entirely motivated by religious justification (putting aside the alternative 'government should not be involved in marriage' position). I have not found a single engaging secular argument against SSM, and in fact much anti-SSM political lobbying is openly religious.

SSM is a scenario for which there is a religious justification, and no valid secular justification (perhaps I should say 'arguably'). I think it is a good example because it turns out that the majority of people that happen to hold to the religion in question, are able to separate their religious beliefs from what should be lawfully applied to the population at large. Whether they fully appreciate it or not, they have expressed the secular position for governance, whilst being able to express the religious position in their personal lives.


Given this, I'm having difficulty seeing the logical impossibility that you described. Perhaps you can give an example of an issue that would better illustrate the problem, if you do not think the above does?

Could it be that Erron isn't as smart as he thinks he is?

The argument was presented as "constitutionally secular" as opposed to a "constitutional" and "secular" democracy. I asked for clarification very early on and didn't get one. The long delay between any clarification makes me suspect t_d really meant something erroneous, especially as he continues to argue "constitutionally secular" as opposed to "constitutional" and "secular" separately.

He just doesn't realize his error, and probably won't. Indeed, his sense of "constitutionally secular representative democracy" appears to contain exactly one country, which really challenges his notion of what it means to be "typical."

So if someone wanted to care for the poor ONLY because it achieves a religious outcome, then their perspective should not be considered valid?

What you are suggesting here is pretty much in line with the argument I've been making about the flawed concept of religious neutrality. Indeed, your argument very explicitly favors non-religion over religion. "Oh, that's *JUST* a religious thing? Then it doesn't count."

(Uke - I know you don't see it, but it's right in front of you. Your (a) and (c) are presented *right there*. (b) is contained in tame's argument that people need to be "secular" in certain activities.)

But the resolution to what you're saying here is actually more in line with what I believe is a better framing, which is "religious ambivalence" instead of "religious neutrality." Determining the motivation of a person's beliefs or actions is an extremely difficult (if not impossible) thing to do.

But ultimately, that motivation doesn't matter. For the purposes of government and how it functions, I really don't care what your motivations are. If you support the same thing I support, you can have the worst argument in the world and I don't think I care. (When it comes to an informed and intelligent citizenry... that's a separate issue. Of course I would prefer that you make a good argument, but if you vote for my candidate, I don't care how stupid you are or how bad the logic was that lead you there.)

I would draw the distinction between religious neutrality and religious ambivalence in the following manner: Religious neutrality has to work hard to create the distinction between religious and non-religious things. Look at all of the issues that are created by explicitly trying to fuss with making distinctions between religious and non-religious things. Religious ambivalence sets all of those distinctions aside and simply focuses on the outcome.

http://www.debate.org/opinions/are-t...t-gay-marriage

You may not agree with them, but there are out there. You won't see as much lobbying because the secular positions that are taken are not organizationally useful when you try to separate them out from the core religious supporters (that are already organized in a useful way for lobbying activities in this area).

The ultimate argument in favor of SSM has to do with defining marriage as a social contract mediated by the government, thus providing it with protections for equality as defined by the government. If government were not involved in marriage, I'm not sure that this would even be a conversation. (Of course, that last sentence is pure speculation. But I use things like "baptism" as my analogy.)

The plainest thing would be that "religious freedom" is a thing in a system that claims that religion is not to be favored over non-religion. I've shown in other threads that religious organizations get protections that non-religious organizations get. The types of arguments religious organizations can make have no secular equivalents.

In the converse direction, there are places where religious perspectives are explicitly pushed out because of abstract concerns about religious coercive effects (say, a high school student's graduation speech).

In the example you gave, you would say that a religious argument does not work whereas if there's a non-religious argument for the same conclusion, then it does. That's clearly favoring non-religion over religion.

I don't see these as being logically consistent. Religious neutrality is supposed to reject favoring one over the other, but here we have explicit examples in which one is favored over the other. It doesn't run as a consistent line of reasoning.

I'm going to grammar nit this one. "Secularly" is an adverb, not an adjective. Under the most standard ways of reading English, "adverb adjective adjective noun" is read differently than "adjective, adjective, adjective noun." (The commas matter. One would commonly add "and" into the three adjectives, but I don't think it's necessary.)

Hey genius, the "ly" was on constitutional not secular. FFS.

