Religion Versus Society

The other day when I was walking down the street in Taipei I saw some people burning so-called ghost money, a practice I have criticized in the past. In this case, it brought to mind the efforts by Republican legislators in US states such as Indiana to create a license to discriminate based on religion as well as bans against alcohol in some Muslim countries and the sometimes violent efforts of some Muslims to discourage publication of images of Muhammed. At first glance these things don’t seem to have much to do with each other, but in all cases they involve a negative interaction between some religious believers and the rest of society. They are all violations of the basic principle for religion in society: you are free to practice your religion as long as in doing so you do not significantly infringe on the rights of others.

As I noted in my previous post on the subject, burning ghost money is very harmful to the environment. Aside from being a waste of resources, it contributes to climate change and when the usual varieties of ghost money are used, it adds harmful chemicals to the air. While some people may sincerely believe that it is something they have to do, that belief doesn’t them the right to seriously harm everyone else’s environment in the process. Either find a way to do it without harming the environment (such as by “burning” virtual ghost money), or don’t do it all.

The efforts in some US states to pass so-called “religious freedom” laws in effort to make it possible for businesses to discriminate against some people (particularly gay couples) for supposedly religious reasons create a similar situation. While people are free to believe that their religion doesn’t allow same sex marriage (and individual religions are free to recognize or not recognize particular types of marriage), that doesn’t mean that they can discriminate in their business dealings. Some conservatives, in justifying these laws, have raised a false analogy, saying that forcing wedding photographers or bakeries offering wedding cakes to treat same sex couples who request their services the same as straight couples is equivalent to forcing Jewish deli owners to sell bacon. Of course it is not the same at all; any business can choose what services or products it wants to offer, but it cannot deny those services or products to some on the basis of their sexual orientation. Or for other reasons – if these “Christian” wedding service providers were truly so determined to follow Biblical strictures, they should also be trying to deny services to people on second marriages. For that matter, as many opponents of these laws have pointed out, once you open the door to using religion as a reason to discriminate, some people will start trying to find religious justifications for discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, or other reasons. Once again, no one’s exercise of their religion should give them the right to infringe on the rights of others. If you choose to be a wedding photographer, you can’t discriminate against certain couples. If you choose to be a doctor, you can’t discriminate against certain patients (like the doctor who refused to accept a lesbian couple’s child as a patient). If that is too difficult for you, chose another profession.

It is this principle that makes the Hobby Lobby decision so idiotic – well, that and the absurdity of the idea that a corporation can have religious beliefs. While the owners of a company are free to practice their religion, when doing so interferes with the rights of others (in this case their employees), then they cannot impose their beliefs on the latter. If you think abortion is bad, don’t have an abortion. If you think, contrary to the medical facts, that certain forms of birth control are the same as abortion, then you are free to retain your delusions. But you can’t deny your employees access to necessary medical treatment on that basis (not to mention the fact that if they truly cared about reducing abortion rates, they should be trying to make obtaining contraception easier, not more difficult).

Another ridiculous aspect of the fundamentalist mentality behind the “religious freedom” laws and efforts to escape contraception mandates is how so many right-wing Christians moan about persecution in the process. Despite such claims, requiring that LGBT people be treated equally or making contraception part of a health plan does not interfere in any way with anyone’s private practice of their religion. Nor are restrictions on overtly religious actions and symbols in public contexts part of any kind of a “war” on Christianity. The truth is, it is precisely because Christianity still has such a dominant position in American society that we have to be particularly careful about how much it is allowed to enter into the public sphere. For example, when players at a school sporting event have a “voluntary” prayer, this is still problematic, because in the majority of schools in the US, Christians vastly outnumber everyone else. If a few Muslim or Buddhist students held a prayer ceremony before a game, the rest of their classmates are unlikely to feel any pressure to join. But if a team only has one or two students who are not Christians, they will be made to feel extremely uncomfortable if everyone else joins in a prayer. Of course to be fair this means that any such activities have to be banned, regardless of what religion is involved or whether they represent a minority. But it is clear that such a ban would not constitute persecution of Christian students but on the contrary it would provide necessary protection of the rights of non-Christian students.

