The secular conscience

Austin Dacey & Colin Koproske Reply

2011-06-30T18:10:00.004-04:00

Dissent (Summer 2011), posted with permission

We are grateful for the historical and constitutional perspective that William Galston brings to his stimulating response. He does not dispute our charge that the present regime of religious accommodation rests on philosophically unsound arguments. Instead, he says this is irrelevant because “a philosophical question is not the same as a constitutional question.” But surely we should prefer a constitutional order based on defensible assumptions to one based on indefensible assumptions. If something like Eisgruber and Sager’s Equal Liberty approach is justified, then such an understanding of our constitutional order is available to us.

We argued against accommodation not just on philosophical grounds, but on the legal and moral grounds that it conflicts with the Establishment Clause, treats citizens unfairly, and violates individual rights. Equal Liberty insists that the treatment of religious practice under the law must be guided by principles of nondiscrimination, neutrality, and general liberty that apply to all citizens. By putting equal rights first, it interprets the Free Exercise norm in a way that protects the legitimate freedoms of the religious without privileging any claims of conscience simply because they are associated with “religion.” Thus, Equal Liberty brings greater coherence to the constitutional treatment of religion.

Galston fails to offer an alternative that addresses the problems of fairness and individual rights. He sees the wisdom in extending the zone of accommodation to secular moral claims in the Seeger and Welsh cases, citing the (suspiciously philosophical) rationale that in these cases, the convictions of conscience impose “binding obligations” that “shape individual identity.” Why won’t he follow us to the conclusion that the law should reflect the non-religious rationale for accommodation? Because, he says, “religion provides the paradigm for that zone.” This is not unlike saying that combat roles in the military should be denied to women—instead of being denied to anyone who is not combat-ready—because men provide the paradigm of combat-readiness. We well recognize that religion has a traditional monopoly on claims of conscience. That is precisely the problem.

There is little comfort in the assurance that the courts have been “perfectly capable of distinguishing legitimate and counterfeit conscientious claims.” With so many blanket, presumptive exemptions for those who claim affiliation with a mainstream religion, there is not nearly enough distinguishing going on. There is no reason to think that equality-based alternatives must run afoul of Scalia’s anarchy of conscience. The genuine worry over anarchy is that the “compelling state interest” standard is too high, not that we cannot distinguish between those citizens who deserve some relief from a burdensome law and those who do not. We do distinguish, and we must. But we must not do so merely in virtue of traditional religious affiliation.

The merits of an approach like Equal Liberty do not depend on its faithfulness to Madison. However, a plausible case can be made that Madison’s thought contains the resources to support it. His 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance” attacked Patrick Henry’s proposed Religious Assessment Bill, which would have dedicated tax monies to the support of Christian denominations. Madison argued that in virtue of their natural rights, citizens retain “equal title to the free exercise of Religion according to the dictates of Conscience” (emphasis in the original):

Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered. As the Bill violates equality by subjecting some to peculiar burdens, so it violates the same principle, by granting to others peculiar exemptions.

The Framers’ attention to “Religion” was a wise response to the circumstances of their historical moment: the fresh memory of reli- gious war and the social necessity of presenting arguments persuasive to Protestant lawmakers. With the maturation of toleration and the proliferation of new ideologies, both religious and secular, this moment has passed. If we read Madison’s “Religion” so as to include only traditional theistic communities, then Seeger-style expansions would be anti-Madisonian. The alternative is to take Madison to be concerned with the space of liberty of conscience in which citizens pursue questions of ultimate meaning and value, a
domain that in his time happened to be roughly coextensive with the ranks of the major faith communities.

Call us unfaithful Madisonians, but we would like to think that the framers, in their unswerving attention to legal equality for minority viewpoints, would have responded to the astonishing and unpredictable explosion of religious and moral pluralism since 1785 by recognizing that the fundamental ideal at stake is not the freedom of the God-fearing but of all persons of conscience. We may owe to God our eternal obedience, but what we owe to each other is equal liberty.

William Galston Responds

2011-06-30T18:06:00.007-04:00

Dissent (Summer 2011), posted with permission

Is religion “special”? Taking this as a philosophical question, we might conclude that it is not, that religion is a specific instance within a more general category of belief or commitment. But a philosophical question is not the same as a constitutional question. After all, the U.S. Constitution might explicitly affirm or implicitly reflect propositions that philosophical reflection would refute. If so, unfettered reason must give way to the law. Jeremy Bentham famously declared, “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.” He might well be right. But that is not what the Framers thought, and it is their thought that governs us, unless and until we the people decide to discard or emend it.

The First Amendment unmistakably singles out religion for special treatment. Congress may not establish a religion, either by giving it a preferred institutional position or by using its distinctive doctrines as the basis for legislation. But far-fetched as it may sound, there is nothing in the Constitution to stop Congress from establishing a secular doctrine. For example, it can create and fund an economic board whose membership is restricted to Keynesians (or supply-siders), and it can base legislation on its preferred economic theory, even though many experts and ordinary citizens reject it.

There are many reasons why the first U.S. Congress embraced this distinction. Its members knew all too well about religious strife; they had no experience of civil or international conflict sparked by philosophical differences. They knew, as well, that the repression of religious differences had been characterized by exceptional cruelty and went to the core of individual identity. The man who drafted the First Amendment was the author of the famous “Memorial and Remonstrance,” which had placed each individual’s understanding of duties owed to the Creator above, or outside, the proper scope of civil law. Religious free exercise, said James Madison, was “in its nature an inalienable right.”

It followed that proposals to limit religious free exercise would have to discharge a heavy burden of proof. No one doubted, or doubts, the propriety of certain “time, place, and manner restrictions”: free exercise doesn’t entail the right to conduct a loud revival meeting in a residential neighborhood at 2 a.m. In such circumstances, religious noise is on par with secular noise.

But how far does this legal parity extend? No one would seriously argue that the claims of religious free exercise extend to human sacrifice (as opposed to animal sacrifice, which does enjoy First Amendment protection). There are some bedrock civil concerns that the law may enforce, regardless of their effects on particular religions. But for most of our national history, legislators and jurists distinguished between such concerns and the more typical objects of legislation, which were thought not to be so fundamental as to out- weigh religious free exercise. Despite the obvious importance of communal self-defense, many colonies exempted Quakers from serving in battles against the French and indigenous people, an exemption that some colonies continued during the Revolutionary War regarding the British. Madison and the members of the first Congress were well aware of this. Many legal historians disagree with the contention of the authors that the drafters of the First Amendment did not contemplate, and would have opposed, the regime of religious accommodation codified in Sherbert v. Verner.

Many episodes since the ratification of the First Amendment testify to the persistence of this concern—not only our draft laws, but also the least successful constitutional innovation in our history. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1920. It was widely understood that without the concurrent legislation authorized in Section 2, the general prohibition on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages, would be too vague to enforce. On October 29, 1919, the National Prohibition Act (popularly known as the Volstead Act), which created the legal definition of “intoxicating liquor” and specified penalties for producing it, passed over Woodrow Wilson’s veto and stood as the law of the land until 1933.

The Volstead Act created a number of exemptions to the prohibition regime, of which two are especially noteworthy. First, the act allowed physicians to prescribe liquor to individuals for medicinal purposes and to employ it pursuant to treatment for alcoholism in certified treatment programs. Second, the act stated that nothing it contained should be construed as applying to “wine for sacramental purposes, or like religious rites,” and it permitted the sale or transfer of wine to rabbis, ministers, priests, or an officer duly authorized by any church or congregation.

Suppose the act had not exempted physicians. The omission would have been subject to criticism on policy grounds, but no one would have suggested that it ran afoul of constitutional norms. If the act had failed to exempt wine for sacramental purposes, however, there would have been both a political firestorm and a First Amendment challenge that almost certainly would have succeeded.

The use of sacramental wine lies at the heart of more than one religion. The Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church prescribes, “The most holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist must be celebrated in bread, and in wine to which a small quantity of water is to be added.” For its part, Jewish law (halacha) commands the drinking of wine during the Passover Seder, specifying not only the famous four cups but also a minimum quantity to be consumed. (There is no maximum.) Comprehensive prohibition without exemptions would have prevented faithful Jews and Catholics from behaving as their religion requires. The Constitution’s presumption in favor of free exercise is designed to reduce to an avoidable minimum the circumstances in which such clashes are resolved in favor of the state.

I don’t want to be understood as espousing an untenable literalism. Although religion is special, it is not completely distinctive. Starting in the 1960s, the Supreme Court has recognized (rightly, in my view) exemptions based on conscientious claims that are not strictly speaking religious. In United States v. Seeger (1965) the Court broadened the conscientious objector section of the draft law to include “sincere and meaningful belief which occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by God of those admittedly qualifying for the exemption.” Five years later, in Welsh v. United States, the statute’s reach was further broadened to include explicitly secular beliefs that “play the role of a religion and function as a religion in life.” There are matters of conscience that, like religious claims, shape individual identity and are experienced as binding obligations. So yes, the zone of accommodation extends beyond religion. But it is religion that provides the paradigm for that zone.

Note that by advocating “freedom of conscience” rather than “freedom of religion,” the authors are intensifying rather than evading Justice Antonin Scalia’s concern (expressed in Employment Division v. Smith) that broad accommodation creates a system “in which each conscience is a law unto itself.” This is pure hyperbole; during the three decades that Sherbert was the controlling legal authority, our courts proved perfectly capable of distinguishing legitimate and counterfeit conscientious claims. I don’t understand why so many liberals have been attracted to Scalia’s rather Hobbesian argument, which flouts both the letter and the spirit of Madison’s thought. Indeed, it is a matter of record that Madison’s first draft of what became the First Amendment read, “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established; nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or in any pretext, infringed.” What Scalia sees as Pandora’s Box, Madison regarded as the animating principle of our constitutional order. In this, as in so many other matters, we should remain faithful Madisonians.

(Read our reply to Galston here.)

William Galston is Ezra Zilkha Chair and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. He is the author of eight books and numerous articles on political philosophy, public policy, and American politics. From 1993 to 1995, he served as deputy assistant for domestic policy to President Bill Clinton.

Against Religious Freedom

2011-06-28T00:16:00.020-04:00

Austin Dacey & Colin Koproske
Dissent (Summer 2011), posted with permission

Controversy in the summer and fall of 2010 over plans for the construction of an Islamic community center in New York City near Ground Zero reminds us that America's legacy of religious freedom is by no means settled. Debates about the proper limits of religious freedom don’t arise only with respect to new Muslim populations. Even as conservative Christians seek to restrict Muslims' freedom, they allege that their own freedom is under threat from aggressive secularism: school administrators are infringing students' rights to pray and discriminating against creationist biology teachers. And atheists argue that their rights are violated when they are compelled to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

As disparate as these views may be, they agree on the importance of religious freedom. And yet few of us have thought through its real meaning and implications. In fact, there are two quite distinct ideas that fly under the banner of "religious freedom." The first is that people have the right to practice a faith, consistent with the rights of everyone else. We think this is vital and unassailable. However, as we will contend, it is misleading to label this idea "religious freedom." The second idea is that religions deserve some special accommodations under the law that are not available to comparable secular institutions or commitments.

Traditionally cherished and unquestioned though it may be, this latter notion of religious freedom is philosophically unsound, legally incoherent, and morally indefensible. To make real progress in the conversation about church and state, we must give it up.

Paradoxes of accommodation

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The religion clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were perhaps the boldest and most novel assertions of the American experiment. Their formulators, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, hoped "to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries," as Madison put it. Neither man foresaw that the Free Exercise clause would come to mean what it does today: the "accommodation" of religion by granting practitioners a presumptive right to violate otherwise valid laws.

This is a relatively recent development. The seminal 1963 case Sherbert v. Verner concerned unemployment compensation for Adell Sherbert, a Seventh-day Adventist who was denied benefits under South Carolina law because she refused to take available suitable jobs. Sherbert felt religiously bound to reject such jobs because they would require her to work on Saturday, her Sabbath. The Court ruled in favor of Sherbert, granting her an exemption to the state law. This case, together with the 1972 decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder, set a far-reaching precedent: free exercise of religion entails that religiously motivated persons may disobey a valid and generally applicable law unless the government can demonstrate, first, that there is a "compelling state interest" in enforcing it and, second, that there is no alternative, less burdensome legislative means of pursuing this interest. In practice, this is a tall order, because a compelling state interest is considered more powerful than a merely "rational," “important," "valid," or "legitimate" purpose.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a series of judicial and legislative twists and turns, pivoting on the controversial 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith and the legislative backlash against it in the form of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and similar state-level laws. Today, many areas of law in many states still operate within the Sherbert-Yoder framework. Statutory and case law tends to grant presumptive exemptions to the religious, typically making no provisions for those nonreligious individuals who might be substantially burdened by a law on account of their moral convictions.

