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PhilGoetz comments on Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015 - Less Wrong
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When there we have it. To you, and to Phil Goetz, a moral belief implies an imperative to make everyone conform to it, had one only the power to do so. The implication is so unconscious and axiomatic to you, that when you and he read Lewis saying how he thinks people should live (and he would indeed be against gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy), you immediately imagine him imposing it on everyone, and pointing to the unwelcome result as a refutation of Lewis. Of course, the result is only unwelcome to you and Phil because you do not agree with Lewis on how people should live. But then, how will an army of Jiro clones rule, or Phil Goetz clones?
The briefest acquaintance with Lewis' writing, including the quote in question, would indicate that this is antithetical to both his written views and his life. He was an Oxford don, who once refused an honour in order not to be drawn into politics. But if you do not see a gap between "this is how people should live" and "people should be compelled to live so" then you will not only fail to make any sense of Lewis, you should on no account be allowed such power over anyone.
Richard, this is not what I believe, but rather what Lewis almost certainly believed, as evidenced by how all Christians, everywhere, throughout all history up to Lewis' time, have behaved. It would be an astonishing coincidence if the one Christian we were talking about were the one secretly willing to grant religious freedom to non-Christians.
(Yes, religious freedom includes the right to polygamy and prostitution.)
In fact I have several times explicitly stated the same thing you wrote here, as a critique of Eliezer's outline of CEV, which assume (without even noticing it) that a moral belief implies an imperative to propagate itself.
I prefer to determine what Lewis almost certainly believed by looking at what he certainly wrote. The very quote that started this discussion is explicitly saying the opposite.
Besides, it's nearly five hundred years since the Thirty Years War knocked the stuffing out of Christian proselytisation by the sword, and the imperative to force people into belief, or at least practice, has been declining ever since. Further history here.
The fact that they no longer tell people to convert or die does not mean they grant freedom of religion. I'm not aware of any society with a Christian majority that has ever refrained from enforcing its moral rules on the rest of its society. I am aware of probably hundreds, if I added them up, throughout history, that have done so. Find me a dozen counterexamples and I'll listen.
From talking about C.S. Lewis, the conversation has now floated up to the outer edges of the atmosphere.
Yes, most Christian societies have laws against murder, then again so do most non-Christian societies.
I assume Phil means that Christian-majority societies have tended to enforce not only Christian rules that are widely shared among non-Christians, but also Christian rules that are not. Phil, would you care to clarify?
Well, all the examples cited in this thread are also widely shared among non-Christians.
Much less widely than the prohibition on murder.
Among examples of rules not widely shared among non-Christians that are enforced in present-day western countries, off the top of my head I can think of the ban on selling alcohol on Good Friday in Ireland, and bans on certain types of stem cell research in various countries. There probably are many more that don't immediately spring to my mind.
One could hardly come up with a worse example of a Christian-only prohibition. Alcohol is religiously forbidden to Moslems, and in some Moslem countries, legally forbidden on every day of the year, not just the selling of it, but the drinking. The punishment is flogging, or death for persistent offenders.
ETA: Ah, you said Western countries, which currently excludes all the Moslem states. But the Moslem populations of the West still have the religious prohibition.
"Prohibits alcohol on Good Friday" means "specifically prohibits alcohol on Good Friday". Prohibiting it as a subset of a generic prohibition on all alcohol doesn't count.
Why's that relevant? The point (unless I'm misunderstanding badly) is that the ban is there because some Christians wanted it to be, that the great majority of the non-Christian population would likely prefer it not to be there, and that this is therefore an example of a Christian rule being enforced on people who are not Christians.
The fact that a small fraction of the non-Christian population might be happy enough for the rule to be there is irrelevant. If there were a law requiring everyone to go to church on Sundays there would probably be as large a fraction of the non-Christian population in favour; it would still (obviously, no?) be an example of a Christian rule being enforced on people who are not Christians.
Lot's of societies have laws banning conducting of various types of business on major holidays.
The first thing that pops into my head is monogamy.
That was a Greco-Roman idea the Christianity inherited.
The alcohol rule is not enforcing a Christian rule on non-Christians, since neither Christians nor Catholics have a rule against buying alcohol on Good Friday. That law (which I only know about from this comment) is specifically Irish. It is not banning something for everyone which is against the rules for some; it is banning something for everyone which normally would not be against anyone's rules.
(Which does not mean there are no cases of Christians enforcing specifically Christian rules on non-Christians; there are likely cases like that.)
