Author Archive for Daniel Fincke

Mitt Romney Is No Longer A Mormon.

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 8, 2012
.

That’s right. Mitt Romney, America’s most famous representative of the Church of Latter Day Saints no longer belongs to the Mormon faith. His associations with the church were invalidated when a moment ago I took it upon myself to unbaptize him. So, spread the word far and wide, fellow atheists, Mitt Romney is now one of us. He is a man without a faith—regardless of whatever appearances he is going to try to keep in the future.

Now, I know some people may say, “It is not only immoral but impossible to take away someone’s conscientious beliefs like that!”

That’s what I thought too. Until a couple weeks ago when I read that Mitt Romney decided that the conscience of his staunchly anti-religious atheist father-in-law was a mere irrelevance and posthumously subjected him to a forced baptism. Luckily for Team Atheist, Bill Maher subsequently unbaptized him last weekend (see the video below), so he’s back with us now.

And I decided to take it a step further and unbaptized Romney himself. So, from now on atheists, speak only according to the truth. Correct everyone who tells you that Mitt Romney is a Mormon that they are behind the times. And if Mitt Romney objects—well, why should that matter?

Now some might object should not be faulted for disrespecting his father-in-law’s conscience because he had only the noblest intentions, even if they were misguided. He was urgently trying to save his father-in-law’s soul and get him into heaven. But in fact, I did this for Mitt’s own good, too. I am trying to help him get elected to the presidency by taking away his unfortunate, misguided beliefs that alienate him from so much of the public that so rightly judges their political candidates by what faith they have. This can only mean his chances of winning the Presidency can go up. You’re Welcome, Governor.

UPDATE: Sorry, I just learned that atheists are even more mistrusted than Mormons as presidential candidates. I’m so sorry, Governor, but what’s done is done!

Your Thoughts?

The Amazing Rape-Celebrating Atheist

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 8, 2012
.

High alert trigger warning. Read with caution.

What kind of an evil person would write something like this to anyone who tells him that he or she has been raped?

Yeah. Well, you deserved it. So, fuck you. I hope it happens again soon. I’m tired of being treated like shit by you mean little cunts and then you using your rpae as an excuse. Fuck you. I think we should give teh guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow. Actually, I don’t believe you were ever raped! What man would be tasteless enough to stick his dick into a human cesspool like you? Nice gif of a turd going into my mouth. Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole? Or was it both? Maybe you should think about it really hard for the next few hours. Relive it as much as possible. You know? Try to recall: was it my pussy or my ass?

This guy, with 290,594 You Tube subscribers and 94,453,812 views of his videos, that’s who. I just unsubscribed. I should have gotten around to it when I first discovered he was part of the stomach churning torrent of abuse constantly hitting Rebecca Watson.

But now, after I read all the disgusting details of what he was up to last night, I think every atheist with a conscience and a platform (whether it be Facebook or a Freethought Blog) needs to say that this amazing asshole does not represent the countless truly amazing atheists out there.

His real name is TJ Kincaid and he goes by the handle “terroja” and his YouTube videos bill him as “The Amazing Atheist”. Make these names infamous. Spread the word that he deserves to be shamed out of the community. Unsubscribe from him. Encourage others to unsubscribe. Make sure he never parlays his YouTube prominence into a place on the atheist speaker circuit or publishing list.

And for those of you who actually think what he said above can be classified as some sort of justifiable “satire” or rebellion against censoriousness, I recommend you catch up on my posts How Atheist Reddit Doesn’t Get It and Schrödinger’s Rapist and Schrödinger’s Racist to get clearer on the ethics of respecting women.

UPDATE 1: I’ve been accused of inconsistency for not calling out the ICumWhenIKillWomen username that Kincaid considers just provocation for his abusive behavior. For the conscience-impaired, that username was disgusting and worthy of unequivocal denunciation too. As is the regular barrage of misogyny coming from MRA forums and from the blog ERV, which it was meant to satirize.

There are clear lines, for anyone not overwhelmed with hate, between satire and dehumanizing hostility. And when you encounter dehumanizing hostility it is wrong to respond with more of the same in return. Two wrongs do not make a right. I did not respond to Kincaid’s comment relishing how he would rape someone and trying to emotionally violate that person by calling for anything violent or dehumanizing to happen to him. I just called for him to be shamed as an irresponsible person willing to hurt someone in a truly malicious way. No provocation justifies his reply. And I have consistently written against abusive verbal treatment of others. I denounce it in atheists, in fellow left wingers, etc. This is not some arbitrary (and inexplicable) misandry on my part.

Secondly, it is alleged that TJ Kincaid’s claim to being a rape survivor too justifies his behavior. He does not deserve his public platform and he does not deserve to treat people maliciously simply because others have treated him unconscionably in the past. I’m not a psychologist. I have no idea about his ultimate mental state, so do not take the following analogies as any kind of diagnoses or insults: Psychopaths and child rapists often have violent histories. These do not exempt them from criticism for killing or raping or even from verbally abusing people. When unrepentant and violent in their words or deeds, they do not deserve public platforms of prominence to spread their views on the world.

Maybe Kincaid needs professional psychological help. Maybe he needs a lot of love from people in his life. I have no idea his mental diagnosis and do not presume to judge. All I know is his behavior—regardless of its far distant or more immediate triggers—makes him at minimum an emotionally reckless and potentially destructive person who makes the places he resides on the internet threatening, upsetting, and exclusionary to nearly all women. He carelessly stokes other men’s anger and models violent language and celebrates the violent treatment of others. What spilled out on the internet seemed to come out of a seething cauldron of hatred. The public atheist community is not the place for him to vent or to get whatever help he needs—whether it is merely anger management classes or whether it is more intensive psychiatric help. I truly wish him the best as a fellow human being. But he is only unrepentantly perpetuating cycles of violence and that is inexcusable, whatever his history.

Finally, even by the false and childish excuse I’m hearing on Facebook, such that “two wrongs made a right” and that his interlocutor got what he deserved by provoking him, what he did was shamefully inexcusable because he was writing in a public forum and verbally assaulting all rape victims—not just the one verbally sparring with him, but all of them looking on. And that is utterly disgraceful and such behavior needs to be purged from the atheist forums. That’s not censorship, it’s the enforcement of minimal standards of civility and morality.

UPDATE 2: PZ has a definitive explanation of the situation and a sound response to it. More insightful coverage also comes from Lousy Canuck, Crommunist Manifesto, Blag Hag, and The Atheist Experience (who alerted all the rest of us this morning).

Your Thoughts?

St. Vincent’s “Cheerleader”

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 8, 2012
.

A new video from the incomparable St. Vincent:

This is the closest to anthemic that Annie Clark ever gets and that makes it too relatively straightforward for her. What is here is good if there were something else, less direct also going on. The song feels half done, more like a traditional pop song than other of her work. Her latest album, which includes this song, is Strange Mercy. For more St. Vincent videos and more opinions from me about them, see the posts “Actor”, “Marrow”, “Cruel”, “Dig a Pony”, “Now Now”, and “The Alluring Annie Clark”,

Your Thoughts?

Patton Oswalt Sums Up The Underwhelming Imagination of the Star Wars Prequels

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 8, 2012
.

From his comedy album Werewolves and Lollipops, Patton Oswalt sums up many people’s disappointments with the premise of the Star Wars prequels:

It’s weird that objectively I fully understand and usually agree with many of the criticisms of the prequels and yet still personally love them. Are they flawed? Absolutely. They could have been 15 times more awesome if done differently in any number of ways that have been meticulously dissected over the last 13 years.

But I still think that even at 1/15 their potential awesome, they were still an awesome experience for me both when I first saw each film and through countless repeat viewings. I know I’m virtually alone in feeling this way. But there it is.

Your Hatred?

Religious Privilege and Grievance-Based Catholic Identity Politics on Full Display

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 7, 2012
.

In a column last week, Melinda Henneberger criticized the Obama administration’s refusal to exempt the Catholic Church from requirements it provide for its employees health insurance which would cover birth control at organizations it runs which have secular functions. The column is an extraordinary exemplification of religious entitlement, identity politics, and anti-secular, anti-democratic demands for a government ruled by faith and not by common reason for the common good. Henneberger starts out:

President Obama quoted C.S. Lewis on Thursday morning, and normally that would have made my day.

Because it is especially important and exciting to Henneberger that our secular President, in his capacity as President, expresses solidarity with her Christian identity—regardless of whether this pander to people of the Christian faith indicates a partisan solidarity with them at the expense of solidarity with the millions of unbelieving and non-Christian people who would prefer a religiously neutral president. It gives her a special rush to know he’s like her in a way that makes him not like one of those non-Christians.

The president is good at talking about his Christian faith, as he did at a National Prayer Breakfast, and ought to do more of it if he wants to relieve Americans of some of their most basic misconceptions about him.

Right, it’s his job to prove he meets that litmus test of Christian belief to qualify him for public office, lest the American people justifiably throw him out. Very Constitutional advice.

But more than I want to hear him tell how the Rev. T.D. Jakes drops by the Oval now and again,

And here she sets up her demands from religious privilege. And note, Obama hanging out with some black religious leader is not really doing it for her desire to feel like he shares a sufficient religious identity with her. As a Catholic what’s really important is how he’s going to pander to nuns. And neither is it enough that the President of what is supposed to be a secular nation, which is supposed to be neutral on the value of religion, is explicitly endorsing the value of religious faith over lack of religious faith by having such unconstitutional events as the National Prayer Breakfast. No she feels entitled to some practical demonstrations of his commitment to legislating by faith and not just giving faith symbolic support by discussing what his private Christian life is like.

Despite sounding throughout parts of her article like something of a progressive politically (at least insofar as she favors the Affordable Care Act), Henneberger’s true test for Obama’s sincerity of faith is that he give special conscience exemptions to Roman Catholic institutions which would allow them to deny health coverage for the contraceptive needs of their employees who perform non-religious functions (like education, health care provision, etc.) at their non-religious institutions. If Obama does not do this, this is not to be taken as evidence that he has a different view of secular justice and of the meaning of the 1st Amendment than she does. No, it is to be taken as proof that his faith is insincere. Is this because she implicitly realizes that only someone with a faith-based identity who privileges the faithful in their legislating would give such an exemption? Does she realize it has no secular justification and that it would take a President and legislators who rule by faith-based judgments to approve of it?

Presidents and the Congress should not make public decisions according to the dictates of private faiths. They should legislate according to neutral rational standards which are in principle acceptable to all because non-adherents to their particular faiths (whether members of other faiths or atheists) will be subject to those laws. If they have only a faith based rationale and no secular justification then essentially such legislation subjects a faith’s non-adherents to that faith’s laws in ways that violate non-adherents’ own rights of conscience. It effectively conscripts someone involuntarily into that religion to that extent.

But let’s say Obama’s decision here should or could be a litmus test of his faith. Let’s imagine for a moment that that was not egregiously unConstitutional. Obama is a liberal Protestant. Why should that faith give special privileges to a reactionary and regressive form of Catholicism? Not only would that violate Obama’s reason-based political conscience as a progressive Democrat, but it would violate what are likely his private faith beliefs about the supremacy of reproductive rights over theocratic rule. Why does Henneberger want Obama to violate his faith?

Henneberger’s implicit assumption is that the right wing’s reactionary amalgamation of religio-political fundamentalism is faith itself. Now, that does not sound very pluralistic or tolerant of people of different faiths; does it? Any true person of faith (and anyone worthy of public office!) will automatically identify with and acquiesce to the demands of right wing reactionary regressive faiths. Deviating from them, either for reasons of secular political conscience or liberally religious conscience reveals you as not a person of true faith.

So, not only is faith a litmus test for a fit leader, and not only does Henneberger demand (from a shockingly bloated sense of privilege) that he give multitudes of religious identity markers that closely match her own, but the only kind of legitimate faith she will accept from the liberal Protestant President is one that puts the consciences of regressive Catholic bishops over the consciences and health care rights of their employees who perform non-religious tasks.

This also means, by the way, putting the consciences of the Church hierarchy not only over their employees who are godless (whose consciences are obviously irrelevant), but he must put their concerns even over that resounding 98% majority of Roman Catholic women who use contraception. This liberal Protestant President can’t be a true man of faith if he does not help a group of male leaders who refuse equal participation from women in their hierarchy to make it harder for their poorer women employees to prevent becoming pregnant against their own wishes. So, the litmus test of faith—for a politically and religiously liberal Protestant even—is whether he will support a policy imposed by a minority of religious men over a majority of their female employees (of mixed faiths and no faith) requiring them to have children against their wills.

