“Mind Unfettered”: A Philosophical Perspective on Religious Freedom[i] By Irfan Khawaja
To the Bahai Campus Association The College of New Jersey November 5, 2002
Copyright (c) 2002, Irfan Khawaja. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without express permission.
My topic tonight is religious freedom, or more broadly, freedom of conscience, and my aim is to try to get clear on what it is and why it’s as valuable as it is. That’s a fairly abstract topic, and also an abstract approach to it, so it may help to start by considering some examples. Aristotle tells us in his Ethics that if you want to know the nature of justice, it helps to take a look at injustice[i] and so it is, I think, with freedom. If you want to understand the nature of freedom, take a look at persecution, and the issue becomes a little clearer than it might otherwise have been. There are many ways of classifying persecution, but I’ll classify them here by religion, focusing on the major monotheistic religions, but touching on the minority religions. What I want to draw attention to is the fact that all of the major religions have both perpetrated persecution as well as being victims of it.
Let’s start with the oldest of the monotheistic religions, Judaism. The horrifying history of persecution of the Jews is well-known to most of us: it goes back to the enslavement of the Hebrews by the Egyptians; the destruction of the Temples of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and Romans; the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe, starting in the Middle Ages and stretching straight to the Holocaust, and more recently, to the rise of anti-Semitism among Arabs and Muslims.
Judaism, however, has a parallel history of perpetrating persecution as well, and the roots of that persecution lie, ironically enough, in the very books of the Bible that describe the Jews’ persecution. Consider this passage from Exodus:
My angel will precede you and lead you to the home of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, whom I shall exterminate. You will not bow down to their gods or worship them or observe their rites, but throw them down and smash their cultic stones…I shall send terror of myself ahead of you; I shall throw all the peoples you encounter into confusion, and make all your enemies take to their heels. I shall not drive them out ahead of you in a single year…I shall drive them out little by little before you, until your numbers grow sufficient for you to take possession of the land.[ii]
This idea—of clearing the land of Israel for God’s children—finds expression in the idea of “transfer” in modern Zionism, where it’s applied not to Canaanites or Amorites, but to modern-day Palestinian Arabs. As the early Zionist leader Israel Zangwill put it in 1905, “We must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the Arab tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us.”[iii] Unfortunately, 100 years later, the same idea finds some support in Israel today, often at the highest levels of the government.[iv]
What about Christianity? The persecution of the Christians, of course, begins with the very first Christian—Christ—who was crucified by the Romans. It continues with the mass persecution of the Christians throughout the pagan part of the Roman Empire—think of the Christians being thrown to the lions in the Roman Circus. Once Christianity acquired political power, Christian persecution focused on minority Christian sects or Christian dissenters, a phenomenon that culminated in the Religious Wars of the sixteenth century (1562-98) and the flight of the Pilgrims to the New World (1620). More recently, we see the persecution of Christians throughout the Islamic world, notably Sudan, where they suffer mass persecution at the hands of the Muslim- controlled military, and Pakistan, where Christian missions and churches have been targeted by Muslim terrorists, supported by Muslim politicians.
But Christianity has been no stranger to the perpetration of persecution, either. The Byzantine Empire, which brought Christianity to power, lasted some 1100 years, and it’s no exaggeration to say that persecution was a prominent feature of its entire existence. As a result, while Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire, Christendom became an empire of its own, as persecutorial as the pagan one. To restate the obvious, Christianity brought us the Crusades and the Inquisition, along with the mass murder and enslavement (on religious grounds) of the native populations of North and South America. Admittedly, Christian persecution is milder today, but we hear echoes of it from the Christian right in this country, with its insistence that we live in a specifically Christian country whose Christian values should be imposed on non-Christians by law. As one of its members, Ralph Reed, puts it: “What Christians have got to do is to take back this country” and “make it a country once again governed by Christians.” Or in Pat Robertson’s words, “If Christian people can work together, they can succeed during this decade [the 90s] in winning back control of the institutions that have been taken from them over the past 70 years.”[v]
Now move to Islam. The persecution of Muslims, I think, is less well-known in the West, but it is hardly different from that of Jews or Christians. The early Muslims were subjected by their pagan Arab rulers to death, torture, expulsion, and expropriation; the Muslim doctrine of jihad was a response to this. Muslims were victims, of course, during the Crusades, and they were victimized through hundreds of brutal years of Western imperialism; indeed, Muslims today tend to see the Crusades and imperialism, with some justification, as two different phases of the same phenomenon. And the persecution of Muslims continues to this day. The names “Hebron,” “Ayodyha,” “Sabra and Shatila,” and “Gujarat,” mean almost nothing to Americans, but they are each of them sites of Muslim 9/11’s, signifying tremendous loss of life and in the case of Gujarat, the willful destruction of anything that seems even remotely “Islamic,” whether or not it actually has anything to do with the religion.
But once again, Muslims bear great responsibility for persecution as well. The Muslim conquests of Arabia, North Africa, Southern Europe, and Southern Asia are obvious examples, as are the recent bouts of Muslim terrorism. And a great deal of Muslim persecution takes place under the radar screen, especially the Muslim persecution of religious minorities living in predominantly Muslim countries. The plight of Jews, Christians, animists, Bahais, Shias and Ahmadis, and of writers like Neguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasreen, Faraj Foda, Younis Shaykh, Sadiq al Azm, and Ibn Warraq, (and many others) should tell us how rare a commodity freedom of conscience is in the Muslim world.
