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Purgatory : Public health and religious freedom
This discussion was created from comments split from: Rodney Howard-Browne arrested.
I thought this was worth a thread of its own.
Eutychus
I thought this was worth a thread of its own.
Eutychus
Comments
From your link: "“No right with public effects is absolute, including the precious right of religious freedom,” he added."...
That sort of makes sense, but it raises questions as to who, ultimately, grants rights.
Further: "Decrees banning religious freedom also (...) must be time-limited, with a clear and public expression of when the ban will end”
While France's Health State of Emergency is well-defined and subject to review, AIUI this is not the case of the prohibition on gatherings. You are right that in general religious gatherings are not a specific target*, nevertheless I think that for those who usually attend, they are more than a leisure activity, which many gatherings are. They are of existential significance.
Another problem is that powers granted under emergency legislation have a way of becoming enshrined in normal law later. This is certainly the case in the wake of the state of emergency decreed in France after the 2015 terror attacks. Some of the provisions (the time people can be held after arrest, for instance) are hair-raisingly extreme.
In my world of prison chaplaincy, we are concerned that measures embraced to overcome our current inability to enter jails (one project involves dedicated call-out lines) may be seen as a useful excuse to keep us out altogether once this is over. Precedent comes in the form of court hearings via video link, once the exception and fast becoming a norm, and a terrible substitute for being there in person (for one thing, the legal counsel cannot be with the defendant and the judge at the same time).
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*ETA bear in mind that the largest single identified source of super-spreading in France is an evangelical gathering in Mulhouse immediately before preventive measures were announced. The last I heard, 17 people in that congregation have died and people infected there have gone all over France and beyond just when they were the most contagious. I know two of them. The church is not to blame at all, but that hasn't stopped them attracting blame to the point that France Info has tried to do a damage limitation piece on their behalf, which is pretty much unprecedented in my experience.
And that's mostly because I don't see why such an argument suddenly becomes legitimate because the adjective religious is placed in front of terms like 'belief'.
Rule of law fundamentally means that sometimes I have to go along with rules that I don't personally agree with. Everyone does, or else face consequences for not going along with those rules. It doesn't matter whether I personally think current rules about limiting gatherings are appropriate, as far as the law is concerned what matters is which of those are genuinely rules that have been put into law, as opposed to guidelines/advice. I can choose to follow guidelines or advice. Once something is a law, I don't get a choice. That's the point.
But then people think that somehow they can avoid this by claiming that it's not them personally that doesn't agree with a rule, it's God that doesn't agree with a rule. Which might be workable if it wasn't for the fact that God appears to hold a bewildering number of divergent views all at the same time, depending on who you ask.
In other words, to me claiming that a belief is 'religious' tends to be little more than outsourcing, and asserting that somehow you're not responsible for your own beliefs because you developed them while using words like 'God' or 'spiritual'.
Because if you dislike gays for some general reason, the law doesn't care. But dress your antipathy up as a commandment from God and suddenly that's different?
There's been a draft religious discrimination law up for debate in Australia. It talks about religious belief without explaining what that is. Because defining what makes a belief 'religious', as opposed from a garden variety non-religious belief, is insanely difficult.
He did not flinch from commanding all churches closed. Quite a few had done so anyway, but religious gatherings were one of the things specifically shut down as non-essential.
However, I also know people who took considerable risks smuggling printing press materials across the Iron Curtain to churches whose members tended to get locked up in psychiatric hospitals indefinitely because their religious belief was classed as mental illness. You can't pretend states never do this kind of thing.
Very true.
The protections lie in having the rationale for laws be visible and accountable*, and also in having meaningful forms of protection (Constitution, Bill of Rights etc) where restrictions on freedom have to be justified and proportionate to some other important goal.
Not that any of that is likely to operate perfectly. But I find it difficult to think of any other system that's viable. You need a court system that's capable of requiring the law-makers to justify what they're doing.
*Laws are really just tools for achieving policies. It amazes me how sometimes it can be incredibly difficult to get my instructors to explain what they're actually trying to achieve when they ask me to write a law, as if I don't need to know. Not only does it help me immensely to know (and by far the best working relationships are with the people who can really explain the policy goals), but they really ought to be preparing to explain the very same things to the Parliament, and somewhere down the track maybe the courts. If you can't rationally explain the point of the law you're encouraging people to knock it down (and for the populace to try ignoring it).