Am I not yet clear enough yet? The rights of Catholics to follow Catholic guidelines on contraception are not threatened. No one is forcing them by law to take contraception. They will not have to use the health coverage provided in that way. These men want to stop other people, of dissenting religious or non-religious beliefs, from controlling whether they get pregnant according to their own consciences, as a condition of employment. And, perversely, they do this in the name of freedom of conscience.

Now maybe, Henneberger thinks that people of faith will stick together and let each other impose their arbitrary beliefs and values which admit of no secular justification as a sort of gentleman’s agreement between equally arbitrary, authoritarian, and imposing faiths. The Protestants will accept the demands of the Catholics on contraception even if they’re a little extreme since they both have vested interests in legislating their common religious beliefs about abortion and gay second class citizenship.

But maybe the kind of faith Obama has is not the authoritarian kind that wants to legislate for others but the kind that has faith that people will (or only should) do the right thing without religious coercion. Maybe his faith is that getting people to be moral does not mean stripping them of the access to do what they want that you disapprove of on faith grounds. If the hierarchy of the Church had this kind of faith, they would let their spiritual and moral and philosophical insights and examples speak for themselves, and people who were rationally persuaded of their judgment, or were merely religiously loyal, would voluntarily refuse all barriers to pregnancy. But the authoritarian Church hierarchy is decidedly weak in this kind of faith. They want to control people by hindering their access to avoid pregnancy. Who cares if these women don’t want to get pregnant? The Church will stand in the way through whatever means the government will give it. Maybe Obama and other liberal religious people (and hopefully even some Catholics?) think that’s weak faith and a form of human arrogance and authoritarianism. Here is Henneberger’s statement of her complaint:

I want to know why he repaid Sister Carol Keehan, who carried health-care reform around on her back for him, with a betrayal that could lose him the Catholic vote and his reelection bid.

If that’s what happens, he’ll have no one to blame but himself, after a recent edict by his Health and Human Service Department effectively denied conscience protections to church-run schools, hospitals and social service agencies, which under his Affordable Care Act must provide free contraception to employees, in violation of church teaching.

To review, there would be no Affordable Care Act without Keehan, the president of the Catholic Health Association, who incurred the wrath of the bishops for standing up for the legislation, and for the truth that there isn’t any abortion funding in it.

There would be no Affordable Care Act if not for Democratic abortion foes in the House, notably Bart Stupak (Mich.), who for his trouble was reviled by his fellow party members, accosted by critics in airports and sent at least one death threat. He also lost his job over it, deciding to retire after the fight, at the end of his term.

So, too, will there be no Affordable Care Act if Catholics swing the other way in the fall.

Wow. So, let me get this straight, in our secular pluralistic democracy, our President, elected primarily by Democrats and independents is supposed to cave to regressive right wing religious demands as payback to quasi-progressive Catholic Democrats who negotiated with regressive right wing religious theocrats on his behalf. Now he owes the Catholic Democrats a solid by capitulating to the right wing authoritarians who want their employees to be subject to Catholic teachings as a condition of employment?

And he owed Bart Stupak, a regressive Democrat, who put deference to the authority of right wing, patriarchal religious authorities over the interests of the vast majority of Democratic women and men who support reproductive rights, and made sure that a health care law arbitrarily excluded government funding for a perfectly legal (and often morally vital) medical procedure because of the arbitrary dictates of the Roman Catholic faith? Sister Keehan is supposed to be celebrated for convincing the bishops that all the ways Democrats were strong armed into letting arbitrary religious demands dictate that law should be adequate to their liking? Democrats, including Obama, owe a debt of gratitude for that?

Mr. Stupak sure didn’t deserve death threats. But he sure deserved to be rebuked by Democrats. And Henneberger is defending a Church which tries to force its will in a liberal democracy by routinely threatening to withhold sacraments from elected officials who do not make Catholic teachings into law but who rather honor the separation of Church and State. And, hypocritically, these bishops use this tactic of withholding sacraments to try to push their way against only left wing politicians—not the right wing ones who violate Church teachings on torture, just war, or social obligations to the poor. If these religious bullies can try to muscle their way to dominance over secular law and make it that even as they get tax free land and government subsidies for their charities no one’s tax dollars can help the poor get abortions, then secular citizens have every right to be mad as hell and challenge the Congresspeople who put their religious faith over their commitments to the Constitution.

And so now Obama, who represents a secular political party that has fought for decades to preserve the full legal rights to unencumbered access to abortion, owes a member of that same party (Mr. Stupak) who betrayed this core value of his party on wholly religious grounds in a secular democracy? He owes this man and his patriarchal religion extra measures to keep these women from being able to even avoid pregnancy? And he is to do this when there is no secular justification to add this extra hurdle to their lives? And the quasi-progressive nun who got what she wanted from him in terms of abortion restrictions and now turns her back on him is not the ingrate but Obama is?

So thanks to the Catholics not only will poor women suffer extra financial burdens in exercising their legal rights to abortion, even though it is a legal life determining health care decision and sometimes a life and death one at that, but now also if these women have the misfortune of working for a Catholic employer they need extra hurdles to avoiding pregnancy in the first place to be thrown in their path?

And if the liberal President of a secular nation, who is personally a man of liberal Protestant faith does not do this, then he has stabbed progressive Catholics in the back, and he is not a man of true religious faith, and he deserves to lose an election because of a religious bloc of votes?

President Romney won’t be forcing nuns to dole out free diaphragms in violation of their religious freedom and the Constitution that guarantees it.

Oh yes, Governor Romney, respecter of consciences. Unless, of course, they are atheist consciences—in which case they can be entirely disrespected and subjected to forced baptisms posthumously. He has such a wonderfully liberal and American sense of religious conscience that he baptized his staunchly anti-religious father a Mormon after he died. (Don’t worry, Bill Maher subsequently unbaptized him last weekend, so the man’s an atheist again.) In a nutshell: the only kind of conscience that deserves respect when it comes to religion is religious consciences. This makes me eager to have him run our secular democracy. I am sure as an atheist he will legislate in ways not at all prejudiced against me. He might claim me for Mormonism after I’m dead, but I’m sure he won’t violate my freedom of conscience in any serious ways while he is in office and I’m alive.

And here’s a fun fact, nuns will not have to “dole out diaphragms”. The Church just has to cover health insurance providers who will do the part of taking care of employees’ reproductive health care needs.

In fact, under him there won’t be any health-care reform at all.

Except in Massachusetts!

(Yes, I refuse to call that reform the O-word, although I might change my mind if the president doesn’t make it up to Sister Carol).

Oh snap! No she di’in’t! Now Obama can’t refuse her!

Newt Gingrich often says that Obama has “declared war on the Catholic Church.” Mitt Romney, too, talks about the president’s “assault on religion.’’ But the worst part is that they aren’t making this up.

Actually—another fun fact: they are making it up. Obama has not assaulted religion or declared war on the Catholic Church. Literally. There is no declaration of war. There is no proclamation against the Roman Catholic Church. It was not signed on parchment with a quill pen and it has not sent executive orders to destroy Catholic church buildings and enforce disbelief in Jesus, the Pope, the sacraments or Holy Mother Church. No Catholics will be forced to have abortions, use contraception or have guilt-free sex. They can engage in their religion just as before. And Obama just went and affirmed the Christian faith explicitly for Henneberger by having an unconstitutional National Prayer Breakfast and by quoting C.S. Lewis in ways that had the potential to make her all glowy. This is a man at war with religion?

This language of war is misleading, inflammatory rhetoric. A disagreement over the extent to which the conscience of the Catholic hierarchy should restrict the health care options of people who perform non-religious tasks is in no way an assault or a war on religion.

And evoking the language of assault troubles me on another level. Because I can imagine a Protestant who is pro-contraception, single, poor, and adamantly against abortion with no exceptions. I can imagine her being employed by a badly paying Catholic charity or hospital or school—partially even out of common Christian faith. I can imagine her unable to afford contraception because of her Catholic employer, despite her own beliefs that it’s okay. I can imagine her being sexually assaulted and pregnant against her conscience. I can imagine her forced by her own pro-life beliefs to have to have the baby, without a husband, years before she’s ready, disrupting her education or career plans, with all sorts of added post-traumatic stress disorder from birthing her assailant’s son.

The Church that throws up roadblocks to her autonomous expression of her own moral conscience to make it harder for her to avoid this scenario is the one who wants special liberty to trample other people’s autonomy and their ability to live their lives as they wish. Of course, no woman need be against abortion or celibate to deserve complete autonomy over her reproductive life. But I use this illustration to demonstrate how even a conservative, staunchly anti-abortion religious woman can have her conscience violated and her life tragically disrupted by this faith-based law—let alone all those liberals whose inadequately authoritarian faiths, or whose outright godlessness, are matters of suspicion and contempt to the likes of Gingrich, Romney, and Henneberger.

Finally Henneberger’s ressentiment, identity politics, persecution complex, and anti-American theocratic leanings come to full bloom:

But now the Obama administration has handed his critics an example of an action that fits nicely with the narrative that he’s a secularist who looks down on believers.

Yes, Henneberger, judger of the sincerity of other people’s faiths discerns contemptuously that it is Obama looking down on her. Of course the condescending elitists here are not the paternalistic Catholic hierarchy which wants its own followers, and even its non-Catholic employees, to be coerced away from control of their reproduction and have babies they aren’t ready for (or may never want). They’re champions of conscience. This is the Catholic Church that won’t turn any pedophile priests over to secular authorities but instantly excommunicated a nun for allowing a woman’s life to be saved with an abortion rather than let her die. That was some fine respect for conscience in ambiguous moral matters. I guess that nun’s faith and her conscience are irrelevant since they violated the Church’s edicts. The pregnant woman had to die. No questions. No deviation from orders. These true champions of conscience and people of superior moral judgment should be allowed to look down on not only their flock but anyone they employ, for whatever purpose.

And secularist is not a dirty word. America is secularism. Secularism is the cornerstone of our liberties. Political secularism is the kernel of the freedom of conscience which keeps us from being an oppressive theocracy. It is what makes the freedom of religion possible. It is not at all incompatible with being a person of faith. A person of faith can believe that his faith flourishes best where he has no power to coerce others legally (or through terms of employment) to either adopt his faith or act according to its precepts or his interpretation of them. Such a person might even think that the only morally and intellectually valuable kind of faith was the kind that could persuade free people under the open conditions that a secular society make possible. Such a religious believer might think political secularism, by offering individuals the possibility of freedom from all religious coercion, is a precondition of true faith in those cases where people embrace their religions anyway.

I am against all kinds of faith because it is a form of willfully believing more than evidence allows or—worse even—willfully believing completely contrary to what the evidence indicates. But even an ardent atheist like I can nonetheless still at least appreciate and respect that some religious people are as genuinely committed to secular political principles as I am and appreciate our common civic bonds and values. Can the Catholic hierarchy, or the Catholic laity who are foaming at the mouth with identity-politics-based ressentiment, appreciate at all that some political secularists are as committed to faith and religious belief as they are—even when their reason leads them to think the Catholic Church is in the wrong sometimes, and even when they refuse to let the Church always act with impunity and be a law unto itself when its actions affect unwilling others’ lives?

Your Thoughts?

I also debated a Catholic theology student about this issue of Catholic demands for exemptions from the Affordable Care Act, in the posts below:

Part 1: “Should Catholic Employers Be Exempted From Paying For Health Insurance Covering Contraception?”

Part 2: “What Are The Limits of Church Authority In the Public Sphere?”

Part 3: “Must (or Can) the Religious Engage in the Secular Sphere ‘Non-Religiously’?”

“Must (or Can) the Religious Engage in the Secular Sphere ‘Non-Religiously’?”

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 6, 2012
.

This is part 3 of a debate with Roman Catholic theology graduate student Mary. The broader topic of the debate is whether or not universities, hospitals, and social agencies run by the Catholic Church should be exempted from laws requiring employers to provide their employees health insurance that covers contraception. You can read part 1 and part 2 of the debate, but you need not read them to understand this self-contained discussion about how religious people or institutions should conceive of what they are doing when they act in the public or secular spheres as religious people.

Mary: I’m very curious about what you mean by “public” because it seems as if you define “public” as that which is not strictly religious. Do I understand you properly?

Daniel Fincke: I define public as anything that involves civil interactions. Even a private affair becomes public as soon as civil liberties or civil rights or other laws become relevant to the doings of the parties. We are having a private conversation but it is undergirded by civil laws which put constraints even on this. To that extent the public has an interest in what goes on here. To the extent that there are no civil law issues, this remains entirely private.

