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Thinking someone is lesser is a problem because you are excluding them from baseline considerations about justice and what is right. This is wrong for both metaphysical reasons and practical ones.
Thinking someone is wrong is a necessary consequence of believing in right and wrong. If wrong exists, some people will be wrong. Claiming that thinking others are wrong is a "crime" is a demand for totalitarian enforcement of one's own values.
If Bentham loves me, he has a funny way of showing it. His ideas lead to torture chambers and mass graves.
Yes, obviously. I'm defending freedom of conscience. My position is that thinking of "thinking of others as lesser" as a crime also requires totalitarian enforcement. Firstly, because it requires divining what others are thinking. Secondly, because being wrong is strictly inferior, so those who are wrong are necessarily lesser.
I reject the christian and muslim view of unbelievers as 'lost sheep', potential equals, as a mealy mouthed, patronizing framing. In reality, they damn and demonize them. Mainstreal islam especially, excludes nonbelievers from its idea of justice and morality, and as you say, that is a problem (though for me, only when they act on those beliefs).
Given your stated beliefs, can you honestly argue that " freedom of conscience" is a good thing? If so, How?
Self-evident, really. Promotes liberty and human flourishing, doesn’t result in totalitarianism. Removes the likelihood of conflict by one degree, since beliefs alone are never grounds for conflict, but only overt acts.
You think your beliefs are ‘good’. I disagree, think they’re bad, insulting and unfair to unbelievers. But it doesn’t matter, because I can live in peace with people with bad beliefs, like you or the chabad jews.
Also prevents 30 Years' Wars. You know how they say "every safety rule has a corpse behind it" and suchlike? Freedom of religion is the peace treaty to end a war that depopulated most of Central Europe.
Yeah, it's annoying that I have to explain that we don't need to kill or forcefully convert each other until everyone agrees, but apparently the memory of westphalia is fading.
It is, and that is the problem that prompts this whole thread. Your position is that Christian attitudes are bad, but it's okay to be bad. I don't think this position is stable in the long term, because people are always going to want to punish the bad and reward the good. "bad but tolerated" just begs the question "why are we tolerating it, exactly?" ...And as you say, the memory of why fades, especially when 80-90% of Americans have never heard of Westphalia or the Thirty Years War, because their moral history consists entirely of Slavery, the Holocaust, and the Civil Rights movement.
To the actual point, I maintain that "thinking of others as lesser" is, in fact, quite different from Christians thinking some people are going to Hell, because the two ideas lead to very, very different conclusions. Christians have proven that they can coexist with non-believers long-term, and are capable of playing the pluralism game so long as it's actually pluralism, because at the end of the day we don't believe that you can actually eradicate sin or force people to repent at gunpoint, so wielding power is of limited and strictly contingent value. People who believe that others are lesser, though, sooner or later are going to act on that belief, and then a lot of people are going to have to die resolving the situation.
It didn’t come naturally to christians, they learned the hard way, and late. But their children, children’s children, children’s children’s children etc, modern christians and me, learned it the easy, less bloody way. Our children can learn it the same, and keep reaping its fruits.
Or do you think we’ve reached the 15-generation expiration date (sidenote: what's long term for you, eternity?) where the lesson has to be jettisoned so we can have another pseudo-religious civil war, thereby resetting the counter? What’s the point? This is just the FC standard error, as if some terrible outcome being likely to happen was a reason to precipitate it.
Next, your position is incoherent. You insist only christians can grant freedom of conscience (obviously false, but whatever), then you argue against freedom of conscience. Some christians definitely believe that other denominations of christians are ‘lesser than’. No tolerance for these guys then? And if that is your red line, you run into the other problem I alluded to, who determines which beliefs constitute this ‘lesser than’ thoughtcrime? The believer, or his ‘victim’?
Because I have a pretty good idea how that discussion would go : “he believes our denomination errs/isn’t saved/sits further away from Christ! Unequal! Crush him” “What are you talking about? All you need to do is recognize the true doctrine and you can sit just as close as me, god knows I believe we are perfectly equal in principle”.
Hard compared to who? Late compared to who? I'm comfortable comparing our record to that of any other major civilization.
You claim the lesson was learned in the past and can be taught in the future. Let's start there. What exactly is the lesson, and when was it "learned"? 1995? 1965? 1776? 1648? I ask, because I'm trying to nail down what actual principles I'm being accused of defecting from. Every date I've listed had significantly more social controls than we currently employ, many of them explicitly shaped by Christian faith, but you're claiming that somewhere in that date range, Christians were adopting a lesson that I'm advocating the abandonment of, and I have no idea why.
At no point in the history of Western Civilization, or any other civilization I'm aware of, have social controls not been a basic part of everyday life. The apogee of social permissiveness/social complexity is probably somewhere around 1990-2010, and it seems obvious to me that the norms attempted then were not stable, and have since collapsed.
