Misfiring Neurons

Religion in government

I was reading a Regan speech on John’s blog today and I felt the need to speak about it. First off, for clarification, I see myself as a religious person; I am often am a little more private about religion than most, but I would like to think that my core principals are driven from my beliefs. But I find myself very much on the other side of the ideological divide than most religious people on this issue, in that I think religion and government should have definite walls of separation. I am going to give you a couple of reasons why I think this should be the case, and hopefully explain my reasons in enough detail to support my view.

My first reason is that we all see our religion as “the one”, and I think this is a natural byproduct in having faith. But our religion is not the only one; there are a variety of religions in this world, each with a very distinct value system and definition of morality. One of the glaring differences is that some religions are monotheistic others polytheistic. And in making this observation we start running into obvious problems like: does a Christian think that religions that are based on the worship of many gods true religions? So we have to ask ourselves right out of the gate “do we consider all religions to be true?” I think in all fairness most of would have to say no. I do not consider worship of the Earth Mother a true faith, but I am sure there are many who would beg to differ. This inability to define a true religion is unimportant for the follower, but much more problematic for society as a whole. When we start trying to protect religious freedom in public funded life, protecting prayer in school might sound like a fine idea, but do Muslim students have the right to a prayer bell ringing several times a day?

Another big problem with not drawing this separation is the tendency of some religions to promote a state sponsored status. I think most of us can think of one very large religion that thinks religion should drive all areas of public life. Growing populations can make a religion that practiced by a small number today the dominant religion tomorrow. Now I know that I am going to get hit with the constitution protection against state sponsored religions argument, to which I would reply “and I also have the right to bear arms.”

My third point is that while most of our laws come from the law of God, our government needs to operate by the law of man. I don’t think that our public servants have any more business placing a stone relief of the Ten Commandments on the foot of their courthouse than a stone Koran. A person facing a judge should know that he is dealing with a person that operates beyond outside influences. If he or she runs over a cow and gets charged with reckless driving, that person should know the judge will not throw the book at him for running over the reincarnated spirit of a dead relative.

I could make several more points but I would like to sum up by saying that I think separation of church and state is good because it goes a very long way in protecting everybody’s right to free practice of religion. I relate it very much to dieting; you take a certain amount of food out of a bag instead of eating out of the bag to keep you from consuming everything. I just feel that this separation protects us from our own worst tendencies to be gluttons.

posted by Barry @ 2:54 PM