No religious test can be required to take office. That means treasonous Atheists, filthy Mohameddans, depraved Mormons, idolatrous Hindoos, heathan Buddhists, haughty Quakers, and penis-waving Baptists are all eligible to run for fucking officer, and all are elligible to take office if elected?
Agree or Disagree? AGREE OR DISAGREE! You fucking agree. And yet you persist.
And you know damn good and well that your scenario of a rational human being sitting down and figuring out their philosophical position on the ultimate questions of the universe before getting into questions of religioun is pure sophistry. You know and I know and the american people know that people don’t make decide that there must be some sort of higher power, and then decide that Christianity is the religion that fits that evidence the best. Please, don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
No religious test can be required, and that includes swearing on a fucking Bible. You cannot require anyone to swear on a fucking Bible? Now do you get it? And if you and Prager don’t want to vote for anyone who won’t swear on a fucking Bible, well, that’s your right, but fuck you.
Well, you’re having a philosophical debate about whether it is just and proper to bar people with my religion/philosophical position from public office unless we forswear ourselves, as well as barring other people who don’t belong to the majority religion.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, magellan. Hard as it may be to believe, I disagree with you, for a few reasons.
First, you’re trying to draw a hard dividing line between “philosophy” and “religion” where no such line is possible to be drawn. The terms are both very nebulous and have a wide variety of definitions, with much overlap between them. This is further confused by the fact that the two terms were even more confused in the era in which the founders were living.
While it’s possible to very narrowly define your terms, as you did, in order to keep the two concepts distinct, I don’t think you’ll have much luck demonstrating that your definitions of religion and philosophy are commonly accepted enough to duck the restrictions of the first ammendment. Further, your definition of religion seems to exclude some religions:
Arguably, you have just defined Buddhism as “not a religion.” There is no “thing” that dictates to a Buddhist what he should do or how he should behave. Buddhism (as far as I understand it, and that’s admittedly none too far) does dictate some behaviors, but generally not at the behest of a God, but more as function of universal principles. Buddhism teaches its adherents to be “good” in a way that’s more or less equivalent to teaching a child not to stick it’s hand into a fire: not because it makes the fire “angry,” but because it’s the nature of fire to burn things.
Ultimatly, I don’t think the founders would have recognized a significant difference between religion and philosophy. The two terms are largely interchangable, especially in the 18th century, and they would have been equally opposed to a philosophical test as they would be to a religious test. The only thing required of someone taking an oath of office is to uphold the Constitution, as the foundation of lawful rule in this country. There’s no mention of specific principles within the Constitution that they are meant to uphold, and of course, the Constitution itself contains instructions on how to change it. I think that, as much as anything else, the founders were trying to avoid dogmatism. They recognized that societies change over time, and that what might have been smart and necessary in their day might become onerous and oppressive for their descendents. They would no more want to see our government require fealty to the “philosophy” of monotheism than they would fealty to the Pope in Rome.
While I’m here, I’ll add that I think you’re wrong to consider the DoI as a foundational document for our nation. While hugely important and necessary step in the formation of our country, it is not a part of its “foundation,” no more than your divorce papers from your first wife are part of the foundation of your relationship with your second wife.
No. That’s a scientific question. “WHY are we here” would be a philosophical question, but “how” is a scientific question. And the answers, at least in the initial stages, will be philosophical answers. Basically, they will fall into two camps. Either the universe is eternal or the universe had a beginning. Expanding on the latter possibility, as that is where the founder’s beliefs will eventually reside, the thinking progresses:
If the universe had a beginning, it was begun by something
That something may be A) one thing or B) more than one thing
So, we’re still in philosophical territory. Either answer is a philosophical answer.
[/quote]
Still wrong. These questions and answers are still scientific, not philosophical.
Now we can explore the options in #2 further while still remaining in the philosophical realm.
A: What is the one thing that created everything else? Here are a few options:
a big explosion or
a giant whale or
the sun or
the earth or
the moon or
water or
fire or
wind or
a supreme entity up in the sky
B: What are these things that created everything else? (Choose a minimum of two.)
a big explosion and/or
a giant whale and/or
the sun and/or
the earth and/or
the moon and/or
water and/or
fire and/or
wind and/or
a supreme entity up in the sky
So we are still in the philosophic realm.
[/quote]
You still haven’t entered it. This is all in the realm of science.
What you’ve done is posit a (question-begging) religious answer to a scientific question.
The “Creator” mentioned in the DOI has no relevance to US law, by the way. The Constutution recognizes no such entity and forbids the state from either endorsing or rejecting the concept.
One thing that struck me in Prager’s followup column is the fact that the ceremony at which he proposes “America, Not Keith Ellison, Decides What Book a Congressman Takes His Oath on” is at bottom, a private event. [
](http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=18328)Well, yeah, Dennis, it kinda does. To begin with, there’s no actual requirement that a separate ceremonial reenactment of the oath (or affirmation) of office be held at all. If a newly-sworn in representative wants to skip it entirely, “America” doesn’t get a vote in that decision. If he wants to have it in the context of a nude skydiving party, “America” doesn’t get a vote in that decision. If he wants to have it during half-time at the Super Bowl, Dennis Prager doesn’t get to veto that.
If the representative isn’t asking “America” to foot the bills for his parties, any argument that “America” gets to decide on the way his parties are conducted is just plain dumb.
