Godwin's law

[liv]

Last week the Islamic society on campus tried to run an Islamic Awareness Week. I say tried to, in that they had some very good events, but they didn't really manage to put any publicity for them in any visible place, so the "awareness" part was rather lacking. Anyway, the keystone of the week was an interfaith panel debate on Should modern law be guided by religious principles?. Some of the regulars from the women's three faiths group I run on campus asked me to speak as the Jewish panellist. I felt somewhat dubious about the event, but I knew that the students who invited me at least were coming from a place of good faith, so I agreed to do it. I made it very clear that I wasn't going to treat it as an adversarial or competitive debate, I wasn't going to try to prove that Judaism is better than Christianity, Islam or humanism, I was only willing to participate on the basis of giving some Jewish perspectives on the topic.

The other speakers were the Anglican chaplain, a law professor who has published a lot on the role of religion in English law, and someone who is essentially a professional Muslim apologist, he does a circuit of speaker and debate events explaining why Islam is great. I felt a little out of my league since the only qualification I had for being part of such an illustrious panel was the fact that I happen to be Jewish, but you know. The organizers kept promising me a schedule for the event, and eventually got it to me about six hours before the debate was due to start, which was the first time I learned that they had planned a three-hour discussion (!) And basically the students were somewhat inexperienced at organizing, chairing and running this sort of panel event, it wasn't a disaster at all but it could well have benefitted from somebody with, say, a congoing background.

The prof was great; he gave a lot of factual information about how English law actually works, countering the unsubstantiated (or American-centric) beliefs that lots of internet debaters have about the intersection of religion with civil law. He absolutely refused to be drawn into any soundbites and wouldn't simplify his scholarship to match people's preconceptions. The chaplain and I both took a very similar stance, we're both secularists as a matter of principle, me perhaps a bit more strongly so, and we're very much religious pluralists while being generally liberal in our own personal religious paths. The Muslim apologist was, hm, how can I describe this? He was polite and well-spoken and had an obviously well rehearsed mix of talking points about how Islam is unfairly stereotyped as being violent and barbaric, with points about how society ought to be guided by a more strict and unified moral code, and liberal democracy isn't that great anyway. Many of his points were sensible (eg Islamist terrorism is much more a product of European colonialism than of Islam), some obviously I disagreed with but that's perfectly fine, some were a bit out there, but my main beef with him was that he ignored the time limits and often didn't respond to the actual points people made but just dropped his prepared speeches into the debate at vaguely relevant moments.

He was also a huge gender essentialist. More or less the first thing out of his mouth after the 'honour to be here' preamble was that men and women are naturally different and isn't unfortunate that all those silly feminists and sociologists have corrupted people's common-sense understanding of basic biology. I am perfectly well aware that not all Muslims share those particular views about gender, but I do think that the strict gender segregation practised by many is a major obstacle to productive coexistence between Muslims and wider Christian-flavoured secular society. The speaker pointed out quite correctly that secular humanism isn't a magical utopia of perfect equality for women, and that many non-Muslim assumptions about Muslim women being universally "oppressed" are nothing but prejudice. But our society has a pretty clear consensus that gender differences aren't really all that important, and we're starting to come to an understanding that gender is more complicated than the strict binary we've constructed. So even if we try to be tolerant and multicultural, minority groups that insist on gender segregation are never going to fit in well. That's of course aside from the fact that a lot of segregation and complementarianism is in fact sexist in reality, even if the ideal is that women's roles are equally valued as long people stick to their own gender.

