Banning someone from congress because they aren't athiest would be the opposite of separation of Church and State.

Besides - all the constitution really says is that the government shall not establish an official religion. Everything else is the result of court decisions.

It's true that the Supreme Court of the United States has considered the original intent of the 1st Amendment. We're fortunate enough to have enough documentation from the founders (e.g. letters) to come to a consensus amongst those of us that don't have a religious agenda.

Pardon my religious agenda, I didn't mean to force my christianity on you.

I don't follow you.

Many Christians are actually in support of a secular government. Some of the founders were actually Christian (those that weren't Deists). I simply can't understand why people would be against the concept of a secular government, even if we were to pretend that the founders didn't believe in such a thing. I fail to see how a non-secular government (e.g: theocracy or state religion) isn't discriminatory.

Your problem is that you're seeing it in some sort of idealized form that can never exist. You say "secular government" like that can ever truly exist when the people making up the government have a religion which they base their beliefs on. I am an atheist, and were I in government, my actions would be based on the belief that there is no god. A christian in government will base his actions on HIS beliefs.

Now, you can keep this mostly in check if the government stays out of peoples' personal lives, but when they start getting involved, it starts to matter. Should the government kill babies? Religion. Should the government give tax breaks to gay couples? Religion. Should the government teach evolution? Religion. If you try to keep religion OUT of those things, then you are endorsing a lack of religion. If you base those thing son religion, than you are endorsing it. The only way to win is to not play.

the problem with your post is that religeons are so fractured that no matter what you do someone will complain, so the best idea is to not endorse any of them.

I don't think that I've given my position in enough detail for you to draw such a conclusion. I don't subscribe to any sort of atheist ideology & merely accept the 1st Amendment interpretation(s) of our founders. I think that you're making some sort of assumption here about what I do or don't believe when it comes to secularism but I'm not quite sure what you're basing it on.


The U.S. government is already mostly secular. We were founded by secularists & we continue to maintain a mostly secular government. I think that we've managed to do a decent job over the years despite the overwhelming majority of citizens & politicians being religious. I think that there have been some mistakes along the way but as long as we continue to keep those that are anti-secular from becoming a majority in the government, we'll be just fine. The problem is that there's an Evangelical or fundamentalist movement in this country to usurp government, to stifle scientific progress & to rewrite history. It's the job of every free-thinking person in this country to thwart these bastards & their lemmings.


This is exactly why you'd make a horrible politician. As a politician you're supposed to uphold the Constitution & to respect our secular form of government. Secularism isn't anti-religious by nature. It's an attempt to remain neutral on such matters.


This is exactly why we as citizens shouldn't be voting for religious fundamentalists that hope to create & enforce anti-secular legislation. It's our duty as citizens of a secular government to prevent these people from usurping government. Obviously the ignorant lemmings that have subscribed to fundamentalist tactics are going to attempt to help these politicians get in to power but that's because they're brainwashed &/or misinformed. This is exactly why religious fundamentalism is so dangerous & partly why our founders embraced secularism.

You miss my point. Should evolution be taught in public school? If you say no, you're endorsing religion over science. If you say yes, you're endorsing science over some religions. Is abortion murder? If the government says yes, it's endorsing certain religious viewpoints; if it says no then it endorses others. Religion and government can never truly be separate because they have overlapping concerns. It's best to accept that and try your best within that context.

Why not work with the things we know we have instead of the things some of us think we do?

Whether to teach evolution in public schools or not is a matter from which religion should be kept separate, as the whole "issue" is artificial. Believing that evolution may not be factual and should thus not be taught in schools is not a belief that may potentially have merit, it's about being either misinformed or closing one's mind in favor of religious beliefs, which is nothing less than self-deception. The main gist of evolution is an observed mechanism that is known to have happened and that is known to keep happening, and lying about it to our future generations isn't going to do any good.

Now, if we wanted to cross into the territory of existential philosophy, we might ask ourselves whether we can be certain that that which we observe is real (there is no spoon, Keaneo!), but that sort of thinking would again not play well into our daily lives where we discuss evolution as a school topic.

I won't delve into the topic of abortion, because I think that is, in contrast to teaching evolution, a genuinely valid matter of ethics and practice.

Sure, you and I believe this. Not everyone does! And saying that this belief is valid and another is not is endorsing that belief. Listen, you'll never hear me argue that religion makes sense, but are you really willing to take the leap and say "Religion is wrong, so it's okay for the government to endorse the alternative"? How is that any different from endorsing one religion over another? Because of scientific facts? You and I put scientific evidence ahead of words in an old book because that is our belief system, but are we then any more entitled to say our belief system is more correct?

