Note: I no more believe that secularists have a right to pass laws that violate religious conscience than religious have to do otherwise. Laws forcing people against same-sex marriage to support it in any way are, to my thinking, equally wrong as laws forbidding people to believe in what some term “sodomy”.
This view overlooks the distinction between making someone do something and forbidding someone from doing something.
It is worse to force someone to do something that they consider evil than to forbid someone from doing something they consider good, in the ordinary case.
An example: it is worse to force a conscientious objector to kill an enemy soldier than it is to forbid a patriot from killing an enemy because the patriot is not in the military.
Or, it is worse to force someone to commit an abortion than to forbid someone from having an abortion.
Why so? Because when we force people to act, we take all range of option away from them. When we forbid, we leave all, licit conduct open to them, and greater freedom is preserved.
I do not believe God or the government has given us the right to forbid others the right to do things which do not infringe on the rights of ourselves. A Buddhist or a Muslim praying in public does not infringe on my right to do the same. People committing adultery does not infringe on my right to be faithful to my spouse. Therefore, I have no right to ban these things.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
When the state says your husband may divorce you for any reason, or for no reason, what it is really saying is that you do not have the right to make a binding vow, or to make a binding vow with him, which obviously restricts your rights in the most fundamental way, by making you a slave.
Moreover, the reasoning reflected in your statement is not even adhered to by the very governments which promote this. Under such reasoning, the state could not draft or conscript soldiers, could not make them obey orders if it did, could not collect taxes, could not take property for its own purposes, could not license anything.
All of this governmental activity infringes on someone’s rights.
I hope that clears it up for you.
We’re gettting there!
Secularism without God is not, however, amoral. Here we disagree. Are you familiar with Social Contract Theory? God is not needed for morals to be used in a country.
This is a tricky concept. Generally, I agree with you that there is such a thing as public morality, and that common decency guides us not to offend our neighbors without some good reason.
However, the theory of the the social contract is more a hinderance than a help in formulating it.
First of all, no one ever did get together and agree on a set of rules to live by. While it has a certain 18th century charm, like Williamsburg, it really is ludicrous fiction, and has more in common with Moll Flanders than the philosophes would have liked to admit.
Virtually all of mankind agrees that in the beginning, the rules were already laid down, and the new creature called man was compelled to agree them by the gods. A few people qualified this general agreement by saying that one God, not many, laid the rules down.
If there is anything behind the social contract myth, it is simply that someone strong forced the people in his or her immediate vicinity to obey, and that they agreed it was better to comply than to be killed or maimed.
The second problem is its internal irrationality. The social contract theory explicitly denies divine law, primarilly on the ground that it is old and outdated.
However, what could me more old or outdated, or of less logical force, than a modern person agreeing to be bound by society’s laws merely because some primitive oafs, when convened one dismal and rainy day in a cave, around a sputtering fire that took them a month to start by steadfastly rubbing the heads of two small children together until they ignited, happened to agree that the collective scratching of fleas and body lice was preferable to the individual removal and consumption of ticks and mites?
Rousseau, like LeCar, simply won’t do.
There are many secularists nations on Earth today, and they have yet to get rid of people’s rights or to legalize murder. One can cry “abortion” all they want, but it is not seen as murder by many secularists, and therefore, while the morality may be dubious, morality is there.
Wait a second - are we going to get on the train or off of it?
If the secularists are moral, then they wouldn’t permit abortion. But if they permit abortion, then their morality is insufficient, or worse, is their morality is in fact immoral. No one can defend the morality of an action by “defining” the problem away.
Are Chinese political prisoners any more free by virtue of being classed as “mentally ill” by the Chinese government?
And if we really don’t agree whether abortion is killing or not, what does this say about the “Social Contract?”
A contract that omits material terms is “nudum pactum.”