State-Church Separation

[Vortex]

Hey there don't forget Australia! We have zealots and Chruch fanatics as well you know!

[mdk]

Nevis said
No, there are literally plenty of people who literally actively work (and publicly advocate) the US becoming-officially-a Christian state.

This is the part where I say "Let's see some."

EDIT: Well, besides Westboro I guess, because we all hate them. But for whatever reason (maybe cuz the dude's dead now) I wasn't really thinking of them, so I'll give you one.

[Nevis]

Here's one. This is worse, though I question those numbers. Still, the point stands.

[mdk]

Nevis said
. is worse, though I question those numbers. Still, the point stands.

That's an essay from 1835, and an anonymous HuffPo poll, respectively.

Here's the poll itself, judge its merits as you will. Sample size, 1000.

[ApocalypticaGM]

mdk said
This is the part where I say "Let's see some."EDIT: Well, besides Westboro I guess, because we all hate them. But for whatever reason (maybe cuz the dude's dead now) I wasn't really thinking of them, so I'll give you one.

Separation of Church and State can arise in more than just the blatant declaration of a nation following a deity, it can also be reflected in making major decisions largely due to ties to a faith-community. These two things are not necessarily the same, and may look very different. A political leader can be a part of a faith without allowing their personal beliefs to be the major force behind a decision. Said leader could also push harder for certain areas simply because they subscribe to a certain faith. While everyone may have their own personal motivations, for an elected official, ideally, they should be working with the needs of the people first. If the people declare their concerns and the leader's faith blocks them from validating and moving on those, Church and State are clearly not separated.

That all said, didn't Vice just do an episode a week or two ago about a major Christian organization pumping tens of millions of dollars to support Israel obtaining the land that's currently Pakistan? Much of that goes toward lobbying and pushing the US Government to support their ideals, and so far isn't really losing. So say money from religious groups leads a nation to make certain decisions. Is that really Separation of Church and State? Is that not an example of a group, obviously significant considering they put more money than actual Jewish organizations toward this cause, guiding a government to make decisions based on religious ideals above all else?

I guess my real point here is that money fuels many votes. Some might like to think the US Government is growing all the more secular, but I'd say that as long as our government's decisions correlates to the will of those forking over the money, that's probably not the case. America is a country of convenience with a majority of its population identifying as Christian. Many may not be active in the faith, some may praise with intense passion, but a good chunk shows its belief through money. We're not talking about a poor minority that has suffered under the boot-heel of the US. I mean, seriously, we're talking about a massively rich faith-community that had direct impact on the laws of the land and the established status-quo.

[mdk]

ShonHarris said
Separation of Church and State can arise in more than just the blatant declaration of a nation following a deity, it can also be reflected in making major decisions largely due to ties to a faith-community. These two things are not necessarily the same, and may look very different. A political leader can be a part of a faith without allowing their personal beliefs to be the major force behind a decision. Said leader could also push harder for certain areas simply because they subscribe to a certain faith. While everyone may have their own personal motivations, for an elected official, ideally, they should be working with the needs of the people first. If the people declare their concerns and the leader's faith blocks them from validating and moving on those, Church and State are clearly not separated. That all said, didn't Vice just do an episode a week or two ago about a major Christian organization pumping tens of millions of dollars to support Israel obtaining the land that's currently Pakistan? Much of that goes toward lobbying and pushing the US Government to support their ideals, and so far isn't really losing. So say money from religious groups leads a nation to make certain decisions. Is that really Separation of Church and State? Is that not an example of a group, obviously significant considering they put more money than actual Jewish organizations toward this cause, guiding a government to make decisions based on religious ideals above all else? I guess my real point here is that money fuels many votes. Some might like to think the US Government is growing all the more secular, but I'd say that as long as our government's decisions correlates to the will of those forking over the money, that's probably not the case. America is a country of convenience with a majority of its population identifying as Christian. Many may not be active in the faith, some may praise with intense passion, but a good chunk shows its belief through money. We're not talking about a poor minority that has suffered under the boot-heel of the US. I mean, seriously, we're talking about a massively rich faith-community that had direct impact on the laws of the land and the established status-quo.

