Ideas is neither good nor bad, they, like any tool, are either useful or useless.
The Freedom Institute’s/Libertas’s/The National Alliance’s assertions about faith are the opposite of an ab hominum attack. They argue that an idea is correct simply because the intention, the impulse behind the idea, is correct.
John McGuirk stated (22nd November 2010) that “individuals [have the right] to be informed by their own values” (which is meaningless enough to be tautological – all subjective experiences are, by definition, subjective) and then conflates this truism with an assertion that ‘secular society’ ‘imposes’ itself into how the individual ought to judge what is right and what is wrong.
He seemed to say that secularists would deem one to be sinful if one disagrees with their perspective.
Rather, the secularist perspective is that individuals have the right to freedom of conscience. Therefore, secularists ought to be disinterested about your thoughts, and care only about how ones actions impact upon other people.
It is therefore appropriate for a secularist to intervene in situations where an individual’s freedoms are being constrained by the actions of a third party. Even when those actions are being carried out by those of faith, whose intentions are pure.
The perfect example of the perversions which arise when one puts the freedoms of the faithful above the freedoms of the individual, is the Roscommon child abuse case. In that case, interested parties – from the choir of god – financed the parents case which asserted the inviolability of the family over the welfare of the children.
Whenever one asserts that a concept, policy, idea, ideology or faith has primacy over the rights to freedom of action, bodily integrity and the freedom of thought and speech (in so far as the expression of these freedoms do not undermine these same rights for other people) then it is inevitable that the actions undertaken to assert this primacy will result in evil and horrors.
That is the lesson of history.
Are all the secularist this pure of thought and action? No. And neither are all of the religious. Hence we, on all sides of the debate, ought to be tolerant. Tolerance, I believe, is not that I accept your right to be wrong but is founded upon my acceptance that I might be wrong.
All that is required of the religious in a secularist state is that they do not force other people to live according to the rules of their conscience.
The “silent majority” of the National Alliance claims the right to proscribe my actions and would claim this right upon the fallacy that there is an insistence that all those in a secular society be secular.