I'm not trying to actually argue for or against the teaching of evolution, I'm simply using it as an example in a hypothetical manner. The point, again, being that no matter how hard you try, you cannot separate people from their beliefs, nor people from the government. Therefore, you cannot fully separate religion (or lack thereof) from government, and to try is to do exactly the opposite.

Should we endorse christian holidays over other religious holidays? Nope. Should we ban the celebration of holidays? Nope.

Seeing as how the topic was originally about SP, thought I'd post this little screenie of the simpsons episode last night (digg readers prolly already saw)

No there's not.

Of course there must be, how else can we make SURE to turn everything into us vs. them?

My point was that it's a "belief" in the same sense that believing that inhaling and exhaling oxygen and carbon dioxide allows us to live, only it's not as apparently and immediately perceived. Would you argue that because not everyone believes in breathing (looking at you Deadman) it may possibly be untrue and so should not be presented as fact in public education?

By the way, I agree with your point that personal opinion will always influence a person's decisions.

LOVE the pic mscbuck

And again, Krok, I definitely agree with you that it is a super-correct belief, just easier to deny than some of the more obvious ones. And of course, we could argue where the line is all day between what beliefs which defy evidence are acceptable and which are not and never get anywhere that matters. Like I said, I don't mean to argue evolution's position with regards to this line, i was only using it as an example.

I am only submitting that there IS a line, because the only way to deny this line is to basically have the government say "Hey, Muslims, you're wrong, so we're just going to outlaw being a muslim since that's better for society's advancement" or any other similar statement.

I think I better see your point now, as it's true that to us there's a lot more to religion than denying evolution which contradicts with what we hold as apparent fact, so in order to remain tolerant we will have to draw the line on mutual ground. I will however maintain that teaching evolution being left out at that line would do a great disservice to education, but I already know you agree and that this whole topic was just an example you used in order to illustrate your original point.

Owned. I spent about an hour typing up a response & then the electricity went out (****ing weather). I'm not going to spend another hour retyping everything. I'll attempt to sum it all up in a few sentences.

I don't accept that government & religion need to overlap (especially not in any of the cases that you mentioned). I think that the Supreme Court decision in Rowe v. Wade was done in the spirit of secularism. The same could be said of the court cases on creationism & evolution. I do however accept that the fundamentalist movement in this country wants to create the illusion that government & religion need to overlap & that there's a war going on between religion & science. In reality it's quite one-sided. Science isn't a religion & doesn't care about religion. Scientists only care about religion when the religious attempt to make scientific claims.

I don't really see where you're coming from on this. Our government currently functions under the concept of secularism. The court cases that relate to the problems that you bring up prove that reasonable people are capable of making secular decisions despite their religion. The only problem that I see is a fundamentalist movement (for Anakin9012) that's trying to place unreasonable people in prominent roles. It's our duty as citizens of a secular government to make sure that this isn't allowed to happen.

Of course they were done in the spirit of secularism. And of course science doesn't care about religion. But put yourself on the other side of some of these decisions (or make up your own future hypothetical, if you want). You and your family have a religious belief and want to instill those same beliefs and values in your children, but the school you send them to is telling them something different, and telling them that you are wrong.

You're okay with this now, because you're on the side that is "winning" and you don't respect any beliefs but your own. After all, yours are based on facts and evidence, so everything else is silly, right? We'd all be better off if people just believed the way you believed? Does it feel pretty good to have what is essentially the same attitude of religious persecution that has existed all throughout history, just buried beneath a thin layer of guilty denial?

To repeat my point: In trying to be a purely secular government that dictates social ideals you alienate and sometimes work against religion, which goes against the ideals of freedom this country stands for. The alternative does too. As is often the case, you can't just say "lets have a completely secular government". All values that are codified into law are in potential opposition or agreement with religious values. Is murder wrong, is stealing wrong, etc. Just because you can think of a way to explain this without religion doesn't mean it isn't also explained by a religion in some other way (or in the same way). There's your overlap. Personally, I think the best way to avoid exacerbating this inherent problem is to keep the government out of peoples' business as much as possible, but this is kind of completely foiled by public education.

Again, I get the feeling you're seeing things in black and white, of correct and incorrect, but I'm telling you that this kind of mentality is dangerous in ANYONE, religious or areligious.