“Ceremonies are important”, Mr. Prager? Rather a sweeping statement, isn’t it? I remember crawling through a plastic-lined dining room, smeared with shortening, wading through an ankle-deep slurry of organic garbage and ice-water, wearing nothing but a pair of underpants and a blindfold, being forced to nibble a maraschino cherry out of the navel of a half-naked 250-pound heavy equipment operator (with my hands bound behind my back), then having a raw oyster poked down my throat by means of a frozen hot dog. That was a ceremony, too.
Actually, I would agree with the intent of Prager’s claim here, (even if he does stupidly misuse the word ceremony where he intended to use ritual, in keeping with his muddy thinking and poor choice of language, generally).
Ritual is (usually) very important to society (at whatever level). Even the idiotic hazing ritual to which you were subjected was important in the sense that it attempted to create some sort of bond of brotherhood or something.
Of course, Prager still gets it wrong. The actual ritual eliminates the entire issue of “swearing on” a book. The ritual actually followed does reinforce the notion that the important act is the giving one’s word to society in the presence of the deliberative the body one is joining for the purpose of committing one’s actions to uphold the principles of society.
On the other hand, the photo op is exactly that: a photo op, the results of which will be distributed to a half-dozen newspapers and TV stations (of which fewer than one in ten will actually run the photo). (Let’s see a show of hands: how many people recall seeing the photo of the House being sworn in in the last 20 years? OK, about a third of us. How many recall seeing an actual photo of their own representative being sworn in from the photo op? Anyone? Anyone?)
Now it is true that Ellison is making a statement. His statement is that he is joining the deliberative body of this nation and he is doing so by affirming by his highest religious beliefs that he will attempt to govern in good faith. It is simply surly (not to say scurrilous) of Prager to insist that a photo op (that would have been seen by maybe a couple of hundred voters in his own district if Prager, Beck, and others had not shit their pants on the issue) using as an insincere prop a work that many hold very dear has more relevance to the gentleman’s actions than the actual giving of his pledge.
(It does not escape my attention in any way the the arguments in favor of compelling the use of the bible (a religious artifact) is being championed by people who have no actual spiritual beliefs. For them it is all “ceremony” and the spiritual beliefs of the participants may be trashed at will, since they are of no serious consequence. Such blatant cynicism has more in keeping with Machiavelli than Jefferson.)
And of course Tom makes the excellent point that in countries with state churches, the “state” part takes precedence over the “church” part. The church becomes an arm of the state, rather than vice versa. Religious leaders are promoted because of their political reliability, and religious belief is transformed into worship of the state.
Those who advocate state religions–like Prager, although usually not as openly as he–do so not out of religious belief, but out of a cynical “opiate of the masses” attempt to manipulate public opinion. The sheer audacity to claim that religious belief means nothing, what matters is being SEEN to participate in public rituals in the official orthodox fashion. Religion is just a matter of going through the motions and mouthing the right words and the right time, it has nothing to do with faith or belief or spirituality. It’s all a show put on for the rubes, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
If I were a Christian I’d be even more offended by Prager and Magellan01 than I am as an atheist.
Actually, Tom~, old Niccolo, a moral and spiritual man but a pragmatist and realist in political affairs, would be just as aghast at the co-opting of a Book many hold dear to play political/ideological games with.
Only **elucidator ** did mention it, it seems to me also that it is silly to ignore the huge context of the revolution:
Speaking of a creator, the founding fathers still understood they were going against the grain of many faiths of the day, who then believed the king reigned by the grace of that same creator!
Problem was, many founding fathers were Deists and had very goofy ideas like denying the existence of the Trinity and well, most of the Cristian and Jewish religion. When the revolution mentioned the creator in the DoI it was IMHO a white lie in context, because the creator they were talking about was likely not the one from the bible. Standing against the king was indeed standing against the old fashion creator(s); being mostly Deists, the founding fathers deduced that no creator that was just would condemn the ones that revolted against thousands of years of tradition when there was justification (here one pauses to realize no creator bothered to tell hundreds of generations that they were doing it wrong), because they saw the king was fighting for untruth, injustice and the [del]nazi[/del] British way.
So the revolution in America saw that besides the many restrictions an official religion wrought to a nation, they noticed that mainstream religions constantly told people it was the will of god to have a king, the revolution in essence was saying in the DoI that: “A true creator would not tell humans what rulers they should get!” AFAICR the revolution had a hard time getting popular support, and one big reason for it was the old time religion it seems.
But it was then time for something new, and so subversive that even today the old time religions continue to try and twist and attempt to turn the constitution to their liking.
Happily, it is hard to do that to a constitution were laws don’t depend from a higher power for being so.
Too bad it didn’t take. The only real effect it had was to confirm my realization that I didn’t really need a shellback card. And I think I threw away the Bluenose certificate when that got passed out.
Had I anticipated ebay, however, I might have hung onto it.
The last statement goes too far. Even if if I am correct, and even if you consider it a religious-type test (which I disagree with) it would still allow many many millions of minority religions to hold office. Anyone who believed in monotheism.
And I am not trying to impose my personal view. I am exploring what I see as inconsistencies via the founders. We all make judgements about what they intended, even what specific passages in The Constitution mean. Even Supreme Court members have had and will continue to have debates over this. There is the matter that what they decide (rarely unanimously, I’ll add) is the law of the land. And that’s fine as far as how we need to act. But it doesn’t mean we need to stop thiinking, discussing, and debating. Not to me, anyway.
Philosophical debates are not personal. If you get that angry, maybe you should pass on those that might tend to rile you so much. Seriously. No snark intended. It’s just a debate board.
Yet you felt the need to type it. Interesting. Thank you for your substantive contribution to the debate. Now I’ll wait now for your zinging response followed by you making yourself invisible again.