And this is where the constitutional text becomes notably important to me. It's not 'Separation of Church and State,' it's 'Congress shall make no law regarding establishment....' In other words, governments can't tell people how to think, but people (even religious people (even religious people who don't agree with me about everything)) should **certainly** be able to tell governments how to govern. That's what by-the-people is all about. If we only wanted the government to serve secular financial/social interests we might as well stop masquerading as a democracy at all. That's phrased oddly, but hopefully you can get at what I mean....

In other words: I'm not a fan of lobbyists. Not the environmental lobby, not the oil lobby, not the ACLU, not the ACLA, none of 'em. They're not designed to be fair, rational organizations -- but they serve an important function, whether I like them or not. When we start arguing about which money is allowed to be spent, which words are allowed to be said in DC... we've already lost.

[Jorick]

mdk said
sorry. Just my way of saying this isn't really a controversial topic anymore, and hasn't been for 250 years or more; everybody agrees, and setting it up as an argumentative topic is a fallacious premise. Nobody wants a conjunction of church and state. I'd wager that anybody still wanting to talk about it has an axe to grind.Closing a post with awkward-silence ellipses is my way of denoting sarcasm, for future reference. Forced grammatical errors too.

Oh, well then, my bad on missing the sarcasm. That's a very odd use of ellipses, as it typically means just a trailing off, but whatever works I guess. We really need some kind of punctuation that officially denotes sarcasm in text to avoid these kinds of silly misunderstandings.

mdk said
Maybe if we count atheism, but who does? I think this is a flawed perception. You see, say, a cross on a hill in a national park, and you want to take it down because separation of church and state, but people disagree with you and don't want to take it down. Your first reaction is to say, 'well they must NOT want a separation of church and state,' because that's how you're interpreting the situation and your perspective alters your perception. Maybe people just want to say 'merry christmas' and not get sued.

I wouldn't count that sort of thing as people trying to force a union between church and state, but that's not at all the upper limit of what some fringe nutters try to push. They're a tiny minority so far as I can tell, but there are indeed people out there who want their country to quite literally adopt the laws of the Bible as the laws of the country, basically as a Christian version of Sharia law. Oh, and there's also the hardcore Muslim folks who try to advocate for real Sharia law being implemented in placed like England and such. It's really a non-issue in most countries, but these people do indeed exist, which is what I think Nevis was trying to say in the thing you quoted.

[mdk]

Jorick said
Oh, well then, my bad on missing the sarcasm. That's a very odd use of ellipses, as it typically means just a trailing off, but whatever works I guess. We really need some kind of punctuation that officially denotes sarcasm in text to avoid these kinds of silly misunderstandings.

/s is the standard on Reddit, but I don't like to do anything that makes RPG more like Reddit, when I can help it. One site I went to had a 'Dodgy' smiley that we all just sorta used instead. *shrug*

I wouldn't count that sort of thing as people trying to force a union between church and state, but that's not at all the upper limit of what some fringe nutters try to push. They're a tiny minority so far as I can tell, but there are indeed people out there who want their country to quite literally adopt the laws of the Bible as the laws of the country, basically as a Christian version of Sharia law. Oh, and there's also the hardcore Muslim folks who try to advocate for real Sharia law being implemented in placed like England and such. It's really a non-issue in most countries, but these people do indeed exist, which is what I think Nevis was trying to say in the thing you quoted.

So, what, the "No Christmas Allowed" people get a pass for being a tiny minority, but the Christians get roped in with the neofascists? Double standard -- which is a natural and common thing, I'm not trying to be confrontational about it (even though using the word 'fascist' in a conversation is kind of automatically confrontational.....) I'm just pointing it out as an inconsistency.

EDIT: No, wait, shit, now I misread YOUR post, fuck. Well..... whatever. I'm pretty sure we're both cognizant so I'll just leave it.