A survey of federal and state laws conducted about a decade ago found that more than two thousand statutes of all kinds provide for so-called religious exemptions. For example, in numerous states, religiously affiliated child care providers are exempt from many of the regulations—such as minimum staff-child ratios and training standards—that apply to their secular counterparts, despite the fact that the religious day care centers may receive federal subsidies. In addition, many states exempt religious organizations from paying property taxes even as they collect property taxes from secular non-profits. The law often defines religious uses of property broadly, qualifying everything from churches to commercial parking lots and multimillion-dollar "parsonages" with golf-course views. Religious exemptions are not just unfair. They can be deadly. Dozens of states provide exemptions from criminal prosecution for child abuse or neglect by members of faith communities that engage in “faith healing”— Christian Scientists among them—and whose children suffer or die while under their care.

A regime of religious freedom gives favorable treatment to some people not because they have a weightier claim but because they claim a particular identity. If the courts were to apply the compelling state interest standard robustly and consistently, then religious organizations and individuals would be free to disregard a significant swath of zoning, environmental, tax, and other law. We would be left with a system, as the Supreme Court put it in Smith, “in which each conscience is a law unto itself.”

The legal quandary goes deeper, right to the core of the constitutional order. Church-state separationists, of course, want to uphold the Free Exercise Clause, but also the so- called Establishment Clause. And yet the Establishment Clause stands in tension with the Free Exercise Clause, interpreted as a protection of religious freedom. The Establishment Clause, as currently understood, forbids government from disfavoring or favoring religion as such. But by conferring special benefits on religion in the form of presumptive exemptions, the government is favoring it, in violation of the Establishment Clause. No wonder, then, that an increasing number of constitutional scholars are calling for an end to the special treatment of religion.

What is so special about religion?

Before considering a constructive alternative to religious freedom let us examine its motivation. Why would one think that religion deserves special protection by the state? Suppose someone were to propose a basic constitutional right to literary freedom, the right of writers to put on paper whatever they wish. Two problems would immediately be obvious. First, the freedom to write is already protected as it is a subset of more general freedoms that are guaranteed to everyone, such as the freedom of expression. Second, if the idea instead is that writers get some kind of additional assistance not already received by everyone, then the following question arises: what is so special about writing—as opposed to painting, cooking, or volunteering for charity—that it deserves to be singled out for favorable treatment from government? In a liberal democracy, the government works to ensure that all people enjoy a certain sphere of personal liberty and privacy in which they can do what they want. It does not give special treatment to those who use that liberty and privacy to write instead of cook. So, while everyone gets the freedom to write, no one gets literary freedom.

Although it is more familiar, religious freedom makes about as much sense as literary freedom. This is overlooked because we are so accustomed to thinking of religious freedom as a unique and basic right. But the free exercise of religion should be seen as one manifestation of more fundamental rights held by all people, religious and secular alike: private property, personal autonomy, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and perhaps most important, freedom of conscience—the right to make up our own minds on moral and spiritual questions. Some people exercise these rights by being observant Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, or Muslims. Others exercise them by being Marxists, existentialists, secular humanists, or devotees of self-help psychology. Still others remain uncommitted.

A number of scholars and public intellectuals have argued that religion is special; that among all the possible manifestations of our fundamental freedoms, it stands apart by its very nature and therefore deserves unique treatment. But they all fail to show that there is something about a religious exercise of conscience that makes it more worthy of state solicitude than a secular exercise of conscience.

Three families of arguments loom large in the literature. Remember that a successful case would have to apply only to religion. It could not apply equally to political or other secular commitments, but to all religions, reasonably defined. If not, it would only prove that particular religious communities deserve special protection. And finally, it would have to illustrate that the distinctions it cites are relevant to political rights.

One family of arguments maintains that religion, or some characteristic of religion, is an important good that warrants special considerations in law and government. In this vein, legal philosopher Timothy Macklem argues that faith, understood as “a mode of belief distinct from reason,” provides “a way to come to terms with the unknowable where to do so is necessary to human well-being.” Yet this way of knowing, whether it is explained in terms of a priori intuitions or basic beliefs not arrived at by inference, is too narrow to capture all religious commitments—see Aquinas, Maimonides, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) on the indispensible role of reason. At the same time, it is too broad to rule out important nonreligious commitments—see Hobbes, Hume, and Mill on the place of desire and value in the foundations of secular ethics.

But insofar as “faith” is distinctive of religion, why should we think that the state has a legitimate duty to subsidize it? Shouldn’t we rather be wary of the public dangers posed by beliefs that are nonnegotiable and unresponsive to evidence, as the philosopher Brian Leiter has observed?

Another candidate for a public good inherent in religion is the search for “ultimate meaning.” Martha Nussbaum writes that “religion merits special deference from the liberal state, given its central importance to citizens in the search for meaning.” This conception of religion succeeds at excluding some secular pursuits, such as playing baseball or day-trading, and points to some- thing that most of us do care deeply about. But like the argument from faith, it is too broad to exclude all secular pursuits. We know of no reason to think that believers’ search for meaning is necessarily more profound than that of their unbelieving counterparts. Nussbaum’s argument serves better as a defense of “liberty of conscience”—not accidentally the title of her recent book on religious freedom, a liberty that belongs to all citizens.

A second family of arguments for religious specialness maintains that religious belief is an exceptionally binding kind of commitment, central to the believer’s integrity. Treating citizens fairly means understanding and respecting such commitments. This suggestion has been developed impressively in the writings of William Galston and Michael Sandel, who emphasize that religious beliefs are not regarded by believers as optional but rather as unchosen commitments that are constitutive of their identity. This line of thought draws our attention to three features that a commitment might have: it is regarded as a categorical obligation rather than a mere preference; it was not voluntarily adopted; and it is essential to a person’s identity. But we must be careful not to overstate the presence of these features in religious commitments or their absence from secular commitments.

Clearly, the Muslim police officer who refuses on religious grounds to shave his beard to comply with police force regulations is acting under an obligation in a way not true of the officer who simply wants to make a fashion statement. But from the fact that some secular claims express mere preferences, it does not follow that all do. It would be perverse to conclude that the commitment to racial justice of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—murdered for their civil rights activism during Freedom Summer—was not sufficiently “binding” because it sprang from secular attitudes.

At the same time, it is not a necessary condition of a religious practice that it is regarded as inescapable. A self-identifying Catholic might recognize that as a Catholic she has a duty to attend Sunday Mass, while at the same time affirming other identities—as friend, colleague, mother, or life partner—that generate their own, conflicting duties and that sometimes take priority over her religious identity. Furthermore, believers may regard a religious identity itself as chosen. As Alan Wolfe documents in The Transformation of American Religion, “religion in the United States is as much about choice and personal autonomy as it is about belonging and community.” Readers who are attracted to Galston’s or Sandel’s position may doubt the “authenticity” or worth of such individualistic adherence. Yet if we are seeking an understanding of religion to inform our general system of law, empirical generalizations about the lived experience of people of faith should carry more weight than the opinions of political theorists.

What these two strategies—religion-as-good and religion-as-binding—have in common is that they posit some property of religion that is supposed to justify special accommodation by the state. However, if our analysis is correct, the properties proposed do not map onto all and only religious practice. So, the most that these strategies could show is that the state must be sensitive to such properties, not that it must accommodate religious practice as such.

A third and different strategy for vindicating the specialness of religion draws strength, perhaps surprisingly, from the doctrine of “separation of church and state.” For Establishment Clause reasons, we already single out religion for special treatment, such as denial of certain kinds of aid. It may seem that if the National Council on the Humanities but not the National Council of Churches is to be constitutionally permitted to receive direct government funding, then we must attribute to religion a special importance. However, this conclusion would be unavoidable only if we could locate no other, more fundamental constitutional rationale for preventing government establishment or endorsement of religion. There is such a rationale. It is the value of equal respect for citizens.

An alternative: Equal liberty

In Religious Freedom and the Constitution, a 2007 book that deserves a broad audience beyond academia, Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager, of Princeton University and the University of Texas, respectively, propose a comprehensive new understanding of the place of religion under the law. They call their model Equal Liberty. According to this model, the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses are not requirements on how the state should treat religion, but rather requirements on how the state should treat citizens.

Equal Liberty encompasses three principles: antidiscrimination, neutrality, and general liberty. The antidiscrimination principle “insists in the name of equality that no members of our political community ought to be devalued on account of the spiritual foundations of their important commitments or projects.” The neutrality principle holds that apart from concerns over discrimination, “we have no constitutional reason to treat religion as deserving special benefits or as subject to special disabilities.” Finally, the general liberty principle holds that “all persons— whether engaged in religiously inspired enterprises or not—enjoy rights of free speech, personal autonomy, associative freedom, and private property that, while neither uniquely relevant to religion nor defined in terms of religion, will allow religious practice to flourish.”

If Eisgruber and Sager’s proposals were to be adopted, many aspects of the present legal landscape would remain in place, though they would be affixed within a more coherent framework. For example, Equal Liberty is consistent with the decision to grant welfare benefits to Adell Sherbert, though not for the reason that she had a religious claim and the state had no compelling interest. Rather, Eisgruber and Sager argue, denying benefits to Sherbert would have violated the antidiscrimination principle by treating her claim differently from mainstream faiths already accommodated by the law. Other exemptions could survive by expanding to countenance comparable nonreligious claims. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Vietnam-era United States v. Seeger, for instance, acted consistently with Equal Liberty when it expanded the existing conscientious-objector status, formerly reserved for theists, so as to include the claims of Daniel Seeger, a pacifist on principled, secular moral grounds.

However, under an equality-based framework, many privileges currently enjoyed by religious organizations and individuals could not survive. What reason—apart from discrimination on the basis of “spiritual foundations”—could be given for granting immunity from zoning or employment regulations to religious charities but not their secular counterparts? Indeed, it may well be that in many of the cases where religious exemptions seem most justifiable—dress codes in public school gym classes, for example—this is not because of the strength of the religious claims but the weakness of the rationale for the rules themselves. On the other hand, where the rationale is particularly powerful—think of the safety of children in the medical neglect and abuse cases—no exemptions of any kind appear justifiable.

Beyond religious freedom

While it is not our intention here to defend Equal Liberty in every detail, we hope to have made clear that there are workable, constructive alternatives to the automatic accommodation of religion as such. To be clear: we would not deny that people have the right to construct a mosque or religiously affiliated community center in Lower Manhattan, but we maintain that their right is not a right of “religious freedom.” Fundamentally, they would be exercising rights that the New York Academy of Sciences, an educational nonprofit organization, exercised when it moved into its offices at 7 World Trade Center: rights of free association and private property. On the other hand, we would oppose presumptively granting to a mosque special privileges that are not also available to the New York Academy of Sciences, unless such privileges can be justified solely by appeals to personal equality and liberty that can be brought by all citizens.

The twin moral pillars of a liberal democratic order are freedom and equality. In the end, the current regime of religious freedom runs counter to the value of treating all citizens equally regardless of their convictions of conscience. In Lynch v. Donnelly, Justice Sandra Day O'Conner wrote that government endorsement of religion is unacceptable because it "sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community." The present legal system of religious freedom does just that. It tells the religious that they are favored members of the political community, while telling secular people of conscience that they are outsiders. What a liberal democracy must stand for is not freedom of religion, but freedom of conscience.

(Read William Galston's response here, and our reply to Galson here.)

An inside look at the UN's new "defamation of religion" resolution

2009-03-30T12:21:00.004-04:00

During the last two weeks in March, I participated in the negotiations over the new UN Human Rights Council resolution combating "defamation of religions." I just published some of my impressions at Religion Dispatches.

UN Human Rights Council does it again

2009-03-26T15:58:00.005-04:00

The UN Human Rights Council has done it again. It has again resolved to "combat the defamation of religions." I actually sat through hours of negotiations over the draft text of this resolution in Geneva, and I still don't know what in God's name the defamation of religions is.

Similar resolutions have been passed by the Council since 1999 and by the General Assembly since 2005. The resolution passed with 23 in favor, 11 against, and 13 abstentions, gaining two additional votes since the last time it was adopted by the Council.

Indian journalists arrested for offending Muslims after reprinting Hari article

2009-02-11T18:47:00.004-05:00

The editor and publisher of a top English-language Indian daily were arrested and briefly detained in Calcutta after the paper, The Statesman, reprinted Johann Hari's article from U.K.'s Independent, entitled, appropriately enough, "Why should I respect these oppressive religions?" As reported by the BBC, the editor, Ravindra Kumar, felt compelled to apologize for an "editorial misjudgement."

Hari quotes me. Does this make me an accomplice?

The Independent's Johann Hari on respecting religion

2009-02-02T20:00:00.003-05:00

Writing for The Independent (UK), the excellent Johann Hari exposes the erosion of free expression at the United Nations, citing the recent report by me and Colin Koproske.

What will change everything?

2009-01-01T21:30:00.003-05:00

I contributed a response to the Edge.com "World Question" for 2009: What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to see? The answers were released at midnight on New Year's Eve.

Meanwhile, I've taken a leave of absence from my position at the Center for Inquiry, and left New York City for a spell to explore some options for my next project.