The words of the fundamentalist Muslim writer Abul Ala Mawdudi are revealing on this score. “The true position of the non- Muslim under Islamic rule,” he writes, “is to be content to remain low (saghirun). As non-Muslims they cannot try to become great (kabirun).” They should, in short, be “grateful” (his word) that they are allowed to live and practice their religions at all. Should their actions encroach on the sensibilities of Muslims, however, they relinquish this privilege, and if a Muslim should convert to a non-Muslim faith, like Bahaism, he is to be put to death without exception, and without the possibility of forgiveness or repentance. He is, in Mawdudi’s words, an “incurable disease” who should be “severed” from humanity.[vi] Mawdudi’s is not the only Muslim position, but it is a common one, and one too often overlooked and excused.
Let’s not omit secularists from our list. I’ve already mentioned some of the persecution against secular thinkers by religious authorities, and the history of Communism gives us a gigantic example of persecution by them, but to bring things home, consider an example of secular persecution right here at The College of New Jersey: the case of the Reverend Stephen White. Reverend White was an obnoxious preacher who applied to speak on campus a few weeks ago, and was given permission to do so. What he said was stupid and offensive, and it rightly offended many people. But their response was equally offensive: some people protested peacefully, but many did not, and Rev. White was soon subjected to what by any legal definition amounted to multiple acts of assault and battery. Though President Gitenstein did a commendable job in defending his right to speak, the bottom line remains that most of those who perpetrated the assaults against White got away with them.[vii]
What do we learn from this depressingly long but still incomplete list? At least two things.
First, that religious persecution has been a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon in history, more or less contemporaneous with religion, and perhaps with the sheer fact of differences of opinion. With just a few notable exceptions, every major religious group has both suffered and practiced persecution. The few exceptions are religious minorities who have suffered without practicing it—the Parsis, the Bahais, the Ahmadis, some Sufis, some Buddhists, some Hindus, the Amish, the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Hasidim, the Mormons. These exceptions can be accounted for partly by the fact that the groups are minorities—they were too small to persecute anyone. Partly it is also the nature of their beliefs—they have been focused more on spiritual than temporal affairs. But notice that the sheer fact of being a weak minority does not imply that you will never practice persecution. Prior to the creation of Israel, the Jews were a minority scattered around the world, but arguably aspects of Zionism do lend themselves to persecution. And all of the major religions began as minorities anyway.
A second lesson is that persecution is partly a simple phenomenon and partly a complex one. From one perspective, persecution is just wrong, no matter who practices it or why. From another perspective, however, things get complex: there are hard cases. Sometimes it’s clear what constitutes a case of persecution. But sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes what seems a perfectly clear case to one group seems totally unclear to another. Consider a few.
(1) To Bahais (and to most people), it is obvious that Mona Mahmudnizhad was the victim of persecution.[viii] To some Muslims, however, it is not. Iran, they would say, is after all a Muslim country, and who should have the right to run a Muslim country but Muslims? Muslims believe in Islamic law, or shariah, and Mona was in violation of shariah. So of course she had to be punished. Perhaps the punishment was too severe, but even that is disputable. If she wanted to practice her religion, she should have done so within the constraints of shariah, and if not, she should have gone elsewhere to do so. That’s not persecution; it’s the right of self-determination.
(2) Take another case, closer to home: Waco.[ix] At Waco, the U.S. government surrounded, besieged, and either shot or burned to death nearly the entire Branch Davidian religious movement. Was that a legitimate exercise in law enforcement or was it an act of large-scale religious persecution? I should add that Waco is a case that Muslim fundamentalists often raise as an example of the hypocrisy of America’s commitment to freedom of conscience. How can you criticize us for Mona Mahmudnizhad, they ask, after what you did at Waco?
(3) Another set of cases, close to home: the religious rights of Native Americans. Some Native Americans smoke peyote in their religious ceremonies. But the DEA doesn’t care why you’re smoking peyote; what they care about is the fact that smoking peyote is against the drug laws. Should we make an exception for Native Americans? Should religious freedom justify exceptions to the rule of law? Arguments have been made on both sides.
(4) Again: Some Native Americans (e.g., the Makah) hunt whales as part of their religion. But whales are protected species, and so the same issues arise as with peyote.[xi]
Such hard cases could be multiplied many times over. Because religious freedom is both a simple and a complex matter, what we need is an unyielding but undogmatic understanding of the principles that justify it—an understanding that neither surrenders to the enemies of freedom under pressure, nor constitutes a blind and unreasoning faith to mindless slogans. Hence the need for a philosophical approach to the issue—on the assumption that philosophy gives us (or ought to give us) unyielding but undogmatic understanding of moral principles. So where do we look?
In my view, freedom of conscience is a relatively modern idea, and one that was more or less invented by philosophers. It has roots in certain ancient texts and religious scriptures, but to my knowledge, it was not explicitly and systematically defended as a principle until the mid-seventeenth century, when it was given powerful expression by a number of thinkers, notably Spinoza, Milton, and Locke, and later on, by John Stuart Mill. Of these, Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is in my view the classic statement of the principle, and incidentally, the one that most influenced American thought. It clearly influenced Thomas Jefferson, who coined the phrase of the “firewall” between Church and State, and at least indirectly, it influenced other early American defenders of that principle—among them, Washington, Paine, Franklin, Madison, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and as we’ll see, the unsung President John Tyler. A quick biography of Locke:
John Locke was born August 29, 1632 in Somerset, England, the son of landed English gentry. He entered Christ Church College of Oxford University in 1652 and passed through the academic ranks quite uneventfully, later assuming a teaching post at the university. To escape ordination in the Church of England—a natural bureaucratic step toward university promotion—Locke took up the study of medicine and was transported into a new world of ‘natural philosophy’ in which he associated with powerful scientific minds like that of Robert Boyle.[xii]
After a long and eventful life, Locke died in 1704 in Oates, England, not far from where he was born.