It would have been a bad idea for several reasons to be confrontational about this. I just dropped a few casual, polite comments into my responses. I noted that as the only biologist on the panel I didn't accept his view of strictly binary gender as being "natural". When he started holding forth about how same-sex marriage was against both nature and the sacred concept of marriage, since marriage is about a union between people with distinct sets of characteristics to create a stable context for reproduction and child rearing, I just neutrally said that as a matter of fact, in Judaism non-reproductive marriages such as those between infertile people or people past childbearing age are totally valid, so it's not a universal that marriage is about two opposite sex parents raising children. Of course he had to admit that infertile people can have valid marriages in Islam too. In general I tried to stick to the ostensible topic of the panel, which was about religious law in modern society, rather than getting drawn into a debate about whether nature and / or God ordain two binary genders with eternally distinct roles. I kept arguing that we need secularism because some religious people want to segregate men from women and assign ritual meaning to different gender roles, and some religious people want to acknowledge gender diversity and practise in egalitarian ways, and neither group should be able to force the other to conform to their ideas about gender.

Because the event hadn't really been well publicized, nearly all the audience were in fact Muslim. And they sat with men on the left side of the lecture theatre and women on the right, because that seems normal to them. Apart from a couple of slightly annoying Dawksinite types who ostentatiously came to sit on the "wrong" side of the room and ostentatiously removed most of their outer clothes so they were much less modestly dressed than most of the Muslims present. I think they were hoping to cause offence or controversy but they didn't get much of a reaction; gender segregation and modest dress were choices that the majority of the audience made, and weren't at all being enforced. They also didn't really want to respect the rules of the debate, such as passing questions through the chair, but did a bit of interrupting by shouting out ignorant internet-atheist talking points about how Islam is terrible because they cut hands off thieves and stone adulterers. Annoyingly they're medical students and somehow expected me to be on their side, partly because I had said I'm a secularist and partly because of the community feeling of coming from the same school.

The Muslim speaker also spoke strongly against secularism, which of course made for an interesting debate. Though it's always a bit sad when interfaith events end up fracturing along conservative versus liberal lines; the liberal members of various different religions get on jolly well, and quite often the conservative ones form a somewhat uneasy alliance against the perils of individualism and immorality and behaving decently to teh gays. He had some slightly odd and not terribly contexted quotes from Hobbes which purported to show that secularism is potentially oppressive, and some rather more relevant examples of legal decisions on the continent where actual religious practices (veiling, circumcision, ritual slaughter) are being banned in the name of preserving a secular society. I did agree up to a point that enforced "secularism" in the sense of banning public expressions of religion is a real danger. Unfortunately he then decided to drag the debate into the gutter by talking about all the atrocities committed by Hitler and Stalin in the name of secularism.

That got me really riled, I have to say. It's bad enough when people try to score useless debating points by trying to total up the numbers of people murdered by atheist dictators versus crusades and religious wars. But to lay the blame for genocide on secularism, ie separating church from state and legally protecting religious freedom was just ridiculous. The kids from I-soc who were running the debate had chosen not to take questions directly from the floor, but to make the audience write down their questions which they then sorted and picked some sensible ones to read out to the panel. The Muslim apologist's going off about Hitler and Stalin led to someone asking the question "Why are laws banning religious practice like Nazism?" In the spur of the moment, I decided that I was not prepared to go down that route. I maintained a smiley, polite demeanour, but I more or less interrupted the question-reader to comment "worst question ever!" and when he turned to the panel I said I wasn't going to answer that question or sit listening to the other panellists answering it, so I got up and walked out of the room. This caused some consternation, with the students worrying that they'd "offended" me, but I am pretty sure it was the right thing to do.

The more I think about this, the more I think it's not about offence. I really should not have to constantly encounter people treating the state-orchestrated torture, enslavement and murder of millions of people as some kind of cute debating point. It's like a kind of little-kid argument: you're evil! Well you're eviller! Well you're evil times infinity! Well you're a Nazi, so nyeh! I hate it in the Great God Debate, this tallying up a score of who's murdered the most people. And I hate it in political debates, whether it's about taxes and regulation, or about abortion, or about the environment, or whatever. Calling your opponents fascists or Nazis doesn't give you the moral high ground, and it also just kills any chances of productive discussion because either it's just meaningless words (which is horrifying, actually, being that casual about genocide), or else it's ridiculously and unhelpfully emotive.

