Tag Archives: Religion

The County Clerk Who Cried Religion

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That Kentucky county clerk is back on the streets, as long as she promises not to interfere with the clerk’s office issuing marriage licenses to gay people. My reaction to her situation is that anybody who strongly objects to their job requirements for personal reasons should look for another job. Same-sex couples now have the legal right to get married. Nobody has the legal right to stop them. It’s as simple as that, regardless of any objections the county clerk might have, including objections based on her particular interpretation of a book she considers sacred.

In a lighter vein, someone named Jim expressed himself on Facebook (the link is no longer universally available). You might lift your voice in song if you know the tune: 

I am the very model of a modern fundamentalist
I’m not merely judgmental, I’m the absolute judgmentalest!
I always follow scripture and I act on God’s authority
But marital longevity was never my priority.

I married first one husband, then two others, then another one
Because I think one man is pretty much like any other one.
I’ve never been too troubled by the dubious legalities
Of sex outside of marriage or of other trivialities.

But when it comes to icky stuff like homosexuality
I’m always very strident with my Puritan morality.
In short in matters biblical and spiritual and Calvinist,
I am the very model of a modern fundamentalist!

In questions of behavior I fall back on my Old Testament
(Though saying no to shrimp is way too much of an impediment).
I pick and choose the verses that support my little weltanschauung
And pledge never to change my mind from now til götterdämmerung.

I’ll ride this hobby horse until I’m richer than a sybarite,
There’ll always be good money in denouncing godless sodomites.
I’ll put my name as author on some books that I can barely read
And get a show on cable to inform the world what God decreed.

My husbands all agree that I know more about what marriage is
Than five Supreme Court justices whose law my faith disparages.
In short in matters biblical and spiritual and Calvinist,
I am the very model of a modern fundamentalist!

In fact, when I see what is meant by constitutionality
When I can do my job with requisite impartiality,
When I can join in marriage two young men who might be thespians,
Or issue nuptial licenses to enterprising lesbians,

When I can see that love is love no matter what the sexes are
And understand that gays are just like me and my three exes are,
In short, when I have finally got a dose of moral clarity
I’ll find out what is meant by the idea of Christian charity.

Til then I’ll flout the law and draw my wages from the county tax
Which is what God would do if only He was up on all the facts
Til then in matters biblical and spiritual and Calvinist,
I am the very model of a modern fundamentalist!

Religious Liberty and Same-Sex Sex

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Marriage isn’t an obscure practice. I bet you know married people even if you aren’t married yourself. Since marriage (the monogamous kind anyway) has always been defined as a relationship between a man (the husband) and a woman (the wife), it’s understandable that many of us are having trouble with the new definition. 

It’s also understandable that some people, including blinkered members of the Supreme Court, are resisting same-sex marriage, arguing that it’s just too weird or that the Constitution doesn’t require legalizing it (their argument being that “equal protection of the laws” doesn’t necessarily mean equal protection of the laws). 

But there’s another reason being offered against same-sex marriage that I’m having more trouble understanding. Here’s the relevant language from Justice Thomas’s dissent (which begins at page 78 of this file):

… the majority’s decision threatens the religious liberty our Nation has long sought to protect….In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well….Today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples….

Religious liberty is about more than just the protection for “religious organizations and persons . . . as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths” …  Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice [pp. 14-15 of the dissent].

Thomas’s concern is that religious liberty includes “freedom of action in matters of religion” and that legalizing same-sex marriage will lead to lots of situations in which people won’t be allowed to practice their religion as they wish. He doesn’t provide any examples, but claims that demands will be made to “participate in and endorse” marriage-related activities to which people object on religious grounds. In support of his position, Thomas refers to the amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief submitted by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

The Church anticipates problems of two kinds:

(1) Churches and church-affiliated organizations won’t be eligible for certain benefits if they discriminate against same-sex married couples. For example, church-run adoption agencies might lose their state licenses if they refuse to place children with same-sex couples. Church-run homeless shelters could lose government grants. Religious colleges might lose their accreditation or their access to government financial aid programs. Likewise, individual employees might lose their jobs or be disciplined if they refuse to provide services to same-sex couples.

(2) Individuals will bring lawsuits against churches and church-affiliated organizations that discriminate against such couples, charging illegal discrimination. Religious institutions might be subject to public accommodation laws that require businesses to provide products and services to anyone who can pay. Same-sex couples denied student housing might sue. Employees in same-sex marriages might sue religious organizations in order to keep their jobs.