I would distinctly define secular as anything that is not strictly religious, anything which appeals to and subjects itself to common standards of reason and morality and practice. When a private church performs tasks which are secular in basic form (i.e., not strictly religious), then it is not doing a strictly religious activity.

Teaching actual science based biology or practicing medicine or administering public goods like adoption or soup kitchens means engaging in activities that the public can take a secular interest in either for employment or receiving services. Just as a religious person may constrain the religious character of the way she does these activities so may a church or mosque or synagogue or temple may be expected to do the same if it means allowing members of other faiths, or of no faith, to receive these services or employment without religious strings attached that would coerce their own consciences.

Mary: Well, it seems, then, that we have an almost insurmountable issue of different definitions. I fear that my responses to your questions will continue to be the same as the one’s I’ve already given because I operate under different ideas of what those words mean.

For me, something becomes secular when it’s not at all religious. In that case, no function of a religious institution is ever secular. Someone taking an interest in or participating in a religiously-run service or good does not then make it not religious, or secular. Allowing all homeless people into your soup kitchen and not just the Catholic ones doesn’t make it a secular activity. Serving the needs of the poor is a hallmark of most religions. A great example is the clergy coalition in Alabama suing the government for preventing their ministry—which consists of counseling, shelter, food, etc.—to immigrants by its harsh immigration laws. 

Considering the law suit has not yet been thrown out on legal grounds, it seems that even the law protects the ministries of these churches. Care of the sick and the idea of the hospitals were long-standing Christian traditions before they were secular ones. I can not agree that something becomes secular because it might be of interest to people with secular values.

For me, something being subject to civil laws doesn’t actually make it something in which the government can necessarily impose itself or interfere. For example, if someone says so to his children, “you cannot bring black people into this house” the government cannot interfere with that decision. Even though the public, i.e. someone outside of that man’s house, is affected. The government can’t say that John Smith up the street has a constitutional right to enter the house even though he is being discriminated against. However, the racist father in that story can’t kill black people because the law doesn’t allow it.

I fear that our definitions of public and secular are what will keep us from ever seeing eye-to-eye on this issue.

Daniel Fincke: Your definition is subject to criticism. It need not be thrown up as a shield from further thinking. How things “started” (if we even understand that accurately), or how the religious person interprets her activities, or how a religious organization interprets its activities are not determinative of a thing’s nature.

A religious individual or a religious institution may in their hearts or in their theological interpretations view an activity as infused with religious meanings but that does not make it distinctively religious in ways that allow religious judgments to trump secular ones when in interaction with people outside your religion.

For example, many religious people think every single thing they do should be infused with religion. Students and teachers at public schools, not just Catholic ones, may want to make all their endeavors “acts of worship”. That does not supersede others’ rights to be treated in distinctly non-religious ways by them when engaged in the fundamentally religion-neutral endeavor of studying biology.

You may interpret the activity as religious and pray to God for strength as you do it and theologically understand it in some larger context. But none of this can rightly affect how you teach the neutral, universal facts of biology or treat students who are non-adherents to your religion and who are only in a classroom with you for the purposes of learning biology. Otherwise religious people would be exempt from all secular laws that deviated in the slightest ways from their religious feelings since no activities could be properly understood as activities without God. On their view all of life is lived in service to God, so religious feelings are supreme over civil law and supreme over demands for respect for non-adherents to their religion. This is why religious people need to learn the difference between their secular and their religious spheres and learn to think in a fairly bifurcated way.

Mary: But the religious person at a public school, in the same way as you, consciously works for an institution completely committed to being non-dogmatic, non-evangelical and neutral in all matters concerning religion. The religious person understands this and must abide by it because that is the mission of the institution.

This isn’t about individual’s privately held beliefs but about religious institutions which are protected and which set up institutions that are private but service the public, optionally should the public want to be served, and which have religious commitments.

Daniel Fincke: But the point is that religious institutions become like religious individuals when they enter the broader political sphere. Just as some religious individuals may find it intolerable that they not let their religious interpretation of their teaching or learning bleed into what they teach, so a religious institutions’ arbitrary feelings about the reproductive habits of their employees need to be constrained when they act as a public citizen and provide employment to the general public.

Mary: And religious people don’t need to live in a bifurcated way—that’s not living in a religious way at all. There are methods of prudence that teach you that you shouldn’t be pulling your students at public school aside and saying “I just want you to know that Jesus loves you” because that doesn’t respect that student’s dignity in that institution. You’re also violating a contract made in good faith if you bring religious teachings into a public school when you acknowledged that you would not.

But a religious person is perfectly free to see all aspects of her life as pertaining to religion even when they act as public citizens. The constitution affords me the right to freely exercise my religion. And insofar as I’ve not made any commitments that I will keep my personal religious views out of certain things, I can be Catholic at my bank and my Church and I will be, thank you very much. I, personally, have no secular sphere. There is no secular world for me. There is one world. I live in one world as a religious person and carry religious commitments with me in that world.

I afford the people in my Church the same dignity as I afford people outside of it. I don’t ask you to pray with me not because I recognize the “secular” character of our friendship but because I recognize your human dignity and your freely-given choice not to pray to God. I ultimately believe that is a God-given freedom! If I were to teach at a public school, that wouldn’t be a secular activity for me.

I would keep my religious views completely out of the school not because I bifurcate things secularly, but because I recognize that societies and Churches flourish in world where there is a separation of Church and state and that the students at the school have a right to be educated in a way that allows their own religious commitments, if they have them or not, to be unviolated by the teacher. No truly religious person could ever commit to bifurcating their lives.

As for “public citizen” I don’t really know how to respond except that for me a public citizen is a politician or someone who works for the government. Unless we’ve committed ourselves in such a way to the public (such as running for office, vowing to protect the government’s public interests and accepting tax-payer funded payment for my services) we are all private citizens. The Church is not telling Rite Aid employees they can’t have birth control, it is telling employees of its institutions who came to work there knowing fully the commitments of that place. The Church-institutions are not saying that if you buy birth control you will be fired, but that they won’t buy it for you. Which is a distinction that you clearly disagree with but that I am committed to as an important one.

Daniel Fincke: Principles about respecting the dignity of students to be free of evangelism in public schools are not “religious”. They are matters of our specific secular civil institutions. If they depended on religious approval, then America could only tolerate those religions that shared this line of thought. As things stand, religions are entitled to exist which dispute this principle theologically as long as they follow the law civilly.

If you have managed to personally reconcile your private faith with your civic values by synthesizing them such that the separation of church and state is a “religious” value and not a distinctly civil one, then that’s great for you. But it’s not necessary of all religions. So either not all religions are fit for civil society or some people learn to bifurcate their religious wishes from their civil compromises for the sake of peace and civil justice and the protections it provides.

In other words, theocrats (which, privately includes not an insignificant number Catholics and Protestants in America) are legally entitled to their views, as long as they keep their theocracy out of public schools and other official actions of government.

I think the term “public citizens” describes expectations of corporations that they act in ways that respect their obligations to and effects on the broader populace. My point is that within the Church’s religious functions it has autonomy to set many laws and rules for its members which do not violate the civil law. When the Church interacts with the rest of the world though it acts as an agent (or agents) with others whom it must respect. When the Church employs such non-adherents it should not be able to implicitly subject such people to its laws about how they should govern their reproduction.

It risks indirectly forcing people into parenthood. That’s quite possibly a human rights violation. It troubles me they do this in private. When they do it in public they cross the line from troubling to illegal. Imagine a world where the Churches grew in power and so did other religious institutions such that they all did corporate functions like making computers and growing our vegetables and they all interpreted each of these functions as a “religious mission”. And imagine the vast majority of employers were religious institutions and they were subjecting employees who didn’t share their religion to their laws implicitly through their employment, then this would essentially collapse the separation of church and state. Here the issue is only the scale, not the effective principle.

You have the last word.

Mary: Ok, well first of all. I can imagine that world. It’s called the European West until about 1400. And many countries in the Middle East right now.

I think it’s absurd to call it “forcing someone into having children.” The only thing that produces children is sex and excepting the issue of rape, any one, including myself, who enters into a sexual union at any time for any reason should know that the first and foremost biological purpose of sex is reproduction. I’ve read the most amazing studies of how everything that attracts people to one another has to do with evolutionary factors in selecting someone who will give you desirable offspring.

In other words, it should come as no surprise to people if they become pregnant after having sex. The idea that we have a fundamental right to avoid the biological purposes of sex while still having it completely and utterly baffles me. Unless the Church-related institution you work at is forcing you to have sex, it is not forcing you to have children. If it is an issue of rape, that is another story which we can talk about at another time.

Furthermore, these employers are not saying that you can’t control birth. You can buy condoms, pull-out, use NFP, or walk into planned parenthood and get discounted oral birth control. It is simply saying that they are a religious institution that provides goods and services with a religious mission and that they will not provide BC because it is a violation of their teachings. It is not an act of discrimination to refuse to provide a method of birth control that is just one method among many. A religious institution does not cease to be religious when it enters the public sphere and its actions don’t stop being religious either. Any employee of a religious institution knows the commitments of that institution prior to being hired and should make the decision to accept employment based on that. So long as they are not being harassed, consistently abused or discriminated against based on their beliefs or non-beliefs, the Church has a right to deny paying for brith control.

 

Your Thoughts?

In case you have not read either of them, here again are part 1 and part 2 of our debate.

“What Are The Limits of Church Authority In the Public Sphere?”

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 6, 2012
.

This is part 2 of a debate with Roman Catholic theology graduate student named Mary. In part 1, we introduced and began to debate the topic of whether or not universities, hospitals, and social agencies run by the Catholic Church should be exempted from laws requiring employers to provide their employees health insurance that covers contraception. In this portion of the discussion our primary focus is on what constitutes arbitrary vs. legitimate acts of control by the Roman Catholic Church in the public sphere. This post should be understandable apart from the larger discussion.

Daniel Fincke: You grasp that the Catholic Church is an institution with an abusive authoritarian history and yet you want to give it special exemption to deny its employees fundamental reproductive rights. Based on religious teachings. In a secular society. How is that not legitimizing the above-the-law-authoritarianism of the Church? How does that protect even all those divorcing and contraception-using Catholics from their Church legally?

Mary: Raping children is not a religious activity – it’s not part of church teaching. So those actions are not in any way above civil law. They weren’t performed as part of a Church mission or by the authority of a Church institution. But the services of universities and hospitals are.

Daniel Fincke:  The decisions to deal with the rapists “internally” as though their “punishments” were all that were morally necessary was a matter of ecclesiastical hubris.

Mary: Yea, it was disgusting. And the idea like “no you can’t arrest our bishop” was absurd. Of course the bishop can be arrested if he’s complicit in sexual abuse. He can be and he should be.

I don’t seek to give the Church any more exemption than it is afforded by the constitution (I hate saying “the constitution” by the way, it reminds me of Sarah Palin). No law can be passed that prohibits the free exercise of religion. This law prohibits the free exercise of religion.

And, fortunately, neither of the Catholic schools you teach at are stopping you from buying birth control, they just aren’t providing it for you. They aren’t paying for the service. If you spent an entire year’s salary on yaz and condoms, they wouldn’t do anything about it. But they won’t pay for it.

Daniel Fincke: The Church does not have to pay for the contraception in this case either. They just have to pay for health insurance. The insurance providers pay for the contraception. Paying for health insurance is no formally different than paying money to an individual.

Mary: Right they pay for health insurance that is required by law to provide it.

Daniel Fincke: Yes, as they are required to pay money in general, lest they be slave holders. And there are understandings with money that you are going to pay for food and shelter and entertainment, etc. But the Church by providing that money does not make my purchases for me or have religious rights to dictate how I spend it. And when paying people with health insurance they do not determine how I may exercise my religious rights to control my reproduction. This is forcing people into pregnancies, Mary. It’s dictating they have families or be celibate as a condition of employment.

Mary: Your first point is interesting. How is it different if I simply spend my own money on birth control? But if you pay an insurance provider to provide health services, it is understood that the insurance provider is going to provide medical services, some of which are deeply contrary to that institution’s protected values. Whereas, while it is assumed a professor is going to spend his salary on food, shelter, entertainment, the truth is that you may have been born a millionaire and that you could spend all of that money on booze and hookers. The money paid to an insurance provider definitely goes to healthcare. The money paid to to an employee doesn’t definitely go anywhere.

I don’t really see how it’s dictating to employees they have families or forces anyone into pregnancies. If there was substantial data that people who work for religious institutions were saddled with more unwanted pregnancies than at other places, I could understand. But this merely says that if you want to control reproduction, which almost everyone does, then you have to do it with your own money because we won’t pay for it. I do not use oral birth control and I’ve been preventing pregnancy through non-abstinence methods for years now. The reluctance of the two Catholic universities I’ve been at now to write prescriptions for birth control have had no effect on my ability to control birth.

