Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  The state of Louisiana now officially mandates displays of the Ten Commandments in both public and private schools. When I first heard about this, the thought that came to my mind was, "whose version of the commandments"?  The passage in Exodus 20 is somewhat different from that in Deuteronomy 5. And neither of them neatly breaks itself down into a list of ten bullet points. The traditional Jewish understanding of the "ten commandments" involves a first commandment that demands monotheism. A second commandment that prohibits graven images. And so forth. In this version, there is only one commandment against "coveting". The Roman Catholic Church has another take on it. The RC Church, after all, enthusiastically embraces icons (the Eastern Church even more so). The RC Church regards iconoclasm, the smashing of images of the sacred, and even of God Himself, as a heresy it has done well to overcome. So it soft-pedd les the whole no-graven-images thing. (...

A recent issue of THE FEDERAL LAWYER contained a review of a book on religion and the state, Brian Leiter's WHY TOLERATE RELIGION? Okay, the title is rather provocative. But that's how one sells books nowadays. ANyway, I confess that everything I know of the book comes from the review, all the following quotations are second hand. Shame on me. The heart of the book: "[I]t is not obvious why the state should subordinate its other morally important objectives -- safety, health, well-being, equal treatment before the law -- to claims of religious conscience." Related (but distinct) claim is that "religious claims of conscience have no greater entitlement to exemptions than other nonreligious claims of conscience." It is appropriate, Leiter thinks, for a government "to say, the law is the law, and there will be no exemptions for claims of conscience, religious or otherwise." But Leiter approves of this no-exemptions stance only with a cav...