The Netherlands threatens to pull out of Durban II

2008-12-18T05:30:00.002-05:00

The Dutch government has threatened to pull out of Durban II conference on racism if changes are not made to the controversial draft resolution.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that four human rights experts have called on the U.N. to stop the discourse on defamation of religions.

Heilige Huisjes

2008-12-15T18:11:00.003-05:00

Literally "holy houses," figuratively, "sacred cows"--subjects too sensitive to be discussed in Dutch society. The holy houses were inspected yesterday at a forum at the Internationale School voor Wijsbegeerte. My talk on "the open conscience and the open society" was commented on by Nahed Selim, a women's rights activist; Rabbi Raphael Evers; Martijn de Koning, an anthropologist, and Coskun Çörü, a member of Dutch parliament with the Christian Democrat party.

De Rechten van de Mens: een bedreigde soort?

2008-12-12T18:47:00.003-05:00

I just came from an interesting discussion at De Balie in Amsterdam with Maurits Berger, Professor of Islam in the Contemporary West at Leiden University, holder of the Sultan of Oman Chair of Oriental Studies.

On Human Rights Day, working for the universality of rights

2008-12-10T14:27:00.006-05:00

On the occasion of Human Rights Day, the Center for Inquiry just released this statement on ongoing work to uphold the universality of human rights and the launch of a campaign concerning Shari'a courts in the United Kingdom.

Today we mark the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and above all its affirmation of the freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and expression.
At the United Nations General Assembly meeting in Paris in December 1948 at which the Declaration was adopted, Eleanor Roosevelt told the assembled delegates: “As we bring to fruition our labors on this Declaration of Human Rights, we must at the same time rededicate ourselves to the unfinished task which lies before us.” That task was to make the Declaration “a common standard of achievement” for humanity, and it remains unfinished.

Read more at Center for Inquiry. My bags aren't packed for Holland (I leave tomorrow night), but at least I think I know what I am going to say.

"Sensitive Words" on cover of Trouw section

2008-11-29T14:38:00.004-05:00

Today's edition of Trouw newspaper in Holland ran a long feature article by me on the Human Rights Council, political Islam, and the future of freedom of expression in Europe. It appears on the cover of the "Words & Mind" section, under the title "Gevoelige Woorden" (Sensitive Words).

De filosoof Austin Dacey woonde een zitting bij in dit ’tragikomische theater aan de Rhône’ en zag dat een open debat over religieuze kwesties al bijna onmogelijk is geworden. „Godslastering is teruggekeerd op het politieke wereldtoneel.”

The entire article is available (in Dutch) online.

Anti-defamation resolution weakens, but still passes U.N. General Assembly

2008-11-25T15:55:00.003-05:00

Yesterday the U.N. General Assembly adopted a draft of the now familiar resolution to combat the "defamation of religions." Pressure from the United States and other Western governments, along with a broad coalition of human rights groups, succeeded in weakening support for the resolution. This year it passed with 85 member states voting in favor, 50 against, and 42 abstaining, as compared with last year: 108 for, 51 against, and 25 abstaining.

U.S. State Department rejects "defamation of religions"

2008-09-29T06:22:00.005-04:00

On the occasion of the release of its 2008 International Religious Freedom Report on 19 September, the U.S. State Department rejected the concept of "defamation of religions," and affirmed the right of individuals to criticize religions. From Ambassador John Hanford's statement:

The United States advocates religious freedom for all faiths, which means we take a leading role in defending the religious freedom of Muslims around the world. However, it is because of this commitment that we take issue with efforts by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and its members like Pakistan and Egypt, in promoting the problematic concept of defamation of religions at the United Nations. As Secretary Rice mentioned a moment ago, this flawed concept seeks to weaken the freedoms of religion and expression by restricting the rights of individuals to share their views or criticize religions; in particular, Islam. The OIC's approach to defamation of religions is inconsistent with international human rights law, and is an attempt to export the blasphemy laws found in several OIC countries to the international level.

Miguel Servetus haunts Geneva

2008-09-23T09:03:00.008-04:00

The room was still buzzing from the exchanges between Egypt, the President, and Littman when I took the floor to summon the ghost of Miguel Servetus, who was burned alive just outside Geneva in 1553 for defaming religion:

Thank you, Mr President.

We welcome the new Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Mr Githu Muigai, and we welcome the call from his predecessor, Mr Doudou Diene, to replace the notion of “the defamation of religions” with the legal concept of incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence.[1] Not only does the former notion have no legal basis, it is a threat to human rights and to religion itself.

Existing instruments such as ICCPR Article 20 already protect believers against expression that constitutes incitement. To go further would be to protect the contents of belief itself. Such protection has no basis in international human rights law. Rights belong to individuals, not ideas.

U.N. resolutions combating the defamation of religions are dangerous, as noted by the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Ms Asma Jahangir, since they can be used to legitimize blasphemy laws that "punish members of religious minorities, dissenting believers and non-theists or atheists”[2]

In Afghanistan, a 23-year-old student named Sayed Pervez Kambaksh sits in prison, convicted of blasphemy for circulating an article critical of wmen's status under Islam.[3] For this he has been sentenced to death. Religion does not need protection from Pervez Kambaksh. He needs protection from those who act in its name.

Ultimately, schemes to safeguard belief by law will defeat themselves since faith flourishes best when left to the free conscience of individual persons.

Geneva is an old city, old enough to have seen the burning alive of Miguel Servetus for heresy on 27 October 1553. Jean Calvin approved, explaining, "There is no question here of man's authority; it is God who speaks, and . . . . we spare not kin, nor blood of any, and forget all humanity when the matter is to combat for His glory." [4]

Calvin was convinced that his victim had defamed religion (as no doubt was the Afghan judge). Yet every advance in religious understanding begins with someone who speaks the truth as his or her conscience dictates it, no matter who may disagree. Belief depends on the right to doubt, to dissent, to discover. To combat the defamation of religions is, then, in the end, to combat religion.

Would this Council return Geneva to the era of heresy and blasphemy? Or will it work to guarantee to Pervez Kambaksh and to all people, the freedom of expression enjoyed here today? We urge member states to return focus to the protection of persons and to abandon the dangerous notion of the defamation of religions. Thank you, sir. [5]

______________________

1. Report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, on combating defamation of religions (Mr Doudou Diène), U.N. Doc. A/HRC/9/12, para. 45, 65.

2. Report of the Special Rapporteur for freedom of religion or belief, on elimination of all forms of religious intolerance (Ms Asma Jahangir), U.N. Doc. A/62/280, para. 76.

3. "Blasphemy case shows Afghan divide," BBC News (9 September 2008) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7605395.stm.

4. Jean Calvin, Defensio orthodoxai fidei. Quoted in John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and 'early Enlightenment' Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 325.

5. For additional discussion, see Islam and Human Rights: Defending Universality at the United Nations, and Is There a Clash of Civilizations? The Failure of the United Nations Response, at www.centerforinquiry.net/UN.

"This is impossible, sir."

2008-09-23T05:34:00.007-04:00

Today David Littman was stopped cold by Egypt and the Council president while trying to read a statement on Islamaphobia and antisemitism. Stepping away from the microphone, he exclaimed, "This is impossible, sir."

Shortly thereafter, Roy Brown made it through (with one interruption) the following statement on behalf of the Center for Inquiry and the IHEU:

Mr President,

We were pleased to note the desire of Mr Githu Muigai, the new Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, to move the discussion from the idea “defamation of religions” which many agree has no place in human rights discourse, “to the legal concept of incitement to national, racial and religious hatred, hostility or violence”.

We also applaud his proposal to gather data on hate speech in order to make “fully informed, empirically sound and factually robust analysis about this phenomenon”. Racial discrimination and xenophobia are indeed a serious and widespread problem. It is essential when dealing with such a complex issue, involving education, language skills, economic opportunities, deprivation, media sensationalism, and opportunism, that proposed solutions be based on accurate information.

In our view, the term “Islamophobia” is both misleading and unhelpful. It falsely implies that any criticism of Islam is based on “irrational fear” and must lead automatically to hatred of Muslims.

The widespread use of the term “Islamophobia” may actually be exacerbating the problem by confusing the issue. Immigrants, and not only Muslims, do face discrimination, but this problem will not be solved by such catch-all, simplistic labelling. The accusation of “Islamophobia” is now widely used as an ad hominem weapon to silence opponents by equating any criticism of Islam with racism. Mr President, criticism of Islam, or of any other religion, is not racism: it is a human right.

There is now some evidence that the incidence of hostility to Muslims is being exaggerated. We cite for example, the United States government’s latest data on hate crimes which show that [There were 147 reported cases of hate crimes against Muslims in 2006, and 362 reported cases against Jews. Yet the population of Muslims in United States (estimated at 9.5 million) exceeds that of Jews by a ratio of three to two , so] Jews are on average more than three times more likely than Muslims to be the victims of hate crimes even in the United States, which in 2001 was the victim of the world’s worst ever terrorist attack, carried out by Muslims.

Finally, Mr President, we wish to comment on two glaring omissions from the last report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Mr Doudou Diene. He makes no mention of attacks on Christians, Bahais , Ahmadis and others that have become commonplace in several Arab states, and in Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh . And whilst he mentions growing Antisemitism in Latin America and its historical roots in Europe, he makes no mention of it in the Muslim world, where according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center : “anti-Jewish sentiment is endemic”. These omissions again call into question the impartiality of that Special Rapporteur.

May we respectfully suggest that, rather than focussing exclusively on “Islamophobia”, States address the deep-rooted Antisemitism and general hatred of “the other” within their own societies?

Thank you, Sir.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2006/table1.html http://www.factbook.net/muslim_pop.php http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/usjewpop.html http://www.bahai.org/persecution/iran/update http://www.thepersecution.org/ai/aius0411bd.html http://bangladeshwatchdog.blogspot.com/2006/05/amnesty-international-report-2006.html http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=248

U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs concerned about Durban

2008-09-22T05:44:00.006-04:00

Our D.C. lobbyist Toni Van Pelt has alerted me to this bill, which should go before the U.S. House of Representatives this week:

12) H.Res. 1361 – Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States should lead a high-level diplomatic effort to defeat the campaign by some members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference to divert the United Nation’s Durban Review Conference from a review of problems in their own and other countries by attacking Israel, promoting anti-Semitism, and undermining the Universal Charter of Human Rights and to ensure that the Durban Review Conference serves as a forum to review commitments to combat all forms of racism.

It is coming out of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, chaired by Howard Berman, Democrat of California.

Update on Agenda item 9: NGO statements postponed until Monday

2008-09-19T11:38:00.002-04:00

The NGOs place on the schedule got bumped by the Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Liberia, who needed to speak because she is leaving Geneva this weekend, apparently.

Time for a large (Danish!) beer.

Agenda Item 9: blasphemy

2008-09-19T06:01:00.009-04:00

Today is the debate on "combating the defamation of religions." The Council welcomed Githu Muigai, the new Special Rapporteur on racism, to open Item 9: Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance, follow-up and implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. He summarized the current report of his predecessor, Doudou Diene's report, which, to our surprise, recommended a shift away from the notion of defamations of religions to the legal instrument of incitement to discrimination, hostility, and violence.

In the interactive dialogue with member states, France and then Belgium came out strongly, saying that people have rights, religions do not, and "the defamation of religions" has no place in human rights law. Almost as if they had read my statement (to come this afternoon we hope).

In his response to member states, Mr. Muigai clarified his position on the "shift" from defamation. This shift would eliminate "controversial nomenclature" while retaining the substance of the concerns and returning focus to the victims. He closed by expressing his support for the U.N. program on the Alliance of Civilizations, with which he has initiated a "dialogue." With that, the Special Rap. departed the floor, leaving behind a question mark about his commitment to freedom of expression.

Late in the day, Denmark spoke on behalf of the European paramount to insist on a distinction between criticism of religions and incitement to religion hatred, and to resist the integration of the "defamation of religions" into human rights law.

Waiting to speak

2008-09-18T11:08:00.004-04:00

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was in the house this morning to present the results of a "High Level Fact-Finding Mission" established by the HRC after an Israeli attack in Gaza that resulted in 19 deaths. Most of the afternoon was given to agenda item 7, Human Rights Situation in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories.

Meanwhile we are waiting in the wings to make statements on religious threats to women's rights, under an agenda item concerning "integration of the rights of women into the U.N. system." The next joint statement by CFI and IHEU is going to test the ground rules for debate under the new regime.

European press for Secular Conscience

2008-09-17T12:16:00.005-04:00

The Secular Conscience is beginning to get some attention from the European press, with recent reviews in New Humanist and The Tablet, and a full-page interview on page 2 of the conservative Italian daily Il Foglio.

CFI releases report on "Islam & human rights: Defending universality at the United Nations"

2008-09-17T11:48:00.003-04:00

At today's session and at a joint press conference with IHEU, we released a new Center for Inquiry report (authored by me and Colin Koproske, a brilliant young graduate student in political science at Oxford) entitled "Islam & human rights: Defending universality at the United Nations." The report is now available for download at CFI.