In any case, I'm all for teaching our children to be as tolerant as possible without causing broad social collapse. I doubt you and I even disagree all that strongly on how tolerant that would be, and it's entirely possible that my level is more tolerant than yours relative to our actual society as it exists, as opposed to hypothetical populations in the future. Unfortunately, I observe that increasing theoretical tolerance seems to inevitably decrease practical tolerance, and I think this is resulting in our society's children failing to learn the actual lessons of the past, leading to serious danger of, as you say, resetting the clock.
I do not think unlimited tolerance is possible, and so limits to tolerance are inevitable. Given that such limits are inevitable, I put forward that our society should set those limits to cover the actual people who are here now, to the greatest extent possible, rather than optimizing for abstract definitions of "tolerance" that justify abuse of large portions of the population, to better people on the other side of the planet and vanishing fringe populations. Further, our society should not import people from the other side of the planet with values and customs very different than our own, and it should not encourage the creation and spread of lifestyles and communities extremely variant from the general mass of the population.
All of the above is easy to misconstrue, so let me give a concrete example: male circumcision is a generally-accepted custom for a fair portion of the population. Female circumcision is not. We should not try to ban male circumcision, or drive out those who practice it, and we should not attempt to legalize female circumcision, or import those who practice it. We should refuse to care if someone engages in a complicated word-game that appears to demonstrate that the two are somehow identical, so treating them differently is in some sense "unfair" or "unjust"; we have coexisted quite well with the one practice, and have never tolerated the other, and derived good results thereby, and so should continue in this fashion.
When I engage with this example, the common reply I get is that this position is stupid and incoherent, because either practice is nonconsensual genital mutilation and therefore evil, and should be banned. When I point out that such a ban would constitute a de-facto ban on Judaism, I've been repeatedly told that "they've changed their religion before, they'll change it again, and if they don't they deserve what they get for being evil".
That right there is your "lesson" failing in transmission. It's isomorphic to the sorts of pre-Westphalian views you condemn, and it is, by all appearances, endemic throughout our culture. I have every confidence that I can teach my kids to avoid this disastrous error in values and worldview, but that won't fix the fact that the rest of you are fucking it up for all of us in a way unlikely to be workable long-term.
My position on precipitating terrible outcomes is that one should not do it, because it is evil. I admit that I have only reached that conclusion relatively recently and very grudgingly, but I have reached it and do not intend to abandon it in the future.
I have never claimed this, and agree that it would be an obviously stupid thing to claim. I do claim that we Christians have the longest, best track record of maximizing tolerance of any major civilization, and I think the historical record backs me up. Given that a significant level of social enforcement is probably inevitable, you are better off having it enforced by Christians than by Progressives. We are much less likely to kill, imprison, enslave or immiserate you in pursuit of some insane utopian ideal. As noted above, "the lesson" you yourself point to was formed and enforced in societies that were supermajority Christian, and its breakdown has coincided with the breakdown of Christian norms in those societies. I argue that this is not a coincidence.
I argue that freedom of conscience, speech, or religion are not unlimited or even fully generalizable. I want the people in my society who are making a good-faith effort to exercise faith to be left in peace to the greatest extent possible, but am not interested either in the revival of Aztec blood sacrifice, nor in banning Jews. I do not delude myself into thinking that there is an objective, meaningful rule available that can nail down what is or isn't a "real religion" or "genuine practice"; there is no substitute for prudence and charity.
Name some? Preferably prominent, widespread, relevant examples?
I'm not sure where tolerance comes into it. You should probably be very wary of them. If they're fringe, that's probably all that's needed. If they start taking over, you should probably plan for bad times ahead. You definately should not allow them to co-opt major institutions, allow them significant access to the public purse, or pass laws that encourage major segments of society to conform to their diktats. If you fail to prevent such things, you are very likely to have serious problems on your hands.
What you are describing is a values conflict, and values conflicts are unsolvable. What we actually do in practice is to have whoever is in power hammer out a set of rules to try to keep everyone in their lane as much as possible. As a matter of historical fact, people who believe you are going to hell are much, much easier to keep in their lane than people who believe you are a class enemy or a sub-human or a traitor by birth.
Christians observably do not suffer from this problem to any great degree now, and arguably have not suffered it to any unusual degree relative to non-christians before. Christian societies full of Christians fought a lot of wars, which were commonly justified by appeals to Christian ideals or principles. The question, though, is whether they fought more and worse wars than non-Christian nations or civilizations. If you entwine Christianity into your politics, it is easy for normal political phenomena like succession crises, border disputes, and regional rivalries to be justified using Christian language; but is the concern what people said about the wars, or is it the scale, frequency and conduct of the wars themselves? I have no doubt that the Christian West fought almost all the wars involving an appeal to Christianity. I note that non-Christian nations had their own reasons for large-scale organized destruction.
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