What on earth is the clarification you need? Your (laughably wrong) grammatical nittery? That the US is a secular democracy is written into the constitution. Does it really take a huge number of back and forths to guess what he meant by "constitutionally secular"?

But I suppose you do have more legs to stand on here than your seemingly made up attributions about "religious neutrality". I think the best thing to do is just quote you and laugh until you address it: ""The way people try to attain religious neutrality is by not allowing religion to speak."". HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Examples like caring for the poor can be justified in many ways, including entirely secular reasoning. I'd say it would be unusual for someone to not accept some secular reasons in addition to their religious ones but in the unlikely case that someone rejects all secular reasons, and only justifies it because, oh I don't know, their religion says that the poor are actually demi-gods who should be treated in a particularly caring way, this is not a valid reason for anyone outside of this religion (but as you went on to say, we'll accept their vote for good legislation despite flawed reasoning).

I happen to think anti-SSM is the best example of certain politicians attempts at religiously motivated legislation. The link you provided does list some of these so-called secular arguments, I contend that not a single one holds, and are easily defeated.


Another way to describe it is that the religious argument does not work for anyone outside of that religion whereas the secular argument should work for all (or most). What you might call favouring non-religion over religion is to prevent religion from becoming favoured without regard of the people's beliefs. Really, that it is a religious argument is less important than it is an attempt to legislate something that should not be expected to be held by the population as a whole. It could just as well be an attempt to legislate using specific political ideals, but it just so happens that religious ideas can be considered vital.

It makes me concerned about these categories religion and non-religion. There are the fundamentalists who want to "put God back into our schools" who express that every part of a school that is not religious, every wall that doesn't have a cross on it, etc, is celebrating the non-religious. i.e. if it's not religious, it's anti-religious. If you're not with us, you're against us. Non-religious = anti-religious.

So what is non-religious? Is it being used more broadly than 'something that could otherwise be considered from a religious perspective'? We don't label positions as non-feminist, non-naturalist, etc as a matter of course.

Regardless of the secular issue, legislating is not perfect. There could be laws that have a genuinely negative impact on the religious over the non-religious, but perhaps you could describe something concrete (whether real or imagined) to better illustrate an scenario that could not be addressed with secular values?

You mentioned a high-school graduates speech (high-school "graduation" *sigh*, I digress...). It is true that in officially representing the state, someone is unable to preach, say. But their personal beliefs are not "under attack", and outside of their official capacity there are no such restrictions. If there were such a thing as 'preaching non-belief', this would also be restricted presumably.

Contrast: certain political beliefs and affiliations are actually legislated against.

Sorry, I feel like I have been rambling on now...

On Scalia's original statement, I suspect that he is correct, but I also think that it is a fairly plausible reading of the First Amendment that it should be applied to some secular worldviews as well.

Aaron is making his point needlessly complicated by using controversial examples. Yes, there are limits on the free exercise of religion. For instance, murder is illegal, and so even if your religion tells you to kill someone, say, a doctor who performs abortions, the state will still prosecute you. Thus, someone with this view is not allowed to freely practice their religion. In this sense, the US is not, nor was it meant to be, neutral between different religions. Nor is any other state.

That being said, I doubt that those Aaron means to disagree with think differently. I suspect they would say something like, freedom of religion is guaranteed when it doesn't conflict with other people's right to freedom of religion. Or, as Rawls put it in his first principle of justice:

This would not fall prey to the problem above. Obviously your right to practice a religion that commands you to kill another person would not be part of a package of rights compatible with similar rights for others.

This is also the justification for various prohibitions against public displays of religion that Aaron thinks are not neutral between religion and secularism. The idea is that any such display would infringe on other people's right to practice their own religion freely. You can disagree with this claim (I myself think it is applied too broadly today) on the merits, but that doesn't mean that you disagree with the principle of justice more broadly. That is, if it is in fact true that some teenager praying at a graduation isn't compatible with other people's liberty to do the same, then it isn't inconsistent to ban such a practice, even if doing so ends up favoring views more consistent with various secular worldviews rather than religion.

Lol -- whoops.

"Typically" was the thing that is in question. I don't know of any other constitutional democracy which is secular vis-a-vis the constitution. For example, the French concept of Laicite is what we could call separation of church and state, but the current manifestation of this was a law that was passed in the early 1900s.

