The Modeerf Question

I'm on the docket for a 'comedy debate' tomorrow. It's about the fictional 'Modeerf' religion, and I'm the secular atheist of the group. Here's the promo:

Where do we draw the line between religious freedom and the law of the land?

Between respecting diversity and double standards?

Between maintaining your culture and becoming Australian?

Come and meet migrants from the little known Modeerf religion.

They know that their practices of men going shirtless, having the holy month off work, annual cannabis burning and feeding children fermented mead are pretty unusual in an Australian context but they want similar legal exemptions and discrimination protection to other Aussie religions.

Here are my thoughts:

I'm against the Modeerf religion, just like I'm against every religion. Religions spread superstition, and we have enough of that already. I do not want to see them getting the okay to break the law for religious reasons. I don't want to pay their taxes for them. I don't want them meddling in civil rights issues like gay marriage. If they want to do their religious thing, they can. But the government has no business promoting them. Ideally, the government would be neutral towards religion.

But -- and this is a big 'but' -- we don't have that kind of government. We live in a country where the government is helping to establish and promote religion, contrary to Section 116 of the Australian Constitution.

• Thanks to John Howard and now Julia Gillard, the Australian government gives a lot of money to give Christian chaplains exclusive access to evangelise high school students.
• The government allows religions to break laws pertaining to anti-discrimination -- they get to deny social services and employment to gay and transgendered people.
• And of course, the government allows religions not to pay taxes, which forces us to carry their tax burden.

If we can't have government neutrality toward religion, then I have a terrible, but still second-best solution: Treat all religions the same. As an atheist, I don't see that any religion as intrinsically better or worse, more sensible or crazier than any other, so every religion should get the same advantage as every other. How about Modeerf chaplains in schools? Come to think of it, how about Muslim chaplains in schools? (Can you imagine the freak-outs on talk radio?) Should the Modeerf be allowed to fire left-handed people in their charity work, if it's against their religion?

I think this second-best solution would still be terrible. You'd have more discrimination, and less reason. But it would at least have the advantage of being fair. (And if some religions are unwilling to accord others the privileges that they receive, it shows their paper-thin commitment to equality.) The Modeerf example doesn't show why it's important that every religion get the same perks. It shows why no religion should.

In doing research for this event, I ran across this statement on a web page from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade:

People are free to practise any religion as long as they obey the law.

Isn't that a great ideal? I hope one day we get there.