Tag Archives: Secularism

News

Supreme Court hands Obama administration a major defeat on religious liberty

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From the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt: (most links removed)

The Supreme Court has rejected the Obama administration’s argument that it can dictate who churches hire as ministers or clergy in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Obama administration unsuccessfully arguedthat the government can dictate who churches hire, as long as it also subjects secular employers to the same dictates regarding who they hire (so-called rules of general applicability). Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument would allow the government to ban a church or synagogue from hiring based on religion (defeating the whole purpose of religious freedom, which is to allow churches to promote their own religion) or sex (preventing the Catholic Church from having a male priesthood). No Supreme Court justice bought the administration’s argument, made on behalf of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The Supreme Court unanimously found that such government control over who churches can hire would violate the religion clauses of the First Amendment.

If federal antidiscrimination laws covered churches’ hiring of clergy, as the Obama administration demanded, they would have to not just avoid discriminating based on things like sex or religion, but would also have to radically alter sensible hiring criteria by eliminating longstanding, neutral church practices that have the affect of inadvertently screening out more members of a minority group than of other groups (so-called “disparate impact” or “unintentional discrimination”). For example, some branches of the Lutheran Church have hiring criteria for religious broadcasters on their radio programs, such as “knowledge of Lutheran doctrine,” and “classic music training,” that few minorities satisfy (only 2 percent of all people with Lutheran training are minorities, and only 0.1 percent of people with both Lutheran training and classical music training are minorities), given the Lutheran Church’s historical roots in overwhelmingly white areas like Scandinavia and Minnesota. Even though they are happy to have black applicants, and do not treat black applicants worse based on their race, the EEOC could easily sue them for racially disparate impact if the Obama administration’s argument had been accepted. (The religion clauses of the First Amendment not only protect who churches hire as ministers, but also other people who serve as “voices of the church,” such as theology professors, and religious broadcasters on behalf of a church.)

We previously wrote about ways that the Obama administration is attacking religious freedom and separation of church and state at this link. We described how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is wiping out jobs and discouraging hiring and job creation through onerous interpretations of federal employment laws, at this link.

Good news for religious liberty means bad news for Barack Obama.

Commentary

Who gives more to charity? Religious people or secular people?

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Barbara Kay explains in the National Post.

Full text:

No matter where you live, charity begins at home. But, as we learn from the Fraser Institute’s newly released annual report on charitable giving, the question of where charity ends depends on where you live. For the 13th year in a row, Quebec has come out on the bottom of the Fraser Institute’s charity scale.

Of the provinces, Manitobans are the biggest givers, with 26% of those filing taxes donating to a registered charity, and 0.89% of total income being donated. Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island tied for second place. Ontario, Canada’s largest province, tied Alberta for fourth place with 24% of its tax filers donating 0.74% of total income to registered charities.

And then there’s Quebec. Oh dear. Only 21.7 % of Quebecers claimed donations to registered charities, and gave only 0.30% of their total income. On average dollar value donated, Alberta led with $2,112. And Quebec limped in at $606, half the national average of $1,399.

Lest Albertans and Manitobans get swelled heads, they should know that no Canadian provinces are a patch on the Americans. Almost 27% of American tax filers donated to registered charities, compared with 23% of Canadians. Countrywide, Americans gave 1.32% of their aggregate personal income to charity, more than double the 0.64% that Canadians gave.

What’s up with these statistics? Aren’t we supposed to be kinder and gentler than Americans?

Well, one clue to deconstructing the Canadian figures, and in particular Quebec’s lousy performance, comes from the news release: “Utah was by far the most generous jurisdiction in North America, with 33.4% of tax filers donating 3.09% of the total income earned in the state, nearly three-and-a-half times the share of aggregate income donated by Canada’s top province (0.89%), Manitoba.”

Why? Here’s a clue: Mormons constitute about 60% of Utah’s population. Mormons give a lot to charity, in part because of their tithing system. And, countrywide, it’s not just Mormons. The United States is a religious country – and research tells us that observantly religious people generally give more to charity (both in time and money) than non-religious people. Canada’s secularism makes it a less generous place, no matter what we tell ourselves about the virtues of being Canadian.