This argument only makes sense when both sides have a valid argument. In the cases that you mentioned only one side has a valid argument. If I'm to entertain this concept you're going to have to give me examples of cases where the government appears to be taking the side of science when the fundamentalists actually have a valid argument. I can't personally think of anything. Can you? Surely you're not entertaining the idea that we should avoid teaching subjects that are only controversial to people that have no understanding of the subject.


I disagree. I think that I'm OK w/ it because secularism is an attempt at being neutral on such issues. I was a Christian for most of my life & raised in a fundamentalist church/family. Even then I was able to understand that the founders intended for this government to be secular & that imposing religious views wasn't fair to everyone. My family didn't allow me to take sex education courses so when I had sex for the first time I didn't even know that women had 2 holes (an anus & a vagina) & thought that it was a sin to use a condom (I had never been exposed to the concept of "pulling out" & I'm lucky that no one got pregnant or that I wasn't infected by a disease). They also didn't allow me to receive vaccinations (I still don't have any to this day) because of a religious exemption. This is the type of idiocy that we're discussing here. Most Christians are capable of understanding that secularism is necessary & thus are also capable of making decisions, when necessary, in the spirit of secularism. We're only discussing this because a fringe element of fundamentalism is attempting to force its way in to power. We shouldn't be entertaining the idea of giving in to their demands. We should be prosecuting them for child abuse &/or neglect. It's our duty as citizens of a secular government to prevent this from happening. It's time that we put an end to the concept of parents owning their children.


I think it's important to discuss whether or not something is reasonable on a case by case basis. There's no reason to believe in a deity & there's no reason to believe that if one does exist that we can know his mind. The government should be in the business of governing w/ reason & not taking in to consideration the unreasonable objections of fanatics. I try not to "believe" anything w/o reason & never stated that we'd be better off as a society if people "believe" as I do. You're already seeing how things would turn out if people thought like I do because we pretty much have a secular form of government.


I don't persecute & have never called for the persecution of any religious person that wasn't committing some type of abuse or crime. I find it ironic that you would speak to an atheist (me) or even a scientist (not me) about persecution. If you want to see persecution, put the fundamentalists whose idiocy that you're defending, in charge of the government. I'll be dead or imprisoned in a week, we'll be teaching children that the Earth is only 10,000 years old, that dinosaurs walked w/ man & that the reason that there's no evidence of anything that they believe is simply because god is really great at hiding things (he'd put on a hell of an Easter egg hunt).


I disagree. You only have that ounce of "freedom" that you do have because of our secularism. I think that you're attempting to show that we have or were intended to have these vast freedoms, yet our constitution both gives & limits them. Not only can you say let's have a secular government, we've already done so & we've been functioning as one for quite some time. It's a good thing too because those of us that are in the minority would be in some serious trouble otherwise.


That's exactly what it means. If the Supreme Court comes to a decision w/o considering religious beliefs, as they should under a secular form of government, then they're not being anti-religious in any way. There doesn't need to be any overlap. The problem that you're proposing only exists w/o secularism.


Spoken like a secularist!




I disagree. I don't think that I see things in black & white at all. I think that I have a rather unique perspective in that I was a Christian raised by a fundamentalist Christian church/family for most of my life & now I'm an atheist. I think that this gives me the ability to see things from both sides of the issue(s). It's far more dangerous to have the mentality of ignorance, lies & misinformation than it is to base decisions on whether or not something is true or false. It's only dangerous if I'm wrong.

An absurd yet humorous notion just popped in to my head. "Well, Jim, we're gonna have to burn &/or torture your wife to death because the evidence seems to indicate that she's a witch."

Sounds to me like Mentat is blaming his ****ty family and ****ty upbringing on religion, instead of ****ty ignorant parents, and is taking it out onand ideas that are remotely religious.

You're completely not listening. But please, continue to argue against whatever you want to and avoid the actual point.

Based on our beliefs, religion is wrong. It doesn't make sense, there is no evidence, etc. It's just plain wrong. If the government works under the assumption that only what is reasonable and logical, and only what can be supported by evidence, then it is operating under the assumption that religion is wrong. If the government operates under the assumption that religion is wrong, it cannot help but work against it.

YOU ARE FULLY IN SUPPORT OF THIS. Your last post all but screamed it from the mountaintops: "Religion is stupid and backwards and it is destroying this country; continued support of it is only detrimental to society." I do not mean to make a strawman argument here, so if you don't essentially agree with that, please say so.

How is it fair to people that are religious to have a government that assumes they are wrong? Now, again, don't misunderstand me, I am in no way recommending that we teach religious ideals in school or have laws that make it illegal to eat pork products. To me, that is just as bad. What I am saying is that a secular government that implements social policies is not any more fair than one with a state religion.

