Shunning Is Not the Same Thing as Bigotry

SHUNNING IS NOT THE SAME THING AS BIGOTRY
Sat. Feb. 25th, 2023

I would argue that shunning is not the same thing as bigotry.  I shun murderers.  If I want to claim the right to shun murderers, then I have to grant other people the right to shun who they want to shun.  But I would argue that I can have the desire to shun murderers and I can act on that desire without being bigoted.  I am not exactly going around telling everybody within earshot that they should shun murderers, even when they have not asked my opinion on whether they should shun murderers.  If I went around telling everybody that they should shun a certain group of people when they haven't asked my opinion about whether they should shun that group of people, then I would be bigoted, according to my lights.

But it's more complicated than that.  There is an exception for religious leaders.  A religious leader has the right to tell their followers that they should shun a certain group of people, even if nobody has asked the religious leader's opinion about that.  So if I disagree with Saint Paul when he says I should shun a certain group of people, to my way of thinking, that doesn't give me the right to call Saint Paul a bigot.  I have to make my own personal reckoning on whether the things I agree with Saint Paul about outweigh the things I disagree with Saint Paul about, and then I have to go from there.  But according to my way of looking at the world -- the linguist Noam Chomsky would call that my "evaluation metric," and it is very important for everybody to remember that Chomsky was a great linguist even if he is a total failure as a political scientist -- where was I? -- oh yeah -- according to my way of looking at the world, if a religious leader tells their followers to shun a certain group of people, that does not mean the religious leader is oppressing that group of people.  That's the special exception for religious leaders.  A religious leader can tell their followers to shun a certain group of people even if their followers haven't asked the leader to share their opinion of that group of people, and it's STILL not bigotry, because they're a religious leader.

How do you know if you're a religious leader?  That's easy.  If you proclaim that you are a religious leader and nobody follows your religious opinions, then you're not a religious leader.

But it's a total mistake to imagine that you can judge whether someone is a religious leader before they die.  A lot of the facts about what kind of person you are -- including whether or not you are a religious leader -- do not fall into place until after you die.  That is true of you and me just as much as it is true of Jesus Christ.  A lot of the facts about what kind of person Jesus was did not fall into place until after He died.  So if you die _before_ a person who claims to be a religious leader dies, you can only make a _provisional_ estimate of whether that person is a religious leader.

And by the same logic, no one can know that they themselves are a religious leader during their own lifetime.  So in fact, the entire generation to which the person who claims to be a religious leader belongs has to die off, before the world can know for sure if that person was in fact a religious leader.

Religious people say "We'll understand it better by and by" -- but non-religious people need to have an equivalent belief.  The equivalent belief for people who do not believe in life after death is "I'm never going to know if you're a real religious leader, because it won't become clear until after I'm dead."

So in fact, the exception for religious leaders (that they can go around telling people to shun a certain group of people even if nobody has their opinion about shunning that group of people) is rather broad.

But what keeps this situation from becoming a vicious circle is that you cannot found a religion around the idea that followers of your religion have to shun a certain group of people -- or kill a certain group of people, which is logically equivalent to shunning them.

Shunning a certain group of people can be a side tenet of your religion, but it can't be the main tenet of your religion.  And it is completely out of the question -- in other words, it is wicked and unacceptable -- for a religious leader to advise his or her followers to kill a certain group of people.  If society decides to put murderers to death, that is a completely secular decision.  The decision to put murderers to death cannot be made by consulting a book which says that a religious leader told their followers to put murderers to death.

Obviously, every link in this chain is important and is up for discussion.  But I'm a religious person, and I think that this chain of reasoning is the claim which we religious people are making (or have been implicitly making): If a religious leader advises their followers to shun a certain group of people, then no bigotry has taken place, and if that leader's followers follow that advice, then no oppression has taken place.

To call someone the founder of a religion is equivalent to calling that person a very, very wise person.  And even to call someone a religious leader -- in the sense in which I am calling Saint Paul a religious leader -- is equivalent to calling that person a very, very wise person.

There are numerous exceptions to rules for very, very wise people.  To give an example which I think is non-religious: Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging the President to take measures to avoid the danger of Germany building an atomic bomb before the United States, and that particular President Roosevelt paid attention to Einstein's warning because Einstein was a very, very wise man.  If you or I had been alive around 1941, and if you or I had written a letter to the then-President Roosevelt urging him to do something to prevent Germany from building an atom bomb, then President Roosevelt would have ignored our letter, because I'm not a very, very wise person and neither are you.

It would not really be surprising if you can poke a hole in my chain of reasoning.  But I am trying to articulate the unarticulated belief of religious people about shunning, and that is a very important thing to try to do, in my opinion.

In my own interpretation of the Bible, religious truth is not the only kind of truth that will set you free, but it is one of the kinds of truth that will set you free.  Scientific truth is another kind of truth which will set you free.  The idea that the truth will set you free is a quotation from Jesus; it is found in the Gospel of John, chapter eight, verse thirty-two (John 8:32 for short).  We Christians believe that many of the things which Jesus is quoted as having said are truths which will set you free.

This has been my attempt to justify shunning.

Frank Newton
Boiling Springs, North Carolina, U.S.A.