I'm not religious myself. But in my country, if someone is actively suicidal (say they are standing on top of a building, planning to jump) they are (forcefully) stopped. I think that's a good thing. Now, of I was religious, I would believe that sinning (and therefore going to hell) would be way way way worse to do to oneself, even when compared to suicide. So just like I agree with forcefully preventing someone from following their will to commit suicide, I would probably agree with forcefully preventing people from sinning.
If you are religious (and believe that sinning = hell), these laws make a lot of sense. Perhaps they should be even harsher.
Firstly, you conflate your personal feelings with the rule of law. You may personally agree or disagree with preventing people from committing suicide, or violating religious norms, but that should be completely separate from whether you think the government should enforce your personal belief on people who believe otherwise. In a democracy, the government is not there to enforce your beliefs, it is there to prevent other people's beliefs from overriding your right to have your own.
[edit: This is also an aspect of democracy that is not well understood in countries with a history of authoritarian or majoritarian rule. Democracies are an engine of creating higher efficiency and flourishing because they tend to protect minority views and are thus open to constant change and debate, which in turn are the drivers of economic growth. In authoritarian minds, change and debate are viewed as hindrances or dangers to the status quo; thus such societies stagnate. I'm practically explaining how Lebanon can't generate a home-made pager whilst a similarly sized country next door and carved up from the Ottoman empire at the same time... which prizes individuality and debate... can, well... nevermind]
Secondly, you make a false assumption that just because a society agrees with you on one thing, you must agree with it on everything else. It would be perfectly rational to be against both the death penalty and against abortion, yet many people are for one and against the other. You make a case that if you lived in a society where the morality pointed a certain way, it would be natural for yourself just to go along without questioning its hypocrisy. That is, quite literally, you are making a case for not thinking for yourself as an individual or seeing anything wrong with the contradictions of whatever society you live in.
It is our duty as human beings to point out the contradictions and hypocrisy in ourselves and our societies, to improve them. You are making the most retrograde, anti-liberal case possible by saying you would not question the values you were surrounded by.
That's why I gave the example of forceful suicide prevention. That is the law in my democratic, non-theocratic country.
Tell me how forcing someone not to commit suicide differs from forcing someone not to sin.
In my view it's the same: You are limiting someone else's liberty; forcing them not to do something you consider a grave mistake.
You personally may view personal liberty as more important: If you think people should have the liberty to commit suicide, it would be morally consistent for you to think people should have the liberty to sin.
I do not believe people should have the liberty to commit suicide. So if I was religious, and believed sinning to be a mistake far worse than suicide, it would be morally consistent for me to believe people should not have the liberty to sin.
> Secondly, you make a false assumption that just because a society agrees with you on one thing, you must agree with it on everything else.
> You are making the most retrograde, anti-liberal case possible by saying you would not question the values you were surrounded by.
I don't know where you got this from. I do question the values of society. It is my very own personal opinion that we should legally prevent people from making certain obvious mistakes.
(And yes, I am very anti-liberal in that sense. Not only do I agree with forcing people to wear seatbelts and not to commit suicide, I would even support banning caffeine.)
If I was religious, I would consider sinning to be the most obvious and most serious mistake of all. Hence, I would try to legally prevent people from making this mistake.
I find it very understandable that a religious government makes sinning illegal.
If you were to be consistent, then the fact that someone else somewhere thinks you're sinning should be sufficient to ban your own behavior, whatever it is. Whether you're religious or not has nothing to do with it. Since you believe in limiting someone's liberty, you should believe that the most radical form of religion should limit yours.
In such a society, in practice, anything can be forced or banned. And it is. If someone dislikes you, any word you speak can be taken as an insult to religion or an insult to the government, and is punishable. Moreover, such a society might force you to take a drug, or decide to euthanize your disabled family member. Sure, it is "understandable" that a totalitarian government makes sinning illegal, but it's hard to think of anything more odious.
