“Militant secularists” again
Barr says the militant atheists are gonna eat your religious freedom.
Attorney General William Barr warned New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan of “an organized, militant secular effort” to suppress religion in “the marketplace of ideas” in an interview Wednesday.
“The problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on non-religious people,” Barr told Dolan on his SiriusXM radio show Conversation with Cardinal Dolan. “It’s the opposite — it’s that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people, and they’re not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.”
“Freedom” is another one of those words that get deployed as silencers when in fact it matters what kind of freedom you’re talking about. “Religious freedom” can mean “freedom” to keep children out of school, to keep women out of universities, to beat children with sticks, to preach racism – it can mean a lot of bad things, many of them illegal. If William Barr is arguing for that kind of religious freedom he should stop talking.
Citing Democrats’ efforts to coerce religious employers to violate their conscience rights as well as their ongoing effort to expand abortion access, Barr has used his platform as attorney general to speak out about what he sees as encroachments on religious liberty.
Sure enough; this is what I’m saying. We don’t think people have a “religious right” to, for instance, refuse to provide an offered good or service to lesbians or gays on the grounds that god hates fags. We don’t think “conscience” means shunning or persecuting people because you don’t like their romantic and sexual choices.
He drew a torrent of criticism in October over a speech at Notre Dame Law School in which he said religiously convicted Americans face “social, educational, and professional ostracism.”
Diddums.
“We believe in the separation of church and state,” Barr stated [yesterday]. “But what permits a limited government and minimal command and control of the population — and allows people to have freedom of choice in their lives — and trust in the people is the fact that they are a people that are capable of disciplining themselves according to moral values.”
But moral values are not religious values. Many religious values are highly immoral, as I’ve been hinting.
What about Barr’s boss? Is he capable of disciplining himself according to…well, anything?
If that were true, we would have no need of police and the justice system entire.
“The problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on non-religious people…”
It’s still a problem for me, am I the only one? OK let’s argue from there…
“…it’s that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people, and they’re not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.”
What values exactly, is there some secularist tome I can refer to? Secularists accommodate religious freedom in a much more inclusive way than any organized religion that I have seen, what about the militant proselytizers, did they all disappear? But proselytizing is OK, cuz god said so? Saying there is no morality without religion is a very old and tired argument. Arguing for religious freedom for all then denying it for some isn’t a coherent idea.
Barr probably knows, but assumes his audience doesn’t, or that they agree with him, that the only value they are really concerned about is the value of freedom to make up your own mind about god. The freedom to send your children to school without being converted to a believe they find unacceptable.
Barr believes that what secularists want is like what Christians want – to send their children to school to have their beliefs reinforced, and to convert all the other little kids to their beliefs. Some secularists probably want this, but on the whole, we want our kids taught to think, how to read, how to write and do math, and in general become educated, not brainwashed.
There is a lot of projection in this. The Evangelical Christians want unencumbered access to other people’s kids. They assume that is what the secularists want. They are afraid someone is coming for their kids because they are ‘coming for’ other people’s kids.
In short, the only value at stake here is belief in the god that Barr believes in. That is for so many Christians the true morality. Believing in God, worshiping God, submitting to God, becoming a “servant” to God. And making everyone else do the same.
But if they use the words “moral” and “values”, it sounds better than “submit or else”. They never actually have to specify those morals because everyone else will fill in what they think morality is. And they can see that morality in Trump because he is willing to force everyone to submit. That’s the only moral they really care about; all the rest are window dressing designed for control. Control people’s sex and diet, and you have them in your control. Mostly.
This cracks me up. A “marketplace of ideas” is a metaphor for public discussion and dispute so that the better ideas eventually drive the worse ideas out of business. In other words, it involves debate and testing results — the opposite of “faith.”
Barr thinks atheists don’t want to argue about religion enough. We’re shy about explaining to people why God doesn’t exist and don’t want the religious to bring their claims into the light of day so they can be scrutinized because that means they’re going to pull our own beliefs out into the open. So they can be heard. We hate that.
I don’t think most Christians really believe that’s our problem.
iknklast,
Indeed, and I would argue that if the only basis for your morality is “because god (or the Bible) says so”, then it is not morality, just obedience.
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I have a problem with the expression “marketplace of ideas”. It confuses acceptance for epistemological justification. Do the customers in this marketplace purchase ideas for their truth, or are they simply going along with dogma?
I dislike that label too, and never use it.
It occurs to me, now I think of it, that it could have originated as a rough translation of “agora.”