This idea that "Nazi" is just the superlative of "bad" is what leads to things like talk-show hosts talking about "feminazis". There's that slogan often seen on icons Feminazi - because wanting equal rights is just like invading Poland. The Nazi invasion of Poland was in fact pretty horrific, even that I'm not sure should be taken as a joke. But most countries have invaded other countries at some point in their history, what's wrong with the Nazis is more about their attempt to exterminate millions of people they considered undesirable. And that's a really horrible thing to be confronted with when you think you're having a civilized and mostly abstract discussion. If you yourself are the sort of person that the Nazis would have considered "Aryan", you're probably going to be rather less emotionally affected by this sort of rhetoric, so in many ways it's a very unfair debating tool. Equally, it's completely unfair to tar people who happen to be ethnically northern European, straight, able-bodied and culturally Christian with guilt for Nazism by association.

Nazi means doubleplus ungood is what lead to the controversy some years back when an Israeli fashion house brought out a "Nazi" line of clothing. They didn't even use Nazi iconography, just the word Nazi, because their marketing people saw "Nazi" as just meaning really really really bad, so they thought it would appeal to rebellious teenagers who wanted to be anti-establishment, like claiming the label of "wicked" or "sick". Of course Israel has an unusually high proportion of people for whom that word is going to trigger seriously traumatic memories, but those people are part of the population in the UK as well, so using Nazi as such a casual insult indicates being pretty indifferent to the potential of causing them real misery. Not offence, fear and trauma. At some point some friends on Facebook who were protesting against Atos and their mistreatment of disabled people initiated one of those clicktivism campaigns when they tried to get people to change their Facebook icons to swastikas. Which meant that I found my FB feed full of swastikas, which was a pretty rotten experience for me and I can only imagine must have been even more unpleasant for people more directly affected.

There's also a more serious consequence to always Godwinning debates like this. It makes it very much harder to talk meaningfully about the actual dangers of state-sanctioned racism; if we express concern about things like the effectively single-party state in power in Hungary, or the rise of the Golden Dawn party in Greece, it comes across as just a trivial thing, oh look, we're calling the people we disagree with politically fascists again, blah blah blah. And closer to home there are very real concerns about racist parties being given increasingly prominent platforms and treated as if they were respectable parts of the polis, and even though they expressed it in rather an awful way, I think the FB people were right to be extremely worried about the trend towards dehumanizing disabled people. But you can't really say that, because everybody calls everybody they don't like or disagree with "Nazi" so it doesn't really mean anything any more.

I was also really struck by this article on the Euromaidan thing in Ukraine (written before the recent escalation). I have absolutely no idea how accurate it is, but if it's at all true, it's really chilling that the Ukrainian government is telling itself that its opponents are Jews and us that its opponents are Nazis. Snyder concludes:

If fascists take over the mantle of antifascism, the memory of the Holocaust will itself be altered. It will be more difficult in the future to refer to the Holocaust in the service of any good cause, be it the particular one of Jewish history or the general one of human rights.

Comments

[rmc28]

That sounds like a very difficult experience, and as though you acquitted yourself well.

And well, perhaps the students should be concerned about their poor choice of questions.

[liv]

Thank you. I think the poor question was a combination of the Muslim speaker unexpectedly deciding to be a dick with his "but Nazis, therefore I win!" nonsense, and one particular audience member trying to suck up to him by asking a dumb question. Sure, the deputy chair should've been more careful when he chose which audience question to put to the panellists, but I don't honestly think it reflects badly on the whole society, it was mostly just inexperience.

[quirkytizzy]

Random DW'r stopping by, caught this via The Latest Things.

I just wanted to say that this was an interesting read, and that I not only appreciate your effort in speaking on a panel like this, but in being a religious person who is also a feminist. (I'm an atheist, though god knows Dawkinites annoy the crap out of me, too!)

I hadn't at all considered the implications of the whole Holocaust thing in the way you put it, the way that culture uses it. Thank you for writing this - it was good brain food! (Sorry if this message is stilted, it is still early in the morning and my brain is not braining right.)