In the Letter, Locke defends what he calls “absolute liberty,” which he describes as “the thing that we stand in need of,” but which we (i.e., his contemporaries) talk much about but fail either to practice or to understand. (That should sound familiar, especially on Election Day.) And Locke’s language should suggest to us that he may have just what we’re looking for: an absolute conception of liberty, but one still susceptible of understanding.
Some parts of the Letter are dated, and some are irrelevant to us, but at the heart of it is one argument that remains sound to this day. To understand it, let’s distinguish between three kinds of religious persecution:
(i) In one sense, group X can persecute group Y merely because Y happens to be an obstacle to X’s secular ambitions—for instance, when Y has wealth or power that X wants. This can involve religious persecution in the sense that X might justify attacks on Y by claiming the sanction of God or Scripture. But this form of persecution is not purely religious; it’s really a quarrel about worldly goods expressed in a religious guise.
(ii) In another sense, religious persecution can be a racial or ethnic matter: if all the members of a religious group belong to the same race, one way of expressing racism against them is to attack their religion. But the real issue here is race, not religion.
(iii) There is a third form of persecution, however, that is purely religious—where the real issue is not wealth, power or race, but religious belief as such, and this is the form of persecution Locke discusses. Imagine a situation in which a certain religious group X believes that its religion is the one supremely true religion. Suppose that such a religious group takes the levers of political power and begins to suppress other religious groups on theological grounds. The government, group X proclaims, belongs to the religion of X, and because it does, all non-X religions are hereby declared enemies of the state. You must either convert to X or suffer persecution. Locke’s question is: since each religious group believes itself to be in possession of some unique and supreme truth, why shouldn’t each religious group persecute the others on just these grounds? There may be superficial practical reasons against it, true; but what is the real reason?
Let me set aside one possible answer to this question. It is tempting to answer that you shouldn’t persecute other religious groups because you should never believe that your religion is the one supremely true religion, or that you have any unique access to the truth. This is the view of the most famous contemporary philosopher to write on the subject, John Rawls of Harvard, and it is a view that many educated people today hold. But Locke rejects it, and so do I. For one thing, it wouldn’t make any sense to adopt a particular religion if you didn’t think it was supremely true. Second, if truth were really such a problem, it would not only be a problem for the tenets of religion, but for the principle of religious freedom itself. You can hardly defend religious freedom if you admit up front that you don’t know whether it’s true. So we can’t defend freedom by appealing to skepticism.
The real reason has to do with the nature of belief—of “assent” as Locke puts it. The first and most crucial point is that our capacity to form beliefs is at some level under our control. In particular, our power of attention is under our exclusive control: you can, as an individual, pay attention to the evidence before you, or evade it; whether you do is up to you, and only up to you. Second, given that control, we have a moral responsibility to pay attention to the evidence for our beliefs, and not to evade such evidence. So we not only can pay attention to evidence; we ought to. That means that when you form a belief, you must do so on the basis of evidence for it as you see it. Your beliefs have to be on your own reasons and reasoning—not your peers’, or the government’s, or your parents’, or even Scripture or God.[xiii]
Stated in general form, the basic principle is this: Form your beliefs only on the evidence available to you, and proportion your assent to the kind and amount of evidence you have, and only on that basis.[xiv] Where no evidence exists, no belief is possible; where your evidence is weak, only qualified belief is possible; but where your evidence is strong, confident affirmation of belief is required. This ethics of belief is known as evidentialism, and it rules out some common habits of belief-formation. The two most common sins are dogmatism and skepticism. Dogmatism is believing on insufficient evidence; skepticism is failing to believe when you have all the evidence you need. The happy medium between dogmatism and skepticism might be called objectivity, and Locke regards the practice of it as an overriding moral obligation.
Once you form a belief objectively, Locke says, you make it your own. (In fact, in Locke’s time, the word for belief was “own.” To say “I own that God exists” was to say “I believe that God exists.”) And this is quite literally true: formed in this way, the belief is now literally the result of processes that you, and only you, have brought into the world, and for which you and only you can and ought to take responsibility. Notice that the reverse is also true: if you don’t form your beliefs in this way—if you just let your beliefs happen to you—you’re not the one bringing them into existence; they’re formed more by circumstances than by you. And if the circumstances had been different, you might as well have formed completely different beliefs.
This argument applies with special force to religious and ethical beliefs. Your religious and ethical beliefs are your standards, the beliefs that you not only hold, but that guide your actions in life. If you form your beliefs objectively in Locke’s sense, when you live up to your beliefs, you’re living up to your own standards, and when you violate those beliefs, you are condemning yourself by the verdict of your own inner tribunal, your conscience. If you believe in God, what you are doing is making God’s law your law; when you violate it, you’re not just violating a law that some alien Being imposed on you and commanded you to follow, but a law that exists in His mind for a reason, and that you’ve written on your own heart for that reason. Now Locke did not accept the possibility of a purely secular morality, but as it turns out, his arguments are almost always formulated so that they can in principle be rephrased in secular terms. God’s law, says Locke, implies a “law of nature,” and “reason, which is that law” teaches us our moral obligations.[xv] If you don’t believe in God, then, you consult nature by reason, and when you discover its dictates, you internalize them, making them your own. You thereby become a law unto yourself, or autonomous to use the Greek word—a bit like writing the owner’s manual for your own life.
