Seasons

To ally government with one particular faith is to turn your back on all others. So much for equality.

Well, and it's not just about endorsement of religion or of one over another. Will we have laws that mimic the religious beliefs of the majority, or laws that are designed for the social good?

Anyway, I guess that if it weren't situated in a context of trying to convert me, I'd have far less objection to assertions of State Christianity -- as long as it was confined to religion, not law.

No Eugene, saying it doesn't make it true, but saying it in a Pledge of Allegience undertakes to bind you to it.

As someone (I don't remember who) said recently, freedom of religion doesn't mean freedom FROM religion. The government has gotten so into not supporting any religion over another that instead they support disbelief in ALL religions. I don't think there's anything wrong with putting God in the pledge of allegiance...hell, if you believe in Allah, stick Allah in there instead. No big deal. So it's a different god, it's still a god. You could stick Zeus in there and I wouldn't give a damn.

As for being religious 24/7, that's fine & dandy as long as you don't try to convert me 24/7. I believe that God gave us free will so that we can do what WE think is right, not just do what he thinks is right so we never have to think for ourselves. That's what I was getting at with God not being necessary to have moral beliefs. If you just do what God says and don't care about it one way or the other except that one way leads to heaven and the other way leads to hell, then you're as bad as a lemming. If he wanted us to act like that, he wouldn't have given us free will to begin with.

You know, it must really suck to be God. I'm glad he's got the job instead of me.

Yes, it would be.

The problem is that when religion is injected into national laws, and when, as we've seen over the past week, people get hot and sweaty protesting that to remove religious language from the law is to violate everything American and is unpatriotic, we see how some people are trying to link patriotism to religion -- that simple. If you don't believe in God (and for the most part, the God of Christianity), you're not really an American.

Well, that's just not acceptable.

And I'm not even going down the road of how futile and arrogant it is in the first place to suggest that this nation derives its purpose and government from God. If so, how are we different from the monarchy the Revolutionary Warriors staged a revolution to overthrow?

Well, Democracy isn't perfect. Since the people control who is elected, everything feasible that can be done to please the people is done. This has thrown our country headfirst into an ocean of political correctness, and one of the main problems with that is that people are stuck in that state of mind(including me, although I don't vocalize my opinions too much). So, even when people aren't offended by something, they're offended by the thought that it might offend some minority(be it race, religion, handicap, etc), and the government can do very little to reverse this process.

humans make mistakes and anything done by humans will have some sort of mistakes, Otherwize we would be a alien or something.

Hmmm. Has anyone ever noticed Ladydyke making a mistake?

The main problem with modern society: a single human makes a lot of mistakes but a country is a LOT of humans all combining their mistakes together so they can affect a lot more people in a lot more annoying ways.

Which is the beauty of a Constitution built around providing inalienable protections to individuals rather than providing increasing power to the the government. Not that ours is as successful as it should be at it, but the principle stands.

The idea was to have checks and balances to make it more difficult to abuse power. Granted, abuse has taken place and our government has done a lot of things they shouldn't that were unconstitutional, but I still think the setup was pretty good to have such a slow corruption rate.

Incidently, I hate Netscape, and I also hate the computer I am using right now. The two good ones with reasonable resoluytion, Internet Explorer, and some resistence to crashing every five minutes, are in use and I didn't have any more time to wait. Ah, the joys of using a terminal at a public library.

Sometimes I think we have too many rights though. Criminals get to sit around for years while they appeal their murder convictions and such. Not to mention the "mentally disabled" who never have consequences for their actions, even when they abuse the people who try to help them. I could go on and on, but I won't.