The Right To Govern Belief
If you’re like me, you love religion. As far back as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the different belief structures that people use to guide their lives. Very fortunately, I’ve been able to take part in traditional Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, and Hindu ceremonies and study many others.
I love talking to practitioners of different belief forms. I have such great admiration for anyone who can devote themselves to an ideal whether I agree with it or not. Being able to find a thought, study it, embrace it, and let it affect your life is a sign of strong character. In a world filled with individuals devoted to something they have never thought on, thoughtful devotion should be admired.
That is one of the great advantages to living in a democracy that from the very first amendment to its constitution, established that anyone is allowed to practice whatever religion they want. This ideal allows for such a wealth of knowledge and depth of spirit to be present in “We The People.” In a democracy, free exercise of religion is a right and the government has no place getting involved, (save in dangerous practices like human sacrifice.) I want to pause there, and talk about what that word, “right” means philosophically.
John Locke is one of my favorite thinkers and one of the philosophers whose work the founding fathers were plagiarizing when they wrote the constitution. In his work, “Second Treatise of Government,” Locke starts from the “state of nature,” a condition of perfect freedom and equality and claims that if all are equal, any right that an individual would claim, must logically be a right of everyone else, because they are all equal. Further, any right you have becomes an obligation for everyone else.
Example: If you have the free and equal right to not be harmed, the rest of us have the obligation to respect that right and not harm you. This also means that you have the obligation to not harm anyone else because we all also have that right to not be harmed. If you have the free and equal right to practice your religion, I have the right to freely practice mine and we both have the obligation to respect the other’s belief.
Locke went to great lengths in the beginning of his work to say that if a deity comes down and establishes their unquestionable authority, then all political philosophy, all logically derived government is null and void. Until then though, government has to function purely on logic because we can’t rule all based on a hunch. Locke, and by extension the founders, weren’t setting up a religious government, they were setting up a government that allowed religion.
There are ideals that I hold to religiously, mostly revolving around cartoons and Asimov’s laws of robotics. It’d be silly and selfish of me to expect the government to turn my religious beliefs into law because there are other forms of belief regarding those subjects and neither view is a matter of public safety, (though eventually robotics laws will be, mark my words.)
When the Flying Spaghetti Monster, (look it up,) descends upon us and establishes what meat we can eat, who I’m allowed to be attracted to, or what decisions a woman can make about her own body, then the government can get involved with those beliefs. Until then though, those are all just beliefs. By definition, you cannot prove a belief. The government only has authority in the provable, in the universally logical. Government has no place using its authority for matters of belief.
