the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, like a taste in food or music.
OK, what if we reword this as “the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, because they are very important and the state is not good at identifying or encouraging appropriate religious beliefs.”
Isn’t that a coherent, moderate principle that explains much of American policy on what to do when religion intrudes onto the public sphere? According to this principle, the state can ban religious discrimination because this reinforces private choice of religion and does not require the state to inquire at all into which religious beliefs are appropriate. Yet, also according to this principle, public schools should not allow prayer during class time, because this would interfere with private choice of religion and requires the state to express an opinion about which religious beliefs are appropriate.
I don’t deny the general assertion that many Americans fail the “express Socratically consistent principles and policies” test, but I’m with Blueberry in that I think moderate, coherent principles are quite possible.
OK, what if we reword this as “the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, because they are very important and the state is not good at identifying or encouraging appropriate religious beliefs.” [...] According to this principle, the state can ban religious discrimination because this reinforces private choice of religion and does not require the state to inquire at all into which religious beliefs are appropriate.
Trouble is, this still requires that the state must decide what qualifies as a religious belief, and what not. Once this determination has been made, things in the former category will receive important active support from the state. There is also the flipside, of course: the government is presently prohibited from actively promoting certain beliefs because it would mean “establishing religion” according to the reigning precedent, but it can actively promote others because they don’t qualify as “religious.”
Now, if there existed some objective way—a way that would carve reality at the joints—to draw limits between religion on one side and ideology, philosophy, custom, moral outlook, and just plain personal opinions and tastes on the other, such determination could be made in a coherent way. But I don’t see any coherent way to draw such limits, certainly not in a way that would be consistent with the present range of moderate positions on these issues.
(By the way, another interesting way to get respectable-thinking folks into a tremendous contradiction is to get them to enthusiastically affirm that legal discrimination on the basis of attributes that are a pure accident of birth is evil—and then point out that this implies that any system of citizenships, passports, visas, and immigration laws must be evil. Especially if you add that religion is usually much easier to change than nationality! Pursuing this line of thought further leads to a gold mine of incoherences in the whole “normal” range of beliefs nowadays, as regularlydemonstrated on Overcoming Bias.)
I don’t deny the general assertion that many Americans fail the “express Socratically consistent principles and policies” test, but I’m with Blueberry in that I think moderate, coherent principles are quite possible.
Another thing I should perhaps make sure to point out is that I don’t necessarily consider coherence as a virtue in human affairs, though that’s a complex topic in its own right.
OK, what if we reword this as “the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, because they are very important and the state is not good at identifying or encouraging appropriate religious beliefs.”
Isn’t that a coherent, moderate principle that explains much of American policy on what to do when religion intrudes onto the public sphere? According to this principle, the state can ban religious discrimination because this reinforces private choice of religion and does not require the state to inquire at all into which religious beliefs are appropriate. Yet, also according to this principle, public schools should not allow prayer during class time, because this would interfere with private choice of religion and requires the state to express an opinion about which religious beliefs are appropriate.
I don’t deny the general assertion that many Americans fail the “express Socratically consistent principles and policies” test, but I’m with Blueberry in that I think moderate, coherent principles are quite possible.
Mass_Driver:
Trouble is, this still requires that the state must decide what qualifies as a religious belief, and what not. Once this determination has been made, things in the former category will receive important active support from the state. There is also the flipside, of course: the government is presently prohibited from actively promoting certain beliefs because it would mean “establishing religion” according to the reigning precedent, but it can actively promote others because they don’t qualify as “religious.”
Now, if there existed some objective way—a way that would carve reality at the joints—to draw limits between religion on one side and ideology, philosophy, custom, moral outlook, and just plain personal opinions and tastes on the other, such determination could be made in a coherent way. But I don’t see any coherent way to draw such limits, certainly not in a way that would be consistent with the present range of moderate positions on these issues.
(By the way, another interesting way to get respectable-thinking folks into a tremendous contradiction is to get them to enthusiastically affirm that legal discrimination on the basis of attributes that are a pure accident of birth is evil—and then point out that this implies that any system of citizenships, passports, visas, and immigration laws must be evil. Especially if you add that religion is usually much easier to change than nationality! Pursuing this line of thought further leads to a gold mine of incoherences in the whole “normal” range of beliefs nowadays, as regularly demonstrated on Overcoming Bias.)
Another thing I should perhaps make sure to point out is that I don’t necessarily consider coherence as a virtue in human affairs, though that’s a complex topic in its own right.