"Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen." - P. J. O'Rourke

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"Something disquieting has been happening to the Western mind over the last half century. One philosophy professor reports that while none of his students are Holocaust deniers, a disturbingly rising number are worse: “They acknowledge the fact, even deplore it, but cannot bring themselves to condemn it morally. ‘Of course I dislike the Nazis,’ one student comments, ‘but who is to say they are morally wrong.’ They make similar observations about apartheid, slavery, and ethnic cleansing.” For these young people, to pass judgment, “they fear, is to be moral ‘absolutist,’ and having been taught that there are no absolutes, they now see any [judgment] as arbitrary, intolerant, and authoritarian.” Cultural critics trace creeping moral relativism to the permissive, antiauthoritarian ideology of the 1960s. Observers across the political spectrum agree that the relativistic shift has been correlated with lamentable social trends, for example, a dramatic rise in crime and social dysfunction in the United States and the United Kingdom in the decades following the 1960s. But the ideology of the 60s can be seen as an outgrowth of the more fundamental liberal notions of autonomy, freedom of choice, and freedom of conscience...

When a rare few secularists push back against religious belief in print, they are branded—often by fellow seculars and liberal religionists—"dogmatic," “evangelical,” “militant,” and “fundamentalist” atheists. Their scandalous premise is that religion is an urgent topic of conversation and therefore subject to the intellectual and moral standards of all serious conversation. There are dogmatists of every stripe, but God knows what an atheist fundamentalist would look like. If the mantra of religious fundamentalism is “I’m right, you’re wrong, go to hell,” the atheist creedo seems to be “I’m right, you’re wrong, let’s talk about it some more.”...

Most secular liberals today seem to be incapable of standing up for their values in public debate.

In the summer of 2003, the Vatican finally speaks out against violence against children. It is not referring to the Church’s child sexual abuse scandal then raging but instead to gay adoption. In a document titled Considerations regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith asserts, “Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.” Permitting children to be adopted by gay couples, the congregation continues, “would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development.” The language got the attention of liberals around the world. But precious few could bring themselves to publicly disagree with Rome’s claim that same- sex coupling is “evil.” Most objected along the same lines as editors of the Boston Globe, who opined, “The greatness of America is its pluralism, and neither president nor pope can impose his religious beliefs on the public realm.” Apparently, there is no mistake in thinking that same-sex couples who adopt are perpetrating violence against children; the mistake lies in mentioning it in public. As the influential American philosopher Richard Rorty put it, “Religion is unobjectionable as long as it is privatized.”...

A New York Times columnist writes of the “dismal consequences of this increasing religious influence,” namely, “policies that are likely to lead to more people dying of AIDS at home and abroad, not to mention more pregnancies and abortions.” Then he goes on to chastise fellow secularists: “Liberal critiques sometimes seem not just filled with outrage at evangelical- backed policies, which is fair, but also to have a sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself. Such mockery of religious faith is inexcusable.” Secular liberals are being asked to perform an act of cognitive contortionism, to object to the “consequences” of conservative religion without objecting to the moral precepts that cause them. What could be more appropriate than to evaluate a system of beliefs on the basis of its consequences for individual and social behavior? If causing more people to die pointlessly is not an objection to a system of beliefs, what would be?

Everywhere secular values are under assault, and almost nowhere are they being defended. On questions of religion, ethics, and values, secular liberals are strangely silent...

Where did secular liberalism go wrong? It has been undone by its own ideas... The Privacy Fallacy consists in assuming that because matters of conscience are private in the sense of nongovernmental, they are private in the sense of personal preference. A related confusion comes from the idea of freedom of conscience. This confusion begins in the core liberal principle that conscience must be left free from coercion. The mistake lies in thinking that because conscience is free from coercion, it must be free from criticism, reason, truth, or independent, objective standards of right and wrong. The indispensable principle of freedom of belief has mutated into an unthinking assumption that matters of belief are immune to critical public inquiry and shared evaluative norms. This is the Liberty Fallacy...

The press is protected, left free and open, not so that it may be private but so that it may perform a vital function in the public sphere. In the same way, conscience is protected in order that it may pursue—in dialogue with others—its vital questions of meaning, identity, value, and truth.

The press may say what it wants, but we don’t say that therefore it is subjective or arbitrary. The press is free, but not a free-for-all...

Susceptibility to public criticism is the price of admission to public debate. Religious conscience does not get in free. Many secular liberals have convinced themselves that freedom of belief entails respect for all religions, and that respect means refraining from criticism. But that is not respect; it’s just blanket acceptance, even disregard. Understood correctly, respect is not just compatible with criticism—respect entails criticism. To respect someone we must take him seriously, and taking someone seriously sometimes means finding fault with him...

The conventional view that genuine conscience requires religion has it precisely wrong: genuine religion requires conscience. If one’s practice of a religion is to be authentic, it must be based on one’s own honest assessment of what makes sense. The difference between believers and unbelievers, then, is not that the latter lack a conscience but rather that their conscience inclines them away from belief. That same conscience, however, can guide them in living ethically, without religious reference points. In this way, the secular conscience stands prior to and independent of all religions and points toward a shared vocabulary for public debate in a pluralistic society...

God is always of many minds, and so thoughtful people must turn to their own minds for guidance. God’s followers are of many names and tribes, and so citizens must appeal to a law higher than God’s if they wish to coexist in peace. That higher law is the rule of conscience...

Historian of philosophy Charles Taylor had documented what he calls the “inwardness” of the self in Christian culture. He begins his story with Augustine of Hippo. Augustine could be seen as the most self-absorbed of saints. He expended inordinate theological energies on explaining his inability to control his erections (God is not the only thing that moves in mysterious ways). Taylor points out that for Augustine, introspection was essential to religious wisdom...

Although it claimed fewer lives than the Protestant revolution, the scientific revolution precipitated no less of a metaphysical and epistemological crisis in European thought...

Someone could argue therefore that “secularism” carries with it some unwanted theological freight. This argument is vulnerable to a general difficulty: etymology is not destiny. That is, word origins do not permanently color present-day meanings like the stain of original sin— they matter only insofar as they are responsible for changes in the behavior of actual current language users. Clearly in this case no such influence remains from the Church origins. Only a relatively small number of people even know about the word’s origins. But not even they use the word that way. In modern usage, secularism has no more connection to Jesuits and Dominicans than lunacy has to the moon...

In its written decision in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court acknowledged that at stake in the case of abortion was a grave moral question: whether the developing fetus deserves full moral consideration as a human person... Whatever one thinks about the jurisprudence of the case, the strategy of bracketing the moral issue just doesn’t make sense upon reflection. For “whether it is reasonable to bracket, for political purposes, the moral and religious doctrines at stake depends largely on which of those doctrines is true.” If the Catholic Church “is right about the moral status of the fetus, if abortion is morally tantamount murder,” then the liberal defense of abortion on grounds of toleration and women’s autonomy must become “an instance of just-war theory; he or she would have to show why these values should prevail even at the cost of some 1.5 million civilian deaths each year.”

To appreciate the force of this point, try bracketing some other moral issue you care about; capital punishment, perhaps... Because public institutions aren’t in a place to say whether a practice is immoral, they are justified in acting as though it is not."

--- The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life / Austin Dacey