Daniel Fincke: But the law is changing to make such basic human necessities as health care accessible to all. Putting the burden on people to go beyond their employers’ health insurance is onerous and some people will not be able to afford it and the aim of the Church here is to keep those people from using birth control by excluding it from their insurance. The Church’s aim is to coerce them into pregnancies they wish to prevent, by not honoring their autonomous wishes to use their insurance to control their own reproductive rights in the manner they wish. The Church’s aims are not to exercise their religion but to impose it. Members of the Church are free to voluntarily abstain from using contraception. No member of the Church will be forced to use it. The Church will not even be forced to directly pay for it any more than any of us directly pay for any services the government provides with our tax money. Even ones different groups dislike.

Mary: Well some people won’t be able to afford oral birth control. Presumably other methods would still be available. And I think I would say “discourage” rather than “keep.” But I guess that’s a matter of opinion. I think there is a difference between what is taken by taxes and what institutions provide – institutions already have the right to decide what sort of coverage they will provide. For example, my parents’ insurance (that I am, thankfully, still on) provides just about anything you could need. My brother’s insurance from Lowe’s doesn’t have dental and certain things aren’t available to him. Even after this government mandate, some insurance providers will still provide certain things that other insurance providers don’t – but here the government is imposing something deeply offensive to a religious institution and saying “either don’t provide insurance for your employees or provide this.”

Daniel Fincke: But that deep offensive does not have a secularly justifiable reason. What if the Catholic Church finds deep offense at a gay marriage and refuses health coverage for a gay spouse? What if the Catholic Church takes deep offense at employing divorced Catholics or non-Catholics? There are non-discrimination acts for a reason. Gay marriage is legal in New York. Should gay people lose their rights because they are employed by the Catholic Church for non-religious jobs?

Being religiously offended is not the same as deserving civil accommodation for your arbitrary feelings when they impact people who are outside the sphere of your private exercise of religion. Religions cannot be bastions of intolerable discrimination. That’s not equal protection under the law for the groups they vilify and want to disenfranchise.

Mary: Well all religious feeling, all religious teaching and all religious practice is arbitrary in strictly secular terms. All authority comes from God whose authority isn’t recognized by the state. But that doesn’t mean it’s not protected. Because it is. But I think there is a distinction between the contraception issue and gay spouses or whatever.

While many religious institutions will fight extremely hard to deny health insurance to the legally recognized spouses of homosexuals, it is not the same thing as doing the wedding service. For one thing, while no Church institutions would recognize “spouse,” many are willing to make concessions for legally-domiciled adult. Furthermore, strong moral arguments can be made that it is more important to keep a gay spouse healthy than it is to deny they exist. If we take the case of gay marriage and use it as an analogy for this contraception case, the government is forcing the Church to marry gays – not just to pay them fairly and treat them fairly. The latter is expected equal protection under the law, the former is a first amendment violation.

If Church-related institutions start firing people who use their fairly-earned salaries to buy birth control, then we can have a different conversation. But right now the government is forcing the Church to provide it. Well actually it’s only forcing Church-related schools and hospitals. The employees of parishes and of diocesan-related activities like youth ministers or secretaries to bishops and the like will still be exempted on the basis of a religious conscience clause—because the lady balancing the books at the priests’ house is performing a “religious” function but the 7th grade religion teacher isn’t.

Daniel Fincke: No, again, the government is not forcing the Church to provide it, it is forcing all employers—including the Church—to purchase health insurance plans that may cover contraception.

But, to your initial point, yes, all strictly religious feelings and beliefs are arbitrary and that’s why only the ones that have a secular justification should be respected in the public sphere and only the ones that are not excessively injurious to individuals should be tolerated within religious institutions.

Within religious institutions you have greater latitude to your capricious values and beliefs. You may discriminate against marrying gays, you may enjoin battered women to stay in their abusive marriages because Jesus forbids divorcing (unless your wife cheats, of course). But you can’t do the beating yourself or withhold necessary health care from your kids, etc. There are limits even in the private exercise of religion.

And in the public sphere, when you want to employ and service people outside your faith or perform functions that are not distinctly religious (no matter how much you want to personally interpret them as acts of devotion to God), you need to be subject to the same laws, honor the consciences and health needs of others just as everyone else does. You need more than capricious feelings to justify exemptions from public laws that serve to enforce the rights and dignity of other people in the public.

And it is irrelevant that you think the Church could have some rationales for accommodating gay spouses. The point is that by your assertion of the right of “deep offense” to trump all laws, the Church would be equally in their rights to deny to cover such a spouse and contribute to the well-functioning of such an “unholy” union as they would be in their rights to deny contraception and contributing to the prevention of unwanted pregnancies.

The point is that your principle of “religious offense” would be a “get out of equal protection” pass which could cover all manner of bigotry beyond the cathedral walls. Even as things stand, Catholic adoption agencies want to refuse to let gays adopt—even while they accept public funds! They want to prohibit abortions in their hospitals, forcing women, even those with life threatening pregnancies, to become mothers (or die!), unless they can escape to another hospital quickly enough or can afford or have convenient access to another hospital, etc. They want to allow pharmacists to get in the way of having people’s prescriptions for contraception filled.

In all these and more cases, they want their “offense” to trump other people’s rights to legal services that hospitals or social service agencies are expected to provide. Your “offense” fiat would cover all of this, and justify gay spouses not being covered under health care plans.

Mary: Well perhaps I should say, “deeply contradictory to the Church’s beliefs in such a way that forcing them to do it would prohibit their ability to act freely as a Church.” The point that I hold, and hope that I have made to some degree of coherency, is that there is a difference between a Church-related institution discriminating against someone and a Church-related institution being forced to provide a service contrary to its teachings.

They are not “equally” with in their rights to discriminate against any legally-recognized spouse, because they don’t have to do the wedding mass. They aren’t being forced to arbitrate divorces by the state. But here they are actually being forced into doing something that violates their religion. It’s forcing them to be proactive in something that is against their teaching. This means that Church-related institutions would have to serve only Catholics and hire only Catholics. That does prohibit their freedom to function as religious institutions.

I still believe that Church-related institutions need seriously to consider the funding it takes from the government and the strings that come attached. The link you posted last year about the adoption agency that simply shut down rather than provide services to gay couples—it’s certainly not what I would personally want because that doesn’t match my views. But I think it was the right thing to do. Don’t take the government’s money if you don’t want to play by the government’s rules. But in most cases, the government provides funding not because they just love nuns or whatever, but because it is in the government’s best interest for services to be run by more locally-administered private institution. And it is well-within its rights to withdraw funding when discrimination is taking place within those private institutions. In this case the government is not saying “we allow you to submit your students for national humanities grants so provide abortions!” they’re saying, “you have to provide contraception whether you’re completely financially free of us or not.”

Daniel Fincke: They are not being asked to provide the contraception. Only the health insurance which may cover contraception. And it’s troubling that you are equating the ability to function as a religious organization with never making accommodations to freedom of conscience of other people on something as non-central to uniquely Catholic belief as the issue of contraception. It’s not like they have to deny the divinity of Jesus.

They argue for their position against contraception putatively on natural law grounds. They derive it as a matter of philosophy, not strictly as a theological matter. They have to recognize, as all of us do, that our rights to impose our private views on metaphysics in ways that unduly burden others are limited.

That’s what it means to live in a secular society. And being financially free, again, is not the issue here. The issue in this case is not government strings attached to money, it’s being an employer of the public and accepting limitations on your ability to do that in distinctly religious ways. You can only do private actions in wholly uncompromised religious ways.

Mary: Well, you’re right, it’s not a Catholic belief. But religious systems are not simply systems of beliefs statements which one must affirm or not affirm, they also have moral teachings and those moral teachings are central to the daily lives of their followers.

As for the natural law grounds of denying contraception, I’m in no position to debate natural law. It is my understanding that natural law is neither natural nor a law and that it is falling out of favor, even with the Church, as a method for defending the Church’s moral teachings. I understand the Church’s teaching on contraception but outside of any natural law claims.

And the Church’s ability to impose its views is limited—to its own institutions and even then to its own actions. It doesn’t force its employees not to buy birth control, it says it won’t pay for it. So it is actually quite limited indeed.

 Concluded Here.

Your Thoughts?


“Should Catholic Employers Be Exempted From Paying For Health Insurance Covering Contraception?”

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 5, 2012
.

If you were reading Camels With Hammers regularly before we made the move to Freethought Blogs, you would have frequently been treated to the long, insightful, and vigorously argued comments of my friend Mary. Mary is a Roman Catholic and is politically liberal in many (but not all) respects. We met when I was a graduate student at Fordham University chaperoning out of state trips for the Fordham University Rose Hill mock trial team. Mary was on the team. She has since graduated and become a theology graduate student.

On Facebook she recently posted with approval an article from a Catholic Democrat angry over Obama administration requirements that the Catholic Church pay for insurance plans for employees that include contraception coverage whenever it hires both Catholics and non-Catholics alike as part of running universities, hospitals, social service agencies, or any other publicly accessible institutions with non-exclusively religious purposes. (At my recommendation Ophelia Benson responded to the article nicely at Butterflies and Wheels.)

Essentially, when the Catholic Church employs or serves non-Catholics and performs non-religious functions, it needs to offer all the same rights and protections that non-religious institutions are required to provide. Some Catholics, including some left-leaning ones, are up in arms alleging that this is tantamount to a violation of their rights to free exercise of religion. Mary is one of those outraged Catholics.

On the other hand, secularists, such as I, argue that governmental rules like these protect the consciences (which includes the religious consciences) of employees and the public. If a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist takes employment to teach or practice medicine at a Catholic institution, this should not interfere with her ability to get access to the contraception she needs in order to regulate her reproductive life according to her own conscience. The rights of conscience of particular Catholics, and of the Catholic Church collectively to believe and worship as it wishes, should not extend to a right to encumber the free exercise of conscience of everyone who they employ for non-religious functions. This is intrusive and authoritarian. If the Roman Catholic Church wants its employees—even the non-Catholic ones—to honor its moral dictates then it should trust them to freely obey.

Finally, I have been employed by Roman Catholic universities since 2000 (sometimes even working at two at a time). I studied for ten years at Fordham and received my doctorate there. The entire time I was there I was an atheist. I have happily never suffered the slightest discrimination. Not only was I free to write a dissertation which was highly critical of Christianity, I have received several valuable publishing opportunities from one of the department’s few Jesuit priest philosophers. My criticisms are on principle and do not come from any special animus or inherent suspicions of mainstream Roman Catholic institutions’ theoretical abilities to provide non-religious services to non-Catholics.

Mary and I have debated the merits of our respective positions and below is part one of our three part exchange:

Daniel Fincke: Could you please explain the positions of prominent Catholic leaders in the current political discourse about the application of the Affordable Care Act as it pertains to Catholic institutions, and explain why you agree or disagree with particular points?

Mary: Well, I do hesitate to speak on behalf of prominent Catholic leaders. The average “liberal” Catholic isn’t really reading Bishop Dolan’s blog. But I think that the best summation of it is in a press release from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, “Bishops and lay Catholic leaders across the United States have made it clear that we cannot comply with this unjust law without compromising our convictions and undermining the Catholic identity of many of our service ministries. This is not just another important issue among the many we need to be concerned about. This ruling is different. This ruling interferes with the basic right of Catholic citizens to organize and work for the common good as Catholics in the public square.”

And if I were to speak for what other people I know, other concerned Catholics, think on the issue it’s that the teaching against birth control is a long-standing teaching in the Catholic Church that is directly related to important issues regarding dignity of life. Many of those Catholics, like myself, would like to see a serious dialogue within the Church about its position on birth control and, God willing, a serious editing of those beliefs. But for most Catholics it’s less about the content of the teaching of birth control and more about the fact that the government is forcing Catholic institutions, though not employees of parishes, to provide it.

Daniel Fincke: Provide birth control or provide insurance plans which cover birth control?

Mary: To alter their insurance plans in such a way that provides the birth control pill to be used for contraceptive purposes.

My fundamental disagreement with the issue lies in that dichotomy – that my priests and their secretaries get to continue to use their insurance plans as they are because they cater to a Catholic community and do “religious” work, but the teachers who teach at the adjoining elementary school are subject to the change. I think it is a terribly narrow definition of religious and religious activity. No Church, especially no Catholic Church, could ever submit to a definition of religion that is confined to masses and funerals.