[liv]

Hello, welcome! Thanks for commenting. I am glad you can find some common ground from a religious person taking a feminist and secularist approach. I am very much pro-atheism, and don't hold the majority of atheists responsible for either Dawkins or some ill-mannered first year students who don't have much life experience yet.

Thank you for taking my point about the Holocaust used in culture and rhetoric. I was originally just going to write up the debate but I concluded that that was the aspect I most wanted to talk about. I have just entirely run out of patience for conversations where I say, I think the right answer is this because of this evidence and this principle, and people come back to me with, you're wrong because lol, Nazis. Which then means I have to be reminded again that there's an element in European culture who want me dead simply because of my ancestry, and deal with all the really terrible mental images of what happened when they held political power. And really, none of my close relatives was involved, just co-religionists and fellow non-straight people. I can only imagine how much worse it could be for many people.

[mirrorshard]

Tangent: the idea of Nazis as secularists is an interesting one, given that they (or specifically the inner core and the SS) had some interesting ideas about Norse gods and occultism. They weren't exactly Enlightenment types.

[liv]

Yes, people in the debate pointed out that the Nazis were in no way secularists, and the Muslim apologist just retorted that there's no holy scripture of secularism, nobody can say what counts as true secularism and it all depends on your perspective. Which, like a lot of his comments, was just a pat retort and didn't at all address the problems with his original point.

I think it is part of the wider problem of people treating the Nazis as simply a personification of "bad". They project any political views they don't like onto the Nazis, because maybe there's no objective universal morality these days, but damnit, Nazis are bad and anti-Nazis are good, and we're going to define ourselves as anti-Nazis without any reference to what that actually means. I mean, I've seen American Conservatives arguing, apparently seriously, that the Affordable Care Act is bad because it might lead to socialist medicine, and that will lead to Nazism because the Nazi party called themselves "National Socialists".

[oursin]

It's also quite hard to define 'true religion', even if there's is a holy scripture - as Mad William remarked, 'Both read the Bible day and night/but he reads black where I read white'. My general sense of Islam is that there are several major divisions within it and even between e.g. Muslims who regard themselves within the Sunni traditions, likely to be differences of opinion and emphasis.

So yes, slick and meaningless retort to shut down debate, really.

[liv]

Certainly; this speaker was doing things like saying, if someone claims that Islam is all about oppressing women, he can point to verses in the Quran and authoritative hadith showing that women have full rights. But that doesn't really help with the fact that lots of Muslims would entirely disagree with his relatively peaceful if somewhat conservative interpretation of the religion.

I think he was almost arguing on autopilot with the secularism = Nazis thing, though. Like, he probably has prepared answers for nu-atheist types who think Islam is violent and oppressive and uncivilized, and he was dropping them into discussion with me, when I wasn't claiming anything of the sort, I was just arguing for legal secularism. It almost felt like a ritual: scientific humanism is better than Islam / no it isn't because Nazis / Nazis aren't representative of humanism / how do you know because humanism has no clear definition or authority? Only people call "humanism" different things, atheism or Enlightenment values or skepticism or rationality, and I wouldn't be surprised if some people use the term "secularism" to mean that sort of thing.

I deliberately broke that ritual set of responses, though, because that's just not the argument I wanted to be having. I was not at all interested in arguing whether non-religion is better than Islam, and I was certainly not interested in pointless who's-a-Nazi bickering about it.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, I've seen American Conservatives arguing

Not that this is a disease unique to Conservatives: quite a lot of those on the left have a tendency to describe anything they don't like as 'Right-wing' or 'Far-right', as if the difference between, say, free-market economics and expelling immigrants is merely a matter of degree (and as if you can't be both racist and communist: the BNP's manifesto, last time I read it, was the most outright Marxist of all the British parties except maybe the Greens; and, you know, Stalin).

[liv]

I certainly didn't mean to imply that only Conservatives do it! I mean, the anti-Atos people I mentioned in my post are basically left-wing. I've had some largely unproductive arguments about whether the BNP's economic policy is meaningfully Fascist, and I'm fairly convinced that it isn't particularly. I think right-wing has a sensible meaning, it's not wrong to say that someone who values the free market over state regulation is right-wing, that's not saying that they're on a continuum with extreme or far-right types.