Why is it so important for your beliefs to be formed in this painstaking way? Why can’t you just follow some clear moral rules or authority figures—don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, believe in God, say your prayers, etc.—and leave it at that? The answer, in short, is that it’s not possible. There are no finite number of rules which, if memorized, will solve all problems for you, and there’s no authority figure you can reliably trust to have all the answers. At a certain level, you’re on your own. To deal with that fact, you have to cultivate the right methods and habits, which is what objectivity is. Relatedly, to form your beliefs any other way is to accept moral standards as though they were not your own, as though someone made you adopt them. But this is the wrong motive for belief. For one thing, you’ll be less apt to follow beliefs formed in this way. Moreover, it’s psychologically unhealthy to try. A person who accepts religious beliefs on authority will always be divided within himself: he may feel duty-bound, let’s say, to accept God’s law, but if he’s not really convinced of it rationally, it will feel arbitrary. And if it feels that way, then violating it will always seem attractive. So for such a person, duty will always be at odds with desire, and that will lead to alienation, whether from God or from life itself. It is hard to love a God whom you regard as a slavedriver or task master, and it’s hard to love life if you see it as a series of externally-imposed demands.
This leads us back to the issue of persecution. We’ve seen that for Locke, a belief must be formed in the right way—objectively. Now let’s introduce a social element into the equation. If we can each either be objective or not, we can each either encourage objectivity in others or not. There are many ways of doing so, and Locke discusses them at length in the Letter and elsewhere. But there’s one absolutely sure way of discouraging objectivity, and that is coercion or persecution. This is the central lesson of the Letter: it’s our responsibility to form our beliefs objectively, but objectivity requires freedom. Objectivity is hard enough to practice when we have the freedom to do so; it becomes impossible to practice when that freedom is violated. And that means that it is impossible to be ethically upright under coercion. Coercion breeds corruption.[xvi]
Let’s make this more concrete. Imagine the situation of someone like Mona Mahmudnizhad as she faced her persecutors in Tehran. She was a Bahai, they were Muslims; she wanted to remain a Bahai, and they wanted her to become a Muslim. Let’s imagine that Mona had become a Bahai in the Lockean way I described. She was convinced, that is, of the rightness of the teachings of Bahaullah and perhaps of as much of Islam as is compatible with those teachings. Her persecutors don’t think that’s enough. They want her to denounce Bahaullah and affirm Islam and only Islam. Why? Because Bahaullah is (to them) a false prophet and Muhammad is the last of the prophets, and only the Quran is true. Her persecutors have two options here. They can either try to persuade Mona to become a Muslim, or coerce her into it. Let’s take each in turn.
Suppose they try persuasion. Well, then, they’ve got a big job ahead of them. Essentially, they have to prove to Mona that Muhammad was the last prophet, that Bahaullah was a false prophet, that the Quran is the one authoritative text she must accept for her salvation, and that their interpretation of the Quran is right. I suppose this is possible. But in a context of persuasion, she would have the right to rebut anything they said about it. Since there are even Muslims who deny that Muhammad was the last prophet,[xvii] her interlocutors would have to resolve that intra-Muslim dispute before they even got to Mona. And if this really is a context of persuasion, then reason applies to every aspect of the conversation, and Mona would be free to ask, “By the way, why do I have to sit and listen to your arguments?”—in which case they would have to provide an answer. If their answer or arguments weren’t persuasive to her, Mona would be free to get up and leave without repercussions. Or if she actually found them interesting, she would be free to say, “Thanks, this has been interesting, but I’m out of time; I’ll come back next week, and we can discuss this some more.” Could she become a Muslim by this process? Maybe; but it would be up to her. And notice that they could become Bahais by the same process.
Suppose they try coercion. Well, the more committed Mona is to the Bahai faith, the more coercion her conversion will require. The more coercion it requires, the less it appeals to reason. The less it appeals to reason, the less persuasive it is. The less persuasive it is, the less it persuades. And so if Mona gives in and agrees to convert (or renounce her old faith), we can be sure of one thing: she’s doing so not because she has been persuaded, but because she wants the coercion to stop. That looks like a victory for the persecutors, but it isn’t, because their aim was to convert her to Islam, and in fact they have failed. They have merely created two Monas: the outward part that falsely professes Islam, and the inward part that authentically professes the Bahai faith. The obvious problem is that this is not wholehearted belief—it’s not really belief at all. But even worse, the end-result is incompatible with the explicit tenets of Islam. The Muslim ideal is supposed to be ikhlas—sincerity, purity, or holiness. But what they have created is the very opposite. And that’s the definition of failure.
Could the persecutors try to combine aspects of persuasion and force? This is typically what they try to do. But the combination is impossible. For one, you’d need a principle that told you when to use which, and you’d need to justify it, and there is no such principle. Moreover, they’re simply too different from one another to be combined—like running and standing still, or swimming and climbing. You can move from coercion to persuasion at different times, but then you’d be engaged in a kind of schizophrenia, and in practice, you would end up using the coercion precisely where the persuasion failed—at which points all the problems involving coercion would arise all over again.