In these various cases, the Church is arguing that anyone who conscientiously objects to same-sex marriage on religious grounds should have the right to discriminate against same-sex couples. On the face of it, that sounds illegal. But it might not be. An article in The Atlantic explains why:

No law, state or federal, forbids “discrimination” generally. Employers, landlords, and businesses “discriminate” all the time—on the basis of low credit ratings, bad references, and poor employment histories, among other factors. Any type of private discrimination is legal unless a state or federal law specifically forbids it….

Thus, a civil-rights statute has two key parts. The first lays out the traits it governs, the forbidden grounds—for example, … “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” To state a claim, plaintiff must show that he or she has been treated less favorably than others who differ in one of the covered traits, and that the unfavorable treatment was because of that trait….

Then the law specifies what activities it covers, and usually offers certain exemptions. For example, … the Fair Housing Act bars a landlord from refusing to rent to anyone because of “race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.” But it allows religious organizations that own dwellings to favor members of their own sect…

The question, therefore, is where to draw the line between people’s freedom to practice their religion as they see fit and other people’s right to be treated fairly. Religious opponents of same-sex marriage want to draw the line so they can discriminate against same-sex couples in lots of different ways (“we won’t let you attend our college”). Supporters of same-sex marriage want same-sex couples to be treated like other married couples.

Maybe everyone would agree that a minister who thinks same-sex marriage isn’t sacred should not have to officiate at a same-sex wedding. It makes some sense to me that a church-run adoption agency might not want to give a child to a same-sex couple (a Catholic charity in Boston apparently shut down their adoption services to avoid doing that — I’m not endorsing their decision — I’m simply saying it’s understandable from their perspective). But it’s hard to believe there are good religious reasons for the many kinds of discrimination the Seventh Day Adventists and other churches apparently want to practice. 

How can it be against someone’s religion to provide counseling to a same-sex married couple? Or give them food or shelter? Or allow them to attend the college you administer? Or buy flowers or a cake from your shop?

The answer, of course, is that those kinds of discrimination aren’t required by anyone’s religion. In this case, claiming to have religious reasons (or “core religious beliefs”) that justify treating certain people worse than others is a way to attack or renounce their sexual orientation. That’s why the phrase “aid and abet” sometimes appears in discussions of this issue. Opponents don’t want to “aid and abet” what they consider to be deviant sexual behavior, as if that behavior were criminal. They somehow think that acknowledging same-sex marriage or providing aid and comfort to same-sex couples amounts to endorsing same-sex sex.

Certainly, many oppose this evolution in the definition of marriage because it’s strange and new. Following religions that are thousands of years old tends to foster conservatism (the kind that honors tradition, not the fake “conservatism” we hear so much about these days). But the real reason same-sex marriage bothers some people so much is that being in a same-sex marriage is public confirmation that a person has same-sex sex. A person can be gay or a lesbian without announcing that fact to their minister or rabbi, or their college administration, or the staff at their local county clerk’s office. But getting married to someone of the same sex delivers a very clear message. You have the kind of sex that really bothers some people. And you’re planning to have a lot of it for a very long time. You aren’t going through a phase. You aren’t going to change your ways with a bit of counseling. So deal with it.

As a religious person, you can react to this new situation in different ways. You can say “Yuck! I don’t like this at all!” and maybe offer some reasons, religious or otherwise. Or you can mind your own business (“let him who is without sin…”). Or be thankful that more people will be getting married, which is supposed to be a good thing. But you shouldn’t use your religion as an excuse for discrimination. Why make life difficult for people who haven’t done you any harm? Their liberties are just as important as yours.

A Federal Judge Tells the Supreme Court to Shut the F*** Up

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Judge Richard G. Kopf, presumably a Republican since he was appointed to the Federal bench by George H. W. Bush (the first one), reacts to the Hobby Lobby ruling:

In the Hobby Lobby cases, five male Justices of the Supreme Court, who are all members of the Catholic faith and who each were appointed by a President who hailed from the Republican party, decided that a huge corporation, with thousands of employees and gargantuan revenues, was a “person” entitled to assert a religious objection to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate because that corporation was “closely held” by family members. To the average person, the result looks stupid and smells worse.