I think you've hit upon the problem. A lot of the time people talk about 'freedom' when they really mean 'privilege'.
Freedom would consist of being able to gather and worship. Which in most Western societies doesn't tend to be under threat.
Or compulsory registration of all attendees (to refer again to the super-spreading evangelical gathering in Mulhouse, it proved difficult to track those attending - around 2,000 people from all over the place - because the event was free and did not require registration. This point has been raised in their defence in the media, but I don't think that means it won't have been noticed).
Which doesn't stop use of video technology, same as everybody else that is faced with the fact that public gatherings are now restricted to a maximum of 2 people (in some States of Australia by law, in others it's currently only guidelines). Shutting down only certain kinds of gatherings is so... last week I think it was. This stuff moves fast.
I think they'd raise you: Is 54:17 "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper"
People can gather and believe that God is with them, but all sensible people, believers or not, know that they are far morelikely to avoid or recover from the virus by relying on practical, medical advice and help.
I'm not disputing the public health issues. Which @TheOrganist seems to think don't apply to groups of two or three, contrary to public health emergency law here.
I am nonetheless arguing that this public health crisis may present a real challenge to gatherings of all kinds in the future, and more specifically gatherings indoors of people prone to singing, embracing, shaking hands, and so on, that have historically been the target of government surveillance and, occasionally, persecution.
Acknowledging the genuine public health risk does not make that problem vanish.
So why insist on being with fellow believers?
Our local council closed the allotments after "advice" When put to the test, they couldn't provide a copy of the advice but had to backtrack esp. as Michael Gove (of all people) said it was ok to tend your allotment. They've backtracked.
I agree we shouldn't meet but I am a little concerned with 750000 volunteers, the NHS when all this is over, will have access to a vast volunteer group. I rather suspect this will ensure that they won't make the changes they need and NHS staff wages will be kept down by the volunteer availability.
The queues in shops are sort of necessary but again there's the danger that when this is over we'll keep doing it just as we did after WW2. It means that businesses and shops no longer have an impetus to provide good service.
Finally the Govt schemes for financial support for businesses mean that some unviable businesses are kept going when they should be closed.
Unless I'm mistaken, the Greek word for 'church' is ekklesia: a gathering.
This is precisely the sort of "crisis creep" I'm worried about.
Should an ongoing public health risk (albeit lower than at present) mean that these restrictions become semi-permanent, with an added embargo on gatherings of over 50 people (say), and the continuing need to use hand sanitiser on entering the church, we should have no problem.
Said he, hopefully...
(BTW, with all due respect, I do wish The Atheists™ wouldn't keep derailing these threads...we can't prove the existence of God/god/gods, and neither can they prove the opposite)
See my comments in the other thread.
Eh? I wasn't suggesting anyone should be getting together, quite the reverse: the biblical quote gives the number, and I was saying it should be taken as meaning government restrictions should be observed. Of course, if you are a family with child or children there are going to be more than two of you, and how separate you can be from your children depends on age, but that should be the only exception.
I most definitely was not suggesting that small groups should get together, sorry if you took that meaning.
As for the gathering, it can be spiritual rather than temporal or corporeal.
I really think there are limits to this, and that we're going to hit them sooner rather than later.
That's because in my understanding, if you take away the Incarnation from Christianity you don't have much left. The corporeal component is the essence of the thing. And post-Ascension, that corporeal component is very definitely corporate, too.
This includes no right to sealed confession in Canada as far as I understand it. Neither for lawyers who know someone is harming (usually sexual assaulting) a child or planning a crime to harm others. These are public health issues also. A person, clergy or anything, should be criminally liable if they fail to take preventative and protective steps I think.
I am pretty sure, at least in the US, if someone becomes ill in such a gathering, that person or their family may be able to sue the socks off the organizers.
I am completely certain that Jesus is present in virtual gatherings of people in His name, even if their bodies are in different buildings.
In other news, I got a memo today announcing that the two-month Sanitary State of Emergency decreed here on March 24 de facto means I can't go back into my jail until (at least) the end of that time period, i.e. May 24. Of course, we may well still be in lockdown then (two weeks in today), but that strikes me as precisely the kind of overreach I'm expressing concern about here.
(By extension, I'm guessing that summary judicial proceedings will be extended until at least then, etc. Groan).
I agree that church-over-zoom is a poor imitation of church-in-person, but it's a lot better than just having some letters.
