Austin Dacey
Encyclopedia
Austin Dacey is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 philosopher, writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

, and human rights activist  whose work concerns secularism
Secularism
Secularism is the principle of separation between government institutions and the persons mandated to represent the State from religious institutions and religious dignitaries...

, religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

, freedom of expression, and freedom of conscience. He is the author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights, and a 2006 New York Times op-ed entitled "Believing in Doubt," which criticized the ethical views of Pope Benedict
Pope Benedict
Benedict is the regnal name of the current Roman pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI and has been the name of fourteen other popes :*Pope Benedict I *Pope Benedict II...

. He is a representative to the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

 for the International Humanist and Ethical Union
International Humanist and Ethical Union
The International Humanist and Ethical Union is an umbrella organisation embracing humanist, atheist, rationalist, secular, skeptic, freethought and Ethical Culture organisations worldwide. Founded in Amsterdam in 1952, the IHEU is a democratic union of more than 100 member organizations in 40...

  and the creator and director of The Impossible Music Sessions.

Life and career

Dacey was raised in the rural Midwest by liberal Catholics. His father Philip Dacey is a poet. As a young teenager, Dacey became an evangelical Protestant, playing in the Christian alternative rock band, The Swoon, which in 1990 released an EP produced by Charlie Peacock
Charlie Peacock
Charlie Peacock is an American singer-songwriter, pianist, record producer, session musician and author. While growing up in California Peacock was inspired by John Coltrane and began playing the piano. After completing his education, Peacock formed a band and began a career as a professional...

. While studying music and philosophy at The Evergreen State College
The Evergreen State College
The Evergreen State College is an accredited public liberal arts college and a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. It is located in Olympia, Washington, USA. Founded in 1967, Evergreen was formed to be an experimental and non-traditional college...

 in Olympia, Washington, Dacey lost his religion, explaining later that "God stopped returning my calls." He studied applied ethics
Applied ethics
Applied ethics is, in the words of Brenda Almond, co-founder of the Society for Applied Philosophy, "the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment"...

 and social philosophy
Social philosophy
Social philosophy is the philosophical study of questions about social behavior . Social philosophy addresses a wide range of subjects, from individual meanings to legitimacy of laws, from the social contract to criteria for revolution, from the functions of everyday actions to the effects of...

 at Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University, often referred to as Bowling Green or BGSU, is a public, coeducational research university located in Bowling Green, Ohio, United States. The institution was granted a charter in 1910 by the State of Ohio as part of the Lowry Bill, which also established Kent State...

 in Bowling Green, Ohio, and was awarded a doctorate in 2002.

Beginning in 1999, Dacey worked for the Center for Inquiry
Center for Inquiry
The Center for Inquiry is a non-profit educational organization with headquarters in the United States whose primary mission is to encourage evidence-based inquiry into paranormal and fringe science claims, alternative medicine and mental health practices, religion, secular ethics, and society...

 (CFI), a think tank that seeks "to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values." He opened the New York City branch office of CFI and later served as the organization's representative to the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

. In 2009, Dacey left CFI and published a critique of the secular movement. In 2010, he created The Impossible Music Sessions, a forum in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 for censored and persecuted musicians. He has taught ethics at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

Secularism

Dacey has defended a form of secularism
Secularism
Secularism is the principle of separation between government institutions and the persons mandated to represent the State from religious institutions and religious dignitaries...

 emphasizing the values of "individual autonomy, equal rights and freedom of conscience." Religion News Service dubbed him a member of Atheism 3.0, a designation he contests. He claims that secularism is not atheistic, but instead that it comes "before God." Aspects of Dacey's position have been embraced by religious thinkers such as Richard John Neuhaus
Richard John Neuhaus
Richard John Neuhaus was a prominent Christian cleric and writer. Born in Canada, Neuhaus moved to the United States where he became a naturalized United States citizen...

, Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Michael Sullivan is an English author, editor, political commentator and blogger. He describes himself as a political conservative. He has focused on American political life....

, and Rabbi Marc Gellman as well as secular figures such as Sam Harris
Sam Harris
Sam Harris may refer to:* Sam Harris , American playwright and theater producer* Sam Harris , American actor and recording artist* Sam Harris , American author and neuroscientist...

, Susan Jacoby
Susan Jacoby
Susan Jacoby is an American author. Her 2008 book about American anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason, was a New York Times best seller. She is an atheist and secularist. Jacoby graduated from Michigan State University in 1965...

, Ibn Warraq
Ibn Warraq
Ibn Warraq is the pen name of a polemical author of Pakistani origin who is critical of Islam, and who founded the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society . He is a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry focusing on Qur'anic criticism...

, and Peter Singer
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne...

.

Theory of conscience

In The Secular Conscience, Dacey argues that contemporary secular liberalism
Secular liberalism
Secular liberalism is a form of liberalism that involves liberating our culture from the elements of religious conservatism. Christian ideals are usually to be found on the opposite end of the spectrum from secular liberalism.-General summary:...

 has "lost its soul" due to misconceptions he labels the Privacy Fallacy and the Liberty Fallacy. The Privacy Fallacy lies in thinking that "because matters of conscience are private in the sense of nongovernmental, they are private in the sense of personal preference." The Liberty Fallacy lies in thinking that "because conscience must be free from coercion, its moral conclusions must also be free from public criticism." This confused thinking, according to Dacey, leads to "the conclusion that controversial religious and moral claims are beyond evaluation by reason, truth and objective standards of right and wrong, and should therefore be precluded from public conversation."

