GERARD McCulloch (Letters, October 12) requires a response. Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights provides the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. It is a rational document agreed by reasoning people. Judaeo-Christianity has a respectable intellectual history. Its content has been understandable and communicable throughout history. The Bible is a series of witness statements by those who have claimed relationship with God. The writers of the New Testament were literary competents. Paul was more than that, a genius who interpreted the significance of Jesus for all humanity and provided the structure for social Christianity to this day for the world’s present 2.3 billion Christians. Judaism and Christianity have provided the human community with many intellectuals, pioneers, scientists, philosophers, musicians, writers and humanitarians.
Jews and Christians have given thanks to God in adverse circumstances throughout history. The Bible is full of such examples. Jesus suffered and was crucified. Christians today are the most persecuted grouping in the human community. Belief is the external description of what is a personal reality for Christians. Communism sought to obliterate this and failed. Militant atheism is trying to do the same thing today. LGBT ideology has been successful in overturning Judaeo-Christian teaching on human sexuality. It is reasonable and rational to advocate Judaeo-Christian standards for human conduct in distinction from those of a micro-minority whose behaviour is at variance with the means of generation and continuation of the human race.
Rev Dr Robert Anderson,
8 Old Auchans View, Dundonald.
THAT The Herald should ascend to philosophy is welcome ("The court ruling that averted a half-baked kind of liberalism", the Herald, October 12). But it should not be confined to liberalism, despite the good start.
The problem in the bakery case is the confrontation between, on the one hand, the right of the customer not to be discriminated against because he is gay; and, on the other, the right of the baker to refuse to perform an act of writing a message on a cake in icing, which expresses a point of view he despises. It is not a political, but a moral issue.
In the half century since I read The Language of Morals by RM Hare, I applied his solution to moral problems on a daily basis and never once had any difficulty deciding anything. The solution was to determine what moral principles affected the issue and decide which was supervenient: most important. Act on that basis. It never took more than a few minutes to make up one's mind.
Nobody has the right to demand that a person P, to whom one applies to for a service, must supply it, if P is offended by the message he is required to write. Nobody can be forced to comply with the beliefs of others which they do not share. "He is discriminating against me," says the client, on grounds of homophobia. Not so. "You have asked him to do something that offends him. He is entitled to say: I am not required to practise my trade when it goes against my conscience to do so."
There is even a technical reason for his response: "I may be incapable of performing my task to my usual standard because of the offence caused by the message I am required by the customer to write."
Baroness Hale was right. The judges in lower courts had not read RM Hare.That is where their confusion lay.
William Scott,
23 Argyle Place, Rothesay.
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