It depends what you mean by "virtual church". If you're meaning a broadcast of a church service (priest / worship leader produces a broadcast, congregation are spectators on TV / youtube / facebook live / whatever) then I'd agree with you that that's quite close to everyone being individual recipients of an epistle.
If you're talking about prayer services held over zoom / WebEx / jitsi / some other videoconference solution, then that (can be) much more interactive, and a lot more like a community.
I agree with you that it's not adequate. Apart from anything else, we can't share communion over zoom, and the fact that we're all going to be at home in front of our computers for Easter is very sad indeed. It's also sensible, in the short term. We'll gather in person when we're not endangering our neighbours by doing so.
I understand that people need to plan, but making concrete plans two months out right now does seem a bit like overreach. Although if I was in charge of a jail, I'd be erring on the side of keeping the virus out of my jail. I don't know what your jail is like, but I'd imagine it would be hard to isolate many sick people in it, and so I'd want to be pretty certain that people like you, or like prisoners' lawyers, weren't bringing the virus in to my jail. But I'd also worry about guards bringing it in. It's not so bad with lockdown in place, but as you start to lift the lockdown, I'd be worrying about the families of the guards getting infected, and then having an infected guard show up for work. But it's also hard to sequester prison guards away from their families for a couple of months or so.
This is the problem. All the reasons are legitimate ones. Except that they ignore the role chaplains play in "moral and spiritual support", and providing that remotely is not being widely facilitated. I generally appreciate the staff I work with in prison, but it's hard not to get the impression that these measures are seen by some as a way of keeping the pesky chaplains out from under their feet.
Meanwhile, would you consider installing this app? (I see the UK is considering going full Wuhan well before France...).
I'm struggling to see how that would work as described. The article says that "He added that employers might also be justified in requiring staff to use the app if they worked "in an old people's home, with vulnerable groups or [were based] in very crowded places"." - but it doesn't help me if my staff are using this app unless all the people they have contact with are also using it. Employers already know when their employees are sick, because they call in and say "I'm sick". You need to know when to tell Dave not to come in, because his drinking buddy or the lady who sat opposite him on the train just got sick, and you only get that if drinking buddy and train lady also have the app.
It's theoretically a good idea to have a sort of dynamic quarantine like this that only pops up where necessary, but a necessary precondition of such a system is the widespread availability of rapid tests. The majority of people with COVID-19 only have mild symptoms. There are probably a lot of infectious people out there who don't know that they're infectious, and have no idea that they're any more ill than the usual winter grottiness.
Would I install such an app? That depends - do I have a government that is prepared both to give me a cast-iron guarantee that there will be zero commercial use of the data generated from it (in any form) and is prepared to jail chief executives of companies that are found to be in breach of the guarantee? If it's all in the public good, there should be no problem giving me such a guarantee, right?
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
Jesus says the minimum is two
Does the gathering have to be physical? There are plenty of Anglican churches here - and probably other denominations and religions as well - where there is electronic gathering via Zoom or a similar programme. We went to a eucharist from Christ Church Newcastle Cathedral this morning. Admittedly there is no taking by those online (a real loss) but perhaps something can be worked out.
Otherwise, what Orfeo's been saying. I think that the ban in Sydney on gathering for public worship came from ++Glenn before there was any government announcement.
And if you're right in your approach, a maximum of 3.
And gathering with one other person is currently against the law where I live unless you happen to live under the same roof. I find myself in a situation in which the minimum basic requirements for the presence of Christ, according to the Bible according to @TheOrganist, are prohibited by law.
I'll survive, but the point is that it is possible for legal measures to render worship as usually understood impossible; my question is about the point at which one might decide faithfulness to God overrode obedience to man (undoubtedly part of Rodney Howard Browne's excuse).
(ETA it's a bit like the Overton window. Imagine how you would have responded to churches being forbidden to gather for worship - on any grounds - in any of our Western countries just a few weeks ago).
It obviously doesn't have to, nevertheless I think that there stalk the twin ghosts of gnosticism and docetism. I don't think the Incarnation, Christ's engagement of all five senses, including touch, and the calling of an actual group of people together in one place, were considerations due solely to the cultural context of the Christ Event; I think they say something profound about what it is to be human and social and what the Word being made flesh, then and now, is all about.
Though that's a wider issue than religious freedom isn't it ?