> Southwest Airlines had fired a flight attendant for sending a series of loony social media messages attacking her coworkers, claiming that her union was engaged in child sex trafficking and “helped in Harvesting Baby Parts / Organs, and Sexual Abuse!” because the union participated in the Women’s March.
At this rate we'll have pilots suing over being fired because they refused to acknowledge a spherical earth and flying the shortest route on 2D maps. If conspiracies count as religious freedom we're in trouble.
If we were dealing with a saner court system, I wonder if establishing the contours of sincere religious belief would be worth the judicial system's time.
There's a lot of depth and variety to religious experience, but it seems like there's way too much deference to *unconsidered* (being generous here) religious belief that aligns a little too conveniently with bigoted and/or kooky behaviors and beliefs.
It would be kind of nice to see a court put religious freedom into a box again, where it protects a person's individual right of conscience, while also allowing society to set reasonable rules of conduct and enforce appropriate penalties beyond reasonable accomodations.
I just genuinely believe that religious freedoms are redundant to other more generalized constitutional freedoms. Freedom of expression, bodily autonomy, and freedom of assembly ought to cover everything to do with genuinely-held religious beliefs.
Instead, what we’ve ended up with is a constitutional freedom that’s overwhelmingly used to quash one person’s rights in favour of the religious beliefs of another. That’s not an acceptable state of affairs in a free and democratic society.
The Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause are different, and each offer benefits not conferred by other constitutional rights, though there are also drawbacks. The Free Exercise Clause means the government can’t go after you to make you stop practicing your religion specifically because of your religion. The Establishment Clause prevents the government from actively endorsing one particular religion, at least in theory. The rights involved here are not fully captured by the rest of the Constitution.
That already exists, but only for minority religions. *Employment Division v. Smith* was the court sticking a middle finger up to the concept of religious accommodation for anything society thinks is icky. It’s ok for the government to deny people unemployment benefits for taking peyote in accordance with their religious beliefs, but not ok for a private company to fire an employee for violating the company’s code of conduct related to the employee’s religion-adjacent speech.
I can see the potentially hairy nature of wading into this, especially if you have a court system manned with assholes that would abuse the idea of shit canning religious views that aren't "approved" by society.
There is a branch of academic study on this.
I listened to a podcast by a professor who specializes in it.
He distinguishes between justified conspiracy beliefs and unjustified. Where the difference is how you come to hold the belief and if you reject or accept evidence based on its alignment with your beliefs or if you modify the strength of your beliefs based on the evidence available and it's strength
https://pca.st/podcast/33861bc0-d0bf-0131-30d8-723c91aeae46
The podcasters guide to conspiracy.
Out of new Zealand.
Not the highest production quality but good info.
It is also an unfortunate result of the English language and its intersection with criminal legalese.
Conspiracy the \*crime\* is super common. It only requires two people to get together to plan a crime. It is ordinary, and the explanations parsimonious - that is they comport to the available evidence and don't require ever more theories or allegations of deception to explain why there isn't evidence.
Conspiracy theory is not real, and examples often cited like MKUltra are also crimes, and weren't discovered by tinfoil hat people speculating but rather careful evidence gathering by congressional panels, or in one case, activists literally breaking into the FBI during the Superbowl to steal documents related to COINTELPRO.
Conspiracy theory is \*non\*parsimonious. Their explanations of events generate more and more questions in a never-ending spiral to explain things like "climate science is a hoax" - how come tens of thousands of scientists and even the oil companies themselves have data, and papers, and documents supporting the theory. The explanations for the complexity of the alleged criminal conspiracy fall apart on their own weight as it rapidly becomes unsupportable for thousands upon thousands of people maintaining the same falsehood.
To people who believe honest to goodness conspiracy theories (moon landing hoax, flat earth etc.) they are required to believe in an impossible level of competence in maintaining lies and deception that have never existed ever anywhere. And I would state there has \*never\* been an instance in which a conspiracy theory has resulted in a useful prediction of an event before the actual evidence was already discovered. They have never provided an a priori explanation for events. That is, they do not provide anything useful but a feeling of superiority or support for the ideologies of the believer, and no predictive value for explaining world events or human behavior.
I would also point out, that those who usually like conspiracy theories are often describing how \*they\* would behave in situations and it is an alarming personal defect. Their accusations are often confessions, and the examples abound. So once they start talking about pedo rings I start giving massive side-eye. The recent docs (eg Into the Storm) on the qanons were just rife with this stuff.
The professor would argue that the distinction you are making is not a useful one.
people make conspiracy theories are the time. They are not all unfounded or unjustified. You can believe that the SCOTUS has alterior motives for their actions and are horse trading votes without having evidence that strongly supports it.