But a lot of the time the salient feature of why you might want to compare some group to Nazis is not about economic policy, it's about systematic oppression and eventually genocide of undesirable people. So it's not that Obamacare shouldn't be compared to Nazism because it's largely a left-wing / redistributive sort of concept and the Nazis were mostly pro-business and authoritarian. It's that laws about health insurance have absolutely no connection to racism and genocide! There's no economic policy which is exempt from being applied by oppressive dictatorships, so let's talk about a policy or regime's similarity to actual oppressive dictatorships, not about whether it has incidental economic features (let alone a vague similarity of nomenclature) in common with the Nazis.

[ptc24]

I was going to make a point about Kinder, Küche, Kirche (i.e. children, kitchen, church) being a Nazi slogan but apparently it wasn't, not officially at any rate. If the guy had stuck to the Soviets I might just grudgingly concede that he might have something with a passing resemblance to a point - for me (atheist and secularist) the Soviets are people to say "but we aren't like that!" about and then to quietly search your conscience later to make triple-sure you really aren't like that at all.

[liv]

But the thing is, the whole debate about whether the Nazis were religious (because they collaborated with some churches and used some Christian-flavoured concepts, and because they had a bit of vaguely Nordic Pagan occult stuff going on), or atheist (because they were primarily a nationalist and secular government and persecuted some Christians) is basically irrelevant. Atheists aren't responsible for the fact that some atheists have done evil things, and religious people aren't responsible for the fact that some Christians and Muslims have done evil things. Tallying up the score of which team murdered the most is distasteful and unproductive.

The reason to be atheist or religious is whether you think it's likely that God exists, not whether atheists or religious people have been least historically awful in aggregate. The reason to be secularist or pro state religion is because you think that's a better way to run society, not because one or the other makes you less similar to the Nazis. That's like saying that blue and orange are somehow morally better colours than red and black, because the latter were part of Nazi livery and iconography. It's irrelevant and offensive.

[ptc24]

Second paragraph: you say "the reason to X is Y, not Z", which is in a sense true, however it may be that Z has a bearing on Y.

Religions have ethical content. Certainly I've looked at Christianity in the past with a view to adopting it - and the ethical content has been a factor in that. Looking at the Bible and the attitudes of those Christians I saw around me, then it seemed sensible to say "If Christianity is true, then being Christian should make you a better person, in terms of your relations with your fellow human beings as well as in terms of your relations to God." Or, to make a snappier if slightly metaphorical point, "Is Christianity a light to the world?" Obviously Christianity can have good things to give to the world without being true (even Bertrand Russell was prepared to call Christianity an ethical improvement over ancient paganisms - more compassionate, certainly in his opinion more compassionate than Aristotle). I've certainly known Christians - quite close friends from school - who have said that a good way to evangelise is to be the best person you can possibly be. Indeed it's true - without the example of some of my other friends I might never have looked seriously at the matter at all. There's an obvious modus tollens flip side to all this, which in my case turned out not to be the big sticking point, but that's another story.

One can hold Christianity responsible for good or bad consequences without collectively praising or blaming all Christians for those consequences.

Historical analogies: clearly some analogies are worthless, although the fact that you made that analogy with a bad analogy means that either you can't think that all analogies are worthless, or that I shouldn't take your analogy seriously. The colours of your flag are obviously irrelevant to serious statecraft, religious policy is less obviously irrelevant. My favourite examples of unproblematic Nazi policies are motorway building and anti-smoking campaigns. Producing a large essay on reasoning by analogy... will probably have to wait until I'm not late for work as it is.

[liv]

Woah, I'm not in the least claiming that analogies are bad! I think if you read my comment like that it reflects that you're in a headspace of thinking about the rhetorical use of analogies in general. I'd be interested in your essay, but not because I need to be convinced that analogies can be helpful rather than worthless.