Lol -- Your willful misinterpretation of my statement and relying upon nittery (which I applaud, FWIW) to distract from the fact that my point has been affirmed ITT by a direct claim shows that you're not particularly interested in the reality of the conversation. Which is fine by me.

But that's not really the point. The argument you've made was to discount a position on the basis of it being religious, which is explicitly the statement that non-religious arguments have priority over religious ones, to the point that you can simply disregard religious arguments. Your example, by relying upon the "in addition" phrasing is pretty much saying that you're choosing to ignore the religious argument in favor of the secular one. As far as your understanding of the argument is concerned, the religious portion may as well not exist at all. Again, explicitly denying religious arguments on the basis of their religiosity is favoring non-religion over religion.

Whether you think an argument is defeatable or not is irrelevant. You claimed to know of no secular arguments, and now you know that they are there. There are those who believe various arguments in favor of SSM don't hold even though you think you do. That type of disagreement is a different conversation all together.

This isn't really that accurate. If it were true that a secular argument should work for all or most, then a secular argument in favor of SSM would win over the religious arguments against SSM. We see the evidence that it doesn't.

The problem is that you're assuming that secularity is something that people already agree with, that there's some sort of underlying thing that everyone already accepts. But that's not the case. This a manifestation of what I've been referring to as the moral grounding of individuals. You assume the secular argument works because you think everyone is grounded in the same underlying secular principles. But if that's not the case (and it's not), then there's no particular reason to think that secular arguments are going to work for all or most.

Sure. The general concept of diversity allows for multiple viewpoints to be at the table. However, I think that the principle is misapplied in many ways. For example, I remember reading an article that "diversity" to some has become code for "people like me." In almost every instance of the usage of the word "diversity" there's a sense of "not-white-ness" that's conveyed. But that is a bastardization of diversity, since including whites in the pool of people that create diversity seems to me to be a very necessary component.

In the same way, if we want to allow for an equality between religious and non-religious perspectives, you need to allow the religious perspective to come to the table. Obviously, it cannot be allowed to dominate in ways that are unfair. This is a challenge, and there's a tension. And that's the tension I think the discourse needs to live in.

I agree. I think trying to classify arguments in these words is grossly problematic.

I know that some see it this way, but I don't. There are some ways in which I do think religious perspectives are actively pushed to the side and marginalized, but I also think that "putting God into schools" is as much of a problem as "keeping God out of schools."

Yeah, I was clearly tired when I was posting and made several lol-bad mistakes. Oh well.

Anyway, there's something here about the graduation speech, as I think it's pretty stupid to think that the student is an official representing the school. It's a student talking about their experience as a student. That we think it's appropriate to censor the content in this way sets a very weird standard. I can accept that the principal shouldn't lead in a religious sense, but for a student to be denied the freedom to speak on a personal level?

That's okay.

I would argue (obviously) that it's not true. I've been in situations where the speaker invokes a non-Christian prayer emphasizing praying to a female God by drawing out the feminine pronouns -- something that the rest of the room lapped up. As a Christian, I don't particularly agree with that conception of God, but does that prayer infringe on some sort of liberty? Or what if I were at a place where there was a Muslim prayer being prayed? I don't see a reason that this prevents me from having my own sense of God, or that some sort of religious liberty has been restrained.

I can respectfully allow others to express their religiosity. Or even their non-religiosity by giving some sort of secular invocation. And this is the thing that I don't think is happening in a lot of cases. I think that a lot of what's going on has more to do with the decision to allow oneself to be offended by things that are not worth being offended by. (See also "ethnic food microaggression.")

If you meant to dispute "typical", I have already given the example of Turkey, other examples of democracies that are secular by constitution are Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, the Philippines and South Korea. There are plenty of others.

Your claim regarding France is wrong. Secularism was indeed first introduced in France by law, but it was later included in the French Fifth Republic (France's current constitution). It is in fact typed out explicitly in its very first article: "France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic".

Indeed. It seems that my knowledge of this particular aspect of history starts falling apart in the mid-1900s. The last couple days catching up on some world history have been interesting.

It will look this way because of the unique (*) nature of religion in society.