Another well-observed sociological phenomenon is that big government tends to discourage charity – both because people have less money to give to charity in high-tax jurisdictions, and because coddled nanny-state citizens believe that taking care of the poor huddled masses has become government’s job. Statism dampens the impulse to be generous at an individual level.

Quebec scores high on both secularism and nanny-statism. In fact, it is the least religious of the Canadian provinces (and in fact the most militantly anti-religious). Quebec also is the most statist (and highly taxed) of the provinces. Quebecers figure their taxes are taking care of all the social problems, or should be taking care of them, and it is therefore no surprise that they are the least likely to take responsibility for the afflictions of others.

Taking personal responsibility for alleviating the sufferings of others is the mark of a mature individual. Statism tends to suffocate the blessing of empathy, and thereby promotes civic immaturity. One more in a long litany of reasons for working to bring down the size of government.

These findings echo Arthur Brooks’ study on who gives most. Religious people give more than secular people, and that just stands to reason, given that the former generally takes morality to be objective, and the latter generally takes it to be subjective.

News

Richard Dawkins, who claims to oppose genocide, vows to “destroy” Christianity

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Rev. George Pitcher writes about an interview of Christopher Hitchens conducted by Richard Dawkins. (H/T Thinking Christian)

Excerpt:

But the centrepiece of this Christmas edition is the main coup for the New Statesman – an interview by Prof. Dawkins with Christopher Hitchens, the great polymath who today lost his fight against cancer. It’s a fascinating read over three double-page spreads. Not least because Prof. Dawkins reveals a charming humility, allowing Hitchens to show his intellectual superiority at his own expense. Hitchens is thoughtful about CS Lewis and Christianity and rather leaves Prof. Dawkins floundering in his wake, occasionally interjecting little assents to show that he’s still there, as he struggles to keep up.

But one of these interjections is most revealing. About half-way through, the Prof gets this in edgeways: ‘Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?’

So, ‘if we win…and destroy Christianity’. True, there’s a ‘so to speak’ in there, but it doesn’t do much. Try ‘If we win and, so to speak, kill all the Jews’ as an alternative. Doesn’t really work, does it? And Prof Dawkins can hardly claim that he was misquoted or taken out of context. He was editing the magazine, after all – there’s even a picture of him doing so, pen poised masterfully over page proofs.

Now you might think that Dawkins intends to destroy Christianity in debates, and not in the wars and purges of atheism that occurred last century in North Korea, Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union, and so on. Those atheist regimes caused the deaths of 100 million people, according to Harvard University Press. But Dawkins has refused to debate William Lane Craig on more than one occasion. So whatever he means by “destroy Christianity”, he doesn’t mean “defeat them in rational debate, using superior arguments and evidence”. He had his chance to do that, and he passed on it. So, he must mean something else by “destroying Christianity” other than persuasion.

Let’s find out what Richard Dawkins thinks about morality. Dawkins has previously written this:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

(“God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)

Dawkins’ view is that nothing is really good or bad objectively. Cultures just evolve certain conventions, and those conventions vary arbitrarily by time and place. I think we need to interpret his goal of destroying Christianity against the backdrop of his nihilism. 50 million unborn children have been killed in the United States since 1973 alone. That’s 50 million people with distinct genetic codes different from their mothers or their fathers, who will never grow up to achieve their potential.

Dawkins himself is in favor of infanticide:

So what might destroying Christianity look like to an atheist?

Here it what destroying Christianity means in North Korea, the most atheistic country on the planet.

Excerpt:

A Christian woman accused of distributing the Bible, a book banned in communist North Korea, was publicly executed last month for the crime, South Korean activists said Friday.

The 33-year-old mother of three, Ri Hyon Ok, also was accused of spying for South Korea and the United States, and of organizing dissidents, a rights group said in Seoul, citing documents obtained from the North.

The Investigative Commission on Crime Against Humanity report included a copy of Ri’s government-issued photo ID and said her husband, children and parents were sent to a political prison the day after her June 16 execution.

That’s what Kim Jong Il means by “destroy Christianity”. What does Dawkins mean by it?

FLASHBACK: American Atheists calls for the eradication of Christianity.