There is a common and false charge laid against
morality as the framework within which laws are written. This is that if we choose to use the law to enforce one part of our morality, we must therefore use the law to enforce all of it. This charge is at times presented in a for of
reductio ad absurdum: for example, since the Old Testament Law requires extreme punishment for disobedient children, therefor anyone who wants to see parts of a morality derived from a Judeo-Christian metaphysics must support these "excessive" or "extremist" punishments. Of course, no one who is arguing from the Judeo-Christian moral framework is proposing anything of the sort; and while there have been some excesses--prohibition, for example, or more recently the anti-Sodomy laws which took a little too much interest in the activities of the bedroom and would be impossible to enforce--by and large the points of our morality which we think should be enshrined in law are largely matters of public morality which can be arrived at even from "secular" arguments.
Thus, there are people who are neither Christian nor Jewish, nor Islamic, nor necessarily any religion, who may yet share some of our conclusions regarding not only morality, but also which parts of the moral law are enshrined in civil law. To some extent, it is actually the lowest (and certainly the least theological) aspects of our morality which ought to be enshrined in law. Thus, whereas we ought to ban homicides--which includes murder but also manslaughter, and therefore abortion--as violence done against other men, we don't ban blasphemy, though it is a form of violence against God. The former crimes are terrible, and we know this even without looking to religious guidance; but the latter is ultimately more unforgivable (see
Mark 3:29), though we know this only by the special revelation given through our religion. Thus, homicide and blaspheme are both prohibited by our morality, but we are not obligated to prohibit the latter by penalty of law simply because we also prohibit the former. Homicide is a matter of the public good, whereas blaspheme,
rightly understood, is largely a private matter*.
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*Ironically enough, there are people in the US who do want to make "blasphemy" a crime, though under a different name. They are the same people who do
not want to outlaw abortion, but who do want to create a new right for gays to redefine marriage. The name of the blasphemy is "hate speech," and far from being blasphemy against God, it is a sort of blasphemy against secular humanism.
Tags: Morality Religion Political-Philo Sophy
