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Thanks for your answer—it made me realize something scary, though. You see the State as a neutral floor that permits religion to exist above it. But I actually see it as a moving ceiling. Because the State doesn't just stay at 'don't murder or steal'—it actively redefines what counts as acceptable public morality.
Today it says 'teach our civic values in your schools.' Tomorrow it says 'stop hiring based on your doctrines.' The day after, it says 'publicly stating your doctrine is hate speech.' Over time, that moving ceiling pushes religion out of the public square entirely, without passing an outright ban yet. Doesn't that become a slow jurisdictional takeover? Someday religion may be banned for limiting the State.
ChatGPT (or whatever LLM)'s metaphor is wrong. We both see the state as a floor, your concern is when the floor rises above the Church (and what's reasonable), i.e. the state's morality isn't flexible enough to permit Church doctrine.
When we talk about "state" we may refer to two separate things: the theoretical state with laws as they're written (which for most real nations isn't even coherent), or the physical state with laws as they're enforced. As previously said, religion is a set of opinions. The state can (theoretically) ban opinions from being practiced and discussed, but not the opinions themselves, and it's (physical) enforcement is limited.
Sure, in a 1984-esque state with total control and invasion of privacy, a religion will be physically destroyed (although the non-physical set of opinions will always exist, so it may be revived, maybe that's unlikely). Or perhaps a Brave New World-esque state may voluntarily convince the masses to abandon the religion, leaving it all-but-destroyed physically. But otherwise, in today's states (states without total control or persuasion, even Iran), a conflicting religion may at least survive by teaching its opinions (secretly, publicly covertly, publicly if allowed), even if they never get to be practiced; and they may be secretly practiced, moreso whenever the state becomes weaker, and eventually may influence the state so they become legal. Even the Aztec blood religion (although fortunately, a state today may be powerful enough to prevent them from actually carrying out any blood sacrifices).
I don't see a point in this reply unless you're just showing off. Congrats on repeating that I use AI for comments. I'm not too motivated on using wording that can be misundertood and I have had people that felt offended with my straight words, just like I also feel ofended. You spent a lot of words agreeing while pretending to correct me.
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It's actually worse than that.
Aztec blood sacrifice is a legitimate religion. How should freedom of religion operate for people who wish to adhere to that religion? The answer, speaking plainly, is that it doesn't and can't, right here and now, not in some hypothetical "someday" far in the future. If we have a significant population that wants to seize outsiders and rip their hearts out, there's no way we're going to be able to coexist with that population long-term. Nor is there any principled distinction between their claim to toleration of religious practice or mine; there is, in fact, no objective definition of "harm", and yet there is no way to maintain society without enforcement against those inflicting harm; this enforcement will be both necessarily subjective and entirely indispensable.
The logic of the First Amendment assumes that the range of religions is much narrower than the observable range of religions, just as it assumes that the range of ideologies and of values is much narrower than the observable range of ideologies and values. When you get out past the borders of the range it was built for, the logic it runs on simply stops working. The fact is that you cannot actually run even a minimally-cohesive society if your population is too values-diverse to cooperate.
The comment above yours is still filtered.
I think your point is the most valuable in several good posts in this subthread. The more pluralist a society becomes, the less classical liberalism works for it. But America of all places is kind of in a bind on that front. A change in immigration policy might help us stop digging the hole we're in, but even that much is outside the Overton window.
That's one of the fundamental questions on the American right at present: Does classical liberalism necessarily produce a level of pluralism it cannot survive?
Fixed.
Speaking for myself, straightforwardly, obviously, unavoidably, yes.
Classical liberalism as it is commonly understood and described is built on axiomatic assumptions about the possible range of human values, and those assumptions are observably wrong because the observable range of human values is significantly wider. You can track the obvious cross-sectional ways in which those assumptions have decayed by degrees across our entire society over time, and how our institutions and social structures have decayed with them.
Classical Liberalism increases tolerance. Increased tolerance creates values-diversity, and then values-incoherence. Values incoherence creates conflict, which reduces tolerance. Perhaps this cycle can be retarded or bypassed in some ways or in some circumstances, but certainly classical liberalism cannot do it because it cannot even begin to adequately frame the problem. It believes tolerance is a moral precept, axiomatically, but Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept.
Absolutely. Classical liberalism doesn't account for evil, which is understandable since it's the little-autistic-kid-asking-why-not of political ideologies[0] (and why people who aren't autistic little kids, at least at heart, tend to run into trouble with it). The whole 'life/liberty/pursuit of happiness' thing is a pretty clear example of this; for evil women, pursuit of happiness involves oppressing men, vice versa, and etc. for any combination of ingroup and outgroup you like.
In other words, it's an ideology for/by Abel, and as such doesn't put much effort into protecting itself from Cain (or at least denies his ability to do wrong... and really, if Cain should murder him, what Abel has done is generally pleasing to God; what horrible afterlife consequences should he fear? Would it not be a sin for Abel to devote resources to self-defense against his brethren rather than his normal business?).
This cycle is usually retarded/bypassed by having so many resources that the limiting factor on their exploitation is manpower.
Or "$", for short.
You'll note that the pattern of classical liberalism within Western Great Powers tends to come with a new frontier and new technology to exploit it. This means that the population of those countries can get out of PvP mode (zero-sum) and go into PvE (positive-sum) mode, and once that happens, the people spec'd into PvP- the existing power structures- get pushed out because it's harder to rent-seek under these conditions. The US, for most of its history, has spent most of its time in PvE mode, and it shows- all of its cultural memes (including classical liberalism itself) are predicated on the PvE worldviews.
In a PvE environment, you actually can say "just build your own" and it not be in bad faith (and when PvPers say it today, they can't say it decoupled from the concept of PvE being the ideal- more proper snobs, stereotypically the Brits, have a different response to this; Americans will interpret this response as "no, because you're a nigger", because that's what it means). Values-incoherence is not something that can really be stopped if the ruling elements of a population wanted to[1], because if they did they'd be outcompeted by their enemies (internal or external) that did allow it.
Economic contractions, however, push the population towards PvP. Institutions become more powerful, rent-seeking becomes more important as a way to maintain personal wealth [which is where purity spirals come from, and in extremes, will cause the population to sell itself into more and more intense forms of slavery just to get a meal]. Values are mediated by those that still have resources, or can amass them, and those people would really hate if some other system that proved their values were wrong emerged (or allowed anyone the means or motivation to get around their resource monopolies)- hence why they wage holy war on them.
[0] As opposed to paternalist politics; these can be either mother-privileging (progressive) or father-privileging (progressive boogeyman/traditional). This is also what I'm generally trying to get at when I say "trads and progs are the same just with a different gender valence" and point out that liberalism and progressivism are very different things. One might even notice that paternalist politics are obsessed with fighting deontological evils (as a means to assert values-coherence); liberals only really have the consequential one (and as such can't assert values-coherence; "correct" is not a political identity).
[1] The one major exception to this is China, who declined to send colony ships anywhere specifically for this reason. What developed in the New World would fundamentally not be China any more, and unlike Europe they could afford to do this- they had everything they wanted at home. Which would remain true right up until they got curb-stomped by the English, and that was evidently only temporary.
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