To most people, the decision looks stupid ’cause corporations are not persons, all the legal mumbo jumbo notwithstanding. The decision looks misogynist because the majority were all men. It looks partisan because all were appointed by a Republican. The decision looks religiously motivated because each member of the majority belongs to the Catholic church, and that religious organization is opposed to contraception. While “looks” don’t matter to the logic of the law (and I am not saying the Justices are actually motivated by such things), all of us know from experience that appearances matter to the public’s acceptance of the law….

Next term is the time for the Supreme Court to go quiescent – this term and several past terms has proven that the Court is now causing more harm (division) to our democracy than good by deciding hot button cases that the Court has the power to avoid. As the kids says, it is time for the Court to STFU. 

Being one of the “most people”, there is no doubt in my mind that the Hobby Lobby decision was stupid, partisan, misogynist and religiously-motivated, but it’s understandable that Judge Kopf expresses himself more judiciously.

There is a little more on the subject from the judge here:

Remembering Alexander Bickel’s passive virtues and the Hobby Lobby cases.

God and Modern Moral Philosophy

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I’m halfway through J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. “Modern” in this case doesn’t mean “contemporary”. Philosophers generally consider Rene Descartes to be the founder of modern philosophy and he died in 1650. Schneewind’s book concludes with Immanuel Kant, who died in 1804. (Philosophy isn’t one of those disciplines that leaves the past behind.)

Moral philosophy hasn’t stood still since Kant, but he’s still a very important figure. Kant argued that in order to act ethically, we must subject ourselves to a moral principle (the Categorical Imperative) that we freely and rationally adopt. We must be autonomous agents, not someone else’s followers.

However, as Schneewind tells the story in the first half of The Invention of Autonomy, moral philosophers in the early modern period were deeply concerned with an issue that wasn’t modern at all. Plato presented the problem in one of his early dialogues, Euthyphro: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”. Or, in modern form, “Is the morally good commanded by God because it’s morally good, or is it morally good because it’s commanded by God?”.

Not surprisingly, there were a variety of answers to this question. Some philosophers and theologians argued in favor of “intellectualism”: God commands what is morally good because God recognizes the principles of morality. It isn’t in God’s power or nature to prefer the immoral to the moral. Richard Cumblerland, for example, argued that morality is rational and God is supremely rational. Hence, God’s commands must be the right ones. God cannot make mistakes.

But if God couldn’t have issued different commands, doesn’t that limit God’s power? And doesn’t it mean that morality somehow stands apart from God? It would seem that God might not even be necessary for morality. Concerns like that convinced some to argue for “voluntarism”: God’s commands define morality. God voluntarily chose the morality we have, so what is moral or immoral would have been different if God had chosen differently. Descartes was an extreme voluntarist, for example. Schneewind notes that, according to Descartes,

Eternal verities must depend on God’s will, as a king’s laws do in his country. There are eternal truths, such as that the whole is greater than the part; but they would not be true unless God had willed them to be so [184].

Maybe it made sense for the early modern philosophers to spend so much time trying to figure out what God was thinking, and whether God could have chosen differently, and how morality and God are related. Living in a world subject to the idiosyncratic decisions of kings and queens, it must have been natural to view morality in terms of divine commands.

Eventually, however, the intellectualist side prevailed (to the extent that God remained in the picture at all). It became clear that morality and religion aren’t necessarily connected. All that speculating and arguing about the relationship between God and morality was an enormous waste of time. If you don’t believe me, read the first half of The Invention of Autonomy.

A Guide to Reality, Part 10

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Chapters 5 and 6 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality are all about morality. In chapter 5, he lays out what he calls the “bad news”: there is no “cosmic value” to human life and moral questions have no correct answers. Rosenberg explicitly endorses ethical nihilism:

Real moral disputes can be ended in lots of ways. by voting, by decree, by fatigue of the disputants, by the force of examples that changes social mores. But they can never really be resolved by finding the correct answers. There are none….All anyone can really find are the answers that they like [96].

To be completely consistent, Rosenberg would probably have to admit that there is no “bad” anything, not even news. Since, on his view, “physics fixes all the facts” and there is nothing truly good or bad in the world at all. After all, one quark is just the same as another.

Rosenberg explains that nihilism isn’t the same as relativism or skepticism. It’s not the case that ethical views can be correct at some times and not at others, or that we can never know for sure which ethical views are right or wrong. Nihilism doesn’t even mean that “everything is permitted”, since nothing is morally “permitted” or “forbidden”:

[All moral judgments] are based on false, groundless presuppositions. Nihilism says that the whole idea of “morally permissible” is untenable nonsense. [Nihilism] can hardly be accused of holding that “everything is morally permissible”. That, too, is untenable nonsense [97].