I also think I should lay my cards on the table – I know very few people actually employed by a religious institution – at least very few well enough to talk about insurance benefits. So whether or not certain dioceses provide birth control or not, I really don’t know. I imagine some do.

Daniel Fincke: That’s not true that no church could submit for legal or practical purposes to a definition of religion that is confined to distinctly religious functions like masses, funerals, and distinctly religious teachings. There is nothing inherently religious about teaching or practicing medicine or arranging adoptions.

These are strictly speaking religiously neutral activities except in the case of specifically theological teaching—and even that is only religious in character when approached a certain way. The Catholic Church fully understands this in practice otherwise they would not regularly hire non-Catholics to perform these functions. If they are religious functions, they would require Catholics to perform them—just as catechism classes and funerals and masses need to be presided over by Catholics. Also Churches want to claim a secular function that legitimizes government subsidies for their charity work. If there is no separation in principle from a church’s secular and religious functions then the government is funding religion by giving grants or other advantages to putatively public (not religious) services done by churches.

Mary: I think the question of government subsidy is an important one. A part of me would love to see the government stop subsidizing religious charities if for not other reason then I could stop hearing atheists bring it up. But another part of me recognizes that the government subsidizes any private charity, religious or not, because that charity performs services in a certain way that saves the government time and money. But I do think the government should reevaluate its subsidy of religious charities.

It’s very hard for me to answer these criticisms without waxing theological because the answers seem deeply obvious to me on a theological level but that’s not at all what we’re doing here so I’ll try not to.

Daniel Fincke: That’s because part of living in a pluralistic, non-theocratic, civil society with secular laws means bracketing one’s personal theologies or conceptions of the good where respect for other institutions is necessary. You need to think in secular civil terms when in the secular, civil sphere—regardless of how you want to square that with what you privately hold theologically.

Mary: 50 years ago, there would have been almost no non-Catholic employees at the average Church-related institution, even universities. The majority of university faculty were male religious and there were few, though very few, non-Catholic employees. The regular hiring of non-Catholic employees came with two related things: the transforming of schools away from being owned and operated by religious orders to being owned and operated by lay boards of trustees that still retained religious and Vatican II which overturned centuries of Church teaching and gave a teaching on religious freedom.

This religious freedom teaching allowed many institutions, especially the Catholic university, the ability to dialogue with, engage with and work with people who weren’t Catholic. It’s a lot easier for a Jew to teach at a Catholic school when Catholics no longer call him a “Christ killer” by way of official Church teaching.

But this change didn’t come because suddenly Catholic universities recognized that they were participating in a public function that was distinct from Church ministry or that their university functions were no longer “religious” but that a serious theological shift took place within the Church that redefined how Catholics are expected to engage non-Catholics.

But Catholic universities and hospitals still maintained deep commitments, stated in mission statements and other ways, to working *as* the Church in the world.

Daniel Fincke: The theological reasoning process by which Catholicism opened up to modernity should not be determinative of secular law though. Once the Church decides to engage with outsiders and participate more inclusively with the rest of civil society, it cannot dictate all the terms of that interaction. The consciences of the non-Catholics it invites into its institutions matter also.

Mary: But every Church activity is a private one insofar as the Church only dictates the values of its own religious institutions. It would be an “imposition” if the Church forced its views on an atheist organization. It’s imposing its religious views on its own institutions. But I would like to address what you said about consciences – I think that is an extremely important issue.

Daniel Fincke: It is an imposition if the Church forces its views on its atheist employees too. Just because this is happening in a private university or hospital does not mean that public laws should not apply. And if the new law requires employees’ rights to contraception to be respected, the Catholic Church has no right to impose on the consciences of atheists, Protestants, Jews, or whomever else wants that right fulfilled. Private organizations are not lawless.

Even were the Church to employ only Catholics and serve only Catholics in a hospital, say, they should not be exempt from controls to make sure their medical practices are legitimate. People have rights of conscience against their Churches too. Religious people should not be forced to surrender basic rights of equal protection. For example, if a Catholic woman suffering domestic abuse were employed by a Catholic hospital, the hospital should not have the right to fire her if she gets a divorce against Catholic teaching which forbids them. Basic employee protections are in place to protect such abuses from private institutions, churches included. It is this arrogance and authoritarianism of the Church which thinks of itself as totally unfettered in administering the law within its institutions that is responsible for the entire decades or centuries of abuse of children with impunity. This attitude that Catholics are the property of the Catholic Church for it to dictate to them against their consciences without complaint is anti-democratic and must not be catered to by a secular, pluralistic society built on freedom of conscience.

Mary: Ok, allow me to answer your points. There’s nothing worse than the “well they don’t have to work there if they don’t like it!” argument. Especially in academia, jobs are so hard to come by that it would certainly not be indicative of religious charity in any way to say that someone should just pack up and find somewhere else to work – a somewhere that might not exist. But when any professor goes to work for any private school, or a doctor at a hospital, you are introduced to the “mission” of the school. So I’m sure in your employment at Fordham and Fairfield you were told of the explicitly religious mission of those schools that still maintained deep commitments to freedom of speech, anti-discrimination (in a perfect world) whatever. Now you are deeply hostile to religion and still chose to teach there, something I’m sure came from a place of discernment and you followed your conscience in teaching at both of those schools. I respect that choice in anyone.

Now anyone who knows anything about Catholic teaching it’s that Catholic teaching seems to hate the idea of anyone controlling birth and abortion. So there should be no thought in anyone’s mind that that institution would go out of its way, in any way, to provide either of those services. Some people understand this as an inconvenience and a burden and other people are deeply offended by the Church’s teaching on these issues. I think anyone deeply offended by the Church’s teaching on those issues who still works in that place is violating his or her conscience immediately. I would never teach or work at Ave Maria University, Christendom College, Franciscan or Thomas Aquinas College because I am deeply at odds with the missions of those schools. If Catholic feelings toward contraception were secretive and only revealed after an employee started working there, I could understand, but no one should be surprised if Notre Dame doesn’t provide birth control for contraceptive purposes.

And people, do, indeed, have conscience rights against Churches. They’re exercised all the time. 98% of Church going Catholics use methods of birth control considered sinful by their Church. Catholics divorce at a rate as high as all other religious organizations and atheists. Catholics get abortions. The Church doesn’t follow people around asking them what they do and the conscience is supposed to be respected. Unfortunately, it isn’t always respected. The nun who was excommunicated for allowing an emergency abortion to be performed is a great example – that woman did what she thought was the right thing to do and was punished for it and it was in no way right.

And I agree that the authoritarian attitude of the Church is so dangerous and harmful. The sexual abuse scandal that ran rampant for 40 years and, to this day, has hardly been sufficiently punished by civil authorities is just one example of that. Reading some of the case files of how priests used judges with Catholic sympathies to have their charges dismissed are so disturbing it makes you want to kill yourself, frankly.

But this isn’t the Church telling it’s employees that if they use birth control they’ll be fired or if they get divorced they’ll be fired – but that they won’t provide the service because it’s contrary to their teaching. I think that’s an important distinction.

Daniel Fincke: But why does being employed by an institution make you subject to its “teaching” in ways that restrict your own abilities to pursue your own reproductive freedom? Should CEOs arbitrarily dictate their “teachings” to their employees? These are people hired for non-religious functions. I’m there to teach the philosophy course, not to serve any religious functions. The Church should have no say whatsoever what I do with my paychecks. I render services, they pay me. Their abilities to dictate my conscience are constrained to those which are contractual and reasonable related to my function as a philosophy professor. They do not extend to my reproductive freedom.

Continued here.

Concluded here.

Your Thoughts?

Suddenly Gingrich and Romney Will Save the Poor!

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 5, 2012
.

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the econom

Okay, as I always note when discussing anything remotely related to economics, I am not an economist. I rely on my trained economist readers to provide expertise about the strictly economic aspects of what I am about to comment on. I am going to talk about what I perceive as the philosophical problems with what Governor Romney and Speaker Gingrich have to say in the clip above.

First of all, pleased as I am to see Romney get into so much trouble for saying he doesn’t care about the poor as long as they have their safety net, I think his slip was just to say explicitly what politicians always say implicitly. All that matters is the middle class. Because those are the majority of the voters. And when it comes to legislating, of course, even the middle class doesn’t matter, but only the corporations since they fund the campaigns. This is the fundamental reality and everyone can see through all the bullshit on both sides.

But what irks me about Romney and Gingrich’s remarks is the flat out denial of reality that ignores the permanence of poverty. There will always be poor people. Capitalism is set up that way. Gingrich’s proposal for a trampoline to get out of poverty is just empty. There are not enough middle class income jobs in the economy for everyone to have one. For cripe’s sake, our median income is only a meager $26,000! How many single parents must be trying to raise several kids on that (or less)? How many dual income families are raising multiple kids on $52,000? And that’s the median! How many millions scrape by on less?

Trampoline individual poor people out of poverty all you like and then the more mediocre who were just above poverty will fall down into the safety net and not bounce out. The system is structured that someone will wind up poor. The repulsive Republican moralistic judgmentalism towards those who wind up poor (or stuck there) is so simultaneously logically fallacious and self-righteous it turns my stomach. The implicit assumption is that our economic system is unquestionably just, that it adequately rewards hard work, that it intrinsically values labor appropriately, that laissez-faire markets provide every morally valuable    economic outcome by an inherently just nature.

The fact that wages can be bid down to levels where working hard does not earn people even enough money to afford health care just means that not everyone deserves health care morally, on this logic. If these people want health care they should just work harder—even though they may be working 50-60 hours a week at two jobs where the market values their labor at the “you should just die if you get sick” level of assessment.

Or maybe they should work smarter and get a better education. And it’s their fault if they can’t afford to go to school because their parents aren’t rich enough? And it’s reasonable to burden these kids with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get a competitive education necessary to climb the economic ladder? And it’s reasonable to have the poor kids needing to work part or (even) full time to bootstrap through college at an inherent disadvantage against kids who can give their studies the full time attention they require to be done adequately?

I guess it’s purely moral fairness if the young poor don’t use these trampolines available—working jobs that bid you down to a dehumanizing wage that does not allow you even to afford to say alive if you get sick, while being handicapped competing for grades against more affluent kids who don’t have to work, and then coming out of school crushed by a debt that could severely limits your career flexibility as they have to pay onerous debts right out of school and can hardly aspire to “savings” or plan for home ownership or think about retirement.

And not to mention that this poor kid who started out with the luxury of the “safety net” grew up in a poor school district with underpaid teachers and ridiculously limited resources that put her at a further disadvantage starting college.

Whichever of these kids does not trampoline out of poverty morally deserves to be poor for their moral failure, their laziness, in not adequately availing themselves of all the opportunities available—regardless of how systemically inequitably they are made available.

And even those who do work hard—let’s say we all work hard and we all get advanced degrees, do we all get rewarded morally for our hard work and determination? Do we all now get to make more than that meager median $26,000? We all get to be executives and lawyers and doctors and politicians and finance people and tenured professors? Hardly. There is not room at the top for all of us. The current rates of underemployment in the country indicate a failure of the system to morally reward all that aspiration and determination with jobs befitting people’s educations and qualifications. If those people work at wages that don’t afford health care I guess they just deserve to die younger too?

What are the programs Romney or Gingrich have proposed to raise the median wage in America so that even unskilled laborers make good money? What are the programs Romney or Gingrich have proposed to reward all of us underemployed people who have the skills and education to do jobs that pay upper middle class salaries so that we get what we morally deserve by playing by the system’s rules so obediently? What are their programs to wipe out the need for lousy paying menial labor and replace all those jobs with at least middle class incomes so that Romney’s promise of bringing the poor up to the middle can be fulfilled. We won’t quibble with the irrationality of his saying no one needs to be below the middle. We’ll just assume he means the poor can live like the middle presently does and that will be the new poverty. That, admittedly, would very much be progress at least. What’s the plan for this to actually happen? What’s the plan to increase these wages? Are “more tax cuts for the job creators” magically going to pull this off? Somehow less regulations on business do it? Somehow state Republicans’ dismantling of union rights and cutting public school teachers’ salaries is going to make it happen?

And to bring the poor up from the safety net to the middle we need to get unemployment not only down from 8.3% to a normal 5% but all the way down to 0%. And we need everyone able bodied and between 22-65 to pursue a job for that to be a true 0%. Or at least make sure that the 5% unemployed at any given time are not the permanently unemployed. We have a crisis high level people unemployed long enough that they risk being unemployable. What are Gingrich and Romney’s plans to salvage their careers? What’s Gingrich’s trampoline for them? Is it that all people out of work for more than 6 months start working as janitors in elementary schools at a fraction the pay of professional janitors so that they learn how to work again?

