... Let Them Worship How, Where or What They May

In the Articles of Fatih of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is this:

11 We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

We are serious about this.

The fashions and vicissitudes and culture wars, etc. of human culture have altered, in the common context, the meanings of every meaningful word in the above, but we are still dead serious about this.

I have tried to invent a new way to talk about this, without using the words that have, in the vicissitudes of history, become offensive to many, where I substitute the word "cosmology" for "religion", and such, but it only moves the goalposts, and does not lead to mutual understanding. 

And mutual understanding is my real goal, to somehow invite you and your friends, and your enemies, to consider that we argue about it more about abstract definitions than substance -- arguing about choice of dictionaries, in effect.

Even the phrase, "article of faith":

Article: 

Of the definitions in the dictionaries, the one that probably came to mind when you read this word is 

written composition on a news or magazine site

or such.

But what we mean is closer to 

clause

-- particularly a clause of belief or faith rather than a clause of law. 

Speaking of faith,

Faith: 

The popularized definition of faith refers to religious belief, and has even been pushed towards 

system of superstition, and choice of favorite comic book or movie series or other mythologies and their heroes

But what we mean is closer to

fundamental beliefs and how those beliefs affect behavior and thinking and lives

-- but if we are not careful, even there, we can fall into the false trap of the false dichotomy between faith and works.(It's not just a Christian thing, or even "just a religious thing", that false dichotomy.)

For example, if you claim to be an atheist or agnostic, that is an assertion of one of your core beliefs and how it affects your thinking and behavior. 

Or, if you prefer not to be accused of believing something, or anything at all, you still have a choice in your approach to understanding. Or even whether you choose to approach understanding.

And we want to allow you that choice.

Sometimes it is even a valid choice to suspend the choice to understand, rather than to choose to claim understanding. And we want to allow you even that choice when you feel a need to. 

Heaven knows we have found that, at times, we have had to suspend understanding in order to let God teach us something we couldn't understand before.

Freedom of Religion is not about freedom of choice of favorite superheroes. Or, it is not just about that.

I mean, if you choose a favorite superhero, you are often using that as a metaphor to talk about something deeper about what you believe or what you understand, or what you want to understand, or something else important to you.

That's what freedom of religion was meant to be when the framers of the Constitution of the United States of America wrote the First Amendment to it -- the freedom to take your own approach to life, to the extent that it's possible to do so.

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... and if this were to go viral, it would be only a matter of moments before the popular meanings of the phrase "take your own approach" were changed to something I do not intend, and, to the extent that such changes in idiom result from people's attempts to understand, I guess I have to allow that, too.

Addictions and Morality

This is, of course,  not the only framework for discussing morality, probably not even the best, but it seems useful.

Are addictions automatically immoral?

Well, we can bring up the example of the pusher, but that's too controversial.

So we can look at hand-washing.

You've heard of people who wash their hands obsessively, I suppose? Some people develop an obsession with keeping their hands clean, to the point of damaging their skin and of being unable to participate in ordinary social functions.

And someone is going to accuse me of engaging in hate speech against hand-washers.

We all need to wash our hands on occasion.

How much hand-washing is bad?

I think we can guess that a plumber will need to wash his hands more often than a software engineer who spends all his time behind a desk. 

Don't distract me about software engineers who engineer plumbing systems. Or about computer users who never clean their keyboards. 

The point is that there is no good single rule about how many times an hour or a day you should wash your hands, and no more -- no single rule to cover everyone.

So how can you define when it becomes an unhealthy compulsion?

If you're at a social function, and someone keeps excusing herself to go wash her hands every fifteen minutes, can't you get after her for letting her OCDs get the better of her?

I suppose you can, but are you not engaging in a compulsion to gossip and criticize when you do?

This will upset people who have a compulsion to tell other people what to do, but the only answer is that it is between the individual and her conscience --

-- unless she's dragging you along and making you wash her hands for her, I suppose.

No, there are valid reasons for needing help washing your hands, too.

Ultimately, the question must be left up to the individual to decide, between her and God.

Wait. If I say God in the current political climate, the odds are that you will imagine a cartoon caricature, or some caricature from some movie that focused on a particular or supposed aspect.

But if I say conscience, I know there are so many purveyors of arcane rules of etiquette that only profit the purveyors thereof, and of other such ideal-mongering, that most people have trouble distinguishing their innate instincts of right and wrong.

Pushers.

Our society seems addicted to purveyance, but it should be possible to refer to the tendency to addiction when talking about morality.

It should be valid to bring up the tendency to addiction when discussing the necessity for regulating the production and access to a substance.

It should be valid to bring up the tendency to addiction when discussing the need for laws punishing and prohibiting rape and sexual abuse.

It should also be valid to bring up the tendency to addiction when discussing monopoly power over technology, among other things.