Are you succeeding? Do you have a time table? Do you plan to stay the course?
Yes, but slowly, slowly. No. Of course! We’re on a mission from God!
The Associated Press is now running with Prager’s story.
Quoth Prager,
“Bible of this country?” This man huffs glue.
This is a really shitty story, I have to add: the author writes that Ellison “has offended some conservatives,” but quotes only Prager, in an interview and from the TownHall column, and says “Conservative bloggers have picked up the criticism and run with it” without providing a single example or quote. That’s some weasel-wording right there.
I just like the idea that the **best way ** to keep ceremony and tradition in the U.S. is if Congressmen don’t have to swear a binding oath to uphold the Constitution.
Has the concept of Tradition been totally disconnected from, you know, actual tradition now?
Wrong. What Christians have been seeing “whittled away by the governments” over the past few decades is not “Christian traditions” themselves, but rather the encroachment of Christian traditions on what are supposed to be secular, religiously neutral government functions.
The government has not done a damn thing to “whittle away” actual Christian traditions such as Sunday worship services in churches, individual prayer, and so forth. And if it did, we secularists would turn out in droves to oppose such outrageous interference by government in the free exercise of religion.
Did you know that “Pharisee” was Aramaic for “Republican”? That’s a true fact, you could look it up.
Actually, while I’m well aware you were indulging in sarcasm, the origin of the term is quite relevant to the discussion. “Pharisee” literally means “separatist” – one who, to keep himself pure and right with God, separates himself from the sinful masses, whose sinful behavior he seeks to have regulated into a manner more pleasing to God. All this, of course, in his own opinion --giving rise to the term “self-righteous.”
The parallels to comments made by more than a few partisans of the Religious Right are quite scary.
And I think we do ourselves a disservice if we allow the sort of card-switching that has been stock for Prager’s course. Yes, America and her Founding Fathers were “a Christian people” – in the sense that the country always has been and still is, and the FF were, a mixed group, the larger part of whom were either (a) devout Christians, (b) paying lip service to Christianity and with a worldview influenced by Christianity, or (c) believers in a metaphysics very loosely paralleling Christianity, such as Jefferson’s beliefs, Unitarianism, cosmosdan’s description of his belief structure, etc.
The problem here is that, while America is in fact “a Christian nation” in that sense, we specifically rejected being one in the other sense, with an established religion (par for the course in the 1700s), doctrinal tests for office (which Britain still had at independence, and would have for 25 years yet), lack of freedom of religious expression (count the number of colonies founded for just that purpose-- to give an English religious minority a place to be themselves).
Prager is, IMO, a lying sack of shit who has pandered his own integrity to win the kudos of religious conservatives. And he should be called on it – ideally by conservatives of integrity.
And to answer Magellan01’s question of why I condemn him as a danger to the country, so far I’ve seen him want America kept clean of non-English-speaking foreigners and favoring the establishment of a religious test (and don’t tell me that there are not going to be people whose own integrity prohibits them taking an oath on a prescribed Bible).
In the 1740s, George, the second of that name, wanted to send the Army to fight wars he wanted but the people and their elected representatives did not (in behalf of Hanover). He had an established church that influenced him greatly and controlled much of what was politically possible. Things haven’t changed much in 260 years.
What you seem to be supporting, Magellan, would vitiate much of what our forefathers fought to preserve. Do you wonder that I oppose you bitterly?
Anyone with the slightest interest in this thread should read this article from beginning to end.
And still has today!
British law still specifies that the monarch can not be catholic, or married to a catholic, in order to assume the throne.
And elected Members of Parliament are required to swear an oath that is apparently doctrinaire enough that for many years Catholic MP’s from Northern Ireland have been unwilling to do so, and thus excluded from the seat in Parliament they were elected to.
I think that’s just Sinn Fein MPs, and not because they’re Catholic, but because the oath requires them to swear allegiance to the monarch.
Nah, I don’t think I would like to attempt it. When I read the post, I invested more significance in the “enemy of my enemy” meme than you intended to convey, apparently. I’ll cop to having misread your intention, based on your assertion that you saw it as an “off-handed use.”
I have, errr, issues with the use of so-called “ancient pearls of wisdom” to provide facile support for propositions of dubious validity. Thank you for prompting me to examine whether I allowed those issues to give me a distorted understanding of your posts # 291 and # 302. I’ll withdraw “total crap” from my analysis, and try to have it sufficiently qualified before I use the characterization again.
While I don’t mind you condemning or opposing me as bitterly as your awesome powers will allow, I think we’d both be be better off if it were for the right reasons. I actually don’t hold either of the views you cite here, I’m all for legal immigrants coming here, many of whom will not speak english or speak it poorly. I do advocate having English as the Official Language, as to encourage every immigrant to assimilate to our culture as quickly and as fully as possible, which I view as helpful to all concerned. There have been threads on this so we don’t have to rehash all the reasoning here.