I am really really interested in what ways Gingrich and Romney propose to magically elevate the median wage, obliterate unemployment and underemployment, make it so that the competitiveness of capitalism does not require any one getting the short end of the stick, make it so that all employers with no government assistance pay everyone enough to be fully insured with no government intrusions (or fully insure them of their own with no government mandates).

How is this utopia in which we all get what we morally deserve for working hard going to be achieved? How is it all going to happen with less government regulations, lower taxes, gutted education funding, disbanded unions, an abolished minimum wage, and the rolling back of entitlement programs for those deficit creating poor people?

How is everyone who works hard going to get health care? Or is that not something people deserve if they do shitty enough labor that anyone could theoretically do? I’m not a Christian or a “person of faith” at all so I’m not sure how our American values (being so based on Christianity or at least “faith”) judge that issue. Does Christianity say anything about whether menial labor morally entitles one to enough money to pay for a doctor and also pay for groceries and raise children?

Gingrich tells us Obama just hates work and loves having people on food stamps. Apparently hard work can elevate not just some of the poor but obliterate the very dynamic of capitalism by which there are inevitably some poor people. Apparently Gingrich has a way to make this happen so that no one ever needs food stamps again. Is it just his infectious love of work that is going to overcome Obama’s three unconscionable years of teaching the poor to hate work?

Or is it just that capitalism, which pays by the morally unquestionable market value, will always make sure the poor are those who deserve to suffer with no mercy for their moral failures of being born poor, with either few exceptional talents or reduced opportunities to develop them if they did have them?

I’m not an economist. I admit it. But I’m curious how this morally just world where we can blame the poor for being the poor is going to be justified or alternatively how we’re going to create a capitalism where no one is going to wind up poor by our current standards, or how we are going to do this with minimal government regulations of the laissez-faire market as possible? (And copious corporate welfare, of course.)

Your Thoughts?

 

Mitt Romney Fires Debate Coach For Making Him Bad By Making Him Look Good

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 4, 2012
.

In South Carolina’s debates watching Newt Gingrich debate Mitt Romney was like watching Cicero debate automated customer service telephone prompts. So Romney diligently and proactively went out and got an excellent debate coach, Brett O’Donnell. And Romney went on to utterly neutralize and deflate Gingrich next they met, in Florida. So that’s a point in Romney’s column. He competently and quickly took charge of a bad situation and turned it around in an impressive fashion. This also nicely fits Romney’s preferred narrative of himself as an efficient fixer.

But then staffers started crediting the debate coach for Romney’s debate win and Romney responded yesterday in a way that reflects really poorly on him. He fired O’Donnell for upstaging him.

Great leaders are not threatened by great advisers. They don’t compete with them for credit. They don’t risk sabotaging their own effectiveness by treating worthy collaborators as dangerous rivals. Weak leaders, who are more focused on their over-sensitive egos than objective success, do that.

Your Thoughts?

Who Was Saul Alinsky?

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 4, 2012
.

In response to Newt Gingrich’s regular raging against Saul Alinsky in the last few weeks of campaigning, Bill Maher hilariously raised the question, “Who the fuck is Saul Alinsky?”

Bill Moyers educates:

Bill Moyers Essay: Newt’s Obesession with Saul Alinsky from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Money quote:

Maybe that’s why Newt Gingrich has been slandering Alinsky’s name. Maybe he’s afraid. Afraid the very white folks he’s been rousing to a frenzy will discover who Saul Alinsky really was. A patriot, in a long line of patriots, who scorned the malignant narcissism of duplicitous politicians and taught every day Americans to think for themselves and to fight together for a better life. That’s the American way, and any good historian would know it.

Phil Klein also educates by explaining the various ways that Newt Gingrich campaigns precisely employing Alinsky’s recommended tactics. Dan Savage also educates the ways that since the ’80s the entire social conservative movement has thrived using Alinsky’s tactics.

And a few years ago Bill Dedman educated us about Hillary Clinton’s history with Alinsky and what she wrote in her senior thesis about him. And in those same days, Governor George Romney also recommended his associates listen to Alinsky.

Thanks for most of these links goes to The Dish.

Your Thoughts?

Patton Oswalt on Arguments Against Gay Marriage

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 4, 2012
.

Pretty hilarious:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YLzlIsrU4o

From Patton Oswalt’s Finest Hour. In the same show he is as funny as can be on romantic comedies and on “gay friend” tropes in movies. The DVD is coming soon.

(Thanks to Leanna for the video.)

Your Thoughts?

Is Emotivistic Moral Nihilism Rationally Consistent?

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 2, 2012
.

Taylor: I know you’re bothered that I don’t believe in objective values, Pat, but I assure you I still care about the same things that you do. I just don’t say I’m being “objective” when I do so.

Pat: I don’t know why you think I would be impressed by that.

Taylor: Well when you boil things down isn’t that all that really matters—that at the end of the day I am just as committed in practice to what you want to call “moral” values even though I don’t think they’re “real”?

Pat: No, I find your rational inconsistency troubling in itself and capable of potential negative real world consequences.

Taylor: What “rational inconsistency” are you referring to? I think I’m being very scrupulous here and constraining my beliefs to what is rigorously factual. I’m avoiding confusing my preferences and desires for properties of things themselves. When I say “x is good” I am not deluding myself into thinking I’m describing some real property of a thing which constitutes its “objective goodness”. Instead I’m rather strictly, humbly, and rationally consistently accepting that in such a circumstance I am just referring to and expressing my feelings towards it.

Pat: But you’re not. I know you. You still are in the habit of using laudatory language about some people and actions and condemnatory language towards others. You still use moral terms like good and bad, and right and wrong. You ascribe virtues to some people in some cases and attribute vices to other people in other cases and you do so with a great deal of conviction. You seem to think these people really have these traits and that these traits are truly good or truly bad and not just things you like and things you don’t like.

Taylor: So I like those whom I like and I dislike those whom I dislike. Isn’t that what I have described myself as doing? I never claimed to have stopped liking certain kinds of people and actions and disliking others. A moment ago I even stressed specifically that my patterns of liking and disliking don’t diverge very much from your own patterns of valuing. So where is the problem?

Pat: The problem is the strength of your condemnations is too strong for expressions of mere disliking. When you complain that someone is misogynistic or racist or homophobic or selfish or greedy, etc. you get angry in a way you would not if you were describing that someone simply liked different kinds of films than you did or preferred a different flavor of ice cream. It does not seem at all like you are just noting that that other person has different likes and dislikes from your own or different proclivities towards actions than your own. You seem quite adamant that their ways of thinking and acting are objectively worse than yours—that they are worse than they should be.

Taylor: So I dislike misogynists more than I dislike people who prefer strawberry ice cream. So what? They’re both cases of dislike even though one is much stronger than the other. This is merely a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference. I find strawberry ice cream gross and don’t identify with people who like it in the instances wherein they express their preferences for it. But this is usually a fleeting and irrelevant feeling as it concerns me so little. Maybe if someone were singing the praises of strawberry ice cream I would find it mildly annoying since my brain’s automatic response might be to say “No, it does not actually have a pleasant taste! Why is that person saying that? It’s false! Make them stop saying that!” Then on reflection I would see how amusing and arbitrary my brain was being.

On the other hand, when someone hates women and expresses that view, my brain also says, “I find that gross.” I don’t identify with people who hate women. Now since I would think of the harms of misogyny these would naturally ramp up my anger and my disdain for a misogynist more than a strawberry ice cream lover. And I would not dismiss these feelings as laughably arbitrary as I would my possible knee jerk dislike of the strawberry ice cream advocate. It makes perfect sense that I would feel greater anger and feel more inclined to cling to that anger. But it’s still an emotional response of not identifying with someone, feeling at odds with them, and feeling annoyed by their attitude because it is different from mine. So it’s quantitative difference, but the brain processes are of the same kind. I’m not secretly leaping from differences in feeling responses to overreaching judgments that I have a “moral truth” that the other person does not—no matter how repulsive and loathsome I might find that person to be.

Pat: But you think that there is no objective “repulsiveness” or “loathsomeness”, right? Those are projective terms to you, right? Like, you are repulsed by a thing and then call it repulsive as though it was intrinsically repulsive—when in reality you think it’s not intrinsically repulsive in any objective sense but only that it repulses you and that it repulses you for reasons that have to do only with your psychology and which have nothing inherent to do about its objective features. That’s your view right? That when we attribute to things value properties we are confusing our responses to things as reified traits that the things supposedly have themselves, right?

Taylor: Yes, I would agree with that. “Repulsiveness” or “loathsomeness” are not true properties of things. I just am repulsed or I just loathe and that’s a matter of me and my feelings and not objective features of the things or people themselves.

Pat: And yet you use the expressions anyway in describing people.

Taylor: They’re only expressions. It’s not like I think the people I use them to describe have such properties which sit there as part of them independent of my reacting to them with repulsion or loathing.

Pat: But why use those expressions for describing people if you think they’re misleading about the truth and are just a projection of your feelings. Your language treats them as though they are real but you don’t really believe they are. So why not be consistent. Remove this moral sounding language from your vocabulary.

Taylor: Because that would be needlessly cumbersome and limiting and counter-productive to expressing my feelings in a natural way. These are still my feelings. I really feel them. I really want to express them. And I want to use the language that conveys them as I feel them, even if there is a bit of inevitable imprecision in this. I correct for this imprecision when the issues of metaethics are being discussed explicitly, so I don’t see what the problem is.

Pat: The problem is that in metaethics you employ an arbitrarily narrow and false conception of what may be called or treated as “real. You refuse to allow certain complex, objectively describable relationships of effectiveness value relationships to be considered in any sense objectively determinative of truth about values in general or about what it is either more or less rational for people to value in particular. In that discourse you want to choke off potentially productive formulations of what happens when we use moral language—formulations which could ideally preserve, clarify, systematize, and advance our best and most rationally objective ways of settling important ethical disputes.

You are indifferent to the consequences of knee-capping the very concept of ethical legitimacy when you cavalierly and misleadingly take its subjective components as completely negating its equally present objective and rational components. You are indifferent—or even hostile to—articulating the valuable ways that a constructive discourse about value can be legitimate despite degrees of subjectivity and relativity if only it accounts for and respects these things while also exploring what is fruitful and rational about the objective and universalizable components of moral discourse.

You want to stack the deck totally against the value of all “constructed” moral categories when doing metaethics. But when the rubber hits the road in real life and you start making real world value judgments, you don’t have the courage of your supposedly iconoclastic, lopsidedly anti-realist convictions but rather you speak in vehement and unqualified  moral language as though it tracked the very truths your metaethics prides itself on staunchly dismissing as “unreal”.  And you reason morally in ways that effectively track the kinds of truths you tell me are merely subjective and not matters of truth or matters for objective reasoning at all! So, for example, you insist that harming someone is not “factually wrong” but “just something we don’t like”. And yet in your own reasoning you go right ahead and treat harming as a legitimate reason to dislike someone.

Taylor: No, it’s not a “legitimate” reason to dislike someone It’s just a likely one.

Pat: But you feel justified. You judge yourself as silly when you dislike a strawberry ice cream advocate but you judge yourself as right when you dislike a misogynist. That’s not just a difference in strengths of feelings, it is a difference in rational judgments about the appropriateness of each feeling. You often like to claim, in a sophistical way, that harm is not an objective category. You reject the idea that there are intrinsic states of health or flourishing that could suffer objectively identifiable and denunciation-worthy harms. Yet, you realize that your negative feelings towards strawberry ice cream advocates are worth abandoning while your negative feelings towards those who cause harm—which you can identify perfectly well with common sense—are worth staying angry at. You might even judge it appropriate to increase your anger in that case.

Taylor: No, I’m not grasping differences in “true worth”. I’m responding to differences in strengths of feeling. Perceptions of harm, whether tracking something true about the world or not, anger me more than disagreements over ice cream tastes. And I follow my emotions.

Pat: But you admitted earlier that sometimes you have inklings of emotions that are your brain being annoyed in “amusing” and “arbitrary” ways that then you put a stop to. These judgments of what is amusing and what is arbitrary are rooted in logic. We are amused by logical absurdity—and it is absurdly arbitrary to treat a trivial matter, like a difference in taste in ice cream, as though it were important enough to feel anger over. But you know quite well misogyny is not something arbitrary or amusing to feel anger about. Because you know it correlates with objective harms and you know full well both how and why they’re truly harmful in ways that merit your anger as a human being with an intrinsically vested interest in human flourishing.

