A leads to B leads to C.
You agree with A, but disagree with C.
I think you skipped a step.
I think the difficulty is deciding how to group people.
I perhaps understand twig’s frustration that people sometimes criticize the apparent (and often actual) ignorance behind some religious beliefs, while themselves often speaking from a place of ignorance about the wider context of those beliefs.
For example, the term “Christian” is so broad as to be practically useless much of the time. Are we taking about american evangelicals, american mainline protestants, european protestants, american catholics, latin american catholics, european catholics, etc.? And that’s just a bit of the western church. what about the russian orthodox church that is apparently supporting the illegal and immoral invasion of urkraine in support of russians nationalism, as opposed to the easter orthodox church, the coptic church, etc.?
For that matter, american secular humanism is a child of christianity, at least as much as christianity is a child of judaism, in my opinion, and to muslim or eastern minds might seem to be logically grouped with christianity.
Bottom line: who gets to decide what 15% of people get grouped in with 85%?
This is especially hard because religious beliefs often have a context that makes them very difficult to understand to outsiders. For example, at some point a while ago, i decided that young earth creationism belief has such a radically different context for, say, a person without a college degree that i’m not sure it can really be compared to my scientific understanding of evolution.
None of this is to say that actions taken based on religious beliefs, or even those beliefs themselves, should be beyond criticism. They should be.
But i think criticizing the belief misses the point to a degree. For example, people who dislike trans people are acting immoral because they are choosing to not see their inherent worth as people. It is an act of will, not of knowledge or belief. That’s why it’s a problem.
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Well, actually…
I consider this an unqualified statement. It doesn’t say “some/many/most” and has the basic meaning of “all”. Using “all” would have added emphasis, but it doesn’t really change the meaning. Consider your response to someone saying “Cats are black”. Would you be tempted to say “Some are not”?
With regard to the point, I disagree about “totally corrupted”. I don’t think any human organization is free from corruption, but I think there are many organizations where the good they do outweighs the corruption.
Qualified statements are much more reasonable. I would even wager this is true +5%/-10% if you mean “Left Behind” style Rapture.
If you are using Tim LeHaye as an authority on logical arguments, you have failed.
My take on how religious beliefs intersect with the public sphere in a pluralistic democratic society such as ours:
All rights in the society must coexist with other rights, and individuals must balance their own rights with other individual’s rights. Precisely how this happens is subject to debate. Our tripartite government structure is an attempt to balance this as well.
When it comes to religion, freedom of religion was a founding tenet of our republic. It doesn’t mean that my religious motivation for arguing for a particular set of rights is any more (or less) important or has more standing than a secular argument. I agree with this:
As an example, the Catholic Church teaches that women can’t be ordained priests. Some people find that offensive to women. I think most people agree that in the US, the Church is (and should be) free to teach such things, even though some find it offensive.
Perhaps fewer people agree that the Church can act upon this, that is be free to not ordain any women as its own priests. There are some who would say the rights of a woman to choose ordination for herself outweigh the Church’s right to not to so. I (as you would imagine) say this is too much of an intrusion into religious freedom rights.
Now imagine an extreme view someone might hold: no woman should be a priest-equivalent in any religion in America. A person would be free to hold that belief, but it would be wrong to try to enforce it, in part because of our understanding of religious freedom.
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I mean the kind Boebert is referring to here:
“It is an honor to serve in this time. I believe that many of us in this room believe that we are in the last of the last days and that’s not a time to complain, that’s not a time to grumble, to be dismayed, to be disheartened, but a time to rejoice,” Boebert said.
“You get to be a part of ushering in the second coming of Jesus,” the congresswoman said to applause across the room.
Boebert’s remarks of the Christian belief that Jesus will return again after his ascension to heaven 2,000 years ago has triggered a slew of reactions online.
Criticizing the belief, criticizing the ideas, the thoughts, the ways of thinking is fundamental to determining who we are. Looking at the motivations, asking the question why, getting to the root principles behind any action or inaction is fundamental to improvement. It is difficult and ugly and not a task for light company. I like this community because it is not light company.
The soldiers sit together close in this confining space each peering out their grate. One looking out past the metal into the world chooses not to see and instead considers, feeling, hearing, aware of those other soldiers with the same task, the twitching click against the grate of one, the heavy breathing of another, the silence, the perfectly dead silence of a third, all broken by a sharp retort. Looking out into the world our soldier sees the collapsed woman, a silent bit of humanity, and those frantic actions, the agony of those around her. Our soldier knows a fellow soldier pulled the trigger and took that life. Which one? Why did our soldier choose not to see at that moment? Why was the decision made to pull the trigger? Was it driven by fear formulated in a belief? Was it callous indifference? Was it a set of training like an algorithm for a machine? Does it matter or is it just one more dead woman and the crowd of agony and grief around her passing.
A story is just a story, something that fades after reading, something we may dismiss without concern. Reality should not be cast aside like a story lest we cast ourselves aside with it. A significant portion of Americans belief without evidence that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and Joe Biden cheated, and Trump won. They believe it just as people believe in God. Criticizing that belief is important. Criticizing beliefs that lead to or are associated with that belief is important.
Belief drives action or inaction. It gauges the level of acceptance one has for associated beliefs and actions. A set of beliefs or principles drive all our actions. Most often it is our actions that indicate our true beliefs, not the beliefs we claim. So, examining actions and beliefs is paramount to understanding the nature of any of us.
