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No Burial: You're Gay!

Noted this story on the Volokh Conspiracy:

A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.

AP Story here. — Volokh blog post Here

I basically agree with what Volokh participant blogger, Dale Carpenter says when he comments:

I doubt the church refuses to bury people it also thinks have sinned, like liars, blasphemers, and adulterers.

Does this High Point Church scour the lives of the folks they bury and refuse if they find people to be sinners? The pathetic excuse they use in this case is that a homosexual is living a lifestyle that is unrepentant. However, I don’t see how they can know what untold sins their parishioners and the other people they’ve buried have perpetrated through their lives. So, to me, this excuse simply comes off as PR cover, when it really is a discriminatory act. It’s a legal one, but it’s still hateful.

That’s what grabbed my interest in this story. But what further interested me was this at the end of Carpenter’s post:

I was raised in a Christian home and nothing the church did here resembles the values of respect for human dignity, and for the life of every single person, that I was taught. The most loving, understanding, and tolerant people I have known have been Christians. And they have been loving, understanding, and tolerant not despite their faith, but because of it.

Carpenter was taught respect for human dignity, and it does come through in his opinions and his post. And he says that some Christians have risen to the top of the heap as far as tolerant people he has known. Then he says that their faith has made them so.

I wonder on what he bases this conclusion. What this says is that he knows people who he thinks would not be as tolerant if they were not full of Christian faith. I can’t argue with him; I do not know the people he’s talking about. But I’ve never seen evidence that faith makes you tolerant, or a better person.

I’ve known good people of faith and good people who lacked faith. So, faith is not, in my experience, a factor in common. However, one thing those people did share was a respect for human dignity, and a respect for life. These are specifically humanist principles. Christians may share them, but if you affirm a respect for human dignity and you believe that is a large part of the definition of a good person, then it’s not clear to me why faith is necessary.

Perhaps Carpenter feels he needs to give this paragraph in support of faith because it’s clear, just looking at the news, that there are many acts that do not reflect a respect for human dignity, yet they are justified by faith. It would seem that faith is many times at odds with humanist principles.

On the argument that faith makes people more respectful of human dignity, I don’t find Carpenter convincing. I feel this paragraph is more effective as an attempt to mollify Christian readers who do not want to be tarred along with this megachurch. People acting on their humanist principles is a good thing. It seems to me that people betray those principles when they refuse to bury a man ostensibly because a great disapproving being in the sky is frowning at them.