Chapter Text
To preface and anticipate certain critique, I declare that for the purposes of this argument discussions of religion are limited to the Abrahamic schools, comprising over half of all religious adherents globally. Hinduism, comprising an additional fifteen per-cent of all religious adherents, can also be said to satisfy the conditions for persecution that will be discussed through its teaching of Brahman-ite "oneness", but I maintain a quietist disposition towards its deeper claims.
1. Religion is Spiritually Monopolistic
Membership within religious institutions is predicated on the affirmation of doctrine as accurately descriptive of exterior reality to the exclusion of all other positional declarations; one cannot affirm Christianity and Islam simultaneously. In that sense, both traditions, as well as the Judaic foundation from which they stem, consider themselves to be intellectually privileged.
The concept of Religious Freedom, from the perspective of statecraft, represents the idea that governments are obligated, to some degree, to defer to pre-existing religious beliefs when adjudicating disputes. Legislative operations and judiciary findings that would implicate the establishment and free operation of religious institutions according to their spiritual prescriptions, says this theory, would be counter-productive to liberty as a whole.
The problem, then, arises when a dispute between two of these mutually exclusive faiths presents itself. A state adjudicator cannot defer to both faiths at once, and so must either: a.) make a determination in deference to one faith, discriminating against the other; or b.) make a determination on the facts sans religion, discriminating against both. In so doing, the adjudicator has not only betrayed the value of religious freedom they claim to uphold but demonstrated the impossibility of its enforcement.
The simplest solution to this problem is to take the second horn of the dilemma with introspective honesty, which is to say with epistemic hostility. Not only should the state discriminate against both faiths, but it should do so openly on the charge of legalist pretension and intellectual derangement; when the claims made by a faith cannot be demonstrated to be true to the exclusion of all other claims, the holding to a faith becomes an aggravating factor for sentencing rather than an ameliorative one. In so doing, the adjudicator affirms that the religious belief underpinning the institution is socially and morally corrosive, and is in itself a motivating factor towards disputary dispositions (read: criminality).
2. Religion is Foundationally Antirevolutionary
The purpose of a constitution is to provide a political grounding for future statecraft. As a document, it preserves and defends the intention of its framers for the polity they define, building guardrails to distinguish legitimate state action from illegitimate state action. Constitutions are, by rule, the products of successful popular revolt, which is itself the product of popular dissent. To enshrine Religious Freedom into a constitution is to legitimise the delegitimization of the dissent and revolt that brought about the creation of said constitution.
No religious institution recognizes the right of its members to dissent and revolt against its doctrine. Quite the opposite, it literally demonizes disagreement through orthodoxy and anchors this orthodoxy in an immutable and imperious extra-dimensional entity. It becomes not only impossible but doctrinally impermissible to legitimately doubt, question, or refuse the dictums proclaimed by the tradition.
For statecraft to recognize this position as legitimately protected undercuts any claims to revolutionary inheritance; self-determination is anathema to faithfulness. Consider the state adjudicator, now faced with the dilemma of a religious institution persecuting a dissident member within its walls. The enshrining of Religious Freedom insists that the adjudicator affirm the right of the institution to override the right of the dissident because the institution claims a right of higher priority, a religious doctrine of dissident persecution, than the dissident's right to revolt against that doctrine.
The simplest solution to this, again, is to take the second horn of the dilemma with introspective honesty, which is to say epistemic hostility. Not only should the state discriminate against the institution, but it should do so on the grounds that its constitution retroactively supersedes the religious traditions the institution invokes through a supremacy clause. Upon the ratification of the constitution, the state has effectively nullified all religious claims at all times; past, present, and future. Any statement to the contrary within religious doctrine is treasonous on its face, because it seeks to upend and suppress the sociopolitical historiography established by the state's constitution.
3. Religion is Dogmatically Inhumane
By their very nature, constitutions seek to constrain state action within specific measurements of humaneness. Chief among the matters it constrains are a state's relationship to its constituency and the attitude with which a state approaches disputes with its constituency. States by definition are subservient creatures, oathed to recognize an inherent dignity within the individuals upon which laws are enforced. To enshrine Religious Freedom into a constitution is to legitimize the delegitimization of this universal dignity, opening the door to legisfare, or bellum legis contra omnium.
All religious traditions demand that the whole of humanity is the subject upon which the object of an extradimensional authority acts, reducing individual humans to the status of mere property owned by said extradimensional authority. All models of divinity subject herein posit humanity as created, meaning humanity as owned, and so all models of divinity presuppose a denial of humaneness as a valid metric with which to measure state actions.
In deferring to this elevation of religious tradition, a state abdicates any pretense of actual jurisprudence, but more importantly it implodes any regulatory intentions towards legislative scope. Consider the state adjudicator, now faced with the dilemma of a religiously motivated law acting as a vehicle of infringement upon the rights of the religiously unaffiliated. The enshrining of Religious Freedom demands that the adjudicator affirm the validity of this law, even if its enforcement causes other rights to be violated, and in so doing surrenders authority to the religious tradition that spawned the law.
The simplest solution, again, is to take the second horn of the dilemma with introspective honesty, which is to say epistemic hostility. Not only should the state discriminate against the religiously motivated law, but it should do so from inceptive description rather than incidental application. In so doing, the state affirms that any legislative operation (and indeed, any judicial determination) that would seek to promote any religious doctrine is invalid on its face and cannot move forward through any legal process whatsoever.
This tripartite description of the toxicity of religious institutions…
Omniexclusivity, the demand of ideological adherence such that all other positions are either argumentatively annihilated or subsumed,
Superordination, the demand of ethical primogeniture such that all other concerns are of lower class or priority,
Dehumanization, the demand of categorical status such that all persons are rendered cosmologically enslaved,
…is a denial of Anthroposupremacy, which represents the basal threshold of all ethical practice.
Without affirmation of Anthroposupremacy, it is impossible to create and enforce any truly functioning ethical system for any purpose, and its active denial is ethical fascism just as any other denial of rights targeted at specific groups. The denial of rights here is merely universalized by default, which is an ethical dilemma of considerably higher magnitude.
Religious institutions—and notably not individual adherents—are not protected by anything identifiable as "freedom of religion" because this is an invalid concept on its face: nobody has the right to be a fascist.