This little scenario illustrates the basic problem with persecution. Religious persecution is an attempt to achieve a result by means that are incompatible with that result. It’s an attempt to change a mind by force, which is a contradiction in terms. You can change a mind only by reasons, but (as any educator knows) that’s a hard sell, and force isn’t a reason. You can harm a person by force, but harming a person is not the same as changing her mind. And I’ve been assuming so far that the persecutors’ intentions are sincere, which is rarely true. When they are not, what you have is pure sadism. So whether based on sadism or self-delusion, persecution has failure built into it.
A practitioner of persecution might insist that in killing Mona, they have succeeded: they have prevented her from polluting the minds of young Muslims. This was the actual charge against Mona, and incidentally it was the charge against Socrates in the most famous case of religious persecution in Western history. In one sense, it’s true. If Mona is dead, she can’t preach Bahai beliefs to potentially Muslim children. If a child is exposed to both Bahaism and Islam, there is some possibility that he will accept Bahaism rather than Islam. If a child is only exposed to Islam, there is a greater probability that he will only accept Islam.
But accept—at what price? Notice the admission involved in saying that Bahai beliefs “pollute” Muslim minds. The assumption is that minds are totally passive, that ideas pass in and out of them like smog or smoke through air. To make someone a Muslim, on this view, you must condition them to be a Muslim, insisting that they make no mental contribution to the process of becoming one. They just sit there, rotely, repeating mantras until those mantras blot everything else out. The fear seems to be that an active mind is a danger to Islam; the more active the mind, the less the chance of sustaining one’s faith. Note, finally, that this method of inculcating beliefs is equivalent to—maybe worse than—the methods commonly used in training animals. To housebreak a dog, you keep repeating the same thing over and over to it: sit!, heel!, don’t pee on the carpet! etc. To use such methods on humans is to confuse humans with animals. It is also to confuse the process of belief- formation with that of peeing on the carpet. That such equivalences should be made by those who claim to defend religion against insults to it constitutes an absurdity in a class of its own.
This issue—the confusion of the human and animal predicament—gives us a clue, perhaps, as to the motivations behind persecution. Certainly, the sheer absurdity of religious persecution—its obvious futility and pointlessness, its blatant mismatch of means and ends—should lead us to wonder why anyone ever engages in it. One answer might be that persecution comes from people who can neither handle the human level of functioning, nor deal with those who can. It comes from people who regard the responsibility of being human—of looking at the world through one’s own eyes, and taking responsibility for one’s own beliefs—as a great misfortune to be overcome. The explanation, of course, is also an indictment.[xviii]
Lest we think that such people exist only in Tehran or among Muslims, it’s worth asking ourselves about the motivations behind those in this country who insist that children recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning—emphasizing the phrase “under God,” while evading the meaning of the phrase “with liberty.” Consider the embarrassing “debate” we’ve recently had on this subject, a debate in which presumably mature adults—like the President of the United States—have tried to argue with a straight face that the existence of God is an uncontroversial proposition of “minimal religious content,” to which every child must assent on pain of classroom punishment. You have to wonder: have these people been taking lessons from the people in Tehran?
I don’t know whether the Pledge is still required of public school students, as it was when I was in school, but even if it isn’t, rest assured that there’s some Republican legislator somewhere scheming to put it back. And you have to hand it to them: what could be more inspiring than the sight of illiterate and innumerate first-graders, hands on their hearts, mumbling the Pledge of Allegiance in dutiful incomprehension?[xix] (By the way, how many children know what a “pledge of allegiance” is? For that matter, how many adults do?) The hope seems to be that sheer repetition of meaningless phrases will inculcate patriotism by osmosis—bypassing the mind by as circuitous a detour as possible. What we have, once again, is the canine theory of cognition applied to humans, less coercively applied than in Tehran, but no less absurd for that.
Let me sum up. I’ve argued that according to Locke, religious freedom is a matter of freedom of conscience, and it gets its justification from an evidentialist approach to the ethics of belief. This approach shows us why freedom is valuable and why persecution is self- defeating. It’s valuable because it goes to the heart of what we are as human agents: belief-formation is a matter of individual initiative and responsibility; persecution is a futile attempt to subvert that. It’s futile because it tries to bring about an effect, belief, by a cause totally incompatible with that effect, coercion. And so it must fail, and has always failed. So freedom of conscience really is an absolute, and we can now see why. If we’re to form beliefs responsibly, we must do so objectively, and if we’re to do that, we need the freedom to it. I would conclude that we can therefore profess or express a belief in absolutely anything we want, anywhere we want, any way we want, under any government whatever its laws or constitution, so long as our actions don’t constitute force, fraud, or the threat of force against anyone else.
Suppose you accept this. It seems obvious how it helps us become unyielding in defense of freedom, but you might wonder, how does it help in dealing with hard cases?
Well for one thing, it makes certain “hard” cases into easy ones. Take the case of the Muslim who disagrees that Mona’s persecution was really a persecution. Why is it wrong for a Muslim country to impose persecution on someone who disobeys its laws? We now have something precise to say to him. We say that Mona’s beliefs involved no force, and took nothing from anyone that belonged to them. But the government’s actions did both. Their arrest was an act of force, and their execution took from her the deepest thing that belonged to her and not to them: her life. So whatever the laws, the government was wrong, case closed.
