Tag Archives: Secularism

News

Christianity under fire from secular governments in San Francisco and Quebec

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First story from LifeSiteNews about San Francisco.

Excerpt:

A panel of eleven judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in San Francisco will hear oral arguments tomorrow, December 16, concerning the constitutionality of the San Francisco Board of Supervisor’s resolution attacking the Catholic Church for its teachings against homosexual adoptions.

[…]The challenge was made on the grounds that the resolution expresses government hostility toward the Catholic Church and its moral teachings in violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.[…]The resolution refers to the Vatican as a “foreign country” meddling in the affairs of the city and proclaims the Church’s moral teaching and beliefs on homosexuality as “insulting to all San Franciscans,” “hateful,” “insulting and callous,” “defamatory,” “absolutely unacceptable,” and says that Church teaching shows “insensitivity and ignorance.”

And the second story also from LifeSiteNews about Quebec, the most secular and leftist province in Canada.

Excerpt:

The Quebec Government has promulgated a new provincial policy against “homophobia,” touted as the first of its kind from a North American jurisdiction.  While homosexuality is already effectively fully normalized within Quebec law, the policy, released on Friday by the Ministry of Justice, is essentially a manifesto for normalizing homosexuality on the social level.

[…]They highlight at several points the need to target schools and youth, as did the original 2007 report.  “Awareness-raising and educational measures must target young people and the institutions they frequent in order to increase their acceptance of sexual diversity,” the policy states.

Pulling the troops out of Iraq, free health care and tax increases on the “rich” sound good to many uninformed Christians during an election, but they need to be careful about losing their religious liberty.

News

Russia attacks the religious liberty of Jehovah’s Witnesses

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Story here from CBS News. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Russia’s highest court on Tuesday upheld a ruling halting the activities of a regional branch of Jehovah’s Witnesses and banning dozens of its publications in what the group deplored as an unfair move.

Russian Supreme Court spokesman Pavel Odintsov said it rejected the group’s appeal of September’s ruling by a regional court in Rostov-on-Don. That ruling outlawed the group’s activities in the region, seized its assets there and labeled 34 of its publications as extremist.

I found a few more details here at a site called Forum 18.

Excerpt:

The texts considered extremist by the Rostov court are all published in the United States and Germany. They include the books “What Does the Bible Really Teach?” and “My Book of Bible Stories” as well as issues of the tracts “Watchtower” and “Awake!”. The court’s 56-page ruling, seen by Forum 18, gives three categories of alleged extremism located by expert analysts in the texts: 1) “incitement of religious hatred (undermining respect and hostility towards other religions)”; 2) “refusing blood” and 3) “refusing civil responsibilities”. Thus, from the book “Knowledge That Leads to Everlasting Life”, “true Christians do not celebrate Christmas or other festivals based on false religious ideas” appears in the first category; “out of respect for the sacred nature of life God-fearing people refuse blood transfusions” in the second; and “true Christians avoid false forms of idolatry, such as revering flags and performing anthems” in the third.

So what do I, an arch-evangelical Protestant Christian, think of this?

Well, I am against the Russian government, because I am for religious liberty, and even the religious liberty of groups that I don’t agree with. And I’m going to tell you why. I believe that everyone has a right to believe in anything they want to believe in, and it does not bother me at all that people disagree with my religion,and that they speak out against Christianity, or try to convert people away from Christianity. The state should not interfere with anyone’s free speech or religious liberty, including the right of individuals to say publicly they are right about religion and that others are wrong.

I think that people who reject orthodox Christian beliefs about God and Jesus will go to Hell for eternity. I don’t believe that people go to Heaven because of sincerity and good works. People go to Heaven because they have true beliefs about God’s existence, character and his actions in the world, – e.g. – Jesus death on the cross as atonement for sin. But my thinking that people are wrong doesn’t give me any justification for limiting their human rights, including the right to religious liberty, by using the power of the secular state.

I think we need to take a lesson in tolerance from God. God gives everyone space to try to respond to his revealing of himself to people in nature and in the Bible. He arranges the world in such a way that people who he foreknows will respond to him are placed in a time and place where they can respond to him. He does not force people to convert to Christianity by revealing himself so much that they lose their free will to reject him. And since God is not coercive, Christians should also not use state power to coerce others, either.