What you need to understand is that YOU ARE NOT RIGHT. You THINK you're right. EVERYONE thinks they're right. Otherwise they wouldn't think what they do.

So you can say that we have a secular (religion independent) state. We do. It's great, laws are not officially influenced by a specific religion, or even religion in general.

But:
1. They are influenced by religion, indirectly, because some people are religious (even if they try to act independently of it).
2. When public school teaches that a religion is wrong (e.g. science shows that man evolved), it is rejecting that religion.

Basically, I'm saying that "secular" isn't neutral when it comes to some issues, because it is the opposite of "religious" in those cases. Therefore to be truly neutral, you have to argue for a line somewhere between the two.

I disagree. I don't think that you have enough information to make such an assumption. I find that the type of upbringing that I had is quite common amongst fundamentalists. I base this upon the statements of thousands of former fundamentalists on ex-fundamentalist websites (e.g: [url]www.ex-pentecostals.org[/url]). If you read my entire post you would see that I never made negative statements towards Christians that aren't fundamentalist. Fundamentalists are hardly "remotely religious".

I fail to see how that is relevant. Please explain.

[edit: Nevermind, I thought you were responding to his entire post, not the "remotely religious" specific part.]

I disagree. The government, or the people w/in the government don't work under the assumption that religion is wrong & they're not being asked to. They're simply being asked to check their bible in at the door, to make decisions based on reason & to pick up their bible again on the way out. Considering the fact that so many w/in the government claim to be Christian I would have to say that they've done a fairly decent job of this.

It seems to me that you're attempting to say that when the government rules in favor of reason they're being anti-religious. That doesn't seem to me to be a problem that the government should be concerned w/. Those issues should be dealt w/ in churches. Let's pretend for a moment that Christians still believe that the world is flat & that the sun revolves around the Earth. If the government decides to start using circular globes & planetary models that don't show the Earth at the center of the universe in schools, that's somehow anti-religious? If the evidence doesn't support their beliefs, they'll simply need to do what they've always done; change them. A perfect example of this would be how so many of the religious throughout history went to their deaths believing in a literal interpretation of Genesis only to have modern religious people interpret Genesis as symbolic. There are fundamentalists that still believe in a strict interpretation of this book. Who is really creating the conflict here? A government that's merely embracing facts or fundamentalists that refuse to accept the truth? I think that the answer is quite clear. There's a conflict here alright but it's one-sided.


I disagree w/ the part about "continued support of it" being "detrimental to society". I personally think this is true but in the spirit of secularism, if I were in a position to govern, I would obviously check my disgust for religion in at the door because I would obviously recognize that I'm to respect the concept of separation of church & state. I don't really see why this is so difficult to imagine when our current form of government already functions in this manner, for the most part.


It's not & they don't/wouldn't.


I recognize what you're selling but I'm not buying. The reason that this argument is flawed is because under a secular government, ideas that are Christian can/will be accepted, if they're based in fact. Under a theocracy facts will be thrown out the window, those who spread facts will be burned at the stake & the only ideas that'll prosper are those that are w/in an ancient manuscript that doesn't offer much on the subject of reality. If the government was embracing one religion over another I would agree w/ you. However, that's not the case.


Like all humans, I'm "right" about some things & "wrong" about others. I don't see how that's relevant. I'm not even quite sure what you're saying I'm wrong about. Abortion? Evolution? Secularism? I'm certainly "right" on the second one. I could be right about all of them. I don't subscribe to the notion that I'm not right because everyone thinks they're right.


I never made the argument that people aren't influenced by their religion. However, I don't subscribe to the notion that those people aren't capable of checking their bible in at the door. If we all felt that humans were incapable of such a feat, we'd be anarchists. There will always be individuals that don't respect the intent of the founders but our system appears to do a decent job at of balancing things out when it comes to secular matters. If your only intent was to show that humans aren't perfect then I would've agree w/ you ages ago. However, just because humans aren't perfect doesn't mean that we can't have a system that keeps their shortcoming in check. Science is a perfect example of a system that keeps flawed individual humans in check.


I disagree. It's merely embracing the truth. It's the fundamentalists that are rejecting something (the truth). Besides, even if we were to go down that route, teaching something that's contrary to specific religious beliefs isn't rejecting that religion in its entirety.


Secularism isn't the "opposite" of religion (or religious) in any case. It's merely "separate" from religion. I agree that to remain neutral there must be a line drawn somewhere. That line is known as the wall of separation between church & state.