Waco is a slightly harder case. Waco was a botched paramilitary action on the part of the government, and one with shaky legal credentials. The government’s warrant to enter the Branch Davidian compound was flawed, its action was quite blatantly part of a PR stunt, and it lied repeatedly about its actions for years after the fact. Having said that, though, we have to admit that the Branch Davidians were not targeted merely because they were exercising religious freedom or freedom of conscience, but because they were stockpiling weapons. I would say that the act of stockpiling weapons in contravention of the law is a coercive threat to others. So while I think the government deserves criticism for its handling of Waco—plenty of it—I don’t think that Waco was really a case of religious persecution.[xx]
What about Native Americans’ use of peyote? I certainly don’t recommend the use of peyote, much less believe in the spiritual claims made on its behalf, but the relevant point here is that nobody’s use of peyote is a coercive act against anyone else (unless of course they endanger someone’s welfare through the use of it or force it on them). By contrast, outlawing it is coercive; it removes one’s control over one’s own body and cedes that to the government. So I would say that the use of peyote is a legitimate exercise of religious freedom, and outlawing it is persecution.
What about whale-hunting? This is a genuinely hard case in my view. On the one hand, we have freedom of conscience so long as our beliefs don’t violate anyone’s rights. I like whales, but I don’t think they have rights, so that part of me is inclined to say that they can be hunted. On the other hand, whale-lovers have freedom of conscience, too, and their conscience dictates that whales ought to be protected. And I can see the legitimacy of this claim, too. So we have an apparent conflict here between two equally legitimate rights. Whose conscience ought to prevail? The answer is that this is not purely a case of freedom of conscience. It involves the control of a natural resource: whales. So the principle of religious freedom can’t solve this problem by itself. We need a separate principle that determines the control of resources, what philosophers call a “principle of initial appropriation.” As it turns out, I happen to think that Locke has the answer to that one, too—but that’s another lecture.[xxi]
One final point. Locke’s view has a subtle implication that’s worth mentioning. Notice that the whole view depends on an evidentialist ethics of belief. Locke insists that we form our beliefs exclusively on the basis of evidence. A religious person might object that while this vindicates religious freedom in a nice way, it does so by undermining faith. After all, if Locke expects us to form our beliefs by evidence alone, how can he expect us to believe in the mysteries of faith?
At one level, as an atheist, I have to concede the inconsistency in Locke’s view here. My own view happens to be that religious freedom rests on an evidentialist ethics of belief, and such an ethics leads you away from faith and toward reason—which leads eventually to atheism. But that’s my view[xxii]; others, including Locke, have disagreed. You could, after all, believe that the evidence will lead you not to atheism, but to religion, in which case you could accept Locke’s view. Or you could believe that faith pertains to things beyond this world, while reason pertains to this world, and since freedom is a worldly good, Locke’s argument can apply to it without touching the mysteries of faith. You’ll have to decide this issue for yourselves. I would insist, however, that you can’t accept Locke’s view, or defend religious freedom, unless you give reason a large place in human affairs, and especially moral affairs.
That means something a bit heretical, actually. It means that religious freedom is not based on tolerance or diversity—the words we most often hear—but on the pursuit of truth. After all, “tolerance” merely means “putting up with something you would normally not want to put up with.” But despite the title of the Letter, that idea plays no important part in Locke’s justification of freedom, and doesn’t really go to the heart of the matter. As for diversity, while freedom leads to diversity, persecution is diverse, too. So diversity is not an unconditional good, and not the heart of the matter, either. From Locke’s perspective—and mine—the real issue is neither tolerance nor diversity, but truth. Truth is the prize and reward of belief, but we can only fully earn that reward if we’re free to do so. To block the path of someone who strives to earn such a reward is the very paradigm of injustice, something we should never tolerate.
Let me end with the quotation from which I derived my title, “Mind Unfettered,” which comes from a letter of President John Tyler’s, written in 1843. It summarizes many of the themes of my talk, bridging the gap between Locke and us, and it giving us a metaphor with which to replace the “pollution metaphor” of the persecutors:
The United States [Tyler writes] have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent--that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgement. … Such is the great experiment which we have tried, and such are the happy fruits which have resulted from it; our system of free government would be imperfect without it.
The body may be oppressed and manacled and yet survive; but if the mind of man be fettered, its energies and faculties perish, and what remains is of the earth, earthly. Mind should be free as the light or as the air.[xxiii]
[iii] Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Idea of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Thought 1882-1948, (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 10.
[v] Quoted in Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 22.
[ix] For background, see Dick J. Reavis, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), and David Kopel and Paul Blackman, No More Wacos: What’s Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997). See also Senator John Danforth’s Final Report (2000) on the affair, http://www.gospelcom.net/apologeticsindex/b10a03.html, and the site of David Kopel, http://www.davekopel.org/waco.htm.
[xii] “Introduction” to Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), p. 7.
[xiii] This paragraph summarizes and simplifies what I take to be the best aspects of Locke’s (not entirely consistent) argument. What I’ve summarized is perhaps most clearly expressed in his Letter, as well as in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and The Conduct of the Understanding. On the voluntary operation of our mental faculties, see Essay, II.16.15-30. On our moral responsibilities in belief-formation, see Essay, IV.15-16 and IV.19-20, as well as Conduct, 10-11 and 33-35.