NGOs speak out for freedom of expression at the Human Rights Council

2008-09-17T08:14:00.008-04:00

This morning the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies convened an excellent session at the Human Rights Council to critique the movement at the United Nations "combating the defamation of religions," which is being led by the Organization of the Islamic Conference. In resolutions adopted since 1995, the General Assembly has called for freedom of expression to be limited out of "respect for religions and belief." The representatives of these Egyptian human rights organizations were particularly effective in pointing out that such resolutions will only embolden the suppression of dissent within Islamic states.

At noon I spoke on a panel on "Religion and Freedom of Expression at the Human Rights Council," along with Walid Phares, Naser Khader, and Tarek Fatah (sponsored by the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the Center for Inquiry). The session was attended by representatives of several governments. Walid, Naser, and Tarek, as outsiders to the UN system, could speak candor seldom heard within the halls of the Palais. They connected the scrimishes inside the HRC with a wider "war of values" being waged by Islamists against secular, liberal ideals. For my part, I asked what "respect for religions" would demand.

In the final analysis, it is not religions that deserve our respect. A religion is a collection of metaphysical ideas and moral ideals. Ideas are believed or disbelieved; ideals are pursued or rejected. Admiration, appreciation, perhaps, but respect? No. What deserves respect are persons. Surely, the feelings of persons--individuals believers--can be affected when their beliefs are attacked or ridiculed. These feelings are real and important. However, feelings of offense do not generate a right not to be offended.

Respect for persons does not require that we never hurt their feelings, but rather that we treat them as possessing dignity equal to our own, and therefore hold them to the same fundamental intellectual, ethical, and legal standards to which we hold ourselves, to see them as autonomous, self-legislating creatures. Therefore, respect for a person is not only consistent with criticism of a person's beliefs; respect for a person sometimes requires criticism of his or her beliefs. Sometimes in order to respect, we must disagree. Anything less is not respect, but indifference.

The debate over "defamation of religions" seems to be galvanizing a response. There is optimism in the air that the resolution can be stopped at the next General Assembly, perhaps by a push led by the U.S.

Naser Khader calls on Denmark to condemn Islamism at Durban II

2008-09-16T06:41:00.002-04:00

I'm at the Bar Serpentine outside of the Council chambers, eagerly awaiting the arrival of Naser Khader, member of parliament and leader of the Liberal Alliance in Denmark. On my table is a stack of CFI reports entitled, "Islam & Human Rights: Defending Universality at the United Nations," which will be released tomorrow our informal session with IHEU. Khader is a featured speaker at the session.

On 11 September he released a statement in which he describes Islamism as a form of racism, and urges the Danish government to condemn it during the Durban II:

Later this year, the United Nations will hold a conference on racism. Durban II in Geneva. In spite of this conference, which, like the first, is being hijacked by Islamic countries to support Sharia, the Danish government has chosen to participate. Other countries, including Canada, will boycott it. Now that Denmark chooses to participate, this opportunity must be seized to make a firm stand.

I believe that the Danish government should use Durban II to propose a condemnation of political Islam as a racist ideology. We owe it to ourselves and to our soldiers, who set their lives on the line fighting terrorism on the battlefield, that we at the lofty conferences in the international society act equally firmly and with principle against Islamism.

Lunch with Sudan

2008-09-12T12:21:00.002-04:00

Roy Brown and I encamped at the Bar Serpent outside the HRC chambers for most of the day to collaborate on some statements and plan for next Wednesday's "informal session" on Religion and Freedom of Expression at the Human Rights Council.

We stopped by a lunchtime session by the Sudanese government delegation, on the situation on Darfur. They were giving away sandwiches at the door and peddling dubious versions of recent events. Unfortunately I only got the latter. Remarkably, none of the attending country delegations (including the U.S.) made any comments or questions after the remarks. The only questions came from Roy and a French journalist.

Blasphemy in Geneva

2008-09-11T19:33:00.007-04:00

So far, I have found Switzerland to be an impeccably clean, disciplined, well-ordered, prosperous country (and one, it should be said, with many ways to prevent all but the impeccably clean, disciplined, well-ordered, and prosperous from becoming a part of it).

The Human Rights Council was closed today on account of a national holidy. This afternoon we attended a meeting of the Geneva Forum, an association for the numerous international NGOs based here in the city. The meeting was presided over by the UN representative for the Quakers. Tonight we dined up on the hill in the old city, seated across from the Hotel de Ville, the site of the old city hall, and in the shadow of the Cathedrale St Pierre. It was Jean Calvin's Geneva, and I found myself haunted by the spirit of Miguel Servetus, the man Calvin had burned in October 1553 (for the heresy of questioning infant baptism and doubting that Jesus could have been his own father).

I am thinking of blasphemy as I prepare a statement for the HRC on "combating the defamation of religions," a recent push led by the Islamic states at the United Nations to make "respect for religion" an acceptable constraint on freedom of expression in international human rights law.
This topic is emerging as a hot one for this session of the HRC, as the Special Rapporteur on elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (et al). and the High Commissioner will be delivering reports on the matter next week. Plus, the scheduled April 2009 Durban II conference on racism has many ready to boycott, including the governments of the U.S., Canada, France, Great Britain, and Israel. It is shaping up to be another occasion for politicized bashing of "Islam-bashing."

An excellent freedom of expression NGO from the U.K. called Article 19 just issued a fine statement on the matter along with two leading Egyptian human rights groups.

We could all learn something about quashing heresy from Calvin:

Whoever shall maintain that wrong is done to heretics and blasphemers in punishing them makes himself an accomplice in their crime and guilty as they are. There is no question here of man's authority; it is God who speaks, and . . . . we spare not kin, nor blood of any, and forget all humanity when the matter is to combat for His glory.

World Doesn't End, Officially

2008-09-10T09:31:00.005-04:00

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
Some say in supercooled magnets.

Here in Geneva, I had a front row seat to what some feared would be the end of the world by black hole, as the Large Hadron Collider was officially initiated today. Over 1,000 magnets, cooled to near absolute zero (colder than deep space) and arranged along at 27 km track under the Swiss-French border, will steer beams of protons at close to the speed of light, in search of the "God particle."

As it happens, I'm staying in Geneva as the guest of a senior scientist from Cern, who will treat me and my colleague Hugo to a personal tour of the LHC. I'll be especially careful not to spill coffee on anything.

No taboos, says the new Council President, but . . .

2008-09-09T05:36:00.014-04:00

Yesterday afternoon the NGOs at the Human Rights Council were invited to a meeting with the new President of the Council, Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi of Nigeria. The Center for Inquiry delegation was sitting with the irrepressible David Littman, who spoke up towards the end of the discussion period. He called the President a "watchman," the protector of civil society against those Council member states who would target NGO representatives with ad hominem attacks.

Littman went on, probing the taboo on religious subjects imposed by Uhomoibhi's predecessor: "We understand there are a list of words that we may not use. Can you tell us what that list is?" Uhomoibhi responded without hesitation, "There are no taboos in the Council as far as I am concerned." Littman queried, "There are no words?" Uhomoibhi repeated, "There are no taboos."

"But," he began, "your responsibility is to know that your freedom and my freedom are one," with which he launched into a lucid philosophical passage on freedom and constraint, with shades of Rousseau (but which one, Rousseau the father of the revolution, or Rousseau the father of the Terror?).

"You cannot insult me and insult my belief and say that you are free. You cannot humiliate me and my belief and say that you are free."

Growing increasingly emotional, the President intoned, "I am not less human than you are. You cannot ascend a high moral pedestal and treat me as nothing."

Problems arise "when people are opinionated and they think they hold absolute truth." he said. Instead, the President concluded, with something close to exasperation, "Let us be humble. Let us not think we can be god to another person. This is my plea. Because this world is complex, but it is beautiful. This is really my bottom line."

It was an effective statement, but of course it left Littman and the rest of us wondering what exactly it implied. Clearly the matter was close to the President's heart. I think the most charitable reading, which I urged my colleagues to adopt, is that comments on religious subjects may be advanced if done in tones of civility, humility, and mutual respect.

We should take the President at his word, which he has elaborated in media interviews: "No subject is taboo in the Council. Everything that touches on human rights ought to be discussed in total openness. Some believe that to address one subject authorizes them to abuse another. Debates must take place with mutual respect."

Spinoza speaks at Human Rights Council

2008-09-09T04:53:00.010-04:00

Today, David Littman will distribute and read a joint statement by the Association for World Education (AWE), the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and the Center for Inquiry. Littman has the distinction of early being kicked out of the Council for angering the OIC delegations. A number of observers have suggested that the NGO statements during the 8th session would not have provoked the OIC had they not singled out Islam or Shari'ah for comment. That hypothesis will be put to the test today. This statement refrains from specifics and instead channels the prophet of free thought, Spinoza.

ASSOCIATION FOR WORLD EDUCATION

INTERNATIONAL HUMANIST AND ETHICAL UNION

CENTER FOR INQUIRY

JOINT STATEMENT

by Representative David G. LITTMAN (AWE) – Tuesday (am) 9 September

UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL – NinthSession (8–26 September 2008)

Annual Report of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights and Reports of the OHCHR… (item 2)

[Words reduced and in square brackets were not pronounced in the 3 minutes available]

Thank you, Mr. President. [This is a joint statement by the Association for World Education (AWE), the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) and the Center for Inquiry – on the Address by Ms. Navanetham, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at the Opening of the 9^th session of the HRC (“in particular, I refer to the 60^th anniversaries of the UDHR.”)]

We congratulate you, sir, on your election and extend a hearty welcome to our new High Commissioner.

As you stated, Madam, in your opening address:

“… we must focus on the challenges that remain in bringing to reality the comprehensive vision of human rights as set forth in the Universal Declaration. This vision is a beacon of hope for the future.”

Madam, you personify for civil society and many here that Shakespeare line: “For now sits Expectation in the air.”

The theme of the 60^th anniversary of the UDHR is “dignity and justice for all”. In this context, we maintain that articles 18 on “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and 19 on “the right to freedom of opinion and expression” should be neither diminished nor qualified – other than as indicated in articles 29 and 30.

Six months ago, a veteran Paris-based NGO, the LICRA [Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et Antisémitisme/Inter- national League against Racism and Antisemitism] circulated a substantive statement worldwide signed by thousands [including Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel]: The United Nations versus Human Rights.* The title speaks volumes.

[The key question it posed – and being asked more and more within civil society – is this: “Will 2008 be the year when the United Nations celebrates the 60^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and simultaneously destroys its own principles? There is, indeed, cause for great concern because the institution has lost its own way in recent years, becoming a caricature of itself.”]

Surely, sir, it is time for this Council to resolve not to make any further concessions that weaken the principle of “dignity and justice for all.” The universal standards of the United Nations should be upheld, not watered down by cultural relativism or special pleading, nor should restrictions on human rights be dignified with the status of UN Regional Instruments.

We are making available our two joint NGO written statements on this subject: Sixty Years after the UDHR: Threats to the Universality of Human Rights [A/HRC/9/NGO/2]; and The Cairo Declaration and the Universality of Human Rights [A/HRC/7/NGO/96].

350 years ago, Spinoza attempted to substitute the concept of secular law for the 17^th century European notions of the Deity as the source of law. On the triumph of the ‘sectarians’ – a term covering religious fundamentalists of all stripes – he was explicit. I quote:

… inasmuch as concessions have been made to their animosity, […] they have gained state sanction for the doctrines of which they are the interpreters. Hence they arrogate to themselves state authority and rights, and do not scruple to assert that they have been directly chosen by God and that their laws are Divine, whereas the laws of the state are human and should therefore yield obedience to the laws of God — in other words, to their own laws.”

He concluded, and I quote “… in a free state every man may think what he likes and say what he thinks.”

And: “I have thus shown […] That it is impossible to deprive men of the liberty of saying what they think.” **

Mr President, we urge all participants at this Council to consider carefully the relevance of Spinoza’s words today.

Thank you, Sir.

------------------

* LICRA – Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et Antisémitism / International League against Racism and Antisemitism It was signed by many eminent personalities, including Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel. www.licra.org/news/pdf/get_file.php?file_name=the_united_nations_versus_human_rights__english_version_.pdf

** Conclusion of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670, by Baruch/Benedict de Spinoza, The Works of Spinoza, R.H.M. Elwes, I, chapter XX, pp. 257–66, New York: Dover, 1955]

At the Palais: The New High Commissioner

2008-09-08T11:27:00.006-04:00

This afternoon the Center for Inquiry delegation arrived at the Human Rights Council and met up with Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Roy and our other allies are wondering how the new President of the Council will treat his predecessor's procedural ruling prohibiting the discussion of religion by NGOs. The Center for Inquiry's first joint statement, in response to the new High Commissioner's address, will be read tomorrow by David Littman of the Association for World Education. Well, he will begin reading it. Chances are he will not be allowed to finish.