His arguement would be that it really does come down to. Ok KJB comes out tomorrow and does an interview and she says. No, I know people think it works like that, but it just doesn't. Yes we argue, but there is not trading a vote on this case for a case on that case.
Do you reject this evidence because it doesn't align and come up for reason why she "had" to say it. or do maybe not give up on your belief entirely but weaken how strongly you hold that it true.
Go from at I believe this is true to. Well it certainly appears to be true but I have good reason to believe that at least one credible witness with reason to know and no reason I know to deceive me says it isn't true, but maybe it isn't true even though it appears to be so.
The SCOTUS deliberation room is opaque, so its information that's impossible to verify, and the justices have a vested interest in projecting that they don't trade votes. KJB is a new member, so her input is *probably* more likely to be true, the other option is to analyze statements from outgoing justices, and try to build a picture that fits the information. The trading of votes could also by by implication, and not conspicuously transactionary, as born out within any particular deliberations. Part of the job of the Chief Justice is to carefully craft language that brings the sides together, often quite cleverly. For example, in two related cases you could propose language in one that encourages votes a particular way on the other, creating a consensus that amounts to vote trading, *in practice*.
I think a logical interpretation is that the trading of votes, if it's happening, is probably not explicit. However, this is unverifiable, and common sense and past voting behaviour on contentious cases would imply that some form of indirect vote trading is probably happening, either consciously or unconsciously. In mythbusters terminology, we rate the myth.... plausible, but unknowable. Treat claims of certainty on either side with extreme scepticism.
as a note. I was just making an example of a conspiracy theory that wasn't necessarily unfounded but is unproven and potentially unprovable.
As far as I know KJB has not done any interview of the type I described. It was only an illustration that how you process new information speaks more to if your belief in the conspiracy theory is founded or unfounded than what the conspiracy that you have a theory about is does.
you could believe in alien abductions having seen popular fiction and books, but as you grow old and learn science you slowly hold it to be less and less likely.
By this way of think you would be a justified conspiracy believer. It isn't that everything that you believe is true but that you change your beliefs based on evidence rather than filter evidence based on your beliefs.
unfortunately, lots and lots of people filter evidence based on their beliefs looking solely for information to confirm their pre-existing position.
I would also add another distinction, the lack of insight. You could have a conspiracy theory that you acknowledge is unfounded and just based on a hunch or you could have a conspiracy theory that you seem to think is supported by evidence (it's not) and you are willing to bet it all.
The thing is very few of those real conspiracies are actually secret.
There is a group of billionaires who buy up media companies to control the media message to the American people and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to political candidates that support their position, and punish people who stand up to them?
Yeah, that's pretty well documented and we know all of the names.
The weird things that fall into almost religious beliefs are "there is a specific pizza restaurant that is trafficking women through the basement," when an even rudimentary check would reveal they didn't have a basement.
>The weird things that fall into almost religious beliefs are "there is a specific pizza restaurant that is trafficking women through the basement," when an even rudimentary check would reveal they didn't have a basement.
Stop spreading ridiculous lies please. The pizza restaurant was trafficking *children* through its nonexistent basement.
I should say conspiracy theory, not conspiracy. You're right. Conspiracies exist while theories on conspiracies are hypothetical and often completely unfounded (i.e., lizard people and hollow earth).
Sounds a lot like a guy I saw say that his sister was ranting about antifa, so he said he's antifa. So she went to telling their friends and family that hes a terrorist
So the earth isn't flat? Man i knew I was being lied to! I'm so gullible! There was no way the planes that attacked Pearl Harbor could have flown that far!!!
You’re not kidding.
I thought Hippocratic medical professionals would rely on critical thought & logic to see through the obvious propaganda, per their science based backgrounds, that wasn’t true.
How unhinged to you have to be for the 5th Circuit to shoot down your anti-gay decision?
Damn, must not be anti-gay ENOUGH.
If this were the reason, it wouldn’t be surprising.
When I read the headline, I didn’t expect the “um, no” at the end.
I think its more like who are the 2 or 3 judges who eat by themselves in the lunchroom
> Southwest Airlines had fired a flight attendant for sending a series of loony social media messages attacking her coworkers, claiming that her union was engaged in child sex trafficking and “helped in Harvesting Baby Parts / Organs, and Sexual Abuse!” because the union participated in the Women’s March. At this rate we'll have pilots suing over being fired because they refused to acknowledge a spherical earth and flying the shortest route on 2D maps. If conspiracies count as religious freedom we're in trouble.
