Today's musing minute, What does religion have to do with it?

 Listening just now to Dennis Prager, I was struck by what may be an *essential* difference between the religious and the secular approaches to morality.

For the secular, Hume's fork applies, the one that fundamentally distinguishes between facts and values. Facts are matters of objective reality, not always knowable, and often incompletely knowable, but always objectively given to us, outside of our perception of them. So, facts and values (what we regard as good and bad) are distinctive, completely unrelated categories. One concerns objective reality, the other concerns subjective belief (not amenable to scientific investigation and refutation.)

For the firm religious believer, Hume's fork does not apply, or, at least it does not apply in the same way. Both the laws of morality and the laws of nature are revealed to us (insofar as they are revealed) by God.; and they share the same ontological status. Good and bad are matters of objective fact as determined by God, in the same way as heavy and light, high and low, far and near, etc. are. It may be that the ways in which we comprehend and discover these God-given laws are different, thus demarcating scientific from religious/moral inquiry, but both are matters of trying to learn more about God's laws. As I say, scientific and moral laws are ontologically equivalent.

One does not go far along this route before encountering perceived contradictions, the most well known being, the problem of squaring God's omnisience and omnipotence with individual responsibility (and also the problem of the existence of evil given God's omnibenevolence) - a matter, I have learned, that my religious friends prefer to leave unresolved as one of God's mysteries. [footnote: For me it is like saying that, if he wants to, God can make it so that 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 as well .]

So what? So, ok. As a practical matter, this very fundamental difference, matters most when the religiously zealous have political power, and matters least when they don't, because in the latter case they lack the power to compel belief and behavior according to their perception of God's law. Regardless of how we perceived their ontological status, religious laws must be held separate from civil laws, secular laws. In many respects, that move, the move towards "religious freedom" and the secularization of religious identity, that move allowed for the development of the modern world and the great enrichment. Theocracy is incompatible with the freedom of choice that we now take for granted and that made us rich.

It is fortunatethen, that for the most part, even the religiously inclined enthusiastically accept the separation of religion and state as necessary, and forsware the right to compel others according to their beliefs. But, we also know there still exists too many who have not made this move. The future of Western Civilization depends on its continued existence.