In place of the "privacy of conscience," Dacey defends a model of the "openness of conscience," comparing conscience to a free press
Free Press
Free Press may refer to:*Freedom of the press*Free Press , a nonpartisan, non-profit organization founded by media critic Robert McChesney to promote more democratic media policy in the United States...

. It is to be protected from coercion so that it can be free to play an important role in the public sphere and free to follow its own objective standards. Reasons of conscience are by their nature shareable, not subjective. Dacey uses the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to illustrate the thesis that "any act of faith depends on a prior act of conscience."

Politics of conscience

By precluding conscience from public debate, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. Instead, the "gag order" has prevented secular liberals from subjecting religious claims to "due public scrutiny" and from advancing their own views in robustly moral terms, granting a "monopoly on the language of ethics and values" to the religious on the Right and the Left. Dacey argues that claims of conscience—including religious claims—cannot be barred from public debate, but that they can and must be held to the same critical conversational standards as all serious contributions to public debate.

While advocating the separation of religion and state, Dacey has suggested that political institutions should be designed to protect the exercise of conscience, not religion as such. In “Against Religious Freedom”, a 2010 article in Dissent (magazine)
Dissent (magazine)
Dissent is a quarterly magazine focusing on politics and culture edited by Michael Walzer and Michael Kazin. The magazine is published for the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc by the University of Pennsylvania Press....

 co-authored with Colin Koproske, he argues that religious freedom should be regarded as "one manifestation of more fundamental rights held by all people, religious and secular alike: private property, personal autonomy, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and perhaps most important, freedom of conscience."

Secularism and Islam

Criticizing the failure of some on the Left in the West to support secular liberal forces in the Arab and Muslim world
Muslim world
The term Muslim world has several meanings. In a religious sense, it refers to those who adhere to the teachings of Islam, referred to as Muslims. In a cultural sense, it refers to Islamic civilization, inclusive of non-Muslims living in that civilization...

, Dacey has stressed the importance of religious rationales for secularism. He has analogized religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries to dissident Protestant sects such as the Anabaptists who constructed theological arguments for toleration and church-state separation in early modern Europe.

Dacey was a lead organizer of the Secular Islam Summit
Secular Islam Summit
Secular Islam Summit was an international forum for secularists of Islamic societies, held in March 2007 in St. Petersburg, Florida, organized and sponsored by the Center for Inquiry, a global federation committed to science, reason, free inquiry and secularism, in partnership with the...

 in March 2007, described by the Wall Street Journal as "a landmark." The conference issued the St. Petersburg Declaration
St. Petersburg Declaration
St. Petersburg Declaration is a manifesto and affirmation of Human Rights and Freedom of thought for Muslims and non-Muslims in the Muslim world released in March 2007 in St. Petersburg, Florida, by a group of thinkers and reformers from Muslim societies....

, a statement of principles endorsed by Mithal al-Alusi
Mithal al-Alusi
Mithal Jamal Hussein Ahmad al-Alusi is an Iraqi politician and the leader of the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation. He was elected to the Iraqi Council of Representatives as an independent in the December 2005 election...

, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Magan Ali is a Somali-Dutch feminist and atheist activist, writer, politician who strongly opposes circumcision and female genital cutting. She is the daughter of the Somali politician and opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse and is a founder of the women's rights organisation the AHA...

, and Shahriar Kabir
Shahriar Kabir
For the Bangladeshi cricketer of the same name see Shahriar Kabir .Shahriar Kabir is a Bangladesh Awamileague Supported Bangladeshi journalist, filmmaker, human rights activist, and author of more than 70 books focusing on human rights, communalism, fundamentalism, history, and the Bangladesh war...

 among others. Reviewing The Secular Conscience for Asharq Al-Awsat, Amir Taheri
Amir Taheri
Amir Taheri is an Iranian-born conservative author based in Europe. His writings focus on the Middle East affairs and topics related to Islamist terrorism. He gained international fame as the man behind the 2006 Iranian sumptuary law controversy.-Career:Taheri's biography at Benador Associates...

 wrote, "[m]aking this book available in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages of the Muslim nations would be an immense service."

Human rights

As a representative of civil society organizations at the United Nations, Dacey has participated in lobbying at Human Rights Council in Geneva. to oppose efforts by some member states to diminish international standards of freedom of expression out of "respect for religions and beliefs." "The ultimate aim of this effort is not to protect the feelings of Muslims," Dacey has commented, "but to protect illiberal Islamic states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom."

In defending a universal human right to blaspheme, Dacey has emphasized that it is a matter of freedom of conscience as much as just freedom of speech. In The Future of Blasphemy, Dacey contends that debates in the international community about religiously offensive expression should be understood as “contests over what counts as sacred” in which unbelievers and heterodox believers reserve a right of conscience to express their views.

