Taking only the italicized portion of the First Amendment, known as the establishment clause, the question is whether legal pushes to remove non-denominational* mention of God from American practices such as the Pledge of Allegiance, religious institutional tax-exempt status, what we print on Federal Reserve notes [and the obverse of our coinage] would in fact be respecting an establishment [of nihilism, materialism, or what have you] which the amendment itself expressly forbids.
I don’t wish to address anything ridiculous like placing a St. James translation of the Ten Commandments in a court room. Of course, that’s inappropriate because it favors a particular establishment. I am talking only about the effort to separate God entirely from Americana.
Consider: the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America acknowledges faith towards a supreme God who created mankind and while this document is not of a legally binding nature, anybody who’s been through grade school knows stands as a basis of our legal philosophy [with some of the dead white guys who inspired it decades earlier]. God was undeniably important to the framers of the document. The Declaration also acknowledges by all who signed it, the laws of God, the providence of God, and the judgment of God. The Declaration also appeals to God as the Supreme Judge of the world for their intentions. Furthermore, for the support of this Declaration, the signers relied firmly on the protection of Divine Providence.
Many of these men went on to write the Constitution and it was written in such a way that this would not become a Catholic Nation, a Protestant Nation, a Puritan nation etc. etc. by way of state establishment, because these men had varied backgrounds and many of them colonized this country precisely so they could live as they wanted. But belief in God was a common ground and still is for most Americans.
What right then do atheists have to set up an Establishment here which is not under God? – Or – should atheists/atheism even be considered when we navigate the establishment clause?
Ahh, but is belief in God a religion in and of itself or is it postulated like evolution or gravity or a spherical Earth or the calculus?
I am talking about whether abjectly removing God from existence just because we live in a pluralist, free and open society is not in and of itself an establishment.
Additionally, it’s unfair of you to suggest I am Christian. I am not Christian by choice and I was not born Christian either. The word “God” refers to divinity. I’d like to see a religion that does not embrace this concept in one way or another or at the very least, a religion which outright conflicts with the existence of God in the way atheism does.
As you well know, I have been less than convinced by clever atheistic semantic wrangling that I see as attempts to circumvent the establishment clause.
Isn’t it? One definition of religion is ‘A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion’. Religious means ‘relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity’ or ‘scrupulously and conscientiously faithful’. It seems to me that an atheist who believes the ‘ultimate reality’ is that we are born, we live and we die is practicing a form of religion. An agnostic will say that we cannot know if there is a deity or not.
A person who believes in a deity does not know it exists. He believes it does. An atheist does not know a deity does not exist. He believes it does not. Given that each believes something that cannot be proven, is not atheism as much a religion as theism?
To my knowledge ( I’m not an expert on this detail ) : Theosophy, Scientology, various types of ancestor worship, animism, maybe voodoo. Note, my knowledge of these is limited, so I could easily be wrong on any of them.
That’s what the “anti” means.
That’s not atheism, although the two often go together. Atheism is disbelief in gods, nothing more; you can believe in souls and spirits and magic and be an atheist.
No, it is the obligation of those who claim something exists to provide evidence; does my disbelief that the universe was created by a drunken orc count as a religion ?
I’m not sure I understand your point but this comment
As citizens atheists have every right to protest and resist the governemnt trying to establish any religion as the official or preferred religion of the US. So yes they should be considered because they have equal rights and an equal voice.
HAve you read any of the other threads about this subject?
The point is for the governent to remain as nuetral as possible in establishing any particular belief. The government is also obligated by the 1st amendment to defend the rights of its citizens to worship according to their beliefs. That’s where it gets a little tricky defining the details and drawing the lines. In a recent thread we discussed the mention of under God in the pledge. In general it’s seen as a violation of the first amendment for the government to officially sanction “under God” but it protects the rights of those who choose to say it voluntarily because of personnal conviction.
One tricky part is government employees who have deep religious beliefs. Can a teacher read his or her Bible in school? Can a judge or lawyer refer to God in a courtroom? Can a town put the nativity scene in the town square?
I think the question here is about atheism as an establishment. Is removing reference to God respecting the atheist establishment (such as it is) over other establishments?
Theosophy: Theosophy is a body of ideas which holds that all religions are attempts by man to ascertain “the Divine”, and as such each religion has a portion of the truth. A more formal definition from the Concise Oxford Dictionary describes Theosophy as “any of various philosophies professing to achieve a knowledge of God by spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relations, esp. a modern movement following Hindu and Buddhist teachings and seeking universal brotherhood.” Can it be proven? It can not!