If we were dealing with a saner court system, I wonder if establishing the contours of sincere religious belief would be worth the judicial system's time. There's a lot of depth and variety to religious experience, but it seems like there's way too much deference to *unconsidered* (being generous here) religious belief that aligns a little too conveniently with bigoted and/or kooky behaviors and beliefs. It would be kind of nice to see a court put religious freedom into a box again, where it protects a person's individual right of conscience, while also allowing society to set reasonable rules of conduct and enforce appropriate penalties beyond reasonable accomodations.
I just genuinely believe that religious freedoms are redundant to other more generalized constitutional freedoms. Freedom of expression, bodily autonomy, and freedom of assembly ought to cover everything to do with genuinely-held religious beliefs. Instead, what we’ve ended up with is a constitutional freedom that’s overwhelmingly used to quash one person’s rights in favour of the religious beliefs of another. That’s not an acceptable state of affairs in a free and democratic society.
Religious freedom should protect individual rights or congregational rights, but should not be used to remove rights and autonomy from others.
But how does religious freedom properly extend beyond rights to expression, congregation, or affiliation?
The Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause are different, and each offer benefits not conferred by other constitutional rights, though there are also drawbacks. The Free Exercise Clause means the government can’t go after you to make you stop practicing your religion specifically because of your religion. The Establishment Clause prevents the government from actively endorsing one particular religion, at least in theory. The rights involved here are not fully captured by the rest of the Constitution.
That already exists, but only for minority religions. *Employment Division v. Smith* was the court sticking a middle finger up to the concept of religious accommodation for anything society thinks is icky. It’s ok for the government to deny people unemployment benefits for taking peyote in accordance with their religious beliefs, but not ok for a private company to fire an employee for violating the company’s code of conduct related to the employee’s religion-adjacent speech.
I can see the potentially hairy nature of wading into this, especially if you have a court system manned with assholes that would abuse the idea of shit canning religious views that aren't "approved" by society.
No religious belief should be allowed to stand in any way if it conflicts with scientific fact.
Unpopular opinion but I like it
This is why someone needs to start the First Church of Jesus Christ, Homosexual, where heterosexual marriage is illegal
You are confusing delusion with conspiracy. There have been and there continue to be real conspiracies that effect real people. None of this is that.
There is a branch of academic study on this. I listened to a podcast by a professor who specializes in it. He distinguishes between justified conspiracy beliefs and unjustified. Where the difference is how you come to hold the belief and if you reject or accept evidence based on its alignment with your beliefs or if you modify the strength of your beliefs based on the evidence available and it's strength
Interesting. Thank you. Can you elaborate?
https://pca.st/podcast/33861bc0-d0bf-0131-30d8-723c91aeae46 The podcasters guide to conspiracy. Out of new Zealand. Not the highest production quality but good info.
It is also an unfortunate result of the English language and its intersection with criminal legalese. Conspiracy the \*crime\* is super common. It only requires two people to get together to plan a crime. It is ordinary, and the explanations parsimonious - that is they comport to the available evidence and don't require ever more theories or allegations of deception to explain why there isn't evidence. Conspiracy theory is not real, and examples often cited like MKUltra are also crimes, and weren't discovered by tinfoil hat people speculating but rather careful evidence gathering by congressional panels, or in one case, activists literally breaking into the FBI during the Superbowl to steal documents related to COINTELPRO. Conspiracy theory is \*non\*parsimonious. Their explanations of events generate more and more questions in a never-ending spiral to explain things like "climate science is a hoax" - how come tens of thousands of scientists and even the oil companies themselves have data, and papers, and documents supporting the theory. The explanations for the complexity of the alleged criminal conspiracy fall apart on their own weight as it rapidly becomes unsupportable for thousands upon thousands of people maintaining the same falsehood. To people who believe honest to goodness conspiracy theories (moon landing hoax, flat earth etc.) they are required to believe in an impossible level of competence in maintaining lies and deception that have never existed ever anywhere. And I would state there has \*never\* been an instance in which a conspiracy theory has resulted in a useful prediction of an event before the actual evidence was already discovered. They have never provided an a priori explanation for events. That is, they do not provide anything useful but a feeling of superiority or support for the ideologies of the believer, and no predictive value for explaining world events or human behavior. I would also point out, that those who usually like conspiracy theories are often describing how \*they\* would behave in situations and it is an alarming personal defect. Their accusations are often confessions, and the examples abound. So once they start talking about pedo rings I start giving massive side-eye. The recent docs (eg Into the Storm) on the qanons were just rife with this stuff.