[Gwazi Magnum]

Vortex said
You would be surprised how many people want the church in more areas of Goverment, or at least in my town, and I wager that if people in my town want it to happen then there has to be somebody like that in the inter webs.

Remember this is the Internet, which as Thunderf00t puts it is where religion goes to die.

It's an open source of information and sharing, where any question can be answered with a bit of looking, questioning things is actually encouraged and it's easier to find like minded people who are probably shunned off by the communities they live in. Even though an online community can largely agree that it's obviously a good thing to seperate church and state, that doesn't change that a good amount of a local population may want church and state to be the same thing.

[So Boerd]

Better question, why should there be any particular insulation from religion? Hypothetically here in the US, a school could distribute Communist Manifestos but not have a moment of silence for prayer. What exactly is the practical difference?

[gamer5]

Unfortunately I live in a country in which due the fact that over 90% of the population is not just Catholic it's is Roman Catholic and the Church has quite some power in state maters even if, legally, it should have no such thing (for example in most elementary schools only Roman Catholic religious education is provided as part of regular school classes). The region in which I live particularly is tricky since it has the smallest percent of Roman Catholics in the whole country - only around 70% - making the national policy towards the Church quite not-supported.

In some countries the secularization of Religion and State is next to complete. In some states Religion is even considered an enemy and an strong activity for atheism is present (ex and current Communistic states are well known for this). Naturally in some countries religious institutions like the Church have a powerful influence.

So Boerd said
Better question, why should there be any particular insulation from religion? Hypothetically here in the US, a school could distribute Communist Manifestos but not have a moment of silence for prayer. What exactly is the practical difference?

Wikipeaia to the answer:
"Religion is a set of variously organized beliefs about the relationship between natural and supernatural aspects of reality, and the role of humans in this relationship."

"Political ideology is a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explains how society should work, and offers some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order. A political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to what ends it should be used."

AKA religion works with the supernatural, without any possible profs given while political ideologies try to come up with the best system to organized people and their success can be measured and studied with scientific methods (political & social sciences). So while most of religions work by hopping that their believers buy their dogmas about the supernatural political ideologies work by people agreeing to their system of social organization.

[Gwazi Magnum]

So Boerd said
Better question, why should there be any particular insulation from religion? Hypothetically here in the US, a school could distribute Communist Manifestos but not have a moment of silence for prayer. What exactly is the practical difference?

One is a political system focused on running/organizing people in a practical way, the other is belief in something without proof or evidence and using it as a means to judge people and tell them what they can and cannot do. Plus in a sense note we already do this with Democracy basically, anyone can go around (even in school) and say "I love democracy, Democracy is the best". Hell when I was little schools basically made students do presentations on "How great a country Canada is" and put stuff like being a democracy as one of the reasons. But if someone went around and did the same for Communism, Marxism etc. that would be a different story.

Education already shows both political and religious bias when it shouldn't be, but both are accepted because they do it with the most popular religion/political ideology in the area.

[The Nexerus]

So Boerd said
We could always make this a discussion of sonething controversial. For example, the Arabs had stolen Judea from the Christians. In effect, they started the religious wars and the Christians were retaliating. Why do we not equally vilify the conquests of the Rashidun or the subsequent caliphates?

Because criticizing Islam or Muslims is racist.

[Brovo]

So Boerd said
Better question, why should there be any particular insulation from religion? Hypothetically here in the US, a school could distribute Communist Manifestos but not have a moment of silence for prayer. What exactly is the practical difference?

Because history. Nothing, ever, in the five thousand years of human history we have, has good ever come from uniting the thing that mandates people's physical lives and the thing that mandates people's spiritual lives. Want to know what a religiously-dominated government style was like? The Dark Ages are full of them, as are the Medieval ages. Religion was especially used to keep the people docile and to justify things that, today, would be considered heinous war crimes. Many monarchies even claimed divine providence over their people to enforce their authority. No qualifications except "God said so" and "my dad was king, so now I am too!"

Hell, look at North Korea. The government claims divine supremacy over its people, and uses it as a justification to do anything to them. Lock them up for no reason, kill them even.

