Blog Against Theocracy

[Andrew Crystall]

On 21 Mar 2008 at 8:53, Nick Arnett wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 5:22 AM, Andrew Crystall <dawnfalcon at upliftwar.com>
> wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > All an explicit Church-State divide does is mean that politicians
> > cannot explicitly be called on their overtly religious policies,
> > because there is this "divide" in place so they couldn't *possibly*
> > be religious.
> 
> 
> I don't see how that can be.  It means that churches can't interfere in
> elections. 

Religious communities tend to vote for certain candidates, in any 
country, though.

> It means that government cannot do anything that would make a
> particular religion official or in any way coerce people to choose a
> particular religion.

Those to me are entirely separate issues from an explicit church-
state divide. It's nonsense when someone who is religious, elected by 
an overwhelmingly religious community, has his actions (in line with 
his religion) taken to be entirely secular in their basis.

Strong laws for tolerance and equality do more than any dividing line 
between the state and any given non-violent belief structure.

> Those are big deals to me, especially when there are
> some very wealthy churches around and some very aggressively religious
> elected officials.

Get back to me when the CoS has been tossed out of messing with 
politics, huh? They abuse the principle, nastily.

I live in the UK. As far as I can see, it's easier to discuss 
religious influences in politics and to point out where certain 
opinions are coming from, making them less paletable on tolerance 
grounds, than it would be in America precisely because we don't have 
this line blocking debate on the topic.

AndrewC
Dawn Falcon