You're absolutely right Orrin -- what is it about the simple phrase "Congress shall make no law ..." that these anti-religion freaks don't understand? Of course, our judges that decide these cases know damn well what it means, but ignore it anyway.

I'm a screaming atheist and even I think this is stupid. Religious people exist, they're part of our history, and I see no reason why we can't acknowledge that.



This is just another example of why we need some sort of "loser pays" reform to our legal system.

OJ:



Like Ralph, I am an atheist. But that doesn't mean I can't recognize a secularized religious symbol when I see one. People need to learn to put things on disregard.



Regards,

JG

JG - why does it matter if the religious symbol is "secularized"? Why are only "secularized" symbols acceptable?

What I want to know is why these people don't object to the name of the town, too? Or of places with names like "San Francisco", "Santa Fe", "Santa Cruz", "Corpus Christi", "Sacramento", "St. Joseph", "Deseret", "Zion" or even "Providence."



What they want is the Ministry of Truth to make the past agree with the present. And after the religious names have been expunged, we can start on getting rid of the names of slave-owners, like "Washington", "Madison", "Jefferson" and a host of others.

The frightening thing is that the secularizers are so blinded by their hatred of Christianity that fail to recognize what a horror would unfold in its absence. The West without religion to check its force it a true nightmare.

How Orwellian of them

OJ:



Why are only secularized religious symbols acceptable?



Because the alternative is to provide a favored place for one particular religious belief at the expense of all others. That has led, far more often then not, more or less directly to sectarian slaughter (e.g., the BJP party in India)



In order to avoid that, Government needs to maintain strict neutrality towards religion--which means equal time for all of them, including the ones you don't agree with. The easiest way to provide equal time for all is to give no time to any.



Regards,

Jeff Guinn

Jeff:



That's a lovely theory found nowhere in our Constitution nor those of the several states. Government "neutrality" is really nothing more than an excuse for the State to drive religion of every kind from public life and leave the government unchallenged by any countervailing institution of any real weight. It is in those societies where this strategy has been realized most completely that the Terror, the Camps, the Gulag, and the Killing Fields have followed. The reason is fairly obvious: only one orthodoxy remains at that point--that of the government of the moment--and the punishment for varying from that orthodoxy is the same as it's often been through history, but now combined with the unfettered might of the State. Thus does ostensibly benign tolerance breed the most brutal and horrific intolerance of all.

Jeff - You favor one particularistic scheme (100% secularized symbols, 0% religious symbols) and justify this by arguing that the only alternative is a scheme in which one system of religious symbols is favored over others, and proponents of another are slaughtered. These are hardly the only two alternatives. Why not genuine neutrality -- the natural liberty that lets every person use the symbols he prefers, whether religious or secular?



Your system of "neutrality" defined as "giving no time to any [religion]" is the forcible imposition of one religious viewpoint, namely secularism, and by your logic should lead to the slaughter of the oppressed religious.

OJ, PJ:



Gee, and all this time I thought we lived in a country with accountable government and free speech. How many of the societies sponsoring the Terror, the Camps, the Gulag, and the Killing Fields
can make that same claim? You also neglected to mention the Inquisition, pogroms since time immemorial and seriously un-Christian Catholic hostility to every religion in the New World.



I briefly lived in Oklahoma during the late seventies, right when the Monty Python movie "Life of Brian" was released. If my memory serves, the state legislature passed a law prohibiting (which the state court promptly invalidated) exhibiting the movie, on the grounds it was anti-Christian.



Would that be an example of the benefits to follow from religion in politics?



Regards,

Jeff Guinn

Jeff:



Yes, censorship would be a benefit of remoralizing society. Censorship of pornography was common well into the 60s.

OJ, don't forget about Harry Potter movies! We can't be promoting witchcraft now!



The bad thing (from a secularist standpoint) about all these attacks on religious symbols is that it wastes political capital on trivial things that do no harm to non-religious people, instead of focusing on the important abuses, such as forced school prayer.



The public display of religious symbols, like "In God We Trust" on money, tends to cheapen the impact of the symbols. I call it the "Wallpaper Effect". Ubiquity=irrelevance. Popular, public religious expression is self-secularizing. Just look at Christmas. Displays of the Ten Commandments in court-houses are now defended on the basis of being mere historical relics, with no compulsory power. Way to go, Christians! You've taken your most sacred text, and have lowered it to the level of graffiti in the public mind.

RobertD:



Yet we still have the most religious society in the West, while countries that have banished religion from public are irreligious. You're the rationalist: explain how there's no cause and effect here?

OJ, you miss my point. I'm not arguing that the widespread display of religious symbols leads to irreligion, I am saying that it debases the power of those symbols. Christmas is a perfect example of this. Even I celebrate Christmas! It is pretty much a secular holiday nowadays. Where symbols are concerned, less is more.



Your cause-effect doesn't hold with England. England has an established church, and yet it is highly secular. By your reasoning, the state support for religion in England should have kept it religious, but it hasn't.

RobertD:



The argument is self-denying: if the symbols have lost their power then why are we fighting over them so often?



Britain has ghettoized the Church. It has an established one but no religion in its public life.

oj,



I think that very few people are actually fighting over the symbols. There is a small band of hyper-sensitive secularists complaining about symbols which are invisible to most people, but they react to like atheist kryptonite. The reaction to these secularists from most people is of the form of "you've got to be kidding! I didn't even know "Las Cruces" means "The Crosses" in Spanish!" Very little of the reaction to them is of the form "you're right, you athiest bastard, that cross is there to destroy your godless soul, and we will keep it there until you are all extinct!"



The symbols, at least the public display of them, is important to only a small minority of fanatics on either end of the spectrum.

RobertD:



Like the entire Congress, which walked out and said the pledge after the 9th Circuit's ruling and then passed a resolution condemning it? Like the firemen at the WTC who raised the flag and then the cross made out of girders? Like the President who gave his most eloquent post-9-11 speech at the National Cathedral?

OJ:



Let me get this straight. You think it was OK for the Oklahoma legislature to attempt banning the film because they felt it to be blasphemous (never mind for the moment that conclusion could come only from an astonishingly incompetent viewing of the film)?



JG

OJ:



Germany would be one of those European countries that has banished religion, right? Well, maybe except for the mandatory display of crucifixes in school classrooms in at least one of the Lander.



JG