What you list are explicit descriptions of concrete positions on various issues, not the underlying principles and logic. However, what I had in mind is that if you take some typical persons whose positions on concrete issues are moderate and respectable by the contemporary standards, and ask them to state some abstract principles underlying their beliefs, a simple deduction from the stated principles will often lead to different and much more extreme positions in a straightforward way. If called out on this, your interlocutors will likely appeal to a disorganized and incoherent set of exceptions and special cases to rationalize away the problem, even though before the problem is pointed out, they would affirm these principles in enthusiastic and absolute terms.
Let me give you an example of Socratic questioning of this sort that I applied in practice once. In the remainder of the comment, I'll assume that we're in the U.S. or some other contemporary Western society.
Let's discuss the principle that religion and state should be separate, in the sense that each citizen should be free to affirm and follow any religious beliefs whatsoever as long as this doesn't imply any illegal actions, and the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, like a taste in food or music. You'll probably agree that this principle doesn't sound too extreme when stated in these words, and many people with ideological affiliations not too far from the center would enthusiastically affirm it.
But now take these people and ask them: should the government considered religion as a protected category in anti-discrimination laws? Currently, it does. Your employer may demand from you to look and behave in certain ways, and the burden is on you to comply under the threat of getting fired; pleading that this would be contrary to your personal tastes and preferences won't help you at all. Yet if this is contrary to your religion, the government will intervene and compel him to accommodate you within reasonable (and, arguably, sometimes unreasonable) limits. But this is clearly contrary to the above stated principle. How can the state flex its muscle to support your religious beliefs, if it considers them equivalent to mere personal preferences and gives no special support to religion over other sorts of interests and hobbies people have?
Trouble is, arguing that religious beliefs shouldn't be protected by anti-discrimination laws is definitely an extreme position nowadays. It opposes a firm consensus of the entire contemporary mainstream, and to make things even more incoherent, it will provoke hostility especially among certain ideological groups whose members normally consider secularism as a part of their core principles. Among the people who affirm the above principle in the abstract, very few will bite that bullet -- people normally never bite bullets based on abstract principles -- so you'll likely hear a stream of incoherent special pleading aimed to justify its non-application here. That's the sort of incoherence typical of the contemporary moderates I'm talking about.
On the other hand, someone who doesn't accept the separation of religion and state at all, or who is a principled libertarian opposed to anti-discrimination laws altogether -- which are both extremist positions by today's standards -- won't suffer from this incoherence.
the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, like a taste in food or music.
OK, what if we reword this as "the state should consider religious beliefs as a matter of purely private and personal choice, because they are very important and the state is not good at identifying or encouraging appropriate religious beliefs."
Isn't that a coherent, moderate principle that explains much of American policy on what to do when religion intrudes onto the public sphere? According to this principle, the stat...
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