Monthly Archive for October, 2010

From John H. Evans, in The Immanent Frame

This “religion in the public sphere” thread has featured debates about whether citizens of liberal democratic societies can offer religious reasons for public laws that will be coercive on all citizens, or whether they must use, in John Rawls’s terms, “public reason.” An example of a policy that would apply to all citizens is gay marriage, and we have all encountered religious reasons for banning gay marriage, such as, “Leviticus 18:22 tells us that homosexuality is an abomination before God.” “Public reason” is a bit more obscure, but liberal theorists mean by the term general reasons that are widely or near universally shared by citizens. This would preclude reasons deriving from any “comprehensive perspective,” such as religion, obviously including Leviticus 18:22. On the other hand, to “avoid harm” is a public reason because it is near universally held, and this reason is used by opponents of gay marriage when they argue that gay marriage harms children. (Whether the reason is legitimate in this case is a separate matter.)

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By Terence D. Keel, in Gene Watch

The recent discovery by the Neanderthal Genome Project that present day Europeans and Asians might be the only two populations in possession of Neanderthal DNA forces us to yet again ponder the relationship between genetics and human identity. Who we think we are has much to do with the questions we ask. And for Homo sapiens there are perhaps no greater questions of ultimate concern than “where do we come from” and “what makes a human, human?” Increasingly genetics offers tools to trace our roots, and the genetic ancestry industry has flourished due to growing public interest in what has been packaged as “racial” diversity (what geneticists call “admixture”) within our DNA.1 So far, genetic identity testing technologies have been able to trace human origins back to the continental regions where ancestors of modern humans left Africa somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago and branched into the various populations often thought of as “races.” But lately, figuring out what makes us human appears to be a moving target.

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From Zachary Karabell, in Los Angeles Times

One of the sadder consequences of the near decade of war and violence that has followed the attacks of 9/11 is that so many people are convinced that we are in a clash of civilizations divided along religious fault lines. The concept was popularized by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in the mid-1990s, but he didn’t invent the idea; he gave it a name. Until 9/11, however, it was both debated and debatable. Since then, it has become a mainstream view in both the Western world and the Muslim world. The recent furor over the proposed Muslim center in Lower Manhattan, the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Europe and the continued attraction of radical antinomian Islam in parts of the Muslim world attest to this situation.

But Graham Fuller offers a forceful, erudite reminder that neither Islam nor religious fervor adequately explains the animosity between parts of the Muslim world and the United States. In fact, he posits that the fissures that currently exist might well have existed even if Islam never had, and he offers a wide-ranging, at times digressive but always illuminating look at the past centuries to support that contention.

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