In September 2008, Dacey co-authored the CFI report, Islam and Human Rights: Defending Universality at the United Nations, which puts these efforts in the context of a campaign by the intergovernmental Organization of the Islamic Conference to promulgate culturally specific "Islamic human rights."

Dacey also authored a CFI position paper accusing the UN Alliance of Civilizations
Alliance of Civilizations
The Alliance of Civilizations is an initiative proposed by the Prime Minister of the Government of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, at the 59th General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005. It was co-sponsored by the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan...

 of neglecting secular perspectives and perpetuating the "problematic division of the social world by religion" for which the "clash of civilizations" thesis is often faulted. There is a “clash of values" but it is taking place "within societies and cultures, not only between them."

Freedom of music

In March 2010, Dacey launched The Impossible Music Sessions, a forum in Brooklyn that features “artists who cannot appear and the music they are not free to make.” Featured artists join via Internet streaming or phone as a counterpart with whom they have collaborated in advance performs a live interpretation of their music. Mark Levine
Mark Levine
Mark Levine is the name of:* Mark Levine , jazz musician* Mark Levine , host of Mark Levine's Inside Scoop radio show, and The American Dream television show on Press TV*Mark Levine , American poet...

 wrote in the Huffington Post that the first Impossible Music Session “will go down in the annals of rock history.” The Sessions are produced in cooperation with Freemuse: The World Forum on Music and Censorship.

In an interview, Dacey commented, “Ironically, in the Internet age, the live performance has become even more important. The thing that's frustrating for these groups is that while they can record on their Macbook in their basement and share the music with their friends, the government and other powerful forces in society—they control the public spaces. . . . there's something magical about standing in front of people and playing.”

Since 2010, the Sessions have facilitated collaborations between musicians in North America and musicians in Iran, Guinea Bissau, Cameroon, and Cuba. Dacey told the Wall Street Journal that the purpose is to “crosspollinate musically” and “banish isolation.”

Science and culture

From his early work with the Center for Inquiry, Dacey has been interested in the cultural implications of science. In 2004 he argued in Skeptical Inquirer
Skeptical Inquirer
The Skeptical Inquirer is a bimonthly American magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry with the subtitle: The magazine for science and reason....

 that “science is making us more ignorant” by unsettling received cultural understandings of the self, meaning, and morality without replacing them with coherent alternatives. In a column for Skeptical Inquirer, Dacey explores the significance of the “culture of science” in Islamic, Chinese, and Indian cultural contexts.

Dacey coined the term “accommodationism” to describe those “who either recognize no conflicts between religion and science, or who recognize such conflicts but are disinclined to discuss them publicly,” a usage which has been adopted in blogosphere debates about creationism and the New Atheism
New Atheism
New Atheism is the name given to a movement among some early-21st-century atheist writers who have advocated the view that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises." New atheists argue that recent...

.

A sympathetic critic of organized transhumanism
Transhumanism
Transhumanism, often abbreviated as H+ or h+, is an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human...

, Dacey is an advocate of culturing meat as an ethical alternative to using animals for meat.

Controversy

In a 2004 article for Free Inquiry
Free Inquiry
Free Inquiry is a bi-monthly journal of secular humanist opinion and commentary published by the Council for Secular Humanism, which is part of the Center for Inquiry. Philosopher Paul Kurtz is the editor-in-chief and Thomas W. Flynn the editor. Feature articles cover a wide range of topics from a...

 magazine, “Atheism is Not a Civil Rights Issue,” Dacey and co-author DJ Grothe criticized comparisons between the atheist cause in the United States and the causes of civil rights and LGBT rights, concluding that atheists “need a public awareness campaign, not a liberation movement.”. The article was attacked by humanists and the atheist blogger PZ Myers
PZ Myers
Paul Zachary "PZ" Myers is an American biology professor at the University of Minnesota Morris and the author of the Pharyngula science blog. He is currently an associate professor of biology at UMM, works with zebrafish in the field of evolutionary developmental biology , and also cultivates an...

.

The Secular Islam Summit
Secular Islam Summit
Secular Islam Summit was an international forum for secularists of Islamic societies, held in March 2007 in St. Petersburg, Florida, organized and sponsored by the Center for Inquiry, a global federation committed to science, reason, free inquiry and secularism, in partnership with the...

 was criticized by representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations
Council on American-Islamic Relations
The Council on American-Islamic Relations is America's largest Muslim civil liberties advocacy organization that deals with civil advocacy and promotes human rights...

 as being organized by non-Muslims and "neo-cons" with no standing in Islam.

The Guardian compared Dacey to the British conservative author Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. She began her career on the left of the political spectrum, writing for such publications as The Guardian and New Statesman. In the 1990s she moved to the right, and she now writes for the Daily Mail newspaper, covering political and social...

 and associated him with the idea that "our civilization depends on the freedom to publish racist cartoons."

The New York Times questioned whether Dacey has fairly characterized secular liberalism, and commented that many people “will balk at his plea that liberalism place ‘global resistance to theocratic Islam at the center of its agenda,’ much the way a generation of cold-war liberals once mobilized around anti-Communism.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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