We missed the opening address by the new High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. A telling extract, on the troubled Durban II world conference on racism, scheduled for April 2009: "I do not believe that 'all or nothing' is the right approach to affirm one's principles or to win an argument. Should differences be allowed to become pretexts for inaction, the hopes and aspirations of the many victims of intolerance would be dashed irreparably."

She not referring to the controversial declaration produced by the August 2008 Durban preparatory meeting in Abuja, Nigeria--which inveighed against freedom of expression and breathed not a word about Darfur. Instead, she was chastising the U.S., Canada, France, U.K. and Israel, for threatening to boycott the April meeting if it appears like it will degenerate into more politicking by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned states.

Best session at the NGO conference

2008-09-04T17:55:00.004-04:00

The Geneva NGO Special Committee on Human Rights sponsored what was hands-down the best session of the day. The topic was partnerships between NGOs and law firms, but moderator Hillel Neuer, the highly combustible representative of UN Watch, turned the discussion session into a roundtable on the recent undermining of freedom of expression at the Human Rights Council (HRC)

This was the first time at this conference I had heard anyone mention it from the podium. For several years, states from the Organization of the Islamic Conference have advanced resolutions to combat "the defamation of religion," which have passed handily. In March, the OIC, aided by Russia, China, Cuba, and the so-called non-aligned states, succeeded in altering the mandate of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression to include monitoring and reporting on "abuses" of expression on matters of religion. In late August, an Abuja, Nigeria regional meeting (in preparation for the Durban II conference on racism) issued a Declaration that calls on states to "avoid clinging inflexibly to free speech . . . with absolute disregard to religious feeling."

One would have thought that the UN would be a citadel for freedom expression, but it has now become home to blasphemy prohibitions. As I mentioned during the panel discussion today, this taboo is now in effect in the chambers of the HRC itself. Late in the eighth session of the HRC, an NGO representative attempted to raise questions about OIC-backed statements of "Islamic human rights," and he was interrupted by the Pakistani delegation, which claimed that even to discuss such matters was an insult to his faith. The Council President subsequently ruled that NGOs may not make "judgments" about religion in their statements before the HRC. As we enter the ninth session, it seems that certain OIC states have succeeded in defining the terms of the conversation.

Reaffirmer les droits de l'Homme pour tous

2008-09-03T18:07:00.008-04:00

After a long month and a half of writing, and a brief musical interlude in Seattle, my nose is back to the blogstone. The Secular Conscience is starting to get some attention in Europe, and I am in Paris and Geneva for the month of September on assignment from the Center for Inquiry.

I arrived in Paris last night and in Montparnasse met up with my colleague Hugo Estrella, the European director for the Center. Today we saw Simone Veil speak at the opening session of a United Nations conference on "Reaffirming Human Rights for All: The Universal Declaration at 60," held at UNESCO Headquarters.

In the city where Eleanor Roosevelt enjoined the General Assembly to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Veil invoked Auschwitz, and the culture of "hate and death" that spurred the creation of the United Nations. 1400 representatives of 537 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had gathered for the 61st annual NGO conference of the UN, and the Center for Inquiry was now among them. Hugo and I had come to enlist allies in the advocacy we will be undertaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva later this month.

At their worst, NGO meetings at the UN are a kind of ritual observance, wherein civil society activists partake in rites of moral self-purification by bathing each other in well-meaning verbiage. This is no exception. The public computer room at UNESCO where I sit is decorated with a temporary display of fabric panels designed to form part of a peace "ribbon" to encircle the Pentagon (one of them says Save the Whales). But these meetings also draw interesting people doing important work. Hugo and I met many of them today, and tonight at a lavish Hotel de Ville reception hosted by the Mayor of Paris.

Earlier in the afternoon, it was another Holocaust survivor, the former French Ambassador to the UN Stephane Hesel, who spoke of the central paradox of the UN. Hesel, who participated in the drafting of the Universal Declaration, pounded on the table and pointed out that the institution was formed by free democracies but is now dominated by states that are not, and many that are openly hostile to liberal rights.

Washington Post Online: New religious discoveries confirm ancient secular wisdom

2008-06-30T10:48:00.003-04:00

We often hear that some new scientific discovery has confirmed ancient religious teaching. It now appears that this hearkening back has gone full circle, and modern religion is coming around to ancient secular wisdom.

I take this up in a new guest column at Washington Post's "On Faith" site. Other contributers to "On Faith" include Elie Weisel, Cal Thomas, George Weigel, Sam Harris, Karen Armstrong, and Mohammad Khatami (where can I get tickets to that dinner party?).

At the recent "Seeds of Compassion" event in Seattle, the Dalai Lama spoke of three paths to compassion and moral development in children: the theistic path of the Abrahamic faiths, the non-theistic religious path of Buddhism, and the "secular, scientific" approach. Surrounded by brain researchers and empirical psychologists, he recommended this secular way as the most promising. For some time he has held that if any tenet of Buddhism contradicts contemporary science, science must trump.

Meanwhile, during his first papal visit to the United States, Benedict XVI stressed the coequal roles of reason and faith in the religious life, and urged Catholics to translate their contributions to public life into a "public theology" accessible to all. At the United Nations, he enjoined religious leaders to "propose a vision of faith not in terms of intolerance, discrimination and conflict, but in terms of complete respect for truth, coexistence, rights, and reconciliation." In his first encyclical, Benedict wrote, "A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the church," where politics is "the sphere of the autonomous use of reason." He may not like the sound of this, but that sounds like secularism to me.

The God Squad on The Secular Conscience

2008-06-08T13:19:00.003-04:00

As of yesterday, The Secular Conscience has won the endorsement of a priest and a rabbi. Writing in the nationally syndicated newspaper column "The God Squad" for Saturday, June 7, Rabbi Marc Gellman cites the book in a discussion of morality.

I urge you to check out a new book by secular philosopher Austin Dacey: "The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life." Dacey disagrees with most religious opinions about the big ethical issues of our time, and I disagree with him. However, I strongly agree with him that it's wrong to reject an opinion about some moral issue just because the person who makes it is religious.

Gellman concedes the significant secularist point that "the apprehension of the moral truth " can come "from unaided human reason."

All of us, secularists and religious folks, must talk to each other and be prepared to give good reasons why we judge some act right or wrong. Saying there's just one truth in the world doesn't free any of us, religious or secular, from the responsibility to give good, sound, accessible reasons for our moral judgments. That's what Dacey believes, that's what I believe, and that's what the best religious thinkers I know believe.

New York Times story

2008-05-24T07:20:00.004-04:00

Today's "Beliefs" column in the New York Times is dedicated to The Secular Conscience, which, it says, "glows with Mr. Dacey’s confidence in John Stuart Mill’s principle that every idea should be 'fully, frequently and fearlessly discussed,' lest it 'be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.'"

During the more than two hour interview with Peter Steinfels in preparation for this article, I could tell that he had read the book closely. It turns out he is sympathetic to some of its main themes. This comes as a big relief to me, because I was so jet-lagged at the time I have no idea what I said!

By coincidence, a story about my work also appeared today in another publication, one which has never faced high-profile accusations of story fabrication: my hometown newspaper (well, near my hometown, which was so small that it had no daily paper). See The Marshall Independent for the local-boy-makes-good scoop.

Free Inquiry magazine cover story

2008-05-20T11:13:00.003-04:00

The Secular Conscience is featured in the cover story of the current Free Inquiry magazine (complete with an illustration of a naked man entering the public square, which the editor swears is not supposed to be me).

I'm taking a copy with me as I'm off to Raleigh-Durham for a reading at The Regulator bookstore, serving the Duke University campus.

New article with my take on "framing science" and The Dawkins Effect

2008-05-14T14:39:00.006-04:00

Observers of science like Matt Nisbet, Chris Mooney, Robert Pennock, and Jon Miller are known for claiming that Richard Dawkins and other scientist critics of religion are hurting the cause of science education in the United States.

In a major article in the newly released anthology, Secularism & Science in the 21st Century (edited by Ariela Keysar and Barry A. Kosmin and published by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, at Trinity College), I look critically at their writings. I find little evidence for their claim, and put forward my own hypothesis, which I dub The Dawkins Effect:

discussion of science-religion conflict in mass media-driven public discourse results in greater public awareness of messages of science-religion harmony. . . . it also makes the harmony messages seem like a reasonable compromise between anti-scientific religion and anti-religious atheism. In short, the presence of overtly agonist scientists such as Dawkins may make accommodationist scientists like [Francis] Collins appear more reasonable to religious believers, and may make the prospect of adopting accommodationist views as the basis for public policy seem more judicious and fair to the moderate middle.

My contribution, "Evolution Education and the Science-Religion Conflict: Dispatches from a Philosophical Correspondent," along with the rest of the book, is available for free download at the Institute.

Mother's Day in Atlanta

2008-05-11T09:51:00.003-04:00

I dedicated The Secular Conscience "to my mother, the creator of my conscience." As I explained , only half jokingly, to an audience in Atlanta today, the book and its dedication were really written in an attempt to make up to her for never calling or visiting her as much as she would like. Now they all could be the beneficiaries of my being a bad son.

New Point of Inquiry episode on secular ethics

2008-05-09T21:13:00.004-04:00

This conversation with DJ Grothe picks up where the previous left off, by exploring objective morality from a secular perspective. Here's the description from Point of Inquiry's site:

In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Austin Dacey argues for the objectivity of morality from a nonreligious perspective. Maintaining that the conscience is prior to and independent of God and religion, he advocates an "ethics from below" that steers a middle course between an empirical "science of good and evil" and a transcendental religious ethic. While sharply criticizing what he sees as simplistic and misleading applications of evolutionary science to moral matters, Dacey defends a naturalistic understanding of the right and good. He explains the advantages of consequentialist moral theories that seek to promote individual well-being, and returns to John Stuart Mill's On Liberty to show that the belief in objective values is perfectly compatible with the social philosophy of secular liberalism. Dacey also responds to Chris Hedges' assertions that secularists do not grasp the nature of evil and that the Enlightenment notion of moral progress is a myth.

Review in Asharq Al-Awsat

2008-05-08T22:50:00.003-04:00

"Making this book available in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages of the Muslim nations would be an immense service," writes Amir Taheri in a review of The Secular Conscience for Asharq Al-Awsat, a leading Arabic international paper.

Dacey is aware of the fact that the debate over secularism is no longer confined to the post-Christian Western democracies but has also spread to other parts of the world where religion, especially Christianity and Islam, retains a strong hold on the popular imagination. Thus, he cites a number of examples that directly concern the Muslim world to show that Muslims, too, would benefit from an open, honest and respectful debate of the issue facing humanity as a whole.

What I lost (and found) on my book tour

2008-05-07T19:00:00.003-04:00

Now back from over a month on the road, I have taken stock.

What I Lost

1. my glasses (someone sent them to me later)

2. my laptop (for one harrowing afternoon)

3. my beloved cuff links constructed of the "shift" key from an antique typewriter.

4. too much money

5. my personal copy of The Secular Conscience, complete with notes and corrections. Apparently someone took it by mistake at the Barnes & Noble, Greenwich Village book signing (whoever you are, you now know where all the typos are!)

6. my hat

All in all, it could have been worse. Plus, I have:

What I Found

1. some old friends

2. lots of new friends

3. new confidence that there is a real need and an audience for my message

Utrecht, Netherlands

2008-05-02T06:03:00.003-04:00

I left for Holland on Wednesday evening, after returning from a lunchtime faculty seminar at Trinity College in Hartford on The Secular Conscience hosted by Professor Mark Silk at the Program on Public Values.

I am writing from Utrecht, where I am attending a conference on the future of secularism in Europe. The conference featured a lot of interesting people, including Stephen Law, a senior lecturer in philosophy at University of London and author of The War for Children’s Minds; David Nash, reader in history at Oxford Brookes University, and author of Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History; Herman Philipse, a leading Dutch atheist philosopher; and Azar Majedi, an Iranian women's rights activist and wife of the late Mansoor Hekmat.

Interestingly for me, the conference statement of purpose described secularism in precisely the terms I attack: "secularisms claims that religious arguments should not be used in politics"; and "religion should be a private and personal matter." I was happy to stir the pot.

I enjoyed some spirited after-hours discussions on Iranian secular politics (and jams to American rock & roll) with Azar. A committed socialist, she worries that Western anti-Islamists have discredited themselves by aligning themselves with neoconservatives.

I also had a good debate on the freedom of expression with Danish philosopher Malene Busk, who became a prominent secularist voice during the cartoon controversy and who now writes for Jyllens Posten. Eventually we agreed that blasphemous speech cannot be defended without presupposing some moral evaluation of its content. One reason why liberal societies should actively stand up for blasphemous speech--even while they actively oppose anti-Semitic speech--lies in the positive moral value of contesting illiberal religion.

Barnes & Noble, Greenwich Village

2008-04-29T14:23:00.002-04:00

I got out of Chicago early this morning, about 12 hours later than anticipated, and now am catching up on work at the Center for Inquiry and looking forward to a proper NYC booksigning at Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village, followed by a reception arranged by my friend Nica Lalli, author of Nothing: Something to Believe In.

