Oh, the Bible says homosexuality is wrong! – Now it makes sense…

The point is that cherry picking scripture to support misogyny and bigotry in public policy is too easy a trick xians like to use to suggest that god, and not they, wants it to be so and that as good little jack-booted adherents they can claim to be ‘just following orders’. It’s intellectual paucity to suggest that one example, homosexuality, matters today but not all the other absurd ‘laws’ (from the same fracking books, for crying out loud) that jesus supported in their entirety.

Maybe if more faith-based believers stopped being hypocritical apologists and started being intellectually honest about the immorality of their scriptures, we could finally agree that we bring our morality to our religious beliefs and do not derive it from them. That would go a long way to clearing the public policy table cluttered with god-soaked Iron age morality and help us all find better ways to address very real and very damaging equality problems in our systemically unfair and unjustifiable ill treatment of others.

A good starting point is to agree to uphold in secular law the equality of human rights and human freedoms and human dignity over and above any faith-based beliefs contrary to these Enlightenment values. If you can’t do that because it conflicts with some faith-based beliefs, then you simply do not deserve to have a say in the matter nor enjoy equal citizenship to those who do support equal citizenship. But to try to have it both ways – that your hypocritical faith-beliefs enhances one’s moral stature to have a determining say in matters of institutionalized public policy about equality, while relegating the Enlightenment value of equality to be less than the biblical value of misogyny and bigotry – reveals just how broken in reason is the religious mindset in matters of morality in public policy.

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Sorry. I failed to close the italics after the bold font. My bad.

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So what does that agreement look like in principle?

Words.

What does that agreement look like in practice?

Holding a day of prayer called for by the state’s governor and funded by taxpayers is not agreement. Nor is appointing young earth creationists (why are so many involved in the dental profession?) and religiously motivated history revisionists to chair state education boards for buying textbooks and mandating science curriculum. Nor is denying same sex marriage. Nor is paying for military chaplains. Nor is offering vouchers for religious education. Nor is denying abortion services. Nor is opening and closing public meetings with prayer. Nor is stamping currency with religious sentiments. Nor is altering the pledge of allegiance to the secular state include references to god. And so on. The assault to abuse government to extend favoured religious influence in the public domain is never ending.

Too often faith-based believers think their beliefs are equitable… right up until equality challenges a religious privilege. It is at that moment and that moment alone where we see whether or not there is agreement between principle and practice. We see whether or not a religious believer comes clean and either supports legal equality or does not, either understands the role of religious belief to belong properly to the private domain or does not, understands the state’s obligation to stay out of the business of private religious beliefs or does not. And when we see such a huge discrepancy between what average faith-based believers say they support (the country and its founding documents) and what they actually do support, we know there is a very important role for non believers to play in critical review of public policies that cross the religious line between private faith and public policy. Too often, believers simply see no line or consider their practical actions as merely extensions of faith-based opinions now divorced from the original principle.

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Sorry for the confusion, TU; by ‘public’ domain I mean the institutions of government and policies issued from them. A public institution can be staffed by all kinds of religious believers… as long as they keep their personal religious beliefs from affecting the discharge of their public duties. By this I mean a local police officer needs to act responsibly as an agent of the court enforcing the law; what we don’t want is Ahmed using and abusing his office as an policeman to promote his religious beliefs as if they were the law. Ahmed can be a police officer only under the condition that he keep his religious beliefs to himself and discharge his duties as an agent of the court enforcing public law. I’m sure you can appreciate why.

But you need to see the same problem when it’s Officer Bob abusing his position to enforce his christian beliefs… even though you probably agree with those same beliefs. It’s simply not part of the job description for public officials and their staff to use the power of their public offices to favour any religious preference… be it islamic or christian or hindu or jainist or whatever. To do so is wrong. To do so is against the First.

The same argument applies to those in any public office. People can hold whatever private religious beliefs they want but to be a responsible government agent using the power of a public office legally MEANS that those beliefs are to remain private in the sense they do not interfere in any way the discharge of public duties so that the spirit of the First is maintained by EVERYONE: the government (the public domain) has no business privileging religious favouritism without undermining YOUR religious freedom. You, as a believer, have far more at stake in this issue than I as an atheist because I personally couldn’t care less what your personal religious beliefs are… right up until you abuse the public power placed in trust of public offices to affect MY right to equal treatment under the law. By allowing religious belief you happen to currently favour to be privileged by government in the public domain, you run the very real risk of supporting a religious agenda at some other time that curtails your own right (and the right of your children and their offspring) to believe what you (and they) want.

That so many religious believers utterly fail to recognize how they undermine their own freedom of religion in the name of their preferred religion is truly one of the great ironies of our age. You are setting the stage for government and various public domain officials to use your money to promote a religious ideology they personally favour – and one that you may not agree with like Ahmed’s – so that your freedom to believe what you want is directly threatened by the power of the public office they hold – like the polic officer’s.

Believers in the States must wake up to this growing problem and stop blaming atheists for pointing out the dismantling one of the great freedoms we share in the name of some divine respect. Religion has no place in the public domain and we have to turf out those who think it does. Believers are incredibly susceptible to these abusers of the public trust because they mistake their favouritism for some shared piety. That may be true in the short run but undermining another person’s religious freedom is not worth the price.

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Not entirely, no. But there is strong evidence that these discriminations have been supported by biblical scripture (see the video here on the slavery issue, for example), which then allows christians to argue that they are simply following divine orders to discriminate, that discrimination then is right and proper and moral because god says so. It is against this failure to condemn discrimination that very legitimate blame can be laid at the feet of those who support the discriminations on theological grounds. You make it sound as if this support is simply ‘historical’ of which some part will include the religious, rather than understand the historical reality that religious scripture has been (and continues to be in the case of legal discrimination against gays and lesbians) a major driver for excusing the practice of discrimination itself.

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