Look at Tibet. The Buddhist monks that ruled as the theocracy prior to China invading them and taking them over was one of the most insanely violent and disparate rulerships of all human history: Buddhist monks nearly literally rode the corpses of their people to "enlightenment."

History is chalked full of examples of why you keep religion away from government. Either because government uses it as a scapegoat to do horrible things or because religion itself poisons the minds of those ruling the government with dogma that tells them not to think and obey mindlessly, it's pretty much irrelevant which way it goes, or if it always goes one way or the other.

The last thing I want to hear out of my ruler's mouth is "I'm doing X because the voices in my head told me it was a good idea", or, "I'm doing Y because this ancient book written by people who fucked their cousins and died by the age of 30 thought it was a good idea".

A politician can be religious, and that's fine, but their first job is to rule the country in a manner that benefits the people. When the first and most emphatically repeated rule of nearly every religion is "obey your God above all things" this creates a conflict of interest and a serious problem: A truly devout follower of a religion cannot actually properly represent the interests of the people unless they always coincidence with those of the ancient text he or she prescribes their lives towards.

Ergo: Religion and government cannot be fuck buddies. They have to be separated by a wall. That wall being the first amendment: That Congress shall not make any law regarding the establishment of religion: This would be either for or against religion. They have to have nothing to do with it. The spiritual lives of the people should be entirely up to them to decide, not the government. Not now. Not ever. Period.

EDIT

Jeez, and how could I forget the middle east? What a wonderful fucking place to live.

[So Boerd]

Lol, History? Add all the crusades up, multiply the body count by 9. That is the body count of ONE communist leader. Namely, Mao. Communism is just as fanciful as any religion. Replace God with Proletariat, Heretics and Heathens with Counter-Revolutionaries.

[ActRaiserTheReturned]

The Nexerus said
Because criticizing Islam or Muslims is racist.

[Brovo]

So Boerd said
Lol, History? Add all the crusades up, multiply the body count by 9. That is the body count of ONE communist leader. Namely, Mao. Communism is just as fanciful as any religion. Replace God with Proletariat, Heretics and Heathens with Counter-Revolutionaries.

How about the Taiping rebellion? Twenty million deaths.

My point isn't to defend the communist manifesto, it's to tell you why religion and government don't mix. The middle east is a perfect example of that right now. Sharia law is a perfect example of it. So on and so forth.

There is an inexhaustible amount of evidence showing why mixing the two is just a bad idea flat out.

Besides, in American schools, I don't think teachers could hand out Communist Manifestos and not get chewed up for it. Not even if they did it to teach what's wrong with the theory and how it doesn't account for human nature.

[ActRaiserTheReturned]

Brovo said
How about the Taiping rebellion? Twenty million deaths.My point isn't to defend the communist manifesto, it's to tell you why religion and government don't mix. The middle east is a perfect example of that right now. Sharia law is a perfect example of it. So on and so forth.There is an inexhaustible amount of evidence showing why mixing the two is just a bad idea flat out.Besides, in American schools, I don't think teachers could hand out Communist Manifestos and not get chewed up for it. Not even if they did it to teach what's wrong with the theory and how it doesn't account for human nature.

Most religions and governments don't mix. If people could understand that, Christianity does, then the world would be a much better place.

[Brovo]

ActRaiserTheReturned said
Most religions and governments don't mix. If people could understand that, Christianity does, then the world would be a much better place.

What's that one line in the Bible again? "Give unto God what is God's, and unto Caesar what is Caesar's." I don't remember specifically what it is but I get the idea of it, Jesus saying to give to God what is his and to the state what is theirs.

[ActRaiserTheReturned]

Brovo said
What's that one line in the Bible again? "Give unto God what is God's, and unto Caesar what is Caesar's." I don't remember specifically what it is but I get the idea of it, Jesus saying to give to God what is his and to the state what is theirs.

He's saying at least two different things. One of these things he's saying is what you just pointed out, and another thing he's saying is that the entire world belongs to God. Thus, God would rather you give to someone what belongs to them. In this case "taxes". :D