USA Today: We're all values voters now

2008-04-28T02:10:00.004-04:00

I must be in the only hotel in Chicago that doesn't give away USA Today. So I stepped outside in the rain and picked up the last copy from the street corner vending machine. On the opinion pages I found a nice quarter-page layout of my op-ed, now titled (by the paper) "A Values Voter's Trap."

Woody Allen confesses that he once failed a philosophy exam when he was caught looking into the soul of the student next to him. Like metaphysics, morality is not the kind of thing that can be lifted from someone else. And to the extent that one tries, one usually loses it in the process. This could pretty well describe what has been happening lately with the Democratic Party's relationship to religion and values in public life.

Read the full article at USA Today.

Meanwhile, I'm heading over to University of Illinois for an afternoon talk.

The Guardian calls me part J. S. Mill, part Melanie Phillips

2008-04-23T14:54:00.006-04:00

Who is Melanie Phillips? She's a British journalist, commentator, author of Londanistan, and a fierce critic of Islamism in the U.K. Apparently the reviewer for The Guardian didn't care for The Secular Conscience's message about the fecklessness of secular liberals, including reviewers in The Guardian:

Not surprising given the reason for the book's sense of urgency, which is the incipient Islamist apocalypse: "In the face of a challenge to the future of European values, the official ideology of multiculturalism has become a pact for mass cultural suicide." By this point near the book's end those who believe that our civilisation depends on the freedom to publish racist cartoons will be nodding energetically.

I'm convinced Mill would be with Phillips, and me, on Islamism. Of course, neither of us would be with her in her doubts about evolution, which she has called "a theory with holes in it."

Tomorrow I drive east for a Barnes & Noble outside of Detroit, Michigan and then a late night of writing a piece tentatively titled "New Religious Discoveries Confirm Ancient Secular Wisdom."

Grand Rapids girl makes good

2008-04-22T16:25:00.003-04:00

On my way to Grand Rapids, Michigan, I thought of my colleague Susan Jacoby, who hails from there. After a long wait, she is scheduled to go on Stephen Colbert tonight to talk about her book The Age of American Unreason. I hope Stephen will be alright!

Where are the children are above average

2008-04-20T13:56:00.002-04:00

It feels good to be back in my home state of Minnesota, where I'm off to a reading at Garrison Keilor's bookstore Common Good Books in St. Paul in a few minutes. My mother never would have forgiven me if I had not come back here.

Did Ratzinger get my memo?

2008-04-18T12:45:00.003-04:00

It was not to be. I left D.C. just as Benedict XVI arrived there, and now I'm leaving New York as he begins his visit here. Recently he has said, echoing a theme from The Secular Conscience, “Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted.”

My mind is still racing from yesterday's intensive hour of discussion at the New York Academy of Sciences, where I got some of my most probing questions yet, mostly on the nature of reason and the neurobiology of conscience.

We've often heard about new scientific discoveries confirming ancient religious wisdom. Hearing the Dalai Lama's remarks at his "Seeds of Compassion" event in Seattle last weekend, it struck me that this circling back has come all the way around, and now it is modern religion that is confirming ancient secular wisdom. The Dalai Lama mentioned three paths to compassion and moral development in children: the theistic path of Western religions, the non-theistic religious path of Buddhism, and the "secular, scientific" path. Surrounded by brain researchers and empirical psychologists, he declared this secular way the most promising.

Meanwhile, the pope is emphasizing reason's coequal role in the religious life, and urging Catholics to translate their contributions to public life into a "public theology" accessible to all. That sounds like secularism to me.

Back in New York City

2008-04-16T19:41:00.006-04:00

I spent the last three days in D.C., during which I spoke at the Center for Inquiry as well as at the University of Delaware in nearby Newark, Delaware. Meanwhile, I tried to find out what, if anything, the U.S. Department of State plans to do about a resolution to shock the conscience adopted on March 28 by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which effectively establishes a blasphemy prohibition at the heart of the international human rights system.

Having just arrived back in New York City for a few days, I found myself watching the sun set over New York Harbor and catching up in conversation with DJ Grothe, who had just finished an interview with Chris Hedges. Apparently there were some fireworks, which I look forward to catching on Point of Inquiry. Hedges' new book is I Don't Believe in Atheists.

I just learned I'll be filling in for my boss Paul Kurtz at a lunchtime address at the New York Academy of Sciences here in Lower Manhattan tomorrow, April 17.

Watching "Compassion Forum" from Capital Hill

2008-04-13T21:52:00.003-04:00

I gave a Sunday sermon at the Center for Inquiry in Washington, D.C. this afternoon, and then recuperated after several long days and red-eyes by watching the Democratic candidates discuss "faith and values" on CNN's Compassion Forum broadcast from Pennsylvania.

If I didn't know better, I'd say Obama had been reading The Secular Conscience. He chastised liberals who seek to preclude religious reasons from the public square, but also insisted that believers play by the rules of public conversation. They should not try to stop the conversation by citing divine authority, but admit that they can be wrong. He closed by reminding the audience "we are not just a Christian nation. We are a Jewish nation. We are a Buddhist nation. We are a Muslim nation, Hindu nation. And we are a nation of atheists and non-believers."

Argument on Digby's blog

2008-04-11T16:35:00.005-04:00

Tristero has started posting a conversation with me about The Secular Conscience over at the liberal blog Digby's Hullabaloo. He's generally sympathetic, but worries that anti-Islamist liberals like me are playing into the hands of the neocons. I know Tristero as my friend Richard Einhorn, a wonderful composer based in New York. From argument among friends emerges truth? We'll see.

UPDATE 4/12/08: A second post, on liberals and Islam, is now up and generating some heat.

New York Post review

2008-04-11T13:31:00.003-04:00

Last Sunday, the New York Post ran a review of The Secular Conscience. The reviewer describes me as "a secularist philosopher spoiling for a fight." I'll take that. After presenting a good summary of the political portion of the book, Neil J. Kressel (author of Bad Faith: The Danger of Religious Extremism, like mine a Prometheus Book), states

When you criticize Christianity or Judaism sharply, you may be deemed impolite or politically incorrect. But when you hurl similar criticisms at Islam, you may well endanger your life and precipitate an international crisis. Dacey understands, but never gets to the heart of this essential difference.

This confused me, as I devote an entire chapter to Islam, as well as an extended discussion of how its inherently political nature sets it apart from other faiths.

From its beginnings, Christian thought placed a wedge between the temporal order and the spiritual order: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” With the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, God and Caesar found themselves sharing the same throne. Increasing interference by Rome the Empire in Church affairs spurred Christian leaders to define the civil and ecclesiastical roles more sharply. In the early fifth century, Augustine described Christians as dual citizens dwelling in the earthly City of Man but belonging to a heavenly City of God, the community of all saved souls. . . . This foundational Christian dualism has no analogue in Islamic civilization. . . . Muhammad was simultaneously the spiritual, civil, and military leader, a tribal chief. Whereas the first Christians kindled the light of their prophet in cellars, catacombs, and caves hidden from the sword of earthly power, the first Muslims followed their prophet into battle, conquering cities, then empires, for him. Where they went, they would become the earthly power.

Science magazine Policy Forum

2008-04-10T21:51:00.003-04:00

In the new issue of Science magazine, I'm an author, along with my colleagues from Science Debate 2008, of a Policy Forum editorial entitled "Science and the Candidates." It explains how "the U.S. science community has converged at record speed with the unified goal of raising the profile of science in our national dialogue." Science Debate 2008 has issued a standing invitation to the candidates for an April 18 forum in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, I'm preparing to speak at University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Returning to Olympia

2008-04-09T11:10:00.003-04:00

Today I visit my alma mater, The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, for an early afternoon reading in the library. In the evening I'll sit in on two classes that have been assigned sections of The Secular Conscience. I'm looking forward to seeing my first philosophy professor and thanking him for leading me astray.

Steering to Portland

2008-04-07T15:13:00.005-04:00

According to all sociological estimates, Washington and Oregon are the epicenter of the secular boom in American demographics. I'll be at Reed College tonight and then Portland State University Tuesday at 4:30 p.m., with a local radio show early that morning.

Thoughts on A Secular Age from Seattle

2008-04-04T09:35:00.004-04:00

Arriving in Seattle today for a talk at the University of Washington, I'm posting a portion of my forthcoming review of Charles Taylor's book, A Secular Age.

A Secular Age is a polemic. Exceptionally drawn out and mild though they may be, serious arguments are at work in it. If successful, they would vindicate a number of highly controversial philosophical claims about the nature of morality and the good life. Unfortunately, Taylor’s controversial philosophical views are neither clearly identified as such nor justified through rigorous argumentation. Instead, they often surface only in his rhetorical framing (Taylor chooses to describe humanism as “exclusive” rather than “self-sufficient,” and to talk of a “Great Disembedding” instead of a “Great Liberating”), in the hues of his prose, or in the mood that hangs over the book. That mood is, in a word, ennui:

Almost every action of ours has a point; we’re trying to get to work, or to find a place to buy a bottle of milk after hours. But we can stop and ask why we’re doing these things, and that points us beyond to the significance of these significances. . . . The issue may arise for us in a crisis, where we feel that what has been orienting our life up to now lacks real value, weight. . . . But the sense of emptiness, or non-resonance, may arise in a quite different way. It can come in the feeling that the quotidian is emptied of deeper resonance, is dry, flat; the things which surround us are dead, ugly, empty; and the way we organize them, shape them, arrange them, in order to live has no meaning, beauty, depth, sense. There can be a kind of “nausée” before this meaningless world.

The cost of the secular age is this malaise of modernity, the malaise of immanence. We moderns are “restless at the barriers of the human sphere.” We have “deeply felt need” for something more, something beyond our ordinary flourishing. We are haunted by the thought that the suffering all around us is irredeemably pointless. If Taylor were sitting in a café this Sunday afternoon, he’d be the one gazing dejectedly while his tea goes cold, thinking, Is this all there is?

Taylor explores several different cultural responses to the perceived malaise of immanent humanism. Alongside the reactions by traditional, transcendental religion, Romantics sought transcendence in nature or beauty, rescue from the alienation of instrumental reason from the sensual world. And an “immanent counter-Enlightenment”—exemplified by Nietzsche—indicted the morality of humanism for denuding life of the heroic, tragic, and Dionysian by valuing equality and universal happiness above all. In its most virulent expressions, neo-Nietzschean anti-humanism gives meaning to suffering by embracing it, and deals with death by becoming the death-dealer. Believers and humanists might align against neo-Nietzscheans to affirm the worth of mercy and justice, while neo-Nietzscheans and believers converge in thinking that humanism’s vision of life is lacking in some crucial dimension.

Is humanism missing something? What are we to make of these feelings of emptiness, or the specter of irredeemable suffering? Can we continue to find sense in our moral strivings for a better world? What are we to do with these longings for a transcendent good? For those of us who are moved by such questions at all, I see three possible strategies.

Fast. We acknowledge the hunger for the transcendent and we resolve not give in to it until it can be satiated in some good beyond life, perhaps The Good. We accept no substitutes.

Diet. We acknowledge that the hunger for the transcendent is real, but because we also realize that it cannot be satisfied in any way we can live with, with we learn to live with the hunger. We sometimes get pangs, but we perceive them for what they are.

Feast. We recognize the hunger for the transcendent, and while we see that it cannot be met by some good outside of life, we find that it can be nourished by others goods, by forms of transcendence within life.

Taylor takes the Fast approach. Of course, any Faster needs to explain why his favored good is the only kind that can successfully stave off transcendent hunger. Although he devotes zero space to analyzing the concept of transcendence in A Secular Age, Taylor characterizes it as “the full-hearted love of some good beyond life” or “some goals beyond human flourishing.” Why think that these goals must be found in traditional religion, let alone in a relationship to the God of Abraham, as Taylor hopes?

Anyway, why assume that having God around will relieve ennui? Given all that we know about human beings, why not instead expect that if there were a heaven, someone would be sitting there this Sunday afternoon thinking, Well then, is this all there is? So long as we remain persons in the next world, such questions may be inescapable. And inasmuch as we do not remain persons, we literally have nothing to look forward to. I’ve decided that if there are any goods worth wanting in the next world, they will turn out to be goods that we already have in this one—goods like love, knowledge, and beauty. Can the Fast approach conceive of some other-worldly values so different in kind from this-worldly values that they promise a nourishment of a different order?

What should further weaken the will of the Faster is the fact that there are plenty of naturalistic explanations for the transcendent urge. To the extent that we find sources of this urge in inescapable features of the human condition, we stop seeing them as the stamp of a real supernatural realm, and we become inclined to Diet rather than Fast.