[xiv] The clearest statements of this principle in Locke are in the Essay, IV.25.1, IV.26.1, and IV.20.15-17. The version in the text is my own.
[xv] Locke, Second Treatise of Government, sec. 6.
[xvi] As this passage perhaps makes clear, Locke’s arguments prefigure Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, on which see Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, (New York: Dutton, 1991).
[xvii] Namely, members of the Ahmadi sect, followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. The distinction between the orthodox Muslim and the Ahmadi belief turns on the interpretation of the phrase “khatam-ul-rasul.” All Muslims believe that Muhammad was “khatam-ul-rasul,” or the “seal” of the prophets (meaning the wax seal that closes an envelope—not the marine mammal!). Orthodox Muslims take the metaphor of a seal to imply that Muhammad was chronologically the last of the prophets, “sealing” the prophetic line in the way that a wax seal closes an envelope. Ahmadis take the metaphor to imply that Muhammad is the paradigmatic prophet, whose deeds and actions mark him out as a prophet in the way that a seal bears the authoritative mark of its owner. Bahais, whose teachings resemble those of Islam while falling outside of its ambit, follow the Ahmadis on this issue, adopting Muhammad as one of their prophets. The dispute seems nearly irresolvable in the absence of a criterion to determine the essential function of a seal—a criterion that I doubt the Iranian interrogators would be capable of producing or defending. (This raises the problematic question of why God chose to rest so fundamental an issue on so obscure a metaphor.) I thank Ahsan Zafar for helpful discussion of these issues, though he may not necessarily agree with what I say here.
[xviii] The hypothesis is Ayn Rand’s. See “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, (New York: Signet, 1967) and “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It, (New York: Signet, 1982). I’ve sometimes wondered whether there is a connection between “the canine theory of cognition” I mention in the text and Muslim fundamentalists’ well-known hatred for dogs. Could the hatred be motivated by envy?
[xix] Thus as a child, I began each day by repeating two sets of meaningless (and mutually contradictory) oaths of allegiance within a few hours of each other—one being the fajr prayer to Allah, the other being the Pledge of Allegiance to Uncle Sam.
In New Jersey, of course, our busy legislators don’t stop with the Pledge of Allegiance. Thus we have the inanities of Senate Act 2626, which directs the State Department of Education to display the motto “In God We Trust” at every public school. http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2000/Bills/S3000/2626_I1.HTM
[xx] See the material cited in note 10 above.
[xxi] The classic discussion is in Locke’s Second Treatise, chapter 5.
[xxii] As well as that of the W.K. Clifford, typically described as the first modern evidentialist. See Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief,” (1879) in The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), edited by Timothy Madigan.
[xxiii] Quoted in Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic, September 1990, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/90sep/rage.htm . Tyler’s metaphor interestingly prefigures the theme of Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged.
[1] My thanks to Nicole Maldonato for the invitation to give this talk, and to Kevin Maldonato for acting as moderator during the discussion period.
[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.1, 1120a.
[1] Exodus, 23:23-30.
[1] Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Idea of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Thought 1882-1948, (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 10.
[1] Quoted in Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 22.
[1] For background, see Dick J. Reavis, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), and David Kopel and Paul Blackman, No More Wacos: What’s Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997). See also Senator John Danforth’s Final Report (2000) on the affair, http://www.gospelcom.net/apologeticsindex/b10a03.html, and the site of David Kopel, http://www.davekopel.org/waco.htm.
[1] “Introduction” to Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), p. 7.
[1] This paragraph summarizes and simplifies what I take to be the best aspects of Locke’s (not entirely consistent) argument. What I’ve summarized is perhaps most clearly expressed in his Letter, as well as in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and The Conduct of the Understanding. On the voluntary operation of our mental faculties, see Essay, II.16.15-30. On our moral responsibilities in belief-formation, see Essay, IV.15-16 and IV.19-20, as well as Conduct, 10-11 and 33-35.
[1] The clearest statements of this principle in Locke are in the Essay, IV.25.1, IV.26.1, and IV.20.15-17. The version in the text is my own.
[1] Locke, Second Treatise of Government, sec. 6.
[1] As this passage perhaps makes clear, Locke’s arguments prefigure Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, on which see Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, (New York: Dutton, 1991).
[1] Namely, members of the Ahmadi sect, followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. The distinction between the orthodox Muslim and the Ahmadi belief turns on the interpretation of the phrase “khatam-ul-rasul.” All Muslims believe that Muhammad was “khatam-ul-rasul,” or the “seal” of the prophets (meaning the wax seal that closes an envelope—not the marine mammal!). Orthodox Muslims take the metaphor of a seal to imply that Muhammad was chronologically the last of the prophets, “sealing” the prophetic line in the way that a wax seal closes an envelope. Ahmadis take the metaphor to imply that Muhammad is the paradigmatic prophet, whose deeds and actions mark him out as a prophet in the way that a seal bears the authoritative mark of its owner. Bahais, whose teachings resemble those of Islam while falling outside of its ambit, follow the Ahmadis on this issue, adopting Muhammad as one of their prophets. The dispute seems nearly irresolvable in the absence of a criterion to determine the essential function of a seal—a criterion that I doubt the Iranian interrogators would be capable of producing or defending. (This raises the problematic question of why God chose to rest so fundamental an issue on so obscure a metaphor.) I thank Ahsan Zafar for helpful discussion of these issues, though he may not necessarily agree with what I say here.