(*) Well, politics is probably another kind of 'worldview' that needs to be treated in a similar way, and perhaps there are other obvious examples I can't think of atm (philosophical positions, say).

As I said before, rather than it being "favoring non-religion over religion", it is not because an argument is religious that it is not favoured, but because of the nature of these types of position that such arguments can and do alienate subsets of the population not holding to the same worldview. At least wrt government and legislation, secular positions are the response to religious positions, not something that developed independently.

And as I also said before (I didn't clarify my meaning very well), the idea of religious vs non-religious arguments in politics is problematic: a religious argument is probably self-evident, but is every argument that does not mention religion a non-religious argument (in the sense that they are also non-stamp collecting arguments, to employ that meme)? This isn't very meaningful, or fair.


To clarify, because I don't think I wrote the clearest of posts above, my position is that no secular arguments can stand scrutiny, I'm actually quite familiar with these arguments against SSM, incl the examples in your link. That I believe they are easily defeated is obviously based on my strongly secular position, we should leave the details alone as I agree it is too broad a topic on its own. But the reason why I think it is a good example is because I think it illustrates a common thread in religiously motivated legislation: the religious argument against SSM is an attempt to legally force their religious position onto all others (whether religious or not), a position that they are in no way restricted in holding as far as their own freedom and behaviour, but they desire to limit the freedom and behaviour of others. The joke-like phrase that sums it up is "if you don't agree with SSM, don't get SSM'd".


Interesting, I don't know where you got that impression - I think it's clear that the US population is not good at making secular decisions, and turn to religious views or emotions. In fact, what seemed to be the strongest argument that turned the tide against denying SSM is the emotional "love is love" kind of view in the younger ages, which is really a poor argument (but as we both agreed, we take bad decisions if they favour good results!).
I do, however, believe that the courts should be making secular decisions. A great example is Judge John E. Jones III, who presided over the Dover trials and also made the landmark SSM ruling, 'despite' being Republican-appointed and supposedly strongly religious.


I do have to remind myself sometimes of the more moderate positions, because I watch a lot of extreme 'fundie' Youtube / Google plus hangouts (for entertainment purposes!), but it is really disturbing to see that there are people in senior political positions that hold some views that are indistinguishable from these extremes (that, or they are pandering to just as disturbing degrees). Say hello, Mick Huckabee.


I moved this part to the end, because I'm really interested what you'd give as an answer to my question.
Can you provide an example of legislation (real or not) that was based on religious ideals, something that would not be considered secular, that you think would / should be acceptable?

Well, I think your point on lacitee brings up one up important issue. One can differentiate between "aggressive secularity" and "neutral secularity" (my terminology, probably not commonly used).

"Aggressive secularity" is things like laïcité, which can be traced back to a political and cultural distrust or aggression towards religion. "Neutral secularity" is more of the type you find historically in the US, a legal recognition that religions should be not be discriminated for or against by the state.

When we know that many of original immigrants to the US fled religious persecution, this all starts to come together. The former type of secularism is bred by fighting the influence of religion, the latter type is bred by fighting persecution of the religious. It also explains why (culturally speaking) a secular country like France (typically) abhors politicians who express religion, while a secular country like the US (typically) prefers them.

I would agree that the American type of secularism is unique, and that its original intention is different than secularism in other countries.

I don't live there any more, but I understand that Tony Blair's PR team had to work rather hard to diminish his religiosity on order to make him more palatable, the opposite being the case in the United States.

Many Republican politicians sound more like preachers than politicians. Cruz declares he is a Christian first and an American second. That's troubling for someone in the running for leading the most powerful nation.

If I had stronger conservative leanings, who am I supposed to vote for?

The exact opposite of JFK when he ran. He had to stress he would not be a Catholic first.

I believe that is the speech of which Santorum declared "that makes me sick".

So Santorum thinks the President if Catholic, should (as was feared about JFK at the time) "take his orders from Rome"

He is, of course, straw-manning JFK's speech, presenting it as if it means that people of faith should be eliminated from the "public square". I'd go as far as to say that it is less a straw man than an outright lie.

Or perhaps Santorum is a simpleton.

I'll take the latter.

Politics and religion do fall into similar sorts of trappings, but it's a mistake to think that these things are somehow different from all the other things. For example the anti-GMO movement is neither political nor religious, but has many of the same types of elements.