My problem is not with analogies, my problem is with the false syllogism that goes "Nazis were bad, Nazis did X, therefore it's bad to do X". It's particularly awful when X is something that the Nazis never remotely did (eg mandate health insurance, promote the rights of women), but it's also not very helpful when X is something irrelevant to the reasons why Nazis were bad (like your examples about anti-smoking).

I think you're right that purported (even if they're not actually a valid interpretation of the religion's scriptures and traditions) religious beliefs are somewhat relevant to making judgements about particular states' policies. I guess for me the decision about whether to be a Christian depends a lot more on whether it's factually true that an all-powerful God exists who became incarnated as Jesus and saved humanity from sin, than on whether Christians are morally good people. As you say, Christianity may do some good even if it's not true, and equally it could be true and fail to actually improve people's overall moral behaviour.

It's like that thing we were bouncing back and forth when I quoted a speaker who claimed that the Enlightenment had failed because it didn't improve the standards of human moral behaviour. It may well still be true that the scientific method is the best way of understanding the world, and also that widespread cultural acceptance of this truth does not in fact improve the moral behaviour of said cultures. Or at least doesn't universally lead to moral improvement, I think it probably does help patchily, as in fact does cultural acceptance of religious morality.

I suppose if it really were true that atheists are always lovely compassionate people and religious believers are always horrible genocidal racists (or the other way round), that would be an argument in favour (or against) atheism. But it's really not, we know that just about every possible philosophical / political / religious belief has been held by some evil people, so trying to make your religious and economic views as little as possible like the Nazis is unlikely to be productive.

[(Anonymous)]

I wasn't there so am lacking context, but I took "Why are laws banning religious practice like Nazism?" to mean "I disagree with your assertion that such laws are like Nazism. Can you defend it?" or even "WTF? How on earth are such laws like Nazism?"

If so, then OK, maybe it wouldn't be constructive to pursue that line of debate, but it's far from "worst question ever" and the questioner is probably on your side.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that was me (silly DW defaults)

[liv]

To be fair I didn't really have that much context either; someone unknown had written down the question on a piece of paper and a different person read it out, so it's hard to guess what the questioner really meant by it. So it could be that your interpretation is right. I still didn't really feel like talking about the details of the Nazi atrocities, though, even in order to demonstrate that banning the veil is not on the same level.

[randomling]

Ugh, Liv, I'm really sorry you had to go through that. It does sound horrible.

And, especially because it must have been hard, thank you for writing about the experience in such a clear and forthright way - once again this is making me think about the issue in a way that wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise.

[liv]

Thanks for the sympathy! It really wasn't that bad, I personally am binary gendered and cis, so I'm not horrendously upset by people being gratuitously gender essentialist, just irritated. And I have no direct personal connection to the Holocaust either.

I kind of knew it was going to be a bit awkward being the Jewish speaker at a Muslim-hosted event intended to promote Islam, and decided it was important enough for community relations that I wanted to do it anyway. I'm glad to know that my post about the experience gave you something to think about.

[siderea]

Well, that sounds mighty unpleasant. Kudos to you for walking out. And nice move with the comment about non-childbearing couples.

About your smarmy new Muslim acquaintance: I recently was pointed at something which... I don't know if you would find it quite as electric as I did: it's written very specifically with an American audience in mind, and it full of allusions to things Americans encounter in their own culture. But it made a satisfying "thunk" in my mind as it filled in a piece I could tell was missing, and its edges lined up perfectly. I think you might find it interesting: What it is like to grow up in Hezbollah culture.

[liv]

Really interesting article, many thanks for the link. That chimes with my preconceptions about how religious extremism fits into society in general, and about Hezbollah in specific.

It wasn't in general an unpleasant experience, I felt like the audience were mostly friendly and it was well worth doing. The speaker was a bit annoying, but also politically committed to being polite and friendly even when expressing horrifying opinions. I do wonder about where he's coming from, actually; he was presenting himself as a totally independent guy who just happened to set up a business following his passion to tell the world about Allah and Islam, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he were backed / trained by some international org. Probably not Hezbollah, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to guess, but I know there are several more or less dubious Muslim groups sponsoring this kind of outreach.