Don't have time to respond to the wall of text, going to bed, but I will respond to one small part briefly.



I'm not saying you're wrong. You're wrong about some stuff? How can you be wrong about some things for more time than it takes to figure out you're wrong? At the point at which you realize you're wrong, shouldn't you find what's right? What I'm saying is not that everyone thinks they're right so you're wrong. I'm just saying that you're basing your argument on the idea that YOUR beliefs are right and no one else's are. You are saying that YOUR reasoning and YOUR methods of determining what is right say that YOU are right. Well, of course they do. Fundamentalists' methods of determining what is right say THEY'RE right.

Basically, what you're saying is essentially objectively no better than a fundamentalist regime saying "what is in this book is right, so we will base everything on this".

P.S. Good choice with the Thomas Jefferson quotes. Dude's amazing.

I'm confused about this. Were you told that it's wrong to use a condom, but not that sex before marriage is wrong? I could just be misunderstanding your post.

I don't think that's what he was saying, but oddly enough that actually happens a lot. I've known a few girls (all Catholic) that were ****ing like bunnies in high school, but wouldn't let their partners use condoms, and they refused to use birth control :/. Why they chose to disobey one and not the other, is beyond me

Because obeying the other meant they wouldn't get to have sex.
(edit: holy crap Mentat kicks some ass)

Put another way, because anyone can go without contraception, but it's hard to go without sex.

It's quite easy actually.

...

True, but I guess my point is that if you are already committing a sin, and all sins are deemed "equal" by god, why not just commit the other and guarantee (or at least 99.9% guarantee) not to potentially complicate your life. It's just stupid to ****, but yet be SUPER adamant about birth control. Maybe they were just crazy girls

The problem with that train of thought though, is you take away the line completely.
No-one wants to take away the line. They move it, they bend it, they may even break it, but they still want the line to be there. There has to be some kind of order whether you adhere to it or not.
So instead, they came to the quite bizarre (yeah, I agree with you) decision that having sex is bad, but not as bad as using protection.
I guess it's like this:
Murder is completely wrong
Sex before marriage is kinda bad
Abortion is murder
Therefore stopping pregnancy from happening is murder
Therefore condoms are murder... but sex is ok

Now, I'm not saying I agree with this line of thinking or that it's in any way sane... I'm just trying to find their point of view on this whole thing, because people will twist their minds anyway they can, as long as the line remains...




...or something

I think it's also important to point out that many 14 & 15 year olds aren't rational. Especially when everything in their life (family, friends, church, etc.) are also irrational. It's also important to consider biology (hormones). Teenagers have sex (their bodies are ideal for this). That's just what they do. It doesn't matter whether their parents are atheists or Christians. I only brought this particular part of the discussion up to show how the government (schools in this case) giving in to the demands of fundamentalists can be dangerous (STDs are very common & very real). I would've been in for a rude awakening had I gotten AIDS (or any STD for that matter) because my preacher & father led me to believe that only homosexuals got it. This is a perfect example of how a school can simply be teaching a vital subject based upon research & statistics & fundamentalists will claim that they're being anti-religious. It's not anti-religious because the decision was assumed to be made in a secular manner (religion wasn't considered).

For people who believe that sex before marriage is wrong, using contraception of any sort is an admission to premeditation. If you have condoms on you or take birth control, that means that you intended to have sex. If you don't, you can claim (to yourself and anyone who finds out) that it was a spur-of-the-moment moral failing because your passions got the best of you. Or your partner's passions, if you want to pass the buck even farther.

Evolution is better kept in science class, of course, but I recently heard an interesting idea that religion should be taught in school. Except, not any one religion in particular, but all religions. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism, the religions that are no longer practiced (the gods of Greek and Roman mythology), their different branches (how many "forms" of Christianity are there, anyway?), and so forth.

That will not only help kids understand that religion's just that - a religion, nothing too special about it, no matter what it's called - but would also help them choose whichever they prefer if they just can't live without one.

On a slightly related note, when someone tells me they don't "believe" in evolution (and, although like I've mentioned my interaction w/ religious people's rather limited, that did happen), I immediately want to ask whether they believe in kangaroos.

Actually, I think it was Hitchens who said that. While not a novel thought per se, I remember he also mentioned it'd be nice to include the "arguments" that those believing in monotheistic religions come up with to explain that "god exists" in that school theology class.

I think that Dawkins said something similar as well. I think it's a great idea.

... this is how my classes were taught.

Really? I'm curious, did you have a lot of religious classmates, if any?