Category: Religious Freedom

Council of Europe Hailed for Religious-Freedom Resolution

Resolution 1928 says that the assembly must ‘accommodate religious beliefs in  the public sphere by guaranteeing freedom of thought in relation to health care,  education and the civil service.’

National Catholic Register

Carl Bunderson/CNA/EWTN NEWS

STRASBOURG, France — A resolution passed by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly is being lauded as an important — although limited —  recognition of religious and conscience rights in the public sphere.

“The important step with this resolution is the mention of the right to  conscientious objection and the enlargement of its scope of application,” Grégor  Puppinck, general director of the European Centre for Law and Justice, told  Catholic News Agency April 29. [Read more . . .]

 

Claims of Conscience

Religious Freedom and State Power

Commonweal
3 May, 2013

William Galston

Is religious conscience special? And what kinds of claims (if any) does conscience warrant? These are two of the many questions Brian Leiter raises in his provocative book Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, $24.95, 192 pp.).

Note that in principle one could answer the first question in the negative—by denying the distinctiveness of religion—while endorsing broad claims for conscience as such. Imagine a two-by-two table: In the upper left quadrant is an expansive notion of conscience coupled with a broad conception of conscientious claims; in the bottom right is conscience restricted to religion with few or no claims to which the law must yield. The two remaining quadrants are broad/narrow and narrow/broad, respectively.  [Read more . . .]

Conscience vs. Religion

Peter Lawler

So Richard Reinsch has a good article on the limits of James Madison’s religious thought–as expressed in the overrated MEMORIAL AND REMONSTRANCE.  There the duty each of us has to our Creator is private or merely “conscientious.”  It’s a limit to government, to be sure.  But it’s a personal–or not social–limit.  It’s far from clear that Madison is saying that government is limited by the freedom the church as an organized body of thought and action. . . [Read more]

Religion: A Public or a Private Right?

Originally appeared in  Public Discourse:  Ethics, Law, and the Common Good
Online journal of the Witherspoon  Institute of Princeton, NJ

 Susan Hanssen*

Twentieth-century religious liberty jurisprudence developed on the far side of a great historic chasm that separates us from the traditional definition of religion. Between Americans in 2012 and the American founders in 1776 stand William James and the beginnings of the “science of comparative religions.” If we are to grasp the founders’ idea of a natural right to religious liberty, we must perform a labor of historical imagination and recover the longstanding definition of religion that has been lost to us.

The classic book that launched the social scientific approach to the study of religion was James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1903). The book was initially his series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh—the prestigious Gifford Lectures. James deliberately refused to accept the usual title “Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology” for his series of talks and chose instead to call them lectures in “Natural Religion.” He assumed that religion was not, as the word “theology” implied, subject to any rational justification. Rather, he saw religion as essentially experiential and the study of religion as essentially empirical—the collection of a variety of accounts of wildly divergent spiritual experiences. . . [Read more]

Can Atheists and Muslims Support Freedom of Conscience Together?

 Religion and Politics

Qasim Rashid and Chris Stedman

Thomas Jefferson once wrote: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

For many of us, it’s easy to appreciate Jefferson’s eloquently stated advocacy of religious freedom of conscience, as well as the idea that all individuals should be able to express religious or nonreligious positions independent of others’ beliefs. Likewise, at the United Nations, both the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantee “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” to all individuals. But, in spite of international agreements and Jefferson’s beautiful words, the reality is that these tenets are often forgotten. . . . Read more