[shoaling_souls]

comment to say i am reading and agreeing with your points but not having much to say about them.

[liv]

Thanks for commenting :-)

[damerell]

I fear you're not going to like this one.

"Veiling, circumcision, ritual slaughter" seem very different to me. One of them, veiling, is something one does to oneself; I can't see any justification for banning it in a secular society. But inhumane slaughter practices [1] and nonconsensual genital mutilation are done to other entities, and should not get a free pass on religious grounds; the sooner the last of these is illegal, the better.

[1] I have no opinion on whether kosher/halal slaughter practices are actually inhumane.

[liv]

Totally fair call, damerell. If a religious practice is actually harmful, that's a case for the law to intervene, the fact that it's "religious" doesn't magically make it ok. That's one of the issues we were talking about in the debate, how should it work in a secular society when people are hurting others in the name of religion. I personally think that circumcision of male infants and kosher and halal slaughter have some negative effects, but those harms are small enough that they should be balanced against the principle of allowing as broad religious freedom as possible. But that's just my opinion, I can certainly see why others might disagree. Equally some people who want to ban Muslim headcovering genuinely believe that the practice harms women, they're not just being gratuitously islamophobic. These things aren't simple, and I think you're quite right to bring up that objection.

[damerell]

I think the idea that headcovering harms women is handled by the more general principle that person A should not have the power to tell adult B how to dress. Of course, that's tricky to do in and of itself, but...

I can't agree about "allowing as broad religious freedom as possible"; a clear limit to that must be when one's religion negatively impacts other people by (for example) mutilating their genitals or not allowing them to buy things on a Sunday. As the Yanks say, freedom of religion includes freedom from religion; someone who grows up unreligious missing a part of their body because someone else was allowed to cut it off might rightly ask why the state did not protect them.

[liv]

Feels a bit like you're trying to drag me into the circumcision debate; I'm pretty familiar with the arguments on both sides. I don't particularly want to take a position on the question, since I'm not male and I don't have a penis and I am not a mother of sons, so it doesn't really matter what my opinion is. I do accept that there are valid arguments in favour of banning infant circumcision, and I'm also aware that Jewish and Muslim communities can feel really threatened by such bans being proposed or enacted, especially if it's done an insensitive way with a lot of rhetoric about how the practice is primitive and barbaric.

I'm really not clear what you're saying about Sunday shopping. The idea of legally compelling people to work on their sabbath because non-religious people have the right to shop seems pretty unpleasant and I would not at all want to take that legislative direction. I think that freedom from religion is an important principle, yes, but I also don't think you get the most freedom by banning all religious practices that have any possible harmful consequences on anyone.

[damerell]

Let's do the easy one first. No; what I'm saying is that if person A wishes to open their shop on Sunday and person B wishes to buy things, the religious beliefs of C, D, and E should not intervene in a secular society [1].

It's a bit hard to avoid mentioning circumcision in this context (as indeed you did); it seems to me to be one of the most egregious examples in the UK of how religious beliefs are imposed on other people. (And, I mean, I'm quite willing to take a position on FGM even though I'm similarly uninvolved; I appreciate that's a pretty huge difference of degree there). I recognise it's a bit of a tricky one in your shoes, though.

I think what I'm getting at is not banning any religious practices that are in any way harmful (if the muezzin wakes me up at dawn or indeed the bellringers at 10am, well, too bad) but that if one would clearly ban a practice were it non-religious, the fact that it is religious should not grant it a free pass.

[1] ... or, one hopes, one with a rather nominal established church.

[zhelana]

I will say regarding Ukraine that the information I'm seeing from actual Jews who are there overwhelmingly supports Euromaidan. One of my best friends is a Jewish Ukrainian expat whose brother and father were on the front lines there. The idea that Euromaidan is against Jews seems to be largely coming from Russia, which is just slinging shit at the right sector hoping it sticks to defend their indefensible war in Crimea.