You really just are not reading, are you? You’re saying what artemis is saying.
Let’s try smaller words:
A politician is free to be as religious or areligious as he likes in his private life, but ideally he should leave it there and not bring it to the job.
You ARE saying it. Saying you’re not saying it doesn’t make it so. You are saying a politician when he is being a politician should be areligious, IE, share YOUR religious beliefs.
Secular =/= atheist. You said it yourself.
Atheism is a statement about the existence or lack thereof of a god. Secularism doesn’t deal with religion at all in any way. It makes no statements about the existence or lack thereof of a god, because it’s not concerned with gods at all. You can believe or not believe, it doesn’t matter in a secular society.
No, the point is that you cannot even have that conversation anywhere here. Despite being in the Bubble, a lot of people still go to church and you never know who you will be offending. People still take religion quite seriously, and trashing it is neither commonplace nor acceptable in general.
I have theological interests in general. It is spending an hour with people who really do care about ideas. We spend a good hour trying to interpret some of the more challenging stories and deriving lessons for good living. None of this is in any way dependent on belief in God. It is interesting, stimulating, and actually really useful. All of the speakers care passionately about knowledge and learning. In the private sector, this is extremely refreshing. If a Christian colleague invited me to a group like this, I would also gladly go.
I tend to skip the sessions on the efficacy of prayer, though.
Something nearly caused me to drop my cover in the last session, though. A guest speaker argued that it is impossible for atheists to have happy marriages. He further argued that any atheist that did have a happy marriage has to believe in God on some level. I was a good boy and kept my mouth shut. My colleague was shocked, as I usually do not exercise this kind of restraint. The lecturer was very learned, and I did not want to be the dick in the back of the room shouting “no true Scotsman” at him.
Not at all. But unlike you, I know what the term means - and that it is a Christian issue, not an atheist one.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I think that you have glommed onto O’Reilly’s retarded rhetoric (he wrote a fucking book called “Culture Warrior”) in order to accuse me of some sort of hive-think.
Captain Carrot used this “War on Christmas” to, correctly, illustrate the small-mindedness of Christians who don’t get their way. But you need to hold the banner up for all those right-thinkers, and accuse the opposition of persecution.
Oh, if only those mean old atheists would stop complaining because we want them to be Christians.
There is no such thing as a secular person. Secularism applies to the government, not to individual people. You can’t be a Christian at home but not one at work, it doesn’t work like that. If you aren’t a Christian at work, you aren’t one at home either.
Right but you have a standard for how someone should enact policy that completely defies human nature.
No, I know what it means. I just think your view of it is as self-serving as your assessment of what I do and do not know.
Bill O’Reilly did not invent the culture war, and it’s a commonly used term by both sides.
What about the small minded people who are pissed off that their town has a Christmas tree?
headdesk NO ONE IS SAYING POLITICIANS CANNOT BE RELIGIOUS! Got it now?
We are saying that official government actions should be religiously neutral. Justice Roberts should not be inserting religious phraseology into the official Presidential Oath of Office, but should instead recite it as it is written in the Constitution. We are saying that the so-called ‘ceremonial deism’ of inserting the phrase “under God” in the Pledge and the words "In God We Trust’ on the currency should stop. How does that equate to demanding that politicians not express their religious beliefs?
Right, but neither is trashing atheists. Would the lady in question talk trash about atheists unfettered at work? I understand your point but I am refining my point to demonstrate that there are things that are not ok at work but ok outside of work.
That’s one of the great things about Judaism, a lot of it is dedicated toward finding the summum bonnum. If I could find a Christian group like that I might go too, the repeating of Christ as though it’s an all purpose word like, Smurf or Malkovich is really irritating, for you know, aesthetic reasons. 
Well it works as a form of meditation.
LOL. I admire your restraint in this case. Though I’d want to do the same.
Just not at work.
The pledge is a propagandistic creation of itself.
As for the rest, there has been more said since the OP.
I am. I don’t care about religion except as an abstract thing to be discussed. I don’t consider myself atheist, Christian, or Jewish, despite being raised by parents of both religions. It just doesn’t matter to me.
Someone’s religion can inform their policies. I agree there’s not much you can do about that. But one needn’t be explicit. “In the name of Jesus Christ, my personal Lord and Savior, I hereby declare this waterpark open.” It’s just not necessary and marginalizes other beliefs.
Fair enough.
Says the pot talking to the kettle.
Made popular most recently by the right, specifically, old Bill.
They’re small minded. What of it?
It doesn’t make it not a valid issue – that despite your blinders has less to do with Christmas and more to do with religion in general as it applies to the separation of church and state.
