It appears I have a couple more months to finish the books I’m currently reading and get my desk cleared, so I can grab a copy of Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life by Austin Dacey. From the advance reviews on Amazon, it is going to be a fantastic read.
Sam Harris, author of the New York Times best sellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation
“Dacey seeks nothing less than to interrupt a suicide, and he has written a beautiful primer on how our secular tradition can be rescued from self-defeat. The Secular Conscience reveals how simplistic notions of privacy, tolerance, and freedom keep dangerous ideas sheltered from public debate. This is an extraordinarily useful and lucid book.”
Susan Jacoby, author, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
“Austin Dacey’s The Secular Conscience is sorely needed at a time when both the religious right and the religious left claim that there can be no public or private morality without religion. With wit and a philosopher’s insight, Dacey explains exactly why secular morality, grounded in an ethical approach that relies on reason rather than supernatural faith, is sorely needed in the public square.”
Ibn Warraq, author of Defending the West
“Whenever I watch a riot over cartoons or meet another Muslim dissident forced to write under a pseudonym, I wonder, where are the Western secular liberals? Why do they shrink from defending freedom of conscience for all? Thanks to Austin Dacey, I now have an answer. As his piercing analysis shows, liberals have lost their grip on the real meaning of freedom. Only with a restored commitment to conscience as an objective moral ideal can they face down fundamentalists while constructively engaging with reformers of the faith. The Secular Conscience should be read by every friend of the open society.”
Book Description
The open, secular society is in retreat. From Washington to Rome to Tehran, religion is a public matter as never before, and secular values–personal autonomy, toleration, separation of religion and state, and freedom of conscience–are attacked on all sides and defended by few. The godly claim a monopoly on the language of morality in public debate, while secular liberals stand accused of standing for nothing.Secular liberals have undone themselves. For generations, too many have insisted that questions of conscience–religion, ethics, and values–are “private matters” that have no place in public debate. Ironically, this ideology prevents them from subjecting religion to due scrutiny when it encroaches on individual rights and from unabashedly defending their own moral vision in politics for fear of “imposing” their beliefs on others.
In this incisive book, philosopher Austin Dacey calls for a bold rethinking of the nature of conscience and its role in public life. Inspired by an earlier liberal tradition he traces to Spinoza and John Stuart Mill, Dacey urges liberals to lift their self-imposed gag order and argues for a secularism based on the objective moral value of questions of conscience.
He likens conscience to the press in an open society: it should be protected from coercion and control, not because it is private, but because of its vital role in the public sphere. Conscience is free, but not free from shared standards of truth and right.
Marshalling the latest research on belief, the mind, and ethics, The Secular Conscience delivers a compelling ideal for the future of the open, secular society.
About the Author
Austin Dacey, Ph.D. (New York, NY), is a philosopher with the Center for Inquiry think tank in New York City, where he serves as the United Nations representative and a contributing editor to Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines. He teaches philosophy, ethics and science education at Polytechnic University and State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of The Case for Humanism (with Lewis Vaughn) and articles in numerous publications including the New York Times.
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