Scientology: While dubiously a religion, at the very least postulates an immortal spiritual being. Can it be proven? It can not!
Animism: Animism has been used in a number of ways since Edward Tylor used it (in 1871) as a label to define the essence of religion as the ‘belief in spirits’ (i.e. metaphysical, non-empirical or imagined entities). Can it be proven? It can not!
Voodoo: Voodoo is spiritist-animist and in fact also incorporates the ancestor worship you alluded to. There is a large and complex theistic pantheon.
That’s what Erek meant about a cheap semantic argument. It claims to be “anti” in the same way George Bush claims to be a compassionate conservative. You can say it 'till the cows come home but it isn’t necessarily the case, as you’ll see through my next two statements, I hope.
Why belief in spirits, souls and magic while obstinately cutting out one feature, God? It is actually starting to sound rather like a belief system to me… so it cannot really be an anti-establishment at all by your terms.
I have no obligation to prove what I believe, nor do you. That’s what beliefs are for. An atheist does not have the upperhand in this debate precisely because they consider absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. This requires a belief which you don’t even hold to some kind of “reality” because you kinda like spirits 'n stuff.
Ironically, I sort of agree with you on this in a practical sense, but in an idealistic sense I disagree with you.
If this country were truly free, (I mean this in a cultural sense) a teacher would be able to read from the bible if it were appropriate to the lesson, but also be free to read from the Bhagavad Gita or Aleister Crowley’s “The Book of the Law”.
So while I agree that the teacher shouldn’t read it to the class in the current political climate, I would like to see a world where we are free enough to recognize the knowledge that is our heritage without politicizing it in the ways that we currently do.
How would this work in practice? “God”, or the word “God”, is not intrinsic to anything governmental. To be there, someone had to put God there. Even if we follow your logic that atheism is a religion*, taking God out is no different that putting God in (wrt establishment). Take the current debate over “under God” in the pledge. If it represents an athieistic establishment to take God out, why would it not have been a **theistic **establishment to put God in in the first place?
*which I disagree with, but let’s just accept it for the sake of argument.
Are you suggesting that is the definiton of religion referred to in the establishment clause? I could pursue rape and murder with zeal or conscientious devotion and I am pretty sure that a law restricting such activity would be constitutional.
I am an atheist. I profess no belief in any deity. It does not require scrupulous and conscientous faith to do so. I am not required to claim anything about an ultimate reality in order to be an atheist.
So now the definition of religion is “believing something that cannot be proven?” What’s that, the third definition of religion you’ve used? What say we stick to one so as to facilitate the debate.
There is no affirmation required in order to disbelieve in any particular deity. There is no proof possible for the non-existence of God, while the question of his existence would be child’s play to resolve; he merely needs to show himself.
Anyone who claims belief in a particular Supreme Being is necesarily an atheist with respect to all other Supreme Beings.
Clearly not. An establishment of atheism would include statements to the effect that there is no divinty. A statement that makes no mention of (a) god in any way is neither religious nor atheistic (as the word atheism is recognized). (If one wishes to cavil that it is a-theistic, lacking god, that still does not make it an establishment of a belief system.)
The food group and nutrition labels on the sides of packaged food are a-theistic, but only a very odd dabbler in twisted semantics would argue that they were atheistic.
Okay. This is where people apparently get tripped up. Believing in God is mutually exclusive from religion. The tenets of this belief may vary by religion and you may meet folks who hold this belief but are not doctrinaire.
So they have every right to protest, yes, but that is separate from this question as protesting isn’t covered under the establishment clause.
Why yes, I’ve even participated in a few in the last few weeks as you may have noticed.
I don’t think acknowledging belief in the existence of God or founding a country based on the values the framers learned through their study of God and faith is particular at all. In fact, it’s very broad.
Can a teacher read the bible in school? Depends. Are we studying comparative religion? Are we studying the bible as literature? I would certainly not want a teacher to read the bible in school by way of straight-up curriculum for a reason I addressed in the OP: because that would be an establishment issue outside of what I’d like to discuss.
God was added to the pledge to distinguish us from our ideological rival of the day, the U.S.S.R. It is clearly a central value to this country and I wonder if folks who wish to hijack this value by their firm belief and faith that the absence of evidence is an evidence of absense are not themselves setting up an establishment at the expense of non-denomenational theism. When it’s non-denomenational, it does not equal an establishment. It’s like believing in “Freedom” or “justice” for “All”.
I might say that only “some” are due justice, but that would run counter to the values of this country. I might be a freedom-hater. That would also establish something counter to our national values. What do you think?