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No, of course not. Criticize the ways they are trying to control politics.
Oh geez, this thread went into slow down mode while I was off Friday-ing, so I’ll cram responses into one post.
I’m the arbiter of my own opinions, sure. As are you the arbiter of your opinions. I never said that my opinion on what is a valid sincerely held belief should dictate public policy. In fact, I said precisely the opposite.
Respect? I already said that I find lots of sincerely held beliefs to be offensive. And I think the law is pretty clear on what is and isn’t required of religious organizations and am fine with the way the line is currently drawn. Certainly non-religious organizations have a lot less leeway than a church. It’s sex, not race, but obviously the Catholic Church does not hire female priests. But a small business run by a Roman Catholic does not have the freedom to discriminate on the basis of sex (with exceptions for it being a bona fide requirement of the job - which is a pretty high bar to cross.)
You seem to be asking whether gender identity is a protected class or not. The SCOTUS, in the Bostock ruling, made it pretty clear that it is.
It’s perhaps worth noting that it was a 6-3 decision that saw both Roberts and Gorsuch side with the then-4 liberal justices. Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion.
No, that’s not what I said. I said employers shouldn’t be required to pay for birth control. I think I specified religious employers, but if I didn’t that was sloppy on my part.
I’ve also pointed out elsewhere that pharmacists should NOT get this right. If you feel you can’t in good conscience distribute birth control pills to whomever is prescribed them for whatever reason, then you can’t be a pharmacist since dispensing birth control is a component of that job.
Obviously an individual has the freedom to choose to not be a pharmacist. But they don’t have the freedom to choose be a pharmacist who doesn’t dispense birth control… at least not unless they can find a job where it’s not required. (Maybe an in-house pharmacist in a retirement village? The pool of female patients are presumably all beyond their reproductive years, so maybe that would work.)
I’m not completely following what you’re saying here, but looking at the post you’re responding to I’ll try to clarify:
I think the more one group tries to blur the line between politics and religion, the more critical it becomes for the rest of us to clearly distinguish between the two.
Oh i don’t care what religious employers do. I meant like actuarial employers.
That’s one option, but it’s not really our responsibility to maintain that separation. Sure, we can describe that distinction better on a message board, but the line has been blurring over the past 30 years and I’m not sure how you deal with the reality of the situation when any discussion of it is seen as an attack on the religion.
The GOP has been very successful taking their stance on abortion to create this symbiotic relationship with evangelicals. I think they are trying to do the same across country now in suburban school districts by taking over school boards, leveraging resentment over covid restrictions. They are banning books and pushing their agenda. I expect we will see lawsuits creep up to the Supreme Court over these issues in the next couple of years. Id like to think they will systematically lose these cases since they are now clearly in the public space, but i can easily see the scotus saying the school board has the authority to set the agenda and if people don’t like it then elect a new board.
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IMO the way you deal with it is to keep drawing that line between the religion and the politics.
You think gay marriage is a sin? Cool; you have a first amendment right to believe that. But your job issuing marriage licenses for the state requires you to issue licenses to anyone who meets the state’s requirements… irrespective of whether you feel it’s a sin or not. So go on believing that they’re embarking on a sinful union if you want, set up a prayer team at church to pray for homosexual sinners if you want, but you need to either quit your job or issue the licenses without rancor or undue delay.
I agree that should be how things work, but that sounds like a really horrible woke suggestion. Government infringing on religion for sure.
It’s the same list. Not sure the distinction you are trying to draw here.
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Not really. Loads of religious people draw distinctions between what they think is moral and what the laws should be. In some matters virtually everyone does, even the most zealous fundamentalist.
An example of that is adultery. That goes against nearly every religion in existence, and most non-religious people’s morality as well. Even people who have themselves committed adultery pretty much always agree that it was / is wrong. But I have yet to meet a single American who seriously wants to make it illegal.
If I’m discussing abortion with a pro-lifer who wants to make it illegal on moral grounds, they sometimes get frustrated with me when they realize that I agree with them that it’s (usually) immoral. If I agree that it’s immoral then why on earth do I want to keep it legal? And I bring up adultery. Do they want to throw adulterers in jail? No, they never do.
Ok, then we need a better reason than morality to make abortion illegal.
Anyway, I find it both helpful and important to keep that distinction. Believe what you want to believe but that’s not how our laws should be determined.
I’m not sure what suggestion you’re referring to here.
Sorry for some reason i ignored what you actually wrote and had in my mind you were requiring pastors to marry people not just the person issuing the license.
Clearly not enough coffee yet at the time.
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That’s relatively unspecific. Catholics believe Jesus will return, but the Church doesn’t teach it is imminent. It isn’t a bad idea to live your life as if could happen soon (“King Jesus is coming soon, look busy!” is one of my favorite bumperstickers), there are certainly gospel passages that say so.
I do think it is problematic to think we can change the timing by our actions, which is what some people mean when they say “usher it in”.
I think we mostly agree about not using religion to inform legislation. It just seems like you are blind to the reality we’re living in, where an extreme version of Christian fundamentalism has captured political power in many areas of the country and they are imposing their twisted values on their constituents. Look at the treatment of LGBTQ folks in Florida. That’s happening because of religion mixing with politics. All over the country they are banning books and panicking about some nonsense about litter boxes because evil people are using religion as a cover to gain political power. I agree there are plenty of religious folks who are able to separate their beliefs from their politics. There are also many who can’t or won’t do that, and they are the ones in power.
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