It's Debatable: Religion's influence on government

[TexasTowelie]

This week, Arnold Loewy and Don May (aka Mr. Conservative) debate religious morality as a basis for legislation. Don writes an independent blog on lubbockonline.com and Arnold is the George Killiam Professor of Law at Texas Tech University School of Law.

Arnold: Religion is a wonderful behavioral guidepost for the true believer. Where it is not so wonderful is when a majority of true believers seek to impose their morality on a non-believer. For example, in the mid-1960s, it was unlawful in Connecticut for married people to use contraception. Obviously the genesis of this legislation was the Catholic (majority religion in Connecticut) viewpoint that sex for purposes other than procreation was immoral.

-snip-

Consider the Ten Commandments. Many people think they are the foundation for American law. They are not. While murder, theft, and perjury are forbidden by both American law and the Ten Commandments, the latter are not a necessary predicate for the former. With or without religion, it seems clear those things would be forbidden.

-snip-

So religiously inspired laws may be appropriate, but only if there is also a secular justification for them. Otherwise, we would all be captives of whatever the majority religion of the day happened to be.

Don: Our Founding Fathers established the United States of America and its Constitution on a solid foundation of religious principles with very limited federal powers.

Our nation’s founding document, The Declaration of Independence, tells us our rights come from God and not from our government. Our rights are inalienable and cannot be taken from us by a president, a Congress, or anyone else.

The complete debate is at http://lubbockonline.com/editorials/2013-08-25/its-debatable-religions-influence-government#comment-301934 . There are also several noteworthy comments at the link.

[longship]

1. Sadly, May exhibits techniques common to many apologists.

Attempting to square the circle by ignoring the opponent's points. May's resorting to out of context quotations, and dubious ones from discredited sources is typical as well.

The comments are indeed revealing.

William Lane Craig is another champion of these techniques, although he is a somewhat more practiced debater and seems to understand propositional logic enough to frame his arguments under that rubric.

Listening or reading these debates inevitably makes me want to throw chairs at the apologist for their rather obvious disingenuous technique, in spite of the apparent level of their discourse.

Sadly, this one just leaves me shaking my head.

Kudos to Prof. Loewy for at least trying.

[cleanhippie]

2. Sadly, we see apologists here following the same technique.

And then they wonder why there is little actual discourse.

[rug]

3. There's plenty of actual discourse here.

Despite your cartoons.

[cleanhippie]

4. Speak of the devil...