Abstract:
Europe is a constellation of liberal democracies characterised by the
conviction that the public sphere should be strictly secular and should rule
out religious arguments from the realm of public reason. We may call this
attitude ‘the liberal confidence.’ In the last years, the liberal confidence has
been put under considerable strain by a number of cases such as the scarf,
the cross in the classroom or the Mohammad cartoon saga. It quickly
appeared that the liberal confidence could not provide convincing
arguments to decide those issues. The principal explanation for the lack of a
convincing liberal position is reflected in the dogmatic character of the
liberal confidence which assumes, instead of articulating a sound
justification, that religion, religious symbols and religious opinions are best
kept away from our sight. This artificial situation creates more tensions than
it solves and it is time to review this fundamental weakness in the liberal
strand of thought. This problem raises various philosophical issues. First, it
points to a serious epistemological problem, namely what is the status of
religious beliefs in the formulation of public policies? Second, it raises a
political issue regarding the relationship between political and religious
institutions in European polities. Third, it brings back to the public forum the
fundamental ethical question –How should we live?- by asking how can we
possibly share the same polity without engaging in these issues in
comprehensive terms 8that is, in a way that takes seriously everyone’s
religious and other beliefs alongside with other types of beliefs<.
Machine summary:
1099 Abstract Europe is a constellation of liberal democracies characterised by the conviction that the public sphere should be strictly secular and should rule out religious arguments from the realm of public reason.
Third, it brings back to the public forum the fundamental ethical question –How should we live?- by asking how can we possibly share the same polity without engaging in these issues in comprehensive terms (that is, in a way that takes seriously everyone’s religious and other beliefs alongside with other types of beliefs).
uk Introduction Europe is a constellation of liberal democracies characterised by the conviction that the public sphere should be strictly secular, and where religious arguments should be ruled out from the realm of public reason.
The response of the leaders of our liberal democracies is that religion is unable to offer a model of life together where religious and non-religious people can be treated equally by neutral institutions of the state.
1 Both Religion and secularism are doing very poorly; as a result, in the last few years a copious literature on the relationship between faith and reason, State and Church, Christianism and Europe attempted to show that the two are mutually supportive and they should not be regarded as mutually exclusive.
So Ronald Dworkin, possibly the head priest of Rawlsian philosophy as applied to law,2 holds: "the schism over religion in America shows the limitations of Rawls’s project of political liberalism, his strategy of insulating political convictions from deeper moral, ethical, and religious conviction.
Religion, Rights and Democracy in a Future Europe The seeds of cosmopolitanism are present in both the liberal and the Christian Ethics.