Robert George has a good piece on the need to respect another person's religion. For all the talk on how Mormons, Catholics , and people of the Evangelical Faith view each other to be honest it seems the scoffers of religion are on the worse and on the wise.
A very good piece and reminder at "Doing justice to another man's religion"
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Robert George On Respecting Another Man's Religion
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2 comments:
I am eager to defend the constitutional right to freedom of religion, but refraining from ridicule of the ridiculous is another matter. When it comes to freedom of religion, the Mormons were subjected to unconstitutional infringement of their rights to freedom of religion like no other identifiable religious group ever has been. The government of the United States, and the governments of the colonies before that, practiced genocide against indigenous Americans from 1607 until 1934, but it was not because of their religious beliefs, but to steal their homeland from them. But no other religion but the Mormons was absolutely forced to change their religion, and claim that they had received a new revelation from God, in order to stay alive and out of prison, like the Mormons did in 1890. If it had been a true religion, they would have been willing to be slaughtered or imprisoned or whatever the government would do to them rather than change their religion. Therefore they deserve whatever ridicule or disrespect which comes their way for being so gullible as to believe in a religion invented by a known con-artist in 1830, who had already been involved in con-games like water witching with a dowsing rod, and fortune telling with a seeing stone in his hat. However they have the same constitutional right to freedom of religion as any other American, and the government of the United States should apologize for what was done to their ancestors in the nineteenth century, and their "plural marriage" should be fully legalized immediately.
Now what is not an infringement of anyone's religious freedom is the Affordable Healthcare Act. That is just a spurious deceitful deceptive political arguement with no merit whatsoever. NOBODY is being mandated to engage in any birth control, and if they were being so mandated, I would be enraged as well as outraged, and I would be all up in arms to defend the reproductive freedoms of Catholics as well as anybody else. If the government was trying to force the Catholics to change their doctrine about birth control the way they forced the Mormons to change their doctrine about "plural marriage" in 1890, you could count on me. I would be standing shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, to fight against such a thing to my last breath.
I still think the part of the AFA that mandates contraception mnadates is problematic.
Also what is going to get it into toruble is the number of exemptions already in place, added with the fact that the GOVT is defining what is religious in a new unprecedednte way.
I think there are course some things one can be critical about religion in engaging it. But there is a line I think of good taste
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