The Bible shows Jesus talking to people and being kind to them when they were suffering, as well as giving them evidence for his claims in the form of miracles. And that’s the way Christians should persuade others as well – except that we have to use miracles in nature and history, like the fine-tuning argument and the bodily resurrection instead. At no point does Jesus bring in the power of the state to squash the religious liberty of his opponents.

I am not worried about JWs tricking some Christian into becoming a JW either. If someone is able to trick a person into being a JW, then that person is obviously not concerned about the truth. No one becomes a JW because they think JW doctrine is true. It is extremely easy to disprove the beliefs of JWs factually – just take a look at their failed predictions about the end of the world. And Mormons believe in an eternal universe. That’s how you argue against a rival religion – with arguments and facts.

If the Russian government wants to rein in religions like Islam and Jehovah’s Witnesses, then they should be sponsoring debates between opposing scholars and showing them television. Have the different religion groups vote for the best scholar to represent their religion, and then have the scholars debate different topics. That’s just being fair! The state should not curtail religious liberty by using government power.

I wrote a post about this issue of people being afraid to talk about religion.

Commentary

How reliable are persistent vegetative state diagnoses?

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Check out this article from The Weekly Standard. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The case of Terri Schiavo–who died five years ago next March, deprived for nearly two weeks of food and water, even the balm of ice chips–continues to prick consciences. That may be one reason the case of Rom Houben, a Belgian man who was misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a persistent vegetative state, is now receiving international attention.

In 1983, Houben suffered catastrophic head injuries in an automobile accident. He arrived at the hospital unconscious. Doctors eventually concluded that his case was hopeless, and his family was told he would never waken. But the Houben family, like Terri’s parents and siblings, didn’t give up. They diligently sought out every medical advance. This wasn’t delusion or pure wishful thinking. Several studies have shown that about 40 percent of persistent vegetative state diagnoses are wrong.

[…]During the years that Houben was thought unconscious, society changed. Bioethicists nudged medicine away from the Hippocratic model and toward “quality of life” judgmentalism. Today, when a patient is diagnosed as persistently unconscious or minimally aware, doctors, social workers, and bioethicists often recommend that life-sustaining treatment–including sustenance delivered through a tube–be withdrawn, sometimes days or weeks after the injury.

One thing that stands out to me about this story is how the medical profession has accepted the idea that it is OK to kill people who do not have a high enough quality of life. What is behind this view? Well, I think it’s caused by secularism. Secularism has marginalized the Christian worldview that dominated the West. One component of that Christian worldview is that it is morally good to deny yourself happiness to care for the needs of others. And that the right thing is not based on your opinion or the arbitrary views of the majority of people in your culture.

On the secular worldview, though, there is no “right thing” that we “ought to do”. The universe is an accident and there is no design. The only thing to do on an atheistic worldview is to be “happy”. And you can’t be happy if other people need you to take care of them. So, I think that this is what is behind the push by secularists to kill the weak and stop them from using up resources. Secularists look at people who need them, and they want to kill them. There is no objective duty of self-sacrifice for others, on atheism.

Christopher Hitchens is fond of asking people he debates to name one thing that a Christian can do that an atheist can’t do. Here’s one: an atheist can’t rationally ground the decision to sacrifice their own pursuit of happiness to take care of the needs of others. On atheism, self-sacrifice is irrational, unless it makes you happy. You only have one life. There is no way you ought to be. The purpose of life is to be happy. The needs of the weak diminish your happiness. It’s survival of the fittest. That’s what is rational on atheism.

UPDATE: I just got back from breakfast at Denny’s and I was reading Jennifer Roback Morse’s “Love and Economics”. She was talking a lot about the helplessness of babies, and what mothers and fathers do that make children grow up capably. She writes that early on in the baby’s life they scream for everything and the mother has to be there to meet those needs or the child will never learn to trust. Later on, the parents try to encourage the child to be better-behaved and self-sufficient.

All this made me recall this post. If a selfish person believes that it is too much work to care of someone sick who needs extra love, then that person isn’t going to be willing to take care of babies, either. And I guess that’s exactly where we are as a society now, with people having fewer babies, but more abortions and day care. And of course people divorce when they have small children as well, which (usually) deprives the child of a father.