RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

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RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
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The features of Pluralism

• Pluralism as a permanent fact?
• Varieties of comprehensive doctrines religious
  and non religious
• How can a democratic constitutional order
  guarantee a stable political community and a just
  society given the fact of an irreconcilable
  diversity of opinion, beliefs, world-views and
  life-styles among its members?

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The Case of Religious Liberty (Why should the
free exercise of religion enjoy special
constitutional protection?)

• Liberal Views
• Religious liberty is important for the same
  reason individual liberty in general is
  importantso that people may be free to
  autonomously, to choose and pursue their values
  for themselves.
• Government should uphold religious liberty in
  order to respect persons as free and independent
  selves, capable of choosing their own religious
  conviction.

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Liberal views on religious liberty

• The respect the liberal invoke is not, strictly
  speaking, respect for religion, but respect for
  the self whose religion it is, or respect for the
  dignity that consists in the capacity to choose
  ones religion freely.
• On the liberal view, religious beliefs are worthy
  of respect, not in virtue of their content but
  instead in virtue of being the product of free
  and voluntary choice

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• Liberalism Put the right before the good it
  tries to secure the right to religious freedom
  without passing judgment on the content of
  peoples beliefs or on the moral importance of
  religion as such.

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Communitarians Responses

• The right to religious liberty is not best
  understood as a particular case of a more general
  right to individual autonomy.
• Assimilating religious liberty to a general right
  to choose ones own values misdescribes the
  nature of religious conviction and obscures the
  reasons for according the free exercise of
  religion special constitutional protection.
• Construing all religious convictions as products
  of choice may miss the role that religion plays
  in the lives of those for whom the observance of
  religious duties is a constitutive end, essential
  to their good and indispensable to their
  identity. Some may view their religious beliefs
  as matter of choice, others not.

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So for communitarians

• What makes a religious belief worthy of
  respect is not its mode of acquisitionbe it
  choice, revelation, persuasion, or
  habituationbut its place in a good life, or the
  qualities of character it promotes, or (from
  political point of view) its tendency to
  cultivate the habits and dispositions that make
  good citizens.

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ReligionConscience or Preference?

• According to communitarians, to place religious
  conviction on a par with the various interests
  and ends an independent self may choose makes it
  difficult to distinguish between claims of
  conscience, on the one hand, and mere
  preferences, on the other.
• Once this distinction is lost, the right to
  demand of the state a special justification for
  laws that burden the free exercise of religion is
  bound to appear as nothing more weighty than a
  private right to ignore generally applicable laws

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Ilustrations

• If an orthodox Jew is granted the right to wear a
  yarmulke while on the duty on an air force health
  clinic, then what about servicemen who want to
  wear other head coverings prohibited by military
  dress codes?
• If native American have a right to the
  sacramental use of peyote, then what can be said
  to those who would violate state drug laws for
  recreational purpose?
• If sabbath observers are granted the right
  schedule their day off from work on the day
  corresponding to their sabbath, does not the same
  right have to be accorded those who want a
  certain day off to watch football?

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State neutrality?

• Assimilating religious liberty to liberty in
  general reflects the liberal aspirations to
  neutrality
• It allows the state to show equal concern for the
  freedom of all citizens, citizens whose status in
  the political community is independent of their
  particular religious commitment or view about a
  good life.
• It concerns with procedure rather than outcome
  what factors can be invoke to justify political
  decision ?(Larmore)

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Criticism on liberal neutrality

• It confuses the pursuit of preferences with the
  performance of duties unless there were reasons
  to think religious beliefs and practices
  contribute to morally admirable ways of life, the
  case for a right to religious liberty would be
  weakened.
• Can religious beliefs be excluded from public
  sphere? is it justified to demand that religious
  individuals should bracket their essential,
  identity-constituting conviction when they enter
  a political discourse (schmidt)?

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Religious Problems in Indonesia?

• The essence of Pancasila not merely modus
  vivendi
• Political conception, not a comprehensive
  doctrine? (Rawls)
• The Translation of religious beliefs Religious
  beliefs cannot count as legitimate grounds for
  legal coercion unless they are translated into
  secular political reasons (Schmidt)