It certainly is enforcing a Christian rule on non-Christians. "Christian rule" here means not "rule found in the Bible" or "rule adhered to by at least 40% of Christians" or anything like that but "rule wanted only by Christians, for specifically Christianity-related reasons".
The only plausible reason to forbid buying alcohol on Good Friday in particular is that among Christians Good Friday is a solemn holy day on which drunkenness would be exceptionally inappropriate.
(Other hypothetical things that I think would be "Christian rules" in the relevant sense, just to make sure my point is clear: A rule forbidding anyone to speak ill of any canonized Christian saint. A rule forbidding commercial transactions on Sundays. A rule obliging everyone to attend at least one service in an Anglican church every Sunday. None of these is regarded as obligatory by most Christians. Any of them, if made into law, would be an obvious example of Christians imposing Christianity-specific obligations on others. That the obligations aren't readily derivable consequences of Christianity as such makes this worse if anything, not better.)
Sunday blue laws (bans on selling alcohol in the USA on Sundays.)
Heterosexual-only marriage.
I suppose having Christmas be a Federal holiday technically counts as well.
I don't think that the notion of limiting marriage to couples that are not of the same gender is exclusively a Christian concept. Until fairly recently, I don't think that government recognition of same-sex marriage has been common even among jurisdictions that are not predominantly Christian. And, even today, it is hardly the case that same-sex marriage is forbidden only in countries with a majority Christian population.
The United States currently has a Christian majority. And to the best of my knowledge, a large majority of people in charge of the government in all Western countries are currently Christians. That is certainly true of the present Supreme Court in the United States which legalized gay marriage, which is currently composed of six Catholics and three Jews.
If being majority Christian means being tyrannical, the USA is currently a tyranny, and so is every other Western country.
In which case what does this have to do with C.S. Lewis?
The US is majority Christian, but not majority alieving-Christians.
I don't think that is true? There is a huge contingent of evangelicals (last I checked, a bit under half of Americans believe in creationism), it only takes a few non-creationist but religious Christians to get to a majority.
I think you are missing a critical point -- most people seriously don't care about the age of the Earth, at all. So if you ask someone "did God create the Earth in its present form", you are not identifying whether or not someone is a young Earth creationist, but simply giving the prompt "do you believe in God enough to say 'yes' on a random survey?"
One survey found that 25% of Americans don't know that the Earth orbits the sun. This seems like a non-religious question to me, and thus I am willing to take it as a general indicator of 'how much Americans care about basic science'. So I would split that 42% into two groups: 'Americans who strongly believe that God created the Universe in its present form' = 17% (ish), 'Americans who guessed wrong and/or would like to weakly signal that they are Christians' = 25% (ish).
Most people just don't care enough to alieve about science. However, I suspect that more people do care enough to alieve about politics, and are willing to base their political ingroup on religion.
Whether someone is an alieving Christian can be hard to determine because of where you set your threshhold--typically people act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others. But entirelyuseless brought it up in the context of the people who run the government and I think it's exceptionally clear that most of them aren't. I certainly doubt that the members of the Supreme Court who voted for gay marriage are either evangelicals or religious Christians.
Christianity is not a unified body of doctrine, and a very plausible explanation for why people typically "act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others" is that they in fact believe that some things are true but not others.
That's the inverse of "no true Scotsman". "No true Scotsman" refers to the situation where you arbitrarily exclude people who you don't want to count as members of a class, by saying "that isn't really Christian". In this case, you can arbitrarily include people who you do want to count, by saying that any non-Christian things about them aren't really non-Christian.
Then every Christian can count as a religious Christian.
I believe, at this point, that it might be helpful to quote from "Dignitatis Humanae", an official Vatican document on the subject of religious freedom:
To elaborate slightly:
Now, I'm not saying that all denominations of Christianity have an equally strong stance in favour of religious freedom (I've heard about some extremely militant modern Protestant groups, particularly in America). But this is strong evidence that there is a rather large group of Catholics who do believe in the idea of religious freedom; and if Lewis had done so as well, then he would hardly be alone in this stance.
(Dignitatis Humanae was published about two years after Lewis' death)
And yet the Catholic Church and its members still work to ban birth-control in countries where it thinks that's possible.
I don't care what they say they do. I care what they do.
I don't see what that has to do with religious freedom. They're not stopping anyone from being muslim, or protestant, or atheist.