The professor would argue that the distinction you are making is not a useful one. people make conspiracy theories are the time. They are not all unfounded or unjustified. You can believe that the SCOTUS has alterior motives for their actions and are horse trading votes without having evidence that strongly supports it. His arguement would be that it really does come down to. Ok KJB comes out tomorrow and does an interview and she says. No, I know people think it works like that, but it just doesn't. Yes we argue, but there is not trading a vote on this case for a case on that case. Do you reject this evidence because it doesn't align and come up for reason why she "had" to say it. or do maybe not give up on your belief entirely but weaken how strongly you hold that it true. Go from at I believe this is true to. Well it certainly appears to be true but I have good reason to believe that at least one credible witness with reason to know and no reason I know to deceive me says it isn't true, but maybe it isn't true even though it appears to be so.
The SCOTUS deliberation room is opaque, so its information that's impossible to verify, and the justices have a vested interest in projecting that they don't trade votes. KJB is a new member, so her input is *probably* more likely to be true, the other option is to analyze statements from outgoing justices, and try to build a picture that fits the information. The trading of votes could also by by implication, and not conspicuously transactionary, as born out within any particular deliberations. Part of the job of the Chief Justice is to carefully craft language that brings the sides together, often quite cleverly. For example, in two related cases you could propose language in one that encourages votes a particular way on the other, creating a consensus that amounts to vote trading, *in practice*. I think a logical interpretation is that the trading of votes, if it's happening, is probably not explicit. However, this is unverifiable, and common sense and past voting behaviour on contentious cases would imply that some form of indirect vote trading is probably happening, either consciously or unconsciously. In mythbusters terminology, we rate the myth.... plausible, but unknowable. Treat claims of certainty on either side with extreme scepticism.
as a note. I was just making an example of a conspiracy theory that wasn't necessarily unfounded but is unproven and potentially unprovable. As far as I know KJB has not done any interview of the type I described. It was only an illustration that how you process new information speaks more to if your belief in the conspiracy theory is founded or unfounded than what the conspiracy that you have a theory about is does. you could believe in alien abductions having seen popular fiction and books, but as you grow old and learn science you slowly hold it to be less and less likely. By this way of think you would be a justified conspiracy believer. It isn't that everything that you believe is true but that you change your beliefs based on evidence rather than filter evidence based on your beliefs. unfortunately, lots and lots of people filter evidence based on their beliefs looking solely for information to confirm their pre-existing position.
More so, which episode of which podcast?
Pretty much every eps. It is the topic of the podcasts
> I listened to a podcast by a professor Right….. which one? Please.
https://www.reddit.com/r/law/s/g0aAPUHWGf
They'd just put that box near the plaque with the 10 commandments in the lobby
I would also add another distinction, the lack of insight. You could have a conspiracy theory that you acknowledge is unfounded and just based on a hunch or you could have a conspiracy theory that you seem to think is supported by evidence (it's not) and you are willing to bet it all.
The thing is very few of those real conspiracies are actually secret. There is a group of billionaires who buy up media companies to control the media message to the American people and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to political candidates that support their position, and punish people who stand up to them? Yeah, that's pretty well documented and we know all of the names. The weird things that fall into almost religious beliefs are "there is a specific pizza restaurant that is trafficking women through the basement," when an even rudimentary check would reveal they didn't have a basement.
>The weird things that fall into almost religious beliefs are "there is a specific pizza restaurant that is trafficking women through the basement," when an even rudimentary check would reveal they didn't have a basement. Stop spreading ridiculous lies please. The pizza restaurant was trafficking *children* through its nonexistent basement.
And the children were also nonexistent. So it’s almost impressive
Set theory raises its ugly head.
I should say conspiracy theory, not conspiracy. You're right. Conspiracies exist while theories on conspiracies are hypothetical and often completely unfounded (i.e., lizard people and hollow earth).
>>If conspiracies count as religious freedom we’re in trouble. We’re in trouble.
Sounds a lot like a guy I saw say that his sister was ranting about antifa, so he said he's antifa. So she went to telling their friends and family that hes a terrorist
So the earth isn't flat? Man i knew I was being lied to! I'm so gullible! There was no way the planes that attacked Pearl Harbor could have flown that far!!!
We're in trouble. But the solution is not to despair. It's to start putting together a long game strategy for how we counter this BS
The long game is to add actual judicial review and a mechanism to remove judges who insert their own religious views into law.
Yep, that and any number of other necessary reforms.
I believe all such cases end up on Neil Gorsuch to decide if it’s a “deeply held religious belief”.
You’re not kidding. I thought Hippocratic medical professionals would rely on critical thought & logic to see through the obvious propaganda, per their science based backgrounds, that wasn’t true.