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Honest question for religious conservatives here, why shouldn't secular people just straight up make your religion illegal, shut down your churches, burn your bibles, etc? Sure, advocating that would lead to a politically damaging public backlash. But is there a principled reason why they shouldn't do those things?
Yes. My religion is correct. Accordingly, doing any of that is evil.
But ignoring that, as hydroacetylene says, a classical liberal might think that it would be morally wrong to do that. Further, it's not like everyone will stop if you just ask nicely. You're going to have to kill a bunch of people. What benefit do you have that's worth killing a bunch of productive citizens?
This is correct. You should always consider that the people you try to repress might retaliate against you violently. Religious fundamentalists should likewise consider this before trying to force their religious morality on secular people. Some people here have said that physicians in Texas are refusing to treat pregnant women as part of some pro-choice political agenda. I doubt this, but if it's true I say, what'd you expect? You think they're demonic, well, the demonic people don't feel like giving you medical treatment.
What does "repress" mean?
What does "religious morality" mean here? What are the bounds of "religious morality" vs. "definitely-not-religious-totally-universal morality"? If Raskolnikov says that he thinks that killing people is just fine, would you say that society as a whole is obligated to listen to him?
Where did I say this?
I have no problem with freedom of association, provided that we exist in a society with available alternatives.
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I wonder why you wrote this here?
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Under a classical liberal framework? Yes, the same principled reasons that it shouldn’t violently repress dozens or hundreds of other groups.
Under an NrX framework? Because we make good citizens and have demands compatible with flourishing societies. This doesn’t necessarily apply to other religions, but it seems to for Christianity.
Under a one-truth exclusivist framework, that reason would be ‘because we are right and you are wrong’. Obviously, you disagree. But that disagreement goes both ways.
Under a progressive move away from classical liberalism, even Scandinavia and the Netherlands prefer to tolerate their fundamentalist Christian minorities. I suspect a society willing/able to repress Christian fundamentalism is one you do not wish to live in; it probably takes China-tier totalitarianism.
This slippery-slope objection never seems to stop religious fundamentalists from demanding their morality be the basis of state policy, so you'll forgive me if I wonder whether it's being put fourth in good faith.
There are societies in existence right now which don’t oppress married straight people but which target the groups Christian fundamentalists don’t like. Like Poland is not as nice of a place to live as the USA but that’s because of needing to catch up after communism, not because of present day authoritarianism.
The societies which successfully oppress Christian fundamentalists are societies in which government oppression hits everyone, like China. No doubt Dutch Christian fundamentalists would prefer a government more favorable to them, but they get by just fine with laws far less favorable than in the USA. And the Netherlands has far more state capacity, and far fewer political protections for Christian fundamentalism, than the U.S., and attempts to repress it have failed.
I’m not going to pretend my bias doesn’t exist, but by the same token I won’t agree that it doesn’t have an empirical backing. You can have societies where Christian fundamentalism has a lot of influence, and even makes life very difficult for certain groups, without subjecting everyone to totalitarianism. Repressing fundamentalist Christianity seems to be a different thing- you can go full China, or you can tolerate it.
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We're several years past Blue Tribe presidential candidates running on taxing religions they don't like. And of course, Japan successfully suppressed Christianity in the 1600s, Russia in the 1900s and China in the 1950s. In the more limited context of this forum, one of the things that beat the liberalism out of me was the multiple iterations of the circumcision argument, where my opposites argued that religions have conformed themselves to society before, and therefore there's no reason not to use state power to force them to conform arbitrarily in the future. Nor is my opposition to this attitude principled; I'm happy to argue on behalf of the Jews, but I would not be willing to extend the same toleration for the more extreme forms of female genital mutilation, much less Aztec blood sacrifice.
It is entirely obvious that there is no secular, materialist reason not to ban a given religion. We ban harmful things all the time, always have and always will, and there is no objective definition of "harm" for people to resort to in situations of disagreement. It is trivial to generate a definition where conservative Christianity (or drinking alcohol, or playing video games, or teaching women to read, & etc) are serious threats that require the power of the state to suppress.
More generally, tolerance is not a moral precept. There are many good contingent arguments why suppressing conservative Christianity would be a poor idea; Christians are pretty near the core of good citizens, at least under a standard of "good citizen" that has prevailed until recently, and also they are a very old and thus fairly well-understood phenomenon, so there's an argument to stick to the devil you know, as it were. Ultimately, however, toleration is a question of value, and values observably change over time. If your values have changed sufficiently that toleration of conservative Christians no longer seems like a good idea, that's sorta the whole ball game, isn't it? It's sort of like architecture: at the point where you have to expend constant effort to keep the building from falling down, it's probably coming down one way or the other.
Liberalism was built on the assumption that the values held by its founders were something approximating a universal constant, that all humans would hold something approximating those values more or less indefinitely. This assumption is false, and once that realization settles in, Liberalism becomes completely incoherent. Moreover, it is likely that its development and influence were necessarily path-dependent, that it only worked as long as it did because no one had really tried it at scale before, and so the results were unknown. The results now being known, it seems unlikely that it will persist, much less revive.
This assumes that Christians are the ones standing still and others are the ones whose values are changing. This does not fit with the last few years, where people who previously didn't know what IVF was have made opposition to it central to their politics. As you say, the question of whether a religion should be tolerated depends on what it's actually doing, and that can change over time.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I remember IVF as a hugely controversial issue since before I was even politically aware, like since I was 10 or thereabouts.
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Why is IVF more important than every other part of being a productive citizen? Especially given that it's not like Christians are being at all successful in getting rid of it.
The fact that you seem to be sincerely arguing for this makes me considerably more positive towards the times when being a Christian was a prerequisite for holding public office.
Reminded me of this:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AQQPNQ0PFSc
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That reply is understandable, if seculars are going to take away Christians' rights, Christians are going to try and preemptively suppress seculars to prevent that. And likewise seculars will point to this and say, "look, this is why we need to suppress Christians before they suppress us." Might there be some way that these two groups can get along, say, come to an agreement not to force their morality on one another? And yes, this will mean woke seculars, who I despise just as much as Bible thumpers, will stop trying to use anti-discrimination law to violate the free association rights of their enemies.
Not permitting a population to hold political office is very different from attempting to eliminate a population by force.
What does "force their morality" mean? What is your morality? I don't like all the imprecision of the language here.
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I'm not a religious conservative, but of course there is - people need ways to maintain and improve their spiritual health. Is there an atheist materialist reason? No, because religious people aren't atheist materialists.
And more simply, the suppression of true religion is opposition to God himself. That is bad.
Atheistically, if you care about modern liberalism, that would suffice as a reason, what with tolerance being worthwhile and all.
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