Taylor: The silliness of getting angry over a dispute related to ice cream flavors is not a logical one. It is a disconnect of feeling. One part of my brain is getting hyped up and adamant while all the rest of me just can’t bring myself to give a crap, and so my general apathy on that issue means that my anger impulse is isolated and emotionally blown off with a laughter response. In the case of misogyny, no part of me feels like laughing it off. That’s the only difference, not any cognizance of objective “truths” about “objective wrongness” that relate to misogyny’s “intrinsic property of badness” or any such superstition.

Pat: You’re making a strawman of moral properties when you make them sound like mystical fantasy properties and not merely a priori graspable relationships that all people intuitively understand to at least some extent with our natural common sense. These are categories we live by and whose truth we inevitably assume completely when anything practical is at stake. To attack these concepts as superstitious nonsense when it comes time to analyze their logical relationships to each other and to the empirical world is not a scathing honesty but an unnecessary inconsistency that cuts out one’s own legs and makes one’s whole intellectual and personal life—filled as it is with vital moral and political judgments and debates—philosophically incoherent.

But more to the point, I reject your characterization of the reasons you distrust your dislike of a strawberry ice cream advocate. It’s not just a matter of more feelings of apathy happening to swarm and subdue outnumbered feelings of anger. You feel more non-combative and indifferent because your cognitive, a priori grasp of fairness is does not rule against the strawberry ice cream lover but judges in his favor and tells your knee jerk negativity to shut itself down.

Taylor: “Fairness” is just a matter of feelings though too. Different people feel different things are fair.

Pat: But fairness is still an a priori category even if we have trouble discerning how to apply it most accurately to the world, and even if our feelings can prejudice those judgments some times. We intuitively recognize it is not fair (either to reality or to each other) that we let our feelings, instead of our reason, determine our judgments of fair and unfair. You grasp this, you know it is fair to dislike a misogynist and consider them objectively repulsive and you know it is unfair to be angry with someone over a different taste in ice creams.

Taylor: Even if I grant certain brain tendencies which lead us to regularly apply certain distinct moral concepts and categories, that still does not make them “real”. Where is “fairness” in the universe which is scientifically describable apart from human concerns? We may have developed the concept for some survival benefit—some way that it helps us regulate human relationships effectively, but that does not make it a part of reality in the human-independent way that, say, atoms and molecules and water and trees exist in themselves.

Pat: As long as fairness has an internal logic and is vindicated as good for us for whatever ways it can be demonstrated to help us either minimally stay alive, maximally flourish, or successfully reproduce then that’s all the objective reality we need to overcome the charge that it is merely a matter of hopelessly subjective, relative, and distortively “false” emotions. I’m not saying there are no subject-relative or situation-relative components to morality. I am just that there are also objective, a priori, generalizable, and true aspects as well—and that an honest and practically constructive account integrates and makes sense of these too so we our practices and our discourses can be coherent, rational, and beneficial.

Your Thoughts?

These fictional characters, Pat and Taylor, previously discussed the related topic of Immoralism using Nietzsche’s view of it as a touchstone.

Links to the rest of the fictional Camels With Hammers dialogues are below the fold:

A Debate About The Value of Permanent Promiscuity

Moral Perfectionism, Moral Pragmatism, Free Love Ethics, and Adultery

On The Ethics of “Sugar Daddies” and “Sugar Babies”

A Debate About the Wisdom of Trying to Deconvert People Atheist Fundamentalism?

Bullying or Debating? Religious Privilege or Freedom of Speech?

Hell As The Absence of God

God and Goodness

On What’s Presidential, What’s Creepy, and What’s Mitt Romney

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on February 2, 2012
.

I honestly am confused when people say Mitt Romney looks the part of a president–”like he was sent straight from central casting”, as the cliche goes. I never think of presidents as coming off as equal parts sleazy slick soulless greedy corporate raider, creepy door-knocking glazed-eyed proselytizer, and robotically pandering inauthentic politician. I have this crazy idea that presidents are supposed to at least look noble, wise, and charismatically personable. And I don’t have some assumption that presidents are supposed to be patrician wealthy, black haired white men. I grew up with the grandfatherly presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. At 14 I remember being puzzled by the prospect of someone as casual seeming as Bill Clinton being president. And George W. Bush’s face is naturally one of an insecure bully rearing for a fight. He looks in every respect to me like a small man with a puffed up chest. It’s not very presidential.

And while I was startled when Morgan Freeman was first revealed as the president during the film Deep Impact, he was a natural fit. And a few years later 24′s President David Palmer was so charming, commanding, cool, and calming that he began to personify presidential presence for me. And it is a remarkable quirk of history that he would so eerily presage President Barack Obama, who would be elected president so relatively shortly in time after that iconic character was conceived, that I think whoever cast David Haysbert should be working for the DNC or the RNC finding and recruiting candidates for political races. They clearly understand how to spot a winning set of personality traits fitting the zeitgeist.

Obama himself seems a natural president. He has a preternaturally noble bearing. Very calm, very assured and comfortable in his own skin, very handsome and tall, and capable of both stirring oration and sober classy seriousness as the occasion requires. He strikes me as a bit stiff and insincere when trying to play things folksy and dumbed down, but this is partially compensated by the gentle reassuring squint to his eye that seems wise, thoughtful, and compassionate in a very detached and elevated sort of way. None of this is to say he is necessarily anything he appears to be of course. Nor, again, does not looking presidential mean being a bad president where it really matters.

But all this is to say that when I think “presidential” I reflexively think of a kind of appearance of dignity and reassuring wisdom, not simply a kind of handsome powerful WASPiness.

But all that musing aside, Andrew Sullivan speculates interestingly about how Romney’s role in Mormon leadership may contribute to his inauthentic bearing in moments when he is glad-handing the public:

I was chatting with a Mormon friend the other day and asking him what Mormons make of Mitt on this uncanny valley question. The phrase he came up with is “the Mormon mask.” It’s the kind of public presentation that a Mormon with real church authority deploys when dealing with less elevated believers, talking to them, and advising them. The cheery aw-shucks fake niceness in person is a function in part, some believe, of the role he has long played in the church: always a leader.

Think of a pastor who has a game face, or after-Mass cheeriness, because it’s impossible for a human being truly to relate to so many different needs and individuals all the time without some kind of defense mechanism; some set of phrases to get him through a confession or consultation when he may be having an off day; some way to remove himself from the emotionally draining responsibilities of so many pastoral duties.

None of this explains his woodenness, inauthenticity, or unbelievable tone-deafness when speaking off script on stage. But at least this explanation resonates a little with me. I am a pretty personable person who normally thrives on interpersonal interactions but when swarmed by students at the end of a lecture or even when in the position of making small talk with them moments after class on a bus or train, I feel relatively overwhelmed and in the kind of defensive automatic robotic mode that Sullivan describes above. Giving a lecture is mentally and physically draining and when it’s over the energy saps out of my body in a hurry. It’s like coming down from an adrenaline rush in many respects. So the pressure to fully engage socially with my students—with all the appropriate formalities and pleasantries and distance that that requires—does lead me to feel like there’s a mask that naturally goes on and a role that gets unthinkingly played.

And I would also add that Romney’s formative experiences as a missionary had to be a rough sort of experience. I saw him once talk about doing that work and learning how to keep plugging away with a pitch even as very few people buy it. As a philosopher, I’m used to the people I engage with really interacting with the ideas I bring to the table. This is the case whether they’re getting deep into the weeds of the issues with me, or whether they’re expressing a respectful but intimidated appreciation for the blast of ideas, or whether they’re picking my brain out of novice curiosity, or whether they’re trying to brawl with me intellectually and show I’m totally wrong (or that philosophy is nonsense and a waste of time).

In other words, I have pretty human, honest, respectful, productive, and mutually engaged interactions when I open my mouth about what I believe. I can’t imagine the conditioning that the opposite experience must create—what it must be like to start speaking incredible nonsense in a spirit of authority and conviction and not dialectic (except insincerely as part of the appearance of dialogue for the sake of the sales pitch). Or to feel certain you are right and have the truth and repeatedly to be dismissed contemptuously or with bewilderment. Or to go door to door day after day getting rejected. And the whole time needing to project a cheery “loving” welcome demeanor as part of the mission to convey “God’s love” to people from a desperate desire to save them. I can really imagine that creating Romney’s kind of protective skin and fatalistic delivery. And it’s sure great training for saying unbelievable nonsense with an utterly shameless and un-self-aware straight face.

I was an evangelical Christian who did proselytize my share in my day. But it was rarely if ever the social norm breaking door-knocking kind. Then and now approaching people cold who would want to talk to me and striking up conversation when I want something from them is nightmarish for me. I feel terribly embarrassed and shy intruding on people like that. Emotionally I’d rather miss out on 9 people (even attractive single women I’m dying to talk to) who don’t want to talk to me than momentarily bother one who does not want to talk to me. I  really can’t imagine being so immune to rejection.

Your Thoughts?

God and Goodness

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on January 30, 2012
.

Robin: Look, I get it, Jaime. As an atheist, you think that God’s wisdom is foolishness, that God’s righteousness is wickedness, and that the bloody death of Jesus on the cross is hateful and ugly rather than the epitome of love and beauty that Christians like I think it is. The Bible makes it very clear that the world simply cannot understand the way of the cross; those paradoxical ways that God uses the small to humble the great, makes the poor spiritually richer than the wealthy, chooses a finite fleshly body to manifest his spiritual limitlessness, and makes a symbol of death and isolation like the cross into the most transformative symbol of love and solidarity the world has ever known. God’s ways are just beyond ours and we cannot judge them by the world’s paltry standards of goodness, beauty, or truth. The difference between you and me is that I accept that there are some things just beyond all human understanding whereas you demand that everything make sense to human reason.

Jaime: I know you think all these supposed paradoxes make you sound deep and thoughtful and humble, but they don’t. My criticism of the evil in the Bible has nothing to do with some shallow inability to see how the materially poor could sometimes have more meaning in their lives than the rich, or how the formally uneducated might sometimes be wiser in important ways than some Ivy League alumni. Such banal paeans to peons could be made as easily by secular humanists as by Christians. They require no unique revelation from your god. My case that the god in the Bible inverts good and evil is based on the alleged genocides, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, racism, exclusivism and other nastily barbaric institutions and characteristics attributed to him right there in your Bible itself. There’s nothing sublimely beautiful and “beyond human understanding” about any of these things. If a modern day person tried to sell me on the idea that a god had told him to commit genocide, enslave people, and to force women to marry their rapists, and told me that I had to simply accept the goodness of all these apparent evils on faith that his god’s knowledge of goodness was simply beyond mine, then I would judge him to be both wicked and deluded to inordinately dangerous degrees.

Robin: You have an awful lot of faith in your feelings about Good and Evil, such that you think you can judge even God according to your standards of Good and Evil. But you have no basis to believe in Good or Evil if you don’t believe in God. So you’re just arguing incoherently. If there is no God, then there is no such thing as true Goodness or true Evil. There are just accidental states of affairs and subjective human preferences for some of those states of affairs and aversions to other states of affairs. And these preferences and aversions not only vary person to person but can be exactly opposite of each other from person to person. So one person calls a preferred state of affairs “good” and another, repelled by that very same thing, calls it “evil”—and vice versa with some alternative state of affairs. With no moral law giver there is no absolute basis to say anything really is good or really is evil. So when you try to judge God using these absolutes, you assume a moral law which requires God to give it in the first place. So you can only judge God immoral if you implicitly assume God exists in the first place!

Jaime: No, that’s absurd. But before I get into why, let me quickly note that even were you right and only God could create good and evil, it is still possible that God could be evil as it is clearly possible for any lawmaker to violate his or her own laws.

Robin: It wouldn’t be evil for God to not subject Himself to the laws He gives us any more than it would be evil for a pair of parents not to go to bed at 8pm just because they make a rule for their young children that they must go to bed so early for their own good. And if moral law derives only from the will of God, then that will cannot itself be immoral when it makes exceptions for itself.

Jaime: Oh, I see, genocide and slavery, et al. are only immoral for us but for God they’re totally cool because He’s—what? More mature than we are? Or just more powerful and, as such, entitled to abuse people at will with full moral authority?

Robin: But God does not abuse people. He is a God of love.

Jaime: Did someone rip the entire Old Testament and half the New out of your Bible?

Robin: No, God was working with imperfect people. The immoral things they did were not things he commanded.

Jaime: Yes, they were! He explicitly commands the Israelites to kill every man, woman, child, and animal, and goes out of His way to punish them when they do not! And the Deuteronomical and Levitical law codes are brutal. Your alleged god orders the stoning of disobedient children and gays and people who do as little as pick up sticks on a Saturday!