For example, as Thomas Nagel has observed, the occasional impression that our deepest pursuits somehow lack metaphysical heft might be explained by a simple fact about persons, that we are capable of seeing our lives at once from the subjective point of view and from the objective point of view. From the subjective point of view, the view from the inside as it were, our concerns strike us as real and important; they are always splashed across our psychic foreground. But our cognitive equipment also permits us to regard ourselves and our lives as objects, and in this view our concerns disappear into the uniform grain of the physical cosmos. When these two frames of reference collide, the effect is absurdity, much as when a head of state slips and falls off a stage in mid-address. The absurdity, and, often, humor, spring from the sudden juxtaposition a frame of reference appropriate to persons—with the dignity of intentional agency and responsibility—and a frame of reference appropriate to objects—inert players in the slapstick of Newtonian dynamics.

Astonishingly, Taylor neglects empirical scientific explanations for transcendent longings. He seems to think that Freud’s discredited psychodynamic accounts are still the state of the art in this field, ignoring decades of new literature on the evolutionary psychology and neuroscience of religious and moral experience. He does mention the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who in The Fragility of Goodness cautioned against the impulse to “transcend humanity,” locating the root of that impulse in our discomfort and anxiety about our own bodily finitude, neediness, and vulnerability. But Nussbaum is not opposed to stepping beyond the bounds of ordinary experience. She points towards a Feast strategy, which embraces the kinds of going-beyond of which we are capable: “There is a great deal of room, within the context of a human life . . . for a certain sort of aspiration to transcend our ordinary humanity.” We can seek and cherish transcendence of an “internal and human sort.”

Taylor gives an extended hearing to the Feast strategy, but in the end fails to show why it is inadequate. He presents Luc Ferry’s exploration of “le sens du sens”—the meaning of meaning:

[Ferry] sees in the succouring of human life and well-being universally a goal which really transcends the ordinary ambit of life. And he cites moving testimony how service in organizations like Medécins Sans Frontieres has effectively given a strong sense to life for many young people. It is as he argues a kind of transcendence of our ordinary existence, but one which is horizontal, not vertical. He even wants to use the term sacred . . . but this doesn’t take us outside the human domain; on the contrary, it is very much part of the human life-form to propose such ends which transcend the ordinary.

Horizontal transcendence delivers us from the small, cramped world of the self and its hide-bound concerns. And by calling us to impartial, universal moral regard for well-being, it gives meaning to suffering and injustice: they are our enemies. What is wrong with Feasting? Should we not celebrate the worldview that makes possible these secular people who find self-transcendence and le sens du sens in extraordinary service to others? Is something still missing? How could the ascendance of immanent humanism be considered a defeat for humanity, let alone “a victory for darkness”?

Raising Arizona

2008-04-02T18:43:00.004-04:00

Blogging in the sun outside of Tucson, where I arrived this morning for two days of Arizona appearances. Last night was Arizona State University in Tempe. Tonight I speak at a hotel in Tucson. After two days and one long night, I've finished my book review of the colossal new book by Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. I'll post some highlights later.

Southern California

2008-03-31T22:01:00.000-04:00

After arriving in Hollywood late last night, I woke up and gave my secular sermon this Sunday morning at the Steve Allen Theater in the Center for Inquiry on Hollywood Boulevard, where my brother Emmett and his wife Barb came out to cheer me on. The director of the Center gave me his car and set me loose on the L.A. freeways. I drove down to Costa Mesa, Orange County, where I spoke at a public library. By the end of the day, we had sold out all of the books that had been shipped to Southern California. A subject of conversation today: the adoption by the United Nations Human Rights Council of a new mandate to gaurd against the "abuses" of freedom of expression that constitute discrimination against the religious. And all this time we thought the point of the Human Rights Council was to protect human rights!

From the Bay

2008-03-29T13:52:00.003-04:00

Despite rain and a Critical Mass bike rally, we had a good audience at the World Affairs Forum in downtown San Francisco last night. I spent yesterday afternoon writing a release on the Medellin v. Texas decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, and doing a phone interview with Religion News Service on The Secular Conscience. Off to Palo Alto this afternoon.

More fatherly love

2008-03-28T11:41:00.005-04:00

Richard John Neuhaus is no longer the only prominent Catholic priest welcoming one of the main themes of The Secular Conscience. The "religious news analyst" Father Jonathan Morris (you may have seen his CNN or BBC coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II) says at FoxNews.com that when he picked up the book he was prepared for tears, but that it gave him hope that he can talk to atheists about politics.

U.S. tour kicks off in New York City

2008-03-26T20:16:00.004-04:00

This week I kicked off my U.S. book tour in New York City. We had some laughs about the newly released Deadly Sins, but once we got into my material, I began to encounter some serious push-back on my thoughts about secularism and Islamism. I was more than happy to reciprocate.

This Monday I had the pleasure beginning with a reading at The Half King in Chelsea. Many thanks to Clay Ezell and Sebastian Junger at the Half King for making this happen. We had a room full of sharp people, many of whom were eager to discuss the state of the American Left and the Democratic Party. Afterwards I engaged in a polite fight with a woman from Revolution Books, who wanted to turn me on to Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Lucky for me, she bought The Secular Conscience before realizing that I consider the Islamists a bigger threat than the Christian fundamentalists.

Last night I spoke at Columbia University, hosted by a student group the Columbia Skeptics. One audience member seemed to defend Ahmadinejad's statement on gays, suggesting he had been misunderstood. The NYC-based composer and secularist blogger Richard Einhorn wondered whether by reprinting the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Free Inquiry magazine and others were playing into the hands of conservative bigots. Perhaps under the influence of cold medicine, I just blared that I didn't care. Should it matter to our defense of his free expression that Theo van Gogh was an asshole? Richard, a friend of mine, invited me to do an interview for his blog to discuss further. The leaders of the student group, Alon Levy and Jennifer Bernstein, presented me with some of the most probing questions yet. Thanks to Alon and Jennifer for bringing me on campus.

Gays in Iran, moral relativists at home

2008-03-22T13:09:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I had a good conversation with Mike Signorile on his talkshow on the SIRIUS Satellite Network station OutQ, which is advertised as "Information, and Entertainment for the Gay and Lesbian Community." We got into the moral relativism of secular liberals, in particular when it comes to Islam and human rights. I brought up a recent bizarre case in point: the Columbia University queer student group that agreed with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that there are no gays in Iran--on the conceptual grounds that "Western" concepts such as "homosexual" cannot be applied outside our borders.

After the interview I had a chance to thank Signorile for calling attention to the case of Mehdi Kazemi. Kazemi is a 19-year-old Iranian who came to Europe to study, learned that his lover in Iran had been apprehended and executed by the authorities for gay. His application for asylum in Great Britain was turned down in 2006 and he fled to Netherlands, narrowing avoiding deportation to Iran, where would face almost certain death. Now the Dutch are refusing to consider the case, which may end up at the European Court.

How, we wondered, has this story received so little attention from mainstream media outlets?

Just finished taping Point of Inquiry

2008-03-21T15:06:00.004-04:00

I just finished an in-depth interview with my friend D.J. Grothe at the Point of Inquiry podcast. We dug into the first half of the book, and he brought some really challenging questions. D.J. tells me they'd like to have me back to discuss the latter chapters on secular ethics. The show should be posted by the end of today at Point of Inquiry.

Now I'm headed uptown for a 4:30 interview on "The Michelangelo Signorile Show" on SIRIUS Satellite Radio. More on that soon.

Where is The Secular Consience now? In stores

2008-03-18T14:27:00.007-04:00

It is March 18, official publication date. I just called Barnes & Noble at Union Square and Lincoln Center to discover that The Secular Conscience is in. "Please hold while I transfer you to philosophy." So, these stores at least have opted not to file me under Atheism, in the Religion aisle, but instead in philosophy. No doubt they read my incisive blog about the mistake of defining secularism merely as the negation or religion. The point of The Secular Conscience is not so much to go after religion as to come before it.

Please ask for The Secular Conscience at your local bookseller, and if you have a moment, let me know where it is located. This will satisfy my curiosity and drive up demand for the book at the booksellers at the same time!

"State of Belief" on Air America

2008-03-15T10:31:00.003-04:00

I make an appearance on "State of Belief," a nationwide show on the Air America radio network, airing today 10-11 a.m. and tomorrow 7-8 p.m. EST. The show is hosted by Reverend Welton Gaddy, head of The Interfaith Alliance, a leading organization on the Religious Left. In our brief conversation, I wonder whatever happened to the Secular Left. Listen at Air America.

Richard John Neuhaus disagrees with me for the right reasons

2008-03-07T13:39:00.007-05:00

I'm pleased to report the endorsement of The Secular Conscience by one of America's leading religious public intellectuals. Well, partial endorsement. In a review for First Things, Richard John Neuhaus, author of The Naked Public Square, disagrees with me about the right things:

On almost all the hot-button issues—abortion, embryo-destructive research, same-sex marriage, Darwinism as a comprehensive philosophy, etc.—Dacey is, in my judgment, on the wrong side. But he is right about one very big thing. These contests are not between people who, on the one side, are trying to impose their morality on others, and people who, on the other side, subscribe to a purely procedural and amoral rationality. Over the years, some of us have been trying to elicit from our opponents the recognition that they, too, are making moral arguments and hoping that their moral vision will prevail. But in the world of secular liberalism, morality is the motive that dare not speak its name. Austin Dacey strongly agrees.

Are my secularist friends reading First Things? They should be. I sent the below letter to editor.

To the Editor:

It is not always easy to get my secular liberal friends to read First Things as often as they should. Happily, I now have an additional occasion to persuade them: Richard John Neuhaus’ review of my book, The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life. Of course, my fellow travelers may stop speaking to me once they discover that Mr. Neuhaus there refers to me as an "ally." Nevertheless, it is a designation I proudly accept, inasmuch as we both endorse a polity that engages with questions of conscience in public life rather than vainly insisting on "privatizing" them.

As an ally, I must clarify one misstatement of my views that appeared in this fair and thoughtful review. Mr. Neuhaus claims that I offer "a vigorous critique of the limitations" of John Stuart Mill’s thought. In fact, my aim is to rescue Mill the moral realist and objectivist about value from a superficial understanding that takes the wrong lessons from the Harm Principle. To adapt Bacon’s line: a little Mill inclineth man’s mind to subjectivism, but depth in Mill bringeth about men’s minds to objectivism.

Mill could not be clearer in On Liberty that his principle is not "one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other’s conduct in life, and that they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved." Instead, we "owe each other help to distinguish the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former rather the latter." For Mill, we protect conscience from coercion not so that it may be private, but so that it may be open, open to public scrutiny and revision in light of objective standards. Liberty of conscience matters because for creatures like us it is essential to a life well-lived.

In this way, Mill’s liberalism, like Spinoza’s, supplies the antidote to the philosophical and moral infirmity that besets too many of their secular liberal descendents. It is one of the chief of aims of my book to make us all closer allies to them both.

Sincerely,

Austin Dacey

Mammon bites god

2008-03-01T17:09:00.002-05:00

In this month's Atlantic, the unassailable Alan Wolfe argues that secularism is winning the new religious wars, even though not everyone notices:

the idea of inevitable secularization has fallen out of favor with many scholars and journalists. Still, its most basic tenet—that material progress will slowly erode religious fervor—appears unassailable. Last October, the Pew Global Attitudes Project plotted 44 countries according to per capita gross domestic product and intensity of religious belief, gauged by the responses to several questions about faith (a rendition of the Pew data appears on the opposite page). The pattern, as seen in the Pew study and a number of other sources, is hard to miss: when God and Mammon collide, Mammon usually wins.

This is not just because the wealthier and better educated reject the faith of their fathers, but more fundamentally because modernity makes that faith but one among many in a marketplace of belief. Unable to compel adherence to the One True Way, the many ways are forced to compete for adherents. This encounter with modernity, Wolfe shows, can have a profound moderating influence.

As religious leaders recognize that they are more likely to swell their ranks through persuasion than through coercion, they find themselves accepting such secular ideas as free will and individual autonomy. And even religions that are culturally dominant and closely linked with the state must worry about holding on to the allegiance of the young, as well as retaining the loyalties—and the money—of those who have moved abroad and been exposed to religious pluralism and tolerance. As one part of the world becomes modern, those parts it touches also gain exposure to modern ideas. Few places remain where old-fashioned, rigidly dogmatic forms of religion are isolated.

In his monumental A Secular Age, Charles Taylor makes a similar point, although unlike Wolfe he often sounds nostalgic for a pre-secular age. Once belief becomes one choice among many, standing in need of vindication, secularism's work has already been done.

It's a book!

2008-02-29T19:00:00.004-05:00

Faulkner advised writers: Murder your darlings. When I couldn't take mine anymore, I sent them off to school. Now all of a sudden they're back--clean, tall and hard-backed. They got their stuff together. I held a copy of The Secular Conscience in the flesh for the first time this week. Fresh from the printer, they are now shipping on Amazon. My darlings, you can't go home again.

Book tour announced

2008-02-22T00:38:00.003-05:00

The itinerary for a 20+ city promotional tour was just unveiled at www.secularconscience.com, with engagements still being added. After some pre-launch events in and around Toronto in early March, the tour kicks off in New York City with a March 18 publication party at People. I can't wait to hit the road.

Is "secularism" going mainstream?

