Austin Dacey
"Austin Dacey is a philosopher who writes on the intersection of science, religion, and ethics.
He serves as a respresentative to the United Nations for the Center for Inquiry, a think tank concerned with the secular, scientific outlook. He is also on the editorial staff of Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines. His writings have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, USA Today, and Science."
"Austin Dacey is a writer and human rights advocate based in New York City. His writings have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, USA Today, and Science. In 2008 he released The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life. Arguing for the central role of conscience in political and moral discourse, the book "lifted quite a few eyebrows" according to the New York Times. Embraced by figures as diverse as Sam Harris and Father Richard John Neuhaus, The Secular Conscience was noted in North American, European, and Arabic media, and called "timely and important" by Asharq Alawsat.
As United Nations representative for the Center for Inquiry, Austin Dacey has participated in international debates regarding freedom of expression, religion, and the "dialogue among civilizations," speaking before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva and other fora. In 2007 he helped to organize the Secular Islam Summit. He holds a doctorate in applied ethics and social philosophy and has taught most recently at Polytechnic Institute of New York University."
“Guts are important. Your guts are what digest things. But it is your brains that tell you which things to swallow and which not to swallow.”
“ Where did secular liberalism go wrong? It has been undone by its own ideas. The first idea is that matters of conscience — religion, ethics, and values — are private matters. The privatizing of conscience started with two important principles: religion should be separated from the state and people should not be forced to believe one way or the other. But it went further to say that belief has no place in the public sphere. Conscience belongs in homes and houses of worship, not in the marketplace. By making conscience private, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. But of course they couldn’t, since freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public. Instead, secularism imposed a gag order on itself. Because “private” is equated with “personal” and “subjective,” questions of conscience were placed out of bounds of serious critical evaluation. … … The mistake lies in thinking that because conscience is free from coercion, it must be free from criticism, reason, truth, or independent, objective standards of right and wrong. The indispensable principle of freedom of belief has mutated into an unthinking assumption that matters of belief are immune to critical public inquiry and shared evaluative norms.”