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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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