Lest anyone doubt the strength of peer pressure, especially for adolescents, I will give an example. When I was in my early teens, my family attended a conservative Methodist church mostly attended by upper middle class, wealthy white people, most of whom were almost certainly conservative and right wing (in any event, the church library was full of literature with a decidedly right wing bent). I went to a Sunday school class for my age which was full of rather stuck up preppie kids and taught by a young man and young woman with a very fundamentalist approach to Christianity. I always felt rather uncomfortable, for numerous reasons; I was a little late in hitting my growth spurt, so I was smaller than the others, as well as being a little geeky, a bit less well off, and attending a different school (I believe most of the others either went to private school or went to one of the local suburban public schools, while my public school was in the city). In one class, they asked us to vote on which sin we thought was worse, murder or homosexuality. Now at this time I was still fairly conservative myself. I supported Reagan, the Republican party and virtually all the right wing political positions that I mostly abhor now. I was fairly homophobic and as much as I might hate to admit now, I did think of homosexuality as sinful. But even then there was no way I thought it was as bad as murder. From the little I remember, my guess is we were supposed to raise one hand for murder and the other for homosexuality, and I also have the impression that the girls and boys voted separately. In any case, most of all of the girls voted for murder as the worse sin. I was going to do the same, but all the other boys raised their hands for homosexuality as the worse sin, so, I am ashamed to admit, after some hesitation I did the same for fear of how my vote would be interpreted. Of course the teachers, after putting us through this reprehensible exercise, said that in truth all sins were equal in God’s eyes, though if all they wanted was to teach that, it hardly seems necessary to make everyone vote, not to mention the questionable choice of “sins” to chose from (why not murder and theft, say, or coveting your neighbor’s wife and taking God’s name in vain?). In hindsight, it is easy to say that I should have had the courage to vote what I really thought, and even the me of today would be tempted to lecture my younger self about how terrible it was to even passively support the absurd notion that homosexuality is worse than murder or even a sin at all. But frankly, while I’d like to think that if I could go back in time I’d have the courage to stand up and reject the whole premise, probably if I was stuck in the body and mind of my teenaged self, the best that I could manage would be to change my vote, and even that not without some discomfort. So I can easily imagine how hard it must be for a non-Christian teenager in a school full of Christians, if the latter are frequently engaging in “voluntary” religious activities.

On a related note, if any proof is required that Christians are not only not persecuted but still have an unreasonable prominence, we need look no farther than the fact that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible for an openly agnostic or non-believing individual to be elected US President, and it is even quite difficult for an atheist to win election on a local level. It was only recently that I learned that, in clear contravention of the US Constitution (which specifically bans any religious test for office) and the clear intentions of the founders, some states still officially require that anyone running for believe in a Supreme Being. Even aside from this, there are still many people who would not vote for anyone who openly admitted to being a non-believer, no matter how well qualified they are otherwise.

But to return to my original theme, another example of religious people imposing on others through the practice of their religion is how some Muslim countries ban items like alcohol, pork (though I am against eating either pigs or cattle myself, mostly for environmental reasons), and pornography – for that matter, the restrictive attitudes of many Western countries toward pornography and sex work can be traced to Christians imposing their moral standards on the society – as well as the violent reactions of some Muslims toward images of Muhammed. Here, again, while the believers are free to avoid doing things that their religion forbids, or that they think it forbids (as I have noted in the past, the whole idea that Islam forbids images of Muhammed is somewhat questionable, and Islamic images of Muhammed are not unknown), but they have no right to forbid others from doing these things, unless there are rational, non-religious grounds for doing so, such as banning the consumption of pork on ethical grounds (after all, pigs are quite intelligent and the way they are raised and slaughtered in factory farms is inhumane).

In conclusion, religion can never be an excuse for behavior that is harmful to others (such as burning ghost money) or for infringing on the rights of others (by discriminating against them or forbidding them from doing things that are banned by a particular religion). Rather than expending their energy in efforts to infringe on the rights of others, religious people would be much better off attempting to demonstrate the superiority of their religion by exemplary behavior, which in addition to kindness and charity includes the tolerance of and indeed active support for the rights of others even when the latter engage in behavior that contravenes their personal beliefs.