u/MixExpensive3763

So, I was watching Michael Knowles' episode of "Yes or No" (A gameshow where he and another political commentator/celebrity get asked questions and have to guess what the other's answer is, it's very entertaining) with Tim Pool. Tim Pool himself identifies as pro choice, but he brought up an interesting point. Due to the dobbs decision, abortion is now up to the states meaning, effectively, somebody (in this case, the fetus) can be considered a person with full rights in one state and be considered basically garbage in another. Michael Knowles responded with how his class asked Scalia if we could have differing definitions of marriage from one state to another, and Scalia basically said that it wouldn't really work. Tim Pool then describes a hypothetical: A woman living in Oklahoma (a state where abortion is fully restricted) gets up in the middle of the night and drives to Colorado to have an abortion, because she says her husband is abusive so she doesn't want to have this child. Afterwards, her husband claims that she has killed his child and she had no right to do this. He believe adjudicating a case like this will finally force the courts to answer the question: Are fetuses persons or are they not, because Roe and Dobbs both effectively danced around that question. What are your thoughts?

This is something I have run into a lot recently, so I wanted to comment on it. People who support secularism (most often on the political left, but I see this one the political right as well) tend to present secularism (as in, the government takes no official stance on religion) as the neutral/default stance, with state atheism or a state religion being its opposing sides. What I propose is that, rather than secularism being neutral, it actually takes the official stance that every religion is false.

If a religion were true (as I hope every member of this sub believes is Catholicism) then it would then follow that, since every religion promotes a set of moral values, society ought to be ordered in accordance with that religion. Thus, since secularism claims that no religion has the authority to rule, it must be at the very minimum claiming that an individual one is not true. Now, I’m not philosopher, I have no training in formal logic or real education in the enlightenment thinking or such that lead to secular government, so I could be entirely off base. This mainly comes from (again, primarily politically left) secularists in the modern age making the claim that people do not have the right to pass laws based on religious reasoning. Now one could argue that this is an abuse of secular thought, but even if I agree that it’s an abuse of the intentions most of the originators of the concept, it’s not an abuse, but rather the logical conclusion, of the secular view.

I look forward to seeing everyone’s thoughts.

Both in my conversations on this sub and elsewhere I feel like I keep noticing a certain blind spot in progressive thinking when it comes to religion. I find they tend to treat it just like any other social group or cultural practice when if you actually look at how religious people and groups behave and think, it is very clearly not that. I notice this in some conservatives as well but significantly less commonly. Has anyone else seen this as well? If so what do you think the cause is?

Edit:
I’ll elaborate since people don’t seem to understand what I’m getting at. I’ve noticed a tendency of progressives to treat religious adherence as the same as being part of any other given social group or cultural practice, while even non-religious conservatives seem to have a better grasp of how religious people actually view their practices. They aren’t simple community activities or things you just do because it’s your culture, we genuinely believe in the supernatural, that our religious laws are fundamentally different from human ones, etc. It seems that progressives have a more difficult time grasping that than even non-religious materialist conservatives and I don’t really get why.

I visited Arlington National Cemetery and the Mount Vernon Estate today and will be visiting more places in the area this week. So what’s your favorite? This question is mostly directed towards Americans but if any non-Americans want to pitch in with examples from their own countries I would be happy to read them.