Tuesday, August 23, 2011
"World Youth Day and Religious Freedom"
The archbishop-designate of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, has a worth-reading essay on religious freedom -- which is adapated from his remarks at World Youth Day in Spain -- over at the First Things blog. He writes, among other things:
. . . Freedom of religion presumes two things.
First, “freedom of religion” presumes that people have free will as part of their basic human dignity. And because they can freely reason and choose, people will often disagree about the nature of God and the best path to knowing him. Some people will choose to not believe in God at all—and they have a right to their unbelief.
Second, “freedom of religion” presumes that questions about God, eternity and the purpose of human life really do have vital importance for human happiness. And therefore people should have the freedom to pursue and to live out the answers they find to those basic questions without government interference.
Freedom of religion cannot coexist with freedom from religion. Forcing religious faith out of a nation’s public square and out of a country’s public debates does not serve democracy. It doesn’t serve real tolerance or pluralism. What it does do is impose a kind of unofficial state atheism. To put it another way, if we ban Christian Churches or other religious communities from taking an active role in our nation’s civic life, we’re really just enforcing a new kind of state-sponsored intolerance—a religion without God. . . .
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/08/world-youth-day-and-religious-freedom.html
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As I noted over on First Things, I think Paul Horwitz's op-ed-page piece in The New York Times titled "How to Respond to Rick Perry and ‘The Response’" is interesting to read in conjunction with Archbishop Chaput's speech. An excerpt:
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Moreover, by trying to banish religion from the public sphere, Mr. Perry’s critics end up cutting themselves out of the debate. When religion is viewed as a fundamentally private matter, the natural corollary is to think that it is inappropriate to criticize someone’s faith. Thus, when such critics lose the constitutional argument, they find themselves in the awkward position of not feeling entitled to directly criticize the religious view in question. . . .
Some people think we would be better off without religion in public life. In the long run, however, we would lose much more than we gain. Our debates may be more contentious if we allow religion in, but they will also be more committed and honest. Just as the Constitution allows Mr. Perry to stake his political future on “The Response,” it allows the rest of us to answer back.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/opinion/how-to-respond-to-rick-perrys-response.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=paul%20horwitz&st=cse