Nothing at all is morally valuable in itself  (“intrinsically”) or even as a means to something that is.

Notice, however, that Rosenberg isn’t a nihilist about everything. At least, he gives the strong impression that he believes some ideas are true and some are false, and some beliefs are justified and some aren’t. But it’s generally accepted that truth and justification are “normative” concepts just as much as “right” and “wrong”, i.e., they are value-laden. True statements are those which “correctly” describe some state of affairs, while justified beliefs are those that have “good” reasons for believing them. But physics has nothing to say about correct descriptions or good reasons.

In the rest of chapter 5, Rosenberg offers an argument for the truth of ethical nihilism. He begins with a version of the famous question Plato asked in his Euthyphro dialogue: If our favorite moral rule (whatever it happens to be) is both morally correct and favored by God, is it correct because God favors it or does God favor it because it’s correct? Some Christian theologians have tried to deal with the question by invoking the Trinity or by claiming that the question presupposes a misunderstanding of God’s nature, but most people would probably agree that God favors moral rules because they are correct, not the other way around.

Rosenberg, of course, isn’t really interested in a theological version of the question. He brings it up because he thinks it presents an important challenge to his own scientistic position.

He next argues that there is a core set of moral principles common to all cultures. These principles are so common and so obvious, in fact, that they are rarely discussed. For example, we all agree that parents should protect their children; self-interest is acceptable until it becomes selfishness; and it’s wrong to punish people at random. Rosenberg thinks this core morality is the product of millions of years of human evolution (which sounds right to me, too).

He then asks a Euthyphro-like question: did evolution result in our core morality because it’s the correct morality, or is it the correct morality because it resulted from evolution?

Is natural selection so smart that it was able to filter out all the wrong, incorrect, false core moralities and end up with the only one that just happens to be true? Or is it the other way around: Natural selection filtered out all but one core morality, and winning the race is what made the last surviving core morality the right, correct, true one [109].

This question seems more difficult to answer than the theological version. Rosenberg, in fact, argues that the question has no answer. On one hand, evolution is blind, so there was no way for evolution to “know” which morality is correct. Furthermore, evolution has resulted in common views and practices that don’t seem ethical at all, like patriarchy and xenophobia. For that matter, the fact that religion is so common implies that evolution is good at generating false (but useful) beliefs.

On the other hand, just because our core morality resulted from evolution doesn’t make it right. Lots of things have evolved that we’d be better off without (like using the same anatomical feature to eat and breathe). More fundamentally, Rosenberg suggests that there is nothing morally right about having children who tend to survive and have other children, which is the principal thing natural selection makes happen.

But if our core morality isn’t correct because it evolved, and it didn’t evolve because it’s correct, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that our morality isn’t correct at all. In other words, morality isn’t true. It’s merely useful:

Scientism cannot explain the fact that when it comes to the moral core, fitness and correctness seem to go together. But neither can it tolerate the unexplained coincidence. There is only one alternative. We have to give up correctness…

Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts – the facts about us, our psychology and our morality…The biological facts can’t guarantee that our core morality (or any other one, for that matter) is the right, true or correct one. If the biological facts can’t do it, then nothing can. No moral core is right, correct, true. That’s nihilism. And we have to accept it [113].

We might immediately object that the biological facts might not justify morality, but the social facts do. Rosenberg claims that lower-level facts, like the biological, determine higher-level facts, like the psychological. That may indeed be true (I think it is anyway), but isn’t it likewise the case that psychological facts determine social facts, which in turn determine ethical facts? If there are ethical facts (if ethical evaluations can have truth values – which is, by the way, a controversial view among philosophers), aren’t those facts determined by lower-level facts as well?

Those who think ethical statements can be true or false would probably argue that evolution has generated morality, but moral disagreement occurs because we simply haven’t figured out what all the ethical facts are. We know some ethical facts (it’s wrong to hurt people at random and other elements of Rosenberg’s core morality) but not others (is paternalism good in some cases? how about euthanasia?). 

I’ll end for now with the comment that philosophical arguments, even interesting ones like Rosenberg’s, hardly ever destroy the opposition. They almost always lead to more arguments. 

In our next installment, we’ll proceed to chapter 6, in which Rosenberg argues that nihilism is nothing to worry about, since nihilism can be nice.Â