Prisoner loses challenge to an Australian state’s ban on inmates eating Vegemite
cnn.com43 points by sumnole 2 days ago
43 points by sumnole 2 days ago
As a religious person, I find this ruling troubling.
We bend over backward for religious dietary restrictions.
Why not sincerely held secular dietary restrictions and convictions? I also suspect the ruling would have been deliberated more if this wasn't an Australian inmate requesting Australian foods.
What is a 'secular dietary conviction'? Religious restrictions are 'God says it is morally wrong to consume this'. Are you suggesting that australian culture suggests 'it is morally wrong to not eat vegemite'? I don't think that's true.
Because if it's just 'australian people like to eat X, I'm australian, thus it's morally wrong to deny me 'X', I don't see how that's reasonable. It's also a strong australian cultural norm to not be confined to a small cell every day for the rest of your life, but that norm was knowingly taken away as part this inmates' conviction and sentencing. Surely eating vegemite is a much smaller concern compared to the imprisonment.
Thought about the other way around:
Religion is culture. If you doubt that, go to country X and ask them about god(s) then go to every other country and ask the same. Even if one of them got it right and is following the word of god, it would still mean every other country has got it wrong, and _theirs_ is just culture.
Now, if we bend for one cultural norm, why not another? I'd say it's not that his culture shouldn't be treated like religion, it should! It's just that religion shouldn't be treated specially in the first place.
'Religion is culture...'
This argument appears to me unjustified. This equating between culture and religion seems especially unworkable in modern times, where cultural groups don't have single religions at all. Eg in america there is in my opinion a single shared american culture, shared across people of different religions. If we were to equate these two things, does that imply that there is no shared american culture? I just don't see how this interpretation doesn't lead to a single stretched 'culture' term which basically ends up subsuming everything about people, and don't see how it is a useful term or how it aids in thought or understanding.
In this case, the point really isn't 'culture' vs 'religion' it's 'moral' vs 'preference'. Consuming vegemite is not a moral mandate for anyone, it's just a preference, like mayonnaise, fashion, or coke.
My argument is that a religion _is in itself_ a cultural group. Religion is culture, it's just that we have given it special status because people take it (much) more seriously than any other culture.
> does that imply that there is no shared american culture?
I think you might've convinced me of this just with your comment.
Also, flip "religion" and "culture" and the post still (mostly) works, though I don't think that proves anything.
The moral/preference idea is closer, but you get a lot of gray areas like sports teams and Sunday roasts (complete with threat of excommunication for non-adherence).
Right, which is why the distinction exists between religion and moral preference. One invokes a supernatural higher power, while the other does not.
In the US, we often make an exception for the former but not the latter. Sometimes we do both.
For example there is a conscientious objector exemption from the military draft.
Is Buddhism a religion? There's no supernatural higher power there?
Buddhism is actually a great example, because it shows how one can choose their religion just as they can their cultural preferences.
Buddhism as actually practiced for the last 2500 years ascribes all kinds of deity-like features and the supernatural to the Buddha – travel Asia and you’ll see people praying to Amitabha Buddha in order to be reborn in his Pure Land, and even Theravada Buddhism that doesn't go whole hog with pantheons still holds that the Buddha was divinely immune to fire, poison, and drowning. A non-supernatural Buddha is largely a feature of the twentieth-century West, which thought it could get something in tune with a more rational era by reviving, so it thought, “original Buddhism” with questionable results. Even non-revival, supernaturally charged strands of Buddhism have their converts in the West.
Sure, and there are followers of Christ who also do all the things he said not to (Catholics). I don't take a religion's followers as good examples of the founders intents.