This is a rather poor rendering of reality. It's simply false that all secular positions are a response to a religious position, and that it has no "independent" development. We can see strains of "humanistic thinking" dating back a very, very long time. Secular principles of justice are certainly are not a reaction to religious thought.

The way you've framed it, it is a meaningful distinction. Whether it's "fair" depends significantly on the context. I would say it's unfair to reject an argument because you've labeled it "religious." In the same way, I would say it's unfair to reject an argument because you've labeled it "secular." The framework you've presented of the acceptability of arguments hinges on your ability to make such a distinction. I agree that this distinction is problematic, but it's a problem that your framework created.

This framework is far too broad to be successful. Something like setting a speed limit can be placed into the same type of framework. The people who want the speed limit to stay at 75 instead of increasing it to 85 are really just interested in keeping the others on the road from going faster. If you don't want to go 85, don't go 85.

Of course, nobody is actually making religious arguments about speed limits (that I'm aware of), but that framework of arguing from a position of limiting freedom and controlling the behaviors of others is very clear and easy to translate. So presenting that framework is not really enough.

Without going into too much detail (because I agree there's a lot of detail), the fundamental issue at hand is a concept, the idea of what a marriage is and is not. It's tied to other concepts, such as the idea of what sexuality is, and the idea that sexuality is tied to morality in some way. It's too broad of a brush to say that this is nothing more than a matter of trying to control the behavior of others.

I agree that the courts are in a different position than the legislature. They function in very different ways and have different types of responsibilities. The courts are constructed so that the basis of their decision-making is a set of documents that define the various concepts that they need to make their decisions. All decisions are grounded in a set of assertions that have been given to it by the constitution and the laws that the legislatures have passed. They are very much people of the book. It's just a different book than the ones religious people use (and much, much, much longer).

So while I agree that there is a difference for the courts, the "secularity" of the courts is grounded in somewhat the same way that religions are grounded, and I would argue in ways that are far more "fundamentalist" than even religions can be. And this should be seen as neither good nor bad. That's just how the system is set up.

This is an interesting question, but one that I think is a bit riddled with complexities. While there are many difficulties, the ultimate challenge is one of post-hoc justification. Let's just take something as simple as "Thou shalt not murder."

Taken in the context of the Bible, this is a religious legislation straight from the mouth of God. It clearly served some sort of function regarding the assessment of human behaviors. But having identified this as such, one can then create other types of justifications as to why murder is a bad idea and that we shouldn't allow people to do it.

Could it be argued that the idea that murder is bad is grounded completely in religious ideals? I think that argument can be made. Indeed, there have been times and places where ritualized deaths were normal and acceptable behaviors (see also duels and honor killings). So there is a very real sense in which such a law is clearly on the opposite side of culture, and hence would be a strongly religious perspective, but one where we would find the law to be acceptable by our standards today.

There are problems with this example, such as the inability to accurately trace the full understanding of "murder" and put it in a simple box that labels it as either "religious" or "secular." But it's enough for me to show that we *can* understand this law to be completely grounded in religious ideals, while still having secular support.

For perhaps a less abstract example (though more hypothetical), I can imagine a secular society that respects "blue laws" (laws that enact various restrictions on activities on Sundays). While this is particularly religious in its structure, I can imagine a secular society signing onto the idea that the work week should be somehow limited and that people should really take a time of rest.

The reason that it's not too hard for me to imagine this is that such a behavior exists in other countries. France, for example, only recently had students attending school on Wednesdays (which was resisted quite strongly):

http://world.time.com/2013/11/06/boo...on-wednesdays/

So I believe that it would be hypothetically possible for a religious voting bloc to create a mandatory day off for religious reasons, but secular people would could go along with it. ("I don't care why they're pushing that law, but if it gets me a day off, I'll take it!")

If I may interpret him, he was saying that he believes the first obligation is to your god-given beliefs. Even if those are misguided Roman Catholic ones.

Or pushing for "intelligent design" because it is in Santorum's God-given belief system.

So, kind of the opposite (or maybe on the oblique) from what you said.

That too.

Changed the last bit to make it less specific.

Given the change: Of course. Politics makes for strange bedfellows, people's belief systems aren't entirely alien to other people's belief system; we mostly all agree on the whole 'no cannibalism' thing nowadays.