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It's not possible for the state to be neutral with respect to religion. Why? Because religion makes truth claims. To be neutral towards those claims is, in effect, to be against them.
Let's say you have to be somewhere at 6:00pm, and three men tell you what they believe to be the time of day. One says it's 5:00pm, the other 4:45pm, and the other 5:30pm. You want to be neutral and don't want to offend anyone, but you don't have a watch and can't afford to miss this meeting. So you have to choose. Neutrality is impossible. By choosing the time Joe gave you, you have rejected the claims of Sam and George. Presumably you have some reason for trusting Joe over the others - perhaps he's a relative, or a friend you've known since childhood, and he has a good track record.
The state must make the same kinds of choices with respect to religion. Naturally, the state is going to prefer, almost sub-consciously, the religion with which it is historically associated and the religion of those it serves. Religion and morality are not the same thing, but it's true that most people derive their morality from their religious faith. Since the state must make laws on the basis of morality, it will always favor certain religious views and discriminate against others.
I disagree completely. Our western governments today make their laws based on secular humanism with very little influence from religion of any kind. If what you are saying has even a grain of truth in it, then porn would be illegal, gambling would be illegal and above all else abortion would be illegal. I would predict that these things that are 100% opposed to the prevailing faith of the country will always remain legal. Not just that but many other things that are considered to be immoral will become legal.
The problem is that most religious "answers" are flat out wrong, and that is why they are not even considered in most decisions.
Now we're getting somewhere. Can you give me an example that shows: 1) The religious answer to a moral question that is wrong; 2) the non-religious answer to the same moral question that is correct; and 3) the non-religious basis for determining the right answer.
Last edited by WesternPilgrim; 08-19-2012 at 06:11 PM..
Yes, but the Nazis ethics were based on religion, namely Christianity. How can you say that is a good thing?
Tell it to the Christian martyrs of Naziism. Three million dead Catholics in Poland might disagree - the forgotten holocaust. Likewise St. Maximilian Kolbe, killed in a Nazi starvation cell, or St. Edith Stein, who also died at Auschwitz.
"Christianity, for Rosenberg, was the distorted product of Semitic tribes who had tricked the Aryans into jettisoning their pagan truth. The Catholic Church, prime mover in this spiritual swindle, was singled out for sustained attack as the promoter of 'prodigious, conscious and unconscious falsifications.' Rosenberg claimed that Jesus Christ had been an unwitting tool of Jewish world conspirators, active as early as the first century AD. In some writings, he would go further and argue that Christ was possibly not a Jew at all, but a prototype Aryan, son of a Roman soldier stationed in Palestine. In February 1933 Hermann Goering banned all Catholic newspapers in Cologne, citing that 'political' Catholicism — i.e., commenting on government policy — would not be tolerated."
Let's say you have to be somewhere at 6:00pm, and three men tell you what they believe to be the time of day. One says it's 5:00pm, the other 4:45pm, and the other 5:30pm. You want to be neutral and don't want to offend anyone, but you don't have a watch and can't afford to miss this meeting. So you have to choose. Neutrality is impossible. By choosing the time Joe gave you, you have rejected the claims of Sam and George. Presumably you have some reason for trusting Joe over the others - perhaps he's a relative, or a friend you've known since childhood, and he has a good track record.
I haven't a clue and that is the first problem with the analogy. The author doesn't provide any information regarding the times given or the criteria used for making their choice. The author also incorrectly asserts that making any decision is inherently biased, which is ridiculous since the author's argument inherently dismisses the neutrality of empirical analysis. Joe trusted or not, may have given questioner a time most consistent with objective observations or best guesstimates, and not upon their friendship. The simple fact that weighed the opinion of the three offered times implies some evaluation of the evidence presented. If neutrality wasn't present you would dismiss any time other than Joe's out of hand.
Which brings us to problem number two.
When it comes to religion, what religion does the government pick when offered the "correct time" by the disparate theologies that are practiced under its sovereignty? The government picks none, if fact the government never even asks the question. So unlike the analogy given, the government demonstrate nothing but neutrality when if comes to religion under our Constitution.
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