People who think that a Christmas tree in public is a grevious insult are, in my opinion, fighting a dopey battle; however, it is an issue rooted in the constitution. You may or may not interpret it this way, but “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” comes mighty close to, “Hey, look at us, we’re the government and here’s a Christmas tree.” It doesn’t, however, even come near to “DON’T SAY HAPPY HOLIDAYS! SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU HEATHEN!”
I’d say it’s a largely christian nation. It’s not just “this” battle. It’s all the little battles that make people think this is actually a christian nation. It’s a nation with *a bunch of christians *in it. Huge difference.
Jack Batty The fight for ideological purity by the non-religious side on Constitutional grounds is specious to my mind. It’s saying that their non-beliefs should be enshrined higher than otehrs beliefs. It’s a cute loophole to be sure.
Well, I’m not Maeglin, but I can answer that in my part of the country, the lady in question might very well trash atheists at work - and she’d probably get away with it, too. I think this is something you’re missing, mswas; New York City is not a microcosm of the US as a whole. Much of the country is less diverse, and far less tolerant of religious diversity (heck, of diversity in general).
mswas, I disagree, obviously. And I’m sure we can go round and round on this until the electrons run out. But from my point of view, exclusion of any public religious displays is more all-encompassing than the other way around.
Secular includes everybody. Religious does not.
Why do you think I am missing it by any chance? I can’t imagine anything I’ve said that would indicate I’m missing it. I’ve travelled all around this country. I’m pretty aware of what things are like elsewhere. It’s likely I’ve been where you live.
One of the basic tenets of this courntry’s creation is that people should be free to observe whatever religion they wish, rather than the official type of church/state government that existed in England at the time. The 1st Amendment even states that: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. (Funny how that last part keeps getting left off in discussions like this.)
The intent was that people in this country should be free to express their religiosity free from government interference, and that no officially mandated church/state government be allowed. It is also obvious that allowing or presenting religious imagery (Chrismas displays, crosses, In God We Trust, etc.) in public buildings or on money is not a law establishing a religion, and is therefore not unconstitutional.
So it is perfectly obvious to anyone not vested in attempting to remove religion from all public display and discourse that this country’s founders were deeply desirous that people be free to express their religious views and opinions without government interference.
The left in this country over the last fifty or sixty years has, through liberal judicial activism, perverted the founding fathers’ original intent into meaning that no religiosity whatsoever be permitted on government grounds or in government buildings, and now that perverted intent is creeping even into language, where the left wants no religious reference whatsoever from any public official, or money, or document, or whatever.
In other words, what the left wants now is secularism as official government policy, and that flies directly in the face of both the words and the intent of the constitution.
So I submit that since what is going on now is in direct opposition to both the intent and the wording of the constitution, and is thus unconstitutional itself. Hopefully we will one day have a supreme court that will return this country to its true constitutional roots.
To those of you who feel disenfranchised by virtue of your atheism, well, that’s what you signed up for when you decided to believe as you do. You have no more right to interfere with the free expression of those who are religious, whether in goverment employ or not, than they do to require you to embrace religion yourself.
One thing that really and truly seems to me to get lost when talking about liberal ideology is the right of everyone else to think, act and behave as they wish, even if it isn’t the liberal way. The most repressive force at work in this country today is liberalism. It is intolerant of any point of view or belief not its own, and it works actively to squelch its opposition rather than attempt to live in harmony with it.
One doesn’t see members of the right actively working to force liberals to adopt their beliefs and ways. There is no movement afoot to attempt to use the constitution to force liberals to attend church or to believe in God, yet there is certainly a movement afoot to force Christians (and eventually, I suppose, all relgion - though certainly Christianity is currently what comes in for the most grief around here while certain other religions coughIslamcough either get a pass or actively defended) to remove all reference to or of their religion from publlic view - to make them second-class citizens themselves who, prohibited from the free expression of their religious beliefs as the constitution guarantees, must hide their religion from public view in the same way they’ve had to do under Communist regimes.
The nonreligious side? You seem to think all religious people are just fine with the current situation, and it’s only those pesky atheists who are causing all the problems. I rather doubt the Wiccans and other polytheists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hindus, Buddhists, Quakers, Muslims, etc. living in the United States would agree with you. Most of the legal Establishment Clause challenges in the past (particularly the ones related to religious expression in public schools) have been filed by religious people, not atheists. ‘Ceremonial Deism’ somehow doesn’t seem so ceremonial and empty of meaning when it’s not your Deity being referenced.