And I certainly do not advocate a religious test. Where we differ, I guess, is in the interpreation of the establishment clause. (That and the notion that while this was not founded as a Christian notion, it was founded as a monothestic one.) As far as Prager’s argument, I think it makes logical sense, to a degree. Where I personally break with him is that if someone is to swear an oath and invoke something greater than himself, that it should be something he truly believes to be greater than himself. Otherwise the power of “swearing” is undone and we might as well have a clean affirmation. At the same time, I think we have a right to take the book that might be chosen into account (if in fact there is one involved). I think the problem will be solved from here on out by a candidate being asked which book (if any) he would swear on if he wins the election. And from here on out he will be asked. I view that as a good thing: more info about the candidate. If any candidate wants to use a book that is not part of the common culture, let him defend his choice before hand.
So I think we can agree to leave Prager’s novel look at this issue aside and sleep soundly knowing all will be well with the world.
Thanks for taking the time for a closer reading. And, for the record, I share your opinion concerning pearls of wisdom, as well as maxims, saws, or adages, being used as weight-bearing supports for a claim.
Horse apples. This country was not founded as a religious country.
I actually agree, as I find the broad category of monotheism to be a philosophical position, not a religious one. Once you pick a particular deity, then you start to move into the realm of religion.
Any belief in magic is a religious belief.
You’ve also got an entirely erroneous angle on the Establishment Clause. The cutesy answer that monotheism is not a specific religion misses the point that the state does not have a right to say that amy specific belief is wrong. The problem with an endorsement of monetheism is that it’s amounts to a de facto declaration by the state that any other belief is incorrect. The state has no more right to deny the existence of the Hindu pantheon or the non-personality of the Tao or the Earth Mother Goddess than it does to endorse them. Any endorsement of one belief is a denial of other beliefs. The state has no right to do that.
Respectfully disagree. Some animist forms of magic, perhaps most, are concerned with manipulation of spiritual forces to advantage. To such a practitioner, the spiritual forces involved are no more a matter of worship than applied, practical physics. It is not a crude form of religion, it isn’t religion at all.
It’s an interesting point, really. If monotheism is established in the U.S. (and i’d argue it was, what with “In God We Trust” and all), I agree with you that it establishes no religion, but it does act against establishing any pantheist religion, or religion with no gods. And while that seems pretty unfair… I don’t think it goes against the Constitution.
I’m with elucidator. You can have a belief in magic without religion - I wouldn’t consider people who believe they can dowse or are psychic or that ghosts exist are necessarily religious. As elucidator says, for some of these people it may not be anything to with a God or spirituality, but merely a form of natural physics that have gone untapped by other people.
The issue is complicated somewhat by the multiple significance of words like “country” and “nation”, which mean not just “political entity” or “government” but “people, society, culture”. In a sense, yes, the US was a monotheistic and Christian “nation” or “country” even at the time of its founding, and still is, because the people who make up the nation were and still are mostly Christians.
But our nation/country does not have, and never has had, a Christian government, or even a monotheistic one. The government is very clearly specified to be religiously neutral. No religious test may be applied to office holders in the government: not a Christian one, not even a monotheistic one. No matter how monotheistic or Christian our country or or culture may be, we cannot insert Christian or monotheistic bias into our treatment of government office holders PE.RI.OD.
Yes, that is the correct arena in which to deal with the issue of a candidate’s religious preferences. If the voters don’t like the way(s) the candidate plans to express his/her religious faith when in office, they’re free to elect somebody else. (And of course, candidates are free to lie about their plans in that regard if their consciences will permit it. And if the voters don’t like the lie they’re free to elect somebody else next time, but they don’t have any other recourse.)
Once a candidate is elected, the government has no business applying any kind of a religious test to his/her religious preferences, not even if accompanied by woolly-headed diversionary blather about abstract monotheism or “Judeo-Christian values” or any other attempts to pretend the religious test isn’t really religious.
Yeah, yeah, your same old rude estimation of religion. You’ve been called in this before, yet choose to continue to be rude and childish. Glad I gave you the opportunity to inject this usual nonsense into yet another debate. If you’d like my rebuttal look up one of the threads where we discussed the issue. Me? I’ll move on.
I would like to hear what you think, specifically, is erroneous with my interpretation of the Establishment Clasuse. In the process, you’ll no doubt share what you think my interpretation is.
Regarding your specific problem concerning my comment about monotheism, here it is:
Notice the word “founded”? It’s there twice. It is the point of the sentence. Yet, it appears in your rebuttal not once. I wonder why. Probably because that a founding document, the Declaration of Independence, clearly refers to to a single God. Even if we accept the most generous interpretation and take that “Creator” or “Nature’s God” to be the Deist Prime Mover, it still is an acknowledgement that our rights are bestowed within us by a single God.