Once such a system is in place, your freedom to "question the values of society" or form your own personal opinion would cease to exist. Your view is only possible in a free society that prizes liberty, although it is essentially dangerous to the survival of the society you're lucky enough to live in.
The only way to avoid a totalitarian outcome is to tolerate other people having the freedom to make what are in your opinion mistakes. Which includes saying things you don't like. And not only to tolerate it, but to elevate it above all other frameworks.
The paradigm of "my opinion / our opinion should be the law" is what leads to totalitarianism.
Define sin first. Killing yourself results in death. Religious fanatics stretch definition of sin to whatever they don’t like.
Gays? Sin? Woman without hijab? Sin. Abortion? Sin.
> In my view it's the same: You are limiting someone else's liberty; forcing them not to do something you consider a grave mistake.
No, it’s totally not the same. And it’s not necessarily about mistake. Allowing people to commit unrestricted suicide would set a dangerous precedent. And on top of that a lot of inconvenience for people around.
his so-called personal beliefs are shared and deliberately engendered through education. one may say, i think suicide should be prevented at all cost. but when they do so they’re not expressing a personal opinion but rather the result of their education and training. and education is conducted with the law in mind. ‘personal opinion’ from an adult who has been subjected to education is usually a misnomer. they’re not coming to it from independently perusing any data. so yes, the government is there to enforce your beliefs, the same ones they gave you.
democracy isn’t a minority rule, and conjuring up a so-called ‘majoritarianism’ is almost a dirty trick. the standout symbol of democracy is the election where the popular, by a mere enumeration of votes, wins the day. we are not allowed to disqualify ‘unqualified’ votes. do you have an example of a democracy where the minority wins?
> it is our duty as human beings to point out the contradictions and hypocrisy in ourselves and our societies.
not essentially our responsibility qua human beings but of heretics. the mechanisms for this sort of analysis and meta analysis are not by default available to all human beings. they’re acquired through education and through use. so whose responsibility is it to critique the current order? because most of us are blind to it. in the many challenges we face daily, bodily survival takes precedence, and when the current order doesn’t interfere in threatening ways, we can acquiesce.
When I say 'personal opinion', I don't care where it arises from: Be it religion or heresy, or what your government has taught you or what your ancient culture dictates, that's just your opinion. Somewhere, someone believes otherwise.
Democracies which function well seek to strike a balance between those, not to obliterate the minority.
Minorities win in America, in every sense. Immigrant cultures and subculture and counterculture lead to innovation, to the extent they're allowed to thrive. The law recognizes this and, in large over a long time, adjusts to accommodate. Integration in the US is in many ways tolerance.
Hong Kong was a highly successful democracy until its freedom was taken. Taiwan is a democracy which respects minority opinion. Both are/were tolerant of protests which could never take place in mainland China. Who is even to say that China's government has anything to do with protecting culture or majority belief? A majority in China may well believe that their government is illegitimate, but simply cannot say so because "bodily survival takes precedence", exactly because the current order does interfere in threatening says. Although certainly, even this suppression of the majority pales in comparison to the horrific treatment of minorities there.
Of course our values are influenced by the society we grow up in. If people weren't influenced by those surrounding them, I believe our society would significantly worse off.
(In my country the government does not have direct enough control over education to dictate the culture being taught. It's the teachers, or more general, the society as a whole, which teaches its values to young people.)
But I don't think it's reasonable to discredit someone's believes as their own, just because they were influenced by others. People who grow up within the same society do still often have opinions which differ greatly. So while people certainly are influenced by their society, they still shape their opinions themselves.
Even if you're the government, you can't write a law or enforce a law against, say, adultery. You can stop - or at least reduce - the external behavior. But you can't change hearts by an external law. You just create people who are different on the outside than they are on the inside. "Hypocrites" is a term for that, which comes from the Greek word for "actors" - people who pretend to be something they're not.
That's not going to keep them from hell. It might keep them from jail, but that's not the same thing.
