Then your impression is incorrect. On the contrary, Christianity DOES pervade almost every facet of daily life in the United States, and we atheists mostly aren’t terribly bothered. It actually takes something especially outrageous to get our knickers twisted.
It’s the Christians who insist that every time their religion isn’t given special consideration, indeed, treated as the only religion that matters, they’re being oppressed. They need a big steaming cup of shutthefuckup.
“O yea, from within the land of the Caananites, I shall smite thee lest you drop your wicked heathen ways!”
And shit.
To get the ball rolling again:
When is it going to sink in with certain people that this is a false belief? Jesus is not the reason for the season. Observance of the birth of Christ was grafted onto the existing Pagan celebration back in the Middle Ages, making Jesus the excuse for the season, you might say.
Indeed the early Pilgrims and Puritans, whom the Christian conservative are always pointing to as having “founded” the US, thus somehow mandating their religion on all of us, banned so-called Christmas because they understood its Pagan origins well enough.
But no need to throw out the Baby Jesus with the bathwater. Think of the Holiday Season as a smorgasboard of different observance options, some specific to several religions, some secular.
If your family is religious, you can observe all the religious aspects you want. But since governments are secular, they should limit themselves to the secular side of things. No one’s going to barge into your home and demand that you put away the Christian things.
So why is there a problem?
No - since our government mandates freedom of religion, government has to accommodate this. In so doing they cannot confine themselves to the secular side of things. Thousands of examples can be provided showing this - everything from clergy on the government payroll to crosses on government land.
You’re right, they’re not obliged to limit themselves to the secular side, they’re only obliged to not elevate any religion over any other. There are crescents on government land too, of course.
But I’d bet you all the money I have in the world that City Hall displaying a nativity, a menorah, and a fanouz would make Jim Inhofe and his brand of Christians howl with rage.
What do you think a cross on a military headstone shows, exactly? The government would be equally obliged to put a Darwin fish on there if that was what the decedent wanted.
Look at number 16 on that list. It’s not a Darwin fish, but the point remains that an atheist marker is avaliable (not that a Darwin fish is necessarily atheist anyway).
This is kind of off point anyway, since the grave markers are about allowing religious expressions by the citizenry, not by the government. Muncipal “Christmas parades,” are about elected officials abusing their positions by trying to cram their personal savior up everybody else’s asses, not about letting people believe or express what they want.
Never mind, beaten to it.
That depends entirely on the symbol and the religion. Wiccan practitioners were not allowed to have a pentacle on their gravestones until April of 2007, and it took a lawsuit to force the issue.
The fact that they won the lawsuit is a rather good argument in favor of my point. Thanks.
The fact that it took until 2007 AND it took a lawsuit to force the issue to win that right is MY point, thanks for playing.
They didn’t have to win a lawsuit for the right. The fact that they won the lawsuit shows that they had the right. They had to win the lawsuit to enforce that right.
Perhaps you should read post 126 again.
My point is that whether or not the government has a legal obligation to not discriminate in allowing symbols on headstones, they in fact DO discriminate (and have discriminated) in allowing symbols on headstones, requiring lawsuits in order to force them to recognize that they must not discriminate in allowing symbols on headstones.
A government that must be forced to recognize an obligation not to discriminate therefore discriminates until forced not to, making said “obligation” in fact not an obligation at all, but something that is subject to the whim of the current government until the people being discriminated against are organized enough and well-funded enough to enter into lawsuits to force the government to stop discriminating.
An obligation that is not recognized and followed until legal force is brought to bear is, in my opinion, not an obligation at all.
Is there a spiritual parade happening? I can’t find many images from previous parades, but the ones I do find are all pretty secular-looking.
BTW, where do you stand on evolution?
You are of course entitled to your opinion, but that’s how the law works.
The evidence supporting the theory of evolution is too voluminous to ignore, so I’m in that camp.
C’mon, I may be delusional but I’m not fucking crazy.
I don’t know what I was expecting that symbol to be, but that wasn’t it. I would totally wear than on a silver sash over my unitard, though.
An “obligation to accomodate” can apply to siituations where private citizens need government cooperation in order to practice their religion, such as gravestones on public land or chaplains to serve service members.
But the government should not be carrying out any religious missions, and people do not need anything religious in a government-run holiday parade since keeping such thing secular does not deprive them of their overall ability to celebrate the religious aspects of the holiday.