[1] The hypothesis is Ayn Rand’s. See “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, (New York: Signet, 1967) and “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It, (New York: Signet, 1982). I’ve sometimes wondered whether there is a connection between “the canine theory of cognition” I mention in the text and Muslim fundamentalists’ well-known hatred for dogs. Could the hatred be motivated by envy?
[1] Thus as a child, I began each day by repeating two sets of meaningless (and mutually contradictory) oaths of allegiance within a few hours of each other—one being the fajr prayer to Allah, the other being the Pledge of Allegiance to Uncle Sam.
In New Jersey, of course, our busy legislators don’t stop with the Pledge of Allegiance. Thus we have the inanities of Senate Act 2626, which directs the State Department of Education to display the motto “In God We Trust” at every public school. http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2000/Bills/S3000/2626_I1.HTM
[1] See the material cited in note 10 above.
[1] The classic discussion is in Locke’s Second Treatise, chapter 5.
[1] As well as that of the W.K. Clifford, typically described as the first modern evidentialist. See Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief,” (1879) in The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), edited by Timothy Madigan.
That’s a really good essay… a superb display of logical thought and an excellent attempt at unraveling a rather complex concept into simple components.
“A religious person might object that while this vindicates religious freedom in a nice way, it does so by undermining faith. After all, if Locke expects us to form our beliefs by evidence alone, how can he expect us to believe in the mysteries of faith? “
Beliefs ARE formed by evidence alone. I do not think that there should really be any honest objection by a religious person here. I don’t think that faith really precludes evidence. If you ask any person strongly led by faith, I think that if they are honest they will admit that they have a great deal of evidence for their belief. The evidence is based more on subjective experiences rather then more objective proofs. For example: prayers answered, spiritual revelation, spiritual peace, coincidences that seem miraculous, subjective feelings of connection, etc. These things cannot necessarily be verified by another individual, but work as strong evidence to the person who experiences them in association with faith. From this perspective, I think Locke’s view of an evidentialist ethics of belief is still strongly compatible.
“To block the path of someone who strives to earn such a reward is the very paradigm of injustice, something we should never tolerate.”
Amen
-veridicus
"Scientia Est Potentia"
LinK BeKon -(DPSO)Liquid Chaoz
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Re:virus: Mind Unfettered
« Reply #2 on: 2003-01-05 07:38:52 »
[Veridicus] Beliefs ARE formed by evidence alone. I do not think that there should really be any honest objection by a religious person here. I don’t think that faith really precludes evidence. If you ask any person strongly led by faith, I think that if they are honest they will admit that they have a great deal of evidence for their belief. The evidence is based more on subjective experiences rather then more objective proofs. For example: prayers answered, spiritual revelation, spiritual peace, coincidences that seem miraculous, subjective feelings of connection, etc. These things cannot necessarily be verified by another individual, but work as strong evidence to the person who experiences them in association with faith. From this perspective, I think Locke’s view of an evidentialist ethics of belief is still strongly compatible.
[rhinoceros] I also think that the "Mind Unfettered" essay was very good.
As for the rest, go ahead, Veridicus. If anyone objects to your "subjective evidence" for "prayers answered, spiritual revelation, spiritual peace, coincidences that seem miraculous and subjective feelings of connection", you can always tell them that was not objective evidence -- that was subjective evidence, so objections do not apply.
Just curious: How does this approach fare when you talk with people who have their own different "subjective evidence", such as a spiritual revelation for someone's glorious earthly destination? And how do you talk to other people about that?
Just curious: How does this approach fare when you talk with people who have their own different "subjective evidence", such as a spiritual revelation for someone's glorious earthly destination? And how do you talk to other people about that?
[veridicus]I would talk to that person with respect for any belief that they honestly hold keeping in mind that a very large part of each person (as well as the most precious aspects of life) is composed of subjective experiences. I would attempt to suspend all judgements in an effort to understand why they believe what they do. I would pay close attention to the effect that the belief has on their outlook and experience of life. I personally feel that the more perspectives on our existence that I allow myself to fully encounter, the richer my own understanding becomes. Within every lie there is truth, and within every fantasy there is some reality. Most importantly, I would attempt to learn all that I could from that person whether they be wise or a fool (or both). How does this approach fare, you ask. I love life, I love people. The more deeply I know both, the richer my life becomes.
Peace -veridicus
"Scientia Est Potentia"
LinK BeKon -(DPSO)Liquid Chaoz
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Re:virus: Mind Unfettered
« Reply #4 on: 2003-01-06 06:58:40 »
Quote:
"If anyone objects to your "subjective evidence" for "prayers answered, spiritual revelation, spiritual peace, coincidences that seem miraculous and subjective feelings of connection", you can always tell them that was not objective evidence -- that was subjective evidence, so objections do not apply."
Isn't that a form of category error? The evidence of subjective eperience may speak to evidence of the existence of said subjective experience, but it does not speak to the objective existence of any deity. Particularly as said subjective experience (particularly spiritual revelation and spiritual peace) could as easily be described as being noetic in character i.e. generated by the brain itself. Hence the similarity between the description of certain mystical experiences and that of certain narcotic experiences (bearing in mind that substances like peyote or even incense have frequently been used in religious rites).
The other problem, as you indicated, with subjective experience is that it is not especially shareable, communicable or indeed testable. It stands only in so far as it is valid for individual experience.
BTW I seem to recall Sheldrake asserting the psychic powers of certain pets on the basis of miraculous coincidence :-)
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