(April 22, 2023 at 7:51 am)Belacqua Wrote: It looks as though the consensus here is that "religiousness" makes a person unable to participate in democracy in an intelligent way.
Since roughly 80% of human beings in the world identify as religious, I guess we'd have to make laws that they couldn't vote or run for office. That would make democracy more rational. But since some percentage of non-religious people are also irrational (flat-earthers or whatever) then we'd probably end up denying participation to even more people.
So to have reasonable and sane democracy, we'll have to have the remaining 19% rule democratically over everyone. Since the word "aristocracy" means "rule by the best people," it would be a sort of democratic aristocracy -- with of course non-religious people defined as "the best."
History doesn't give us many examples of countries ruled by atheists. I suspect that any number of presidents or prime ministers have been, privately, non-believers, but for political reasons they don't announce that. The only example of a top-level politician I can think of who would see his atheism as a positive trait would be President Xi of China. China is officially the country with the most atheists. So there is a real-world, concrete example of how an atheist might run a country. Certainly other atheists might rule differently, but we have no historical examples. And if the atheists here are advocating rule by only a small minority of the population (until such time as more people become reasonable) then majority rule doesn't seem like something they would prefer.
Earlier atheist rulers of China agreed that rule by religious people was a bad idea. Tibet, before Chinese intervention, was a feudal theocracy in which a small minority of priests controlled enormous wealth, while the great majority of the population were serfs, with short life expectancy and very low literacy rates. Since the atheist intervention in Tibet, literacy and health have achieved modern levels. So given that example I guess atheist rule really would improve many people's lives.
You can certainly have a democracy with religious people.
Democracy doesn’t mean freedom.
You can certainly have a country where they vote and the majority chooses to ban abortion or to send all homosexuals to jail or to kill them all or to destroy a certain minority group.
In Canada, about 25 y ago, one of the political party members said that Canada should institute a law that says when 100,000 canadians want to vote on a topic, the federal government should make a referendum. The name of that politician is Stockwell Day. He is in the Conservative party.
A certain show called The Mercer Report where they do a lot of political jokes asked canadians to sign a petition to change Stockwell Day’s name and you guessed it, over 100,000 signed.
What about the jewish religion and the jewish god? Let’s say we turn the “heaven” into a democracy.
If the majority are jews, for sure, they are going to vote for that same jewish god.
Let’s say that god decides to ban the eating of pork and whoever disobeys, gets 10 y jail time and a beating everyday.
So, there is the issue of respecting other people’s personal space because one day, the atheists might outnumber christians in country X and they might vote to give them 10 y of prison time and a beating everyday.
