I am Jonny King has a significant post that deserves your reflection.

We at Christian News agree with the sentiments of this post, even if we don’t always grasp this bloggers “distinctive” style, …

Just imagine as a witness to our belief that w…

let me speak for the Flanagans [a cold sweat descends on MandM], … In the good providence of the always good God, who is always on time, Matt is waiting for his academic train to arrive. … Madeline is also coming through unusual days, with recovery…

This assumes that divine commands must be heteronomously imposed in a way Kant would reject, John Hare has made the argument that Kant probably had in mind by autonomy the idea of appropriation of Gods commands. A rational person took the commands of a perfectly rational being (God) and made them his or her own. I cant recapulate the textual argument in a small com box like this. But the line of argument you suggest is addressed in his exposition.

regardkess Kant’s argument in the second critique is that belief in God is necessary if one is to coherently adopt a moral perspective.

In any case, the idea that religious values qua religious values ought not to be part of law is just the flip side of the right to freedom of religion.

Ok here you seem to think that the basing a law on a particular religious reason violates freedom of religion. That seems to me false for two reasons.

First I don’t think this follows, If for example I was required by law to refrain from holding slaves on the basis of certain quaker religious views it would not follow I was being required by law to convert to Quakerism . Basing a law on a particular religious value is not the same thing nor does it entail that people are not free to adopt a different religion.

Second an analogous line of reasoning would prove too much. Freedom to not adopt any secular perspective would mean that no laws should be based on secular views. Similarly freedom to join political parties and adopt whatever political one views one thinks are correct would mean that laws should not be based on any political views and so on.

Some sort of neutral ground needs to be found between members of distinct religions (with the proviso that it be agreeable to any future community member who may be of a yet different religion), and it just so happens that this tends to dovetail exactly with the values of the secularists, who have no religion. I’d be willing to argue that this is an accidental feature of a political system based on hypothesized agreement, rather than a deliberate attempt to discriminate against religious people.

Well this is false, those who defend this view such as Audi for example actually insist that the values be secular.

But anyway like I argued in the Rawls piece this argument involves special pleading. Just as there are a diversity of religious views so there is a diversity of secular views, hence if one were consistent one would insist that the laws not be based on a perspective which was “neutral” with regard to all views wether religious or secular and this would mean that almost no substantive laws could be justified as almost every current normative secular ethical theory would be ruled out.

All this being said, there are powerful consequentialist reasons for having a secular pluralist society, one being the extremes of interfaith violence that characterized earlier centuries.

Yes there are arguments of this sort but they are not powerful as people like Quinn, Wolterstorff, Eberle etc have argued. It’s simply false to suggest that most religious beliefs are so dangerous and likely to lead to war if allowed in public discourse but secular beliefs are not.
In fact a large number of wars and atrocities have been justified by secular reasons including religious persecution ( which was frequently justified on secular not religious grounds.

“What is interesting is wether Kant actually would agree. Kant believed that God was the head of the kingdom of ends and that humans needed to identify thier duties with divine commands.”

Well, he can’t say that such necessity is heteronomously imposed, so whether they are divine commands or the commands of one’s own reason makes no difference (that they are divine commands ought to add nothing, or the principle of autonomy will be violated).

In any case, the idea that religious values qua religious values ought not to be part of law is just the flip side of the right to freedom of religion. Some sort of neutral ground needs to be found between members of distinct religions (with the proviso that it be agreeable to any future community member who may be of a yet different religion), and it just so happens that this tends to dovetail exactly with the values of the secularists, who have no religion. I’d be willing to argue that this is an accidental feature of a political system based on hypothesized agreement, rather than a deliberate attempt to discriminate against religious people.

I guess you’d need to conduct a thought experiment to work out whether the imposition of secular standards of public reason was discriminatory in a community with radically plural religions but no secularist members. It might also be the case that some members of this community found the standards of public reason to be in less conflict with their religious beliefs than others did. But again, this could be explained as an accidental feature of the system rather than a deliberate attempt to discriminate in the favour of one group against another.

All this being said, there are powerful consequentialist reasons for having a secular pluralist society, one being the extremes of interfaith violence that characterized earlier centuries. That one could make exactly the same case for the promotion of a contractarian democracy as a means of preventing communists and fascists from killing each other would indicate that the point of public reason is to prevent deep differences in beliefs from becoming politically and socially toxic.

What is interesting is wether Kant actually would agree. Kant believed that God was the head of the kingdom of ends and that humans needed to identify thier duties with divine commands.

Kant also argued that God was a necessary postulate of morality, one needed to assume that God and an afterlife exists and that athiesm makes the moral life rationally unstable. John Hare at Yale has done some good work on this.
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Of course Kant thought that you must accept the Categorical Imperative as a rational being.