2008-02-18T14:49:00.005-05:00

This week's Newsweek includes a right-on column by religion editor Lisa Miller defending the term "secularism" against its critics (among whom she includes Harvard's humanist chaplain, Greg Epstein--but see here). Miller contrasts secularism with nontheism and underscores its positive meaning:

"Secular" was first used in the Middle Ages to mean things and people not belonging to the church—as Webster's puts it, "not overtly or specifically religious; not ecclesiastical or clerical." This remains its best and most important meaning. In this great experiment that is American democracy, "secular" is the only word we have to describe the idea, handed down by the Founders, that our leaders do not belong to God, they belong to us.

In this sense, we're all secularists now.

Gathering of top scientists marred by lack of conflict

2008-02-17T02:30:00.011-05:00

In the exposition hall of the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston, the Templeton Foundation is passing out M&Ms that read "BIG QUESTION" along with its literature. The science-finds-God message that comes out of Templeton funding isn't necessarily sugar-coated, but it is shiny, appealing, and pleasing to the popular palate. And it starts melting even before you swallow it.

My friend Matt Nisbet, an expert on science communication at American University in Washington, believes that Templeton is far more successful than traditional scientific organizations at "creating news pegs around science and religion." Matt organized an impressive session on Communicating Science in a Religious America on this afternoon's AAAS program. The description of the session asserts that scientists need to learn

to craft communication efforts that are sensitive to how religiously diverse publics process messages but also to the way science is portrayed across types of media. In these efforts, scientists should adopt a language that emphasizes shared values and has broad appeal, avoiding the pitfall of seeming to condescend to fellow citizens or alienating them by attacking their religious beliefs. Part of this process includes “framing” an issue in ways that remain true to the science but that make the issue more personally meaningful, thereby potentially sparking greater interest or acceptance.

Matt suggests that writings like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion make many religious Americans regard science and scientists as alien enemies. Of course we wouldn’t want Dawkins teaching high school biology in Texarkana. But that doesn’t mean his perspective has no place in the broader public conversation. In fact, the prominence of sciences-versus-religion messages may elevate the platform of science-religion reconciliation.

“Gathering of Top Scientists Marred by Lack of Conflict” is a not a story headline I’d want to have to pitch to any news desk in America. When it comes to “sparking greater interest,” a good conflict is hard to beat. Case in point: the 2006 Time magazine cover story “God versus Science,” which featured a Richard Dawkins-Francis Collins debate on evolution, creation, and beyond. I hypothesize that the pitting of Collins against Dawkins had two effects. First, it set Collins before a huge general audience who otherwise would have never given a moment’s thought to theistic evolution. Second, by presenting Collins’ accommodating stance on religion and science as the alternative to Dawkins' unflinching rationalism, Time’s conflict narrative made Collins’ view more palatable to the pew-bound than it would have appeared in isolation.

How exactly is this bad for public understanding of science? Science will be personally meaningful to the religious insofar as it has something to say about their deepest cultural beliefs. Saccharine rhetoric about "shared values" may fare better, but I'm aware of no compelling empirical evidence that it is. I find it at least as plausible, if ironic, that the presence of science-religion agonists in public debate makes accommodationists better known and liked, which in turn get them more news pegs.

Come to think of it, what is a news peg, anyway? Maybe it's what you hang a frame on.

Spying Mr. Hitchens in the religion aisle

2008-02-10T19:31:00.000-05:00

A recent trip to a local Borders Books in Manhattan came to a jarring end when I discovered Christopher Hitchens’ anthology, The Portable Atheist. It was in fact the title I had come to find. What jolted me was where I had come to find it: in the religion aisle. There at the end of the aisle were a couple of shelves marked by a protruding shingle reading “Atheism.” What was Hitchens doing here? Isn’t atheism a religion, as the saying goes, like not collecting stamps is a hobby?

Last year I saw Hitchens on panel discussion at BookExpo

America

, a trade show for publishers in the giant Javits Center. The name of the session was “Atheism: A New Subcategory of Religion.” I took these for terms of art of the publishing industry, which divides the world up into various domains according to how those domains would be marketed to different target audiences. Presumably the idea was that people buy books about religion, and atheist books are about religion (specifically, how we’re better off without it). It seems that what began as booksellers’ shoptalk had become bookshop layout.

At the BookExpo, Hitchens appeared perfectly comfortable with the designation of his newfound genre. Standing up to the microphone, he began his talk, “If one cannot be erect, at least one can be upright.” And why shouldn’t God is Not Great do well by the religion market? I would venture that this literary intellectual is more comfortable there than in the Science section, where the entire New Atheist crew is stationed at the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center.

The Secular Conscience is not an atheist book (whatever that means), and I hope it won't end up in that section, esteemed though the company would be. Still, I've been wondering what the new categories imply about the ordering of our thinking.

As an editor with the secularist magazine Free Inquiry, I reserve a special subcategory in my heart for the Borders chain. When in 2006 Free Inquiry became the only magazine of note in

America

to publish the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Borders refused to carry the issue, resulting in headlines around the world for us. A common criticism then, as today, is that critics of religion offer nothing of their own; they only tear down. Atheism does nothing to expand knowledge or enlarge the human spirit. It is pure anti-ism. Atheism, in a word, is just negative.

The more I hear this charge, the less I get it. Of course atheism is merely negative, if you classify it as a subcategory of religion. But that is precisely not the point.

Undeniably, atheism is what logicians call a negation: it is not the case that there exists a perfect being which created and sustains the universe. But logical form alone is not enough to tell us whether a claim is merely critical in any pejorative sense. Consider: It is not the case that you have anything to fear. Atheist assertions take place within the context of a larger cultural conversation. Whether a contribution to a conversation is merely negative depends on what the conversation is about.

Suppose you and I are building a house, and I voice a concern about whether the foundation will be stable without some solid bedrock beneath. You know that with enough of the right kind of clay for the foundation to settle onto, we don’t need bedrock, and so you reject my concern. In doing so, you are not being merely critical. You are making a criticism, but with the broader purpose of furthering a project that is itself constructive: building a house. Furthermore, your contribution is not an attack but a defense, a rebuttal of my skepticism about a part of that project.

Most of the great pre-Socratic thinkers of ancient

Greece

, such as Democritus, had no room for supernatural beings in their theories of reality. The atheism of the ancients was a part of a broad, constructive, naturalistic inquiry into the structure of the cosmos. Over the following centuries, as Greek philosophy was synthesized with Judeo-Christian theology, the naturalistic tradition was to be swallowed up by theology, of which it became a subcategory. Since the whole point of theology is to articulate and vindicate faith, this subcategory of naturalism was merely critical, and its only purpose was, as the American philosopher Quentin Smith puts it, “stimulating further development of the argumentative defense of theism.”

Today we can ask, what is the context of the current conversation about atheism? What is its broader purpose? In post-Enlightenment, post-Darwinian civilization, the dominant outlook is the naturalistic worldview, in which the universe is understood as a system of natural processes unperturbed by occult or spiritual forces. The world doesn’t get to cheat and bring things about by magic, but always by some causal mechanism. This is the outlook presupposed by all of the biology, psychology, and history with which we understand ourselves and our place in nature, as well as the physics, chemistry, medicine, and engineering by which we have transformed ourselves and our places. The open-ended investigations of the empirical sciences—in which people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are engaged—are gradually filling in an ever-more coherent and complete naturalistic world-picture.

Against the backdrop of this naturalistic conversation, it is the supernatural theists who are the naysayers—evolution can’t account for living things, physics doesn’t explain where the universe came from, morality is impossible without transcendent enforcement, and all the rest. It is the believers who are the skeptics, doubters of the foundations of modernity, and the atheists who are shoring up the construction project.

So when atheists today are accused of being negative, they can respond: that depends on what you are talking about. One day, if Dawkins and Hitchens are running the store, you might well find the religion books in the philosophy or literature section, instead of the other way around.

The Goldstein standard

2008-02-01T18:12:00.000-05:00

I have to say I was bit intimidated when I sent my manuscript to the incomparable Rebecca Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza. What would I do if she said I got Spinoza all wrong? (The name of my chapter, after all, is "Spinoza's Guide to Theocracy.") Instead, to my delight, I got this:

Against the cliche that there can be no morality without God, Austin Dacey mounts a rejoinder so intellectually and morally satisfying that all should think twice before repeating that "truism" again. His arguments are so fair-minded, knowledgable, and objective that they demonstrate, in their very form and tone, the values of fair-mindedness, knowledgability and objectivity for which he advocates. A work at once philosophically rich and morally inspiring, The Secular Conscience makes an invaluable contribution to the charged conversation concerning religion and reason.

I have Rebecca to thank for getting me to read Spinoza as a secularist--maybe the secularist--and that after years of failed attempt by my dissertation adviser (God love you, Loren!). Read more blurbs at my website.

Pinker's instinct correct, as usual

2008-01-14T16:57:00.001-05:00

If Steven Pinker's excellent new article for the New York Times magazine on "the moral instinct" is any indication, Third Culture thinkers are starting to go beyond simplistic evolutionary ethics. It would sound like special pleading coming from me, but when Pinker leaves a role for "moral reasoning" alongside science, I have to agree:

Morality, then, is still something larger than our inherited moral sense, and the new science of the moral sense does not make moral reasoning and conviction obsolete.

There could be no strictly scientific account of morality, if only for the simple reason that in order to know what falls under the proper domain of the moral, we must make a moral judgment. The question is, What is a science of morality a science of? And there couldn't be a scientific answer to that question. Luckily, that does not mean there is no answer.

I devote a chapter of The Secular Conscience ("Darwin Made Me Do It") to these issues. Maybe I'll have a chance to discuss them with Steve during our trip into the Amazon this May.

Publishers Weekly: "dazzling" and "timely"

2008-01-03T15:34:00.000-05:00

This from Publishers Weekly yesterday:

In a dazzling display of erudition, this book presents a cogent argument for secular liberalism. Dacey . . . claims that values and ethics--defining what is right and wrong, good and bad--are not the sole domain of theologians. To contribute to our understanding of enlightened secularism, he cites like-minded thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Dewey, Adam Smith, John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Plato, John Locke and Baruch Spinoza, among others. Dacey's presentation is especially timely in view of the emphasis by some current presidential candidates on their religious identity. Not since 1960 when John F. Kennedy, as a Roman Catholic, argued for church-state separation has the issue of secularism versus religion been so prominent in a national election. Dacey's analysis helps to put this question into the larger perspective of liberty and conscience. Dacey advocates for democracy over authoritarianism, not hesitating to challenge theocratic Islam, for example, as a "new totalitarianism." He calls on secular liberals to stand up for "reason and science, the separation of church and state, freedom of belief, personal autonomy, equality, toleration, and self-criticism." This is a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument for progressive secularism.

I'm not sure how Plato made it in there among the like-minded, but who will be the wiser.

New Year's question: What have you changed your mind about?

2007-12-31T12:09:00.000-05:00

This year I was asked to contribute to the Edge Annual Question over at edge.com, the brainchild of third culture impresario John Brockman. Others contributors this year include Alan Alda, Chris Anderson, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Brian Eno, Howard Gardner, Rebecca Goldstein, Daniel Goleman, Steven Pinker, and J. Craig Venter. Brockman's published anthologies of previous years' answers are What Do You Believe is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?, What Is Your Dangerous Idea?, and What Are You Optimistic About?

The question this year: What Have You Changed Your Mind About? My answer, entitled "What Matters," begins with a confession of a dark secret from my past:

As a teenager growing up in the rural American Midwest, I played in a Christian rock band. We wrote worship songs, with texts on religious themes, and experienced the jubilation and transport of the music as a visitation by the Holy Spirit. Then one day, as my faith was beginning to waiver, I wrote a song with an explicitly nonreligious theme . . . .

Find out what happens. Kudos to the good people at edge.com for continuing to ask the right questions.

Praise it forward

2007-12-26T16:15:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to report that I've been getting some good book blurbs, like this one from Sam Harris:

Dacey seeks nothing less than to interrupt a suicide, and he has written a beautiful primer on how our secular tradition can be rescued from self-defeat. The Secular Conscience reveals how simplistic notions of privacy, tolerance, and freedom keep dangerous ideas sheltered from public debate. This is an extraordinarily useful and lucid book.

Damn you, Sam, for putting in 53 words what it took me 70,000+ to say!

We have a pub date

2007-12-02T01:49:00.000-05:00

And the first round is on me. Unfortunately, I've got no time for that right now. My publisher has just announced that my book, The Secular Conscience, will be released in March 2008, and I'm too busy with pre-flight preparations.

It seems like this has been a long time coming. In one sense, I've been working on this book for ten years. In another sense, I wrote it in nine months. And now here it is just weeks away. Making a book is not at all like building a bridge if only because bridges come with a built-in a notion of what it means for them to be complete. With a book, the author has to make up not only what goes inside but also what counts as done. Did I finish, or did I just stop?

What I hope is that the ideas of The Secular Conscience will get to go on in their own ways, and what I want to believe is that the time will be right for them. Maybe I'll have that drink, after all.