Comments on: Believing in religious freedom

By: John

John — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:51:35 +0000

The author is attacking a strawman by arguing that religious freedom means supporting secularism over theocratic radicalism. In fact, it means opposing both extremes. It means rejecting both the secularistic banning of religion in the public square and the theocratic banning of every religion but the dominant one in public life. Religious freedom is about a third way, about allowing all views and religions, including the belief that no religion is true.

Hurd seems to believe this idea of religious freedom is a western, Christian construct foisted imperialistically on the rest of the world. Tell that to Muslims persecuted by Russia or Tibetan Buddhists crushed by China. And tell that to the countries worldwide who are signatories of numerous international human rights agreements proclaiming religious freedom as the birthright of human beings everywhere.

Freedom of religion is not about pointless intellectual abstractions, but about defending the rights of actual people who are being beaten, bloodied, tortured, and slain for daring to follow the dictates of conscience. No matter what country we’re from, we as human beings are obliged to stand for those who are so tormented.

By: Dick Wursten

Dick Wursten — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:24:45 +0000

Meditating on this topic a paradoxical conclusion jumped to (my) mind. I infer from this essay – as far as I understand it – that the category of ‘the religious’ begins to evaporate: Much of the social, cultural, political and civil goods once linked to being religious are now present in the secular realm (within an immanent frame), leaving only the convictions, the beliefs to articulate the term religion. These convictions are still as they used to be: absolute claims concerning everything (ontological worldview with moral implications), but the link to ‘ordinary life’, the socio-cultural context is gone. The believers do not consider this to be a loss, but a purification. and – and this is the paradox – these believers are the ones who most fervently claim religious freedom for the expression and public realisation of their convictions. When religion and culture part ways, it is Holy ignorance that remains (Olivier Roy).

By: Eoin O'Mahony

Eoin O'Mahony — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:27:10 +0000

Kurt: None of your last paragraph is under discussion or dispute here. Hurd’s use of Asad is hardly dependent but perhaps one of the finest operationalisations of his notion of particularity and the “morphology of our provocative choices.” It is almost as if you are trying to depoliticise the directly political as if individual conscience is all that we need examine.

By: Kurt Werthmuller

Kurt Werthmuller — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 23:48:07 +0000

I’d counter – as one who works in the religious freedom sphere – by suggesting that this may be a theoretical problem for Dr. Hurd, but it’s not much of an issue for those communities among whom religious freedom is a real challenge and struggle. She uses the example of Syria: the very communities under threat identify themselves – and are identified by others in Syrian society – by their confessional affiliation, so why is it somehow disingenuous to adopt the same categories? I advocate intervention in Syria, in part, because those minorities are already perceived (a key word here) as collectively adhering to the regime, and I am concerned that they may be attacked according to those perceptions if the situation devolves into sectarian civil war (which is not inevitable).

I’d also suggest that Dr. Hurd simply misses the point of much advocacy (though not, perhaps, regarding religion-specific groups, such as Christian persecution organizations). I, for one, write about religious freedom primarily as an individual right to believe (or not), yes, but to affiliate oneself with a particular group, to publicly confess one’s beliefs – or lack thereof, which is just as important – and to change those convictions as he or she sees fit.

Simply put: religion, in the myriad of ways one may define it, is a basic and essential part of the human experience, and therefore its freedom is a worthy object of protection. Hurd’s dependence on Asad here – who takes Foucaultian thought to an unnecessary extreme in this issue – serves to unnecessarily deconstruct this fairly basic concept.

By: Benson Saler

Benson Saler — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:08:13 +0000

While the notion that belief is “the core of religiosity” is of dubious existential, cross-cultural warranty — as Pascal Boyer observes (in “Out of Africa: Lessons from a By-Product of Evolution,” 2004), most religion “has no doctrine, no set catalogue of beliefs that most members should adhere to, no overall and integrated statements about supernatural agents. Most religion is piecemeal, mostly implicit, often less than perfectly consistent and, most importantly, focused on concrete circumstances” – it is probably the case that many readers of The Immanent Frame deem beliefs of certain sorts to be what is — for them — most interesting about what they call religion. In my opinion, they need not apologize for their point of view and its consequences in their attentions to the human condition. They have every right to explore what they deem most interesting. Unfortunately, however, a host of obiter dicta often distract students of religion from fundamental considerations of what may be meant by “belief” and by different analytically posited sorts of belief. Perhaps we would be better off by first clarifying what we understand by belief and its permutations.