Robin: Look, these were already barbaric ancient peoples, God was civilizing them one step at a time. The Old Testament laws were comparatively more humane than others from the same time.

Jaime: I’m sure ordering these people to keep slaves and commit genocide in more “godly” ways than their neighbors did had a “comparatively civilizing” effect that made them relative models of humaneness. But how is this the evidence of a God who establishes an absolute Good and Evil? Can I be like your god and use this “absolute” Good and Evil to command genocides as long as they’re slightly less barbaric than Stalin’s or Mao’s?

Robin: Trying to outdo those models of consistent atheist morality, are you?

Jaime: There is nothing “consistent” about the moralities of Mao or Stalin and nothing about atheism that either logically or practically necessitates their violence and authoritarianism. It is your conception of goodness—which has it as a matter of assertion of raw might—that would justify their oppressiveness, not my conception of goodness as intrinsic.

Robin: I don’t believe any humans have the right to impose tyrannies!

Jaime: No—you only believe the entire universe is one big cosmic tyranny and that it rightly is one.

Robin: No, it’s not a cosmic tyranny. God is a legitimate authority, who rules benevolently through love and justice. Dictators usurp power and set themselves up as gods. That’s the antithesis of God’s authority. It is the hubris of willful humanity at its apex!

Jaime: Right, when humans commit genocides and enslave people it’s ghastly hubris—unless they did it several thousand years ago and claimed a perfect being made them do it. In which case it is totally copacetic. Godly even! And the alleged god behind their violence is a paragon of moral virtue.

Robin: Again with the bold moral judgments from someone who has no basis for believing in Good and Evil at all.

Jaime: Look, either goodness is a concept knowable a priori, by reason alone or not only can’t I know good from evil but neither can you.

Robin: What do you mean?

Jaime: When you make claims about what does or does not allow for the creation of morality, you implicitly rely on beliefs about what makes a norm authoritative or not. You seem, for example, not to think that human feelings which differ from person to person are sufficient for creating a genuine moral norm. You seem also to think that there are some criteria which you think the god you believe in adequately satisfies to give him the rights to legislate legitimately where mere human dictators may not. Now, you might claim that your god specially revealed to you the ability to discern the conditions by which his true authority could be validated—in which case it is humorous that you keep trying to convince me with reasons that your views are sounder than mine and trying to get me to understand rationally why your god has legitimate moral authority. Or you think that investigating the intrinsic and rationally knowable nature of moral authority itself leads you to your belief in a god who is a legitimate source of moral norms.

But if you believe you can rationally assess, and rationally prove to me, the ontological necessity and moral legitimacy of your morality-giving god, then apparently you think you know the essence of morality and of moral legitimacy on rational grounds that could be communicated even to a non-believer like me. And if that is the case then apparently morality and moral legitimacy are not only graspable a priori but they are more fundamentally real and knowable than your god since your god is subject to, and could only theoretically gain legitimacy from, a moral order that is both more basic to reality and a more fundamentally understandable reality than he is. So, if we need to understand moral categories in order to infer your god’s existence and to legitimate claims that your god is morally good and authoritative, then apparently we must know these moral categories logically prior to any beliefs or lack of beliefs in gods.

In this case, I would necessarily be able to intuit these moral categories as an atheist, without any need for learning of the existence or dictates of your god. This means I do not need to believe in your god either to understand or accept the legitimacy of morality. In fact, since grasping and applying moral categories is the prerequisite for determining whether your god is moral or immoral—independently of his arbitrary, self-serving alleged claims about himself—I am perfectly in a position to judge that he is in fact disproven as a candidate for existence. Yahweh cannot both exist and behave as described in the Bible and be perfectly good, given the wickedness he is purported to have carried out and commanded throughout both the Old and New Testaments.

Robin: But you can’t know any such essential moral truths. It’s not that you can know moral good from evil and then either infer God must exist to make them possible or assess that God is good or bad by moral standards. Rather, discovering and understanding Goodness is identical with discovering and understanding God since God is Goodness. It is because of this that only the believer in the one true, perfectly good God adequately understands Goodness.

Jaime: Ah, and so those of us who think genocide is evil and that it has nothing to do with goodness just don’t really understand goodness. Only if we add an entirely superfluous concept to goodness—that it is a personal being—and then add an entirely contradictory concept to goodness—that this personal being of goodness itself commands evil actions like genocide—can we finally understand what goodness itself really is. The normal human a priori grasp of goodness is inadequate for this task.

Robin: If we start with your atheistic, non-believing perspective all we can say is that the allegedly “a priori grasp of goodness” made by ordinary humans is just a confusion and an error. It’s just a projection of feelings of preference for some things that treats those things as though they have an intrinsic quality of “goodness” when they really don’t. Only if we intuit that there is an absolute lawgiver who creates things to be intrinsically good can they have a real intrinsic goodness which can be thought about in some correct a priori way and not be just a mistaken trick of the mind whereby a reification of our feelings is confused for an intrinsic property.

Jaime: But you still need to know then that a god has the moral authority to make things good and bad by an act of will. In that case you need to already know that an adequately deputized being has such moral legitimacy.

Robin: No, all I need to know is that an omnipotent creator can create things with intrinsic properties. I don’t have to know that any moral absolutes preexist the creation of the moral properties. God does not create moral absolutes because He has prior absolute moral authority. God creates moral absolutes because He creates everything, including moral absolutes and (with them) the whole idea of moral authority itself.

Jaime: Then that contradicts what you said before when you claimed that your god is goodness. Goodness would be just a property your god creates but not a part of your god itself. Your god would be beyond good and evil the way it is beyond being any other specific created thing or kind of thing and beyond having any of the properties which it arbitrarily creates after existing itself.

Robin: Yes, God is completely unlimited by any of the properties of His creation.

Jaime: Including good and evil then.

Robin: Well, yes, I guess. God could not be involuntarily bound by anything. But God would be perfect and so He would voluntarily be good anyway even though He does not have to be.

Jaime: Except when he isn’t good at all—like in the Old Testament.

Robin: In the long run God can bring good even out of evil, His ways are mysterious.

Jaime: And God, being beyond good and evil, can reverse the properties of good and evil radically, on a whim.

Robin: Yes. I mean, I guess.

Jaime: So then there is no absolute Good and Evil, after all, on your view since your god can reverse the properties at any time. So, how is that a basis for belief in a true and absolute morality?

Robin: Well, He could—but he wouldn’t any more than he would switch the essence of being a dog with the essence of being a cat even though He could do that too.

Jaime: How does it make any sense that the essence of dogs could become the essence of cats or vice versa? If a dog changed its features and the DNA which causes them, that’s not a dog taking on a cat essence, it’s a dog being replaced by a cat! The kinds of beings are still totally distinct. Properties cannot be made into their opposites in any rationally coherent way.

Robin: But God cannot be constrained. He must be able to do even what we think is impossible.

Jaime: If that’s so then the existence of such a being makes all human reasoning impossible since there are no essences that God cannot be surreptitiously flipping around and make into their opposites at any time by arbitrary, unannounced, and unrevealed whim.

Robin: But God wouldn’t do that.

Jaime: But how do you know that?

Robin: Because He’s perfectly good and not capricious! He does not just reverse good and evil like that!

Jaime: Except for when he told his “original” chosen people to commit genocide and keep slaves but started telling his modern ones that those things are evil?

Robin: He loves us, He wouldn’t deceive us.

Jaime: But he could and in principle is unconstrained by morality, since it is his invention and not something that he is subject to in any binding way. By your own logic, he created it and can dismiss it whenever he wishes. He can be systematically deceiving us all and having a good laugh at Christians like you who simultaneously believe in, first, his supremely malignant Old Testament deeds, second, his absolute independence of morality as its total creator, and thirdly and most hilariously naïvely, his “perfect moral goodness”. He might just be the most mischievously wicked tyrant of all time. Maximum evil with maximum praise for his “goodness”. I admit, this is a much more plausible prospect for a real god given the world we live in!

Robin: No, God cannot be malicious. If His nature creates the kind  of goodness it does—the kind we find in the world, then this goodness must be a true and necessary expression of God’s own nature. And therefore God must be inclined to do only what that same goodness requires.

Jaime: So then God can only be identical with the goodness we can intuit in nature and any alleged evil actions must not be attributable to God?

Robin: Yes.

Jaime: Then we can prove the god of the Bible is false, a fictional character and not the real god, by pointing out all his wicked deeds unbecoming the god whose goodness we can understand a priori.

Robin: Are you seriously claiming there is a God now—just to try to refute the belief in the Christian God? Is your atheism really just anti-Christianity? You’ll believe anything if it leads to the Christian God being false?

Jaime: No, I just think Goodness is a basic, a priori discoverable feature of the world. If you want to rename it “God”, then be my guest—as long as you don’t ridiculously claim it is a personal being with a Son, a thing for the smell of blood sacrifices, and a creepily excessive interest in consensual adults’ sex lives.

Robin: But again, if there is no personal God, then there is no true goodness or true evil, just human feelings!

Jaime: No, if there is your imagined highly willful personal god, then morality and goodness are just subject to arbitrary assignations of properties by that being. But if we do not confuse ourselves by invoking your metaphysically and scientifically baseless being, we can rather look for goodness right here in the natural world as one of its intrinsic discoverable features.

Robin: But how? How can you say anything is truly good and not be simply be saying you merely like that thing?

Jaime: Goodness is a matter of effectiveness relationships in the natural world. When I say that vegetables are good for me, I do not mean that they have an arbitrarily assigned property granted to them by an invisible supernatural super-being that makes the statement true independent of empirically and a priori analyzable real world functions. Instead, I mean simply they are good at effectively keeping me alive. And this effectiveness is wholly independent of my feelings too. Personally I hate vegetables, but they are good for me. I don’t even feel any special love for this fact that they are good for me—I rather begrudge it, truth be told! But it’s just true. And unless a god changed their effectiveness potentials to harm me in objective ways, no simple ascription of “properties of badness” by any god would make them bad for me.

Robin: What if it is God who set up those effectiveness relationships in the first place? Then God is the one who gives them those properties of effectiveness that makes them objective. And then, again, God is the source of goodness.

Jaime: If that is all you mean when you say that your god creates goodness, then we can dispense with worrying about whether or not he exists altogether and can certainly ignore your holy books. We certainly don’t need him or Christian churches for knowledge of goodness or morality.

Robin: You would need him to create goodness itself so there could be morality at all!

Jaime: No, because the objective effectiveness relationships would exist and be subject to rational investigation independent of any reference to the being that set up such relationships. Such relationships need no such intelligent design to come about or to be maintained and there is no evidence of such a creator behind them. They just are. And even were they set up by some super-mind in the first place, as long as they are rationally investigatable (as they are) then that is our best route to truth about them. The arbitrary (and often wildly wrong) hunches and fantasies of ancient nomads and modern egomaniacs who are bad at statistics provide no extra help in figuring out the differences between good and bad or right and wrong. Frankly, they can only be expected to hinder any progress on this score.

Your Thoughts?

This debate was a continuation of the one begun in the post Hell As An Absence of God.

And for more on the themes of goodness as effectiveness and the problems with divine command theory, see the posts Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness) and On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

 

Hell As The Absence of God

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on January 30, 2012
.
Robin: I know you don’t want to hear it, but Jesus loves you, Jaime. Jaime: Yes, yes, a man who either never existed or who is long dead and rotted by now loves me—and will torture me in hell forever if I don’t worship him, of course. Robin: He just wants you to love him but He won’t force you to do so. Jaime: No, he’ll threaten me with hell if I don’t love him. That’s not coercive at all. Seriously, even if he was up there in some heaven, I could never love—let alone worship—someone who offered me the choice between loving him and being burned alive for eternity. I can think of fewer things more antithetical to true love. True love must be freely given, with no abusive threats of punishment if you don’t love as demanded. Robin: Jesus agrees! That’s why He won’t force you to be in heaven with Him if you don’t want to be there! Jaime: The other option is hell! That’s like some sick abusive husband telling his wife that she has two options—either she stays in the physically and emotionally damaging relationship or he “divorces” her—and keeps her chained up in the basement being subjected to non-lethal torture the rest of her life. And, as a bonus, he has the power and the unchanging will to make her live and continue suffering in that dungeon forever. By your definition, a woman who refused to be in this relationship would be “choosing” this torture. But this is ridiculous. For “choosing” your god to actually be “freely done”, under these circumstances, it is clear there has to be another option—we have to be able to be without your god and not suffering at all for it. Robin: But you don’t get it, being without God is itself the punishment. To fix your analogy, it’s not like the husband tortures the wife physically if she leaves but rather it is that he’s not an abusive husband at all...
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