<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">I doubt very seriously if people join a religion to get legal advantages. If you asked them they would scratch their heads and say Huh?". They join because they believe in their god. I am not saying that Stuarts' thesis is incorrect. bill w</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, May 21, 2023 at 12:53 PM Stuart LaForge <<a href="mailto:stuart.laforge@gmail.com">stuart.laforge@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Example of religious people doing things legally that non-religious people cannot include the Navajo being allowed to legally consume peyote on their reservations. Peyote is an entheogen which brings them closer to the Great Spirit. Which brings me to why religious freedom is necessary for any equitable multi-cultural empire to exist. It allows diverse and distinct cultures to persist in a global economy. Every culture is their particular god's chosen people, and as, should have special legal privileges as a result. If religious people did not receive special privileges under the law, then there would be no advantages to being in a religion in the first place. Therefore, to threaten the freedom of religion is to threaten cultural diversity and equity.<div><br></div><div>Eliminating religion would promotee monoculture and all mono-culture is a evolutionary liability. Monoculture is brittle and would quickly lead to the extinction of the organisms and organizations that adopt it. Monoculture embodied as racism, or other inherent bias, is not just wrong, it is weak and loses wars to diversity. The two biggest wars in American history, the American Civil War and WW2 were wars fought by multiculturalists against racists, and the racists lost both wars, empirically proving their inferiority.<div><br></div><div>To refute John's argument that giving religious people special freedoms and protections over non-religious is crazy, I would say that such special freedoms are what allows religious people to be rational. There would be no advantage for these people to be religious, if religions did not have special legal privileges by virtue of the government recognizing their place as a god's chosen people.</div><div><br></div><div>So to summarize, religious freedom and privilege is necessary to maintain cultural diversity and equity, and cultural diversity and equity are necessary to maintain a strong organization, nation-state, or empire. Religious people, regardless of which religion, have numerous cultural and legal advantages over infidels, apostates, and non-believers. Atheists have the virtue of being "right" at the cost of much companionship and social support through religious networks. Nte that this is true even if "thoughts and prayers" sent through social media are worthless.</div><div><br></div><div>Stuart LaForge</div><div><br></div><div><br><div><div dir="auto">On Saturday, May 20, 2023 at 1:49:19 PM UTC-7 <a href="mailto:fooz...@gmail.com" target="_blank">fooz...@gmail.com</a> wrote:<br></div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><div style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-size:small"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">interpreted to mean that worshiping an invisible man in the sky gives somebody rights that somebody who doesn't worship an invisible man in the sky does not have. If somebody does something for a religious reason it's legal but if they do the exact same thing for a reason other than religion it's illegal, and that's nuts. </span></font><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:large">John K Clark</span></div><div style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-size:small"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:large"><br></span></div></div></div><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-size:small"><span style="font-size:large"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">It rather incenses me that churches pay no taxes. But I need examples of religious people doing things legally that nonreligious people cannot bill w</font></span></div></div></div><br><div></div><div><div dir="ltr">On Sat, May 20, 2023 at 1:28 PM John Clark <<a rel="nofollow">johnk...@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div></div><div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 2:23 PM William Flynn Wallace <<a rel="nofollow">fooz...@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><br></div></div><div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>I was thinking of how to build a moral system. What should be the basic assumptions? </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><font size="4">I would say the basic assumption should be that the moral thing to do is whatever will cause the least amount of human suffering, I'm not saying that axiom is complete and doesn't have some inconsistencies, Kurt Godel proved that even the axioms of arithmetic cannot be complete and self consisted and it would be unrealistic to expect morality could be made to work more reliably than arithmetic, but I think that's about the best we could do. However the Trolley Problem shows us that most people's intuitive feeling about what is moral and what is not has little relationship with minimizing overall suffering, in fact some ethicists, especially medical ethicists, almost seem to be saying that the moral thing to do is whatever will kill the most people.</font></div><div><br></div><div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"> <span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>Start with the Bill of Rights? Certainly a good place.</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><font size="4">I would get rid of freedom of religion, as long as you have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you get freedom of religion<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> automatically, it's just one of the infinite number of things you can talk about or have a meeting about. However the fact that the US Constitution specifically mentions it has been interpreted to mean that worshiping an invisible man in the sky gives somebody rights that somebody who doesn't worship an invisible man in the sky does not have. If somebody does something for a religious reason it's legal but if they do the exact same thing for a reason other than religion it's illegal, and that's nuts. </span></font></div><div><font size="4"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></font></div><div><font size="4"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> John K Clark</span></font></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div>
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