No, and they don’t know it’s Christmas, either.
Theism was created by atheists, too. Spooky. :eek:
I’m confused on how countries with state religions can really be called secular states.
Jokes have to have an element of truth in them to be funny. 
I’m sorry if it bothers people, but secularism wasn’t intended to have anything to do with atheism, it was meant to manage states with a plurality of religious beliefs. Freemasons had more to do with the rise of secularism than atheists, unfortunately. 
Which country with a state religion did I call a secular state.
really? Find me one and lets see.
Let’s see, you can slide by with the EU thanks to the use of ‘most’
The U.K. (Anglican)
Denmark (Lutheran)
Cyprus (E. Orthidox)
but “Every Country in North and South America” should include these states:
Argentina (Roman Catholic)
Bolivia (RC)
Costa Rica (RC)
El Salvadore (RC)
and even then, many countries like Luxembourg recognize certain religions as officially-mandated or what have you.
Ok: the US. The US is pretty much a secular state, and unlike the many states with state religions, religious beliefs here are vibrant and flourishing (as well as people lacking religious belief being mostly free from persecution and able to speak out).
You wouldn’t think so based on the threads in GD. But he wasn’t talking about partly secular countries, but secular.
So if you think the US is such a free and vibrant country, then I guess it’s not bad that religion mixes with government on some level?
I think you are probably misreading/misrepresenting them then.
Nobodies perfect. The US is close enough for the principle to matter.
No, it’s not THAT bad: precisely because the mixes are so minor and trivial. That doesn’t mean that they are good things, and there are people trying to make them less so, and this is a bad idea.
It’s called voting. The US is completely secular. As it is a democracy with a majority of Christian shareholders, it’s voters affect its character. I am sorry if some find the enfranchisement of millions to be ‘unfortunate’, but that is our system.
Overwhelmingly white, too. You cool with bringing back Jim Crow laws?
That a majority of “shareholders” favor something is a separate issue from whether it is inherently right, or just.
In the US, secularism isn’t up for a vote, at least not an ordinary one. It’s the framework of the constitution, and thus pretty secure. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be under threat though, which is why its worth arguing that we not put it at threat.
You people like putting words in people’s mouths don’t you?
Basically how I see it is like this. I figure our system is pretty balanced.
I go on a Christian message board and it’s godless atheists and hedonists with their secularism threatening the very fabric of our civilization.
I come here and hear from a bunch of atheists about how the religious are about to take over and are threatening the very fabric of our civilization.
Sounds like status quo to me.
Switch Dob’s point around. How about we look at how good secularism is by looking at the least secular countries?
mswas - status quo? Really? I mean, you yourself have pointed out the Christian majority in the U.S… I’d be right with you in saying there’s similar levels of bile from both religious and irreligious types, but how many atheist-demonzing Christians are there vs. Christian-demonizing atheists?
You have a very interesting- and self-centered- definition of “balanced”.
So have you figured out what the subject of this thread is yet?
Are you still bemused that people write books talking about stuff?
Thinking about it further, mswas - what exactly are your beliefs? I’ve seen a few posts saying what you don’t believe, but i’d be interested to know if you could narrow it down a bit.
I’m a Deist. For me the question is not whether or not God exists, but what God is exactly and the implications of such a being in my life.
My relationship to such a being has for me, profound impact on my moral growth. As I work to understand what or who God is, I learn more about how to see things from a greater level of universality. In otherwords, not judging things based solely upon how they fulfill my native hungers in the short term.
I think that there must be a sort of higher intelligence intrinsic to all existence. Not as a sort of irreducible complexity argument, but as an integral part of the process. Something about the way the rules of the universe are setup that opposite entropy is a conscious force called Life that tends toward unity as entropy tends toward dispersal. That consciousness is integral to life, and to the patterning, that without an observer nothing in the universe would even have shape or form, because the lack of an observer makes the shape or form irrelevant. Earth is a planet because we have defined it as a planet. It is part of the solar system, and if we were looking at the solar system in a different way, we might consider separating the Earth into a discreet entity as patently ludicrous, however, as we have chosen to define it that way, we have locked ourselves into accepting certain properties of the Earth, thereby allowing ourselves to manipulate those properties in order to remake it in an image that is more useful.
I do not know enough about biology, I’m working on it, I’m taking a Neurology class right now, and intend to explore it much further, because I want to see how intelligence and matter interact. The medium of emotion fascinates me the most because it seems to be the place where material stimuli interacts with subjective intelligence, it’s a realm of partial control. The control of emotion seems to be the keystone of every mystical path I have perused. The greater one can control their emotion, ie, how their nervous system integrates external stimuli into the intelligent working of the system, the greater power an individual has over their immediate surroundings through an increased awareness and a higher level of efficient movement.
The level where information and matter meet is quite fascinating to me. In a way my views are kind of like the inverse of what I see as the atheist norm here. I am not trying to make a statement that applies to all atheists, only a cross-section that I have noticed. What I see is that they believe that minds are contained by individuals that observe the gross material outside. I see the universe itself as a great mind, and I myself as something akin to a nerve impulse or an information packet. When I walk down the streets of New York, I imagine myself as an impulse traveling down a nerve in a greater organism, ie the city, which is itself a ganglion in a large portion of the nervous system called the state, the state is a section of the greater nervous system called the world, the world is part of the solar system, the solar system part of the Galaxy and well, I don’t know much about organizing principles at levels higher than Galaxy Clusters.
I am working to develop a sort of theology for the information age. The word God for me is the supreme being or the aggregate of all intelligence. For instance, in this discussion we are creating a synergy of intelligent communication that creates a greater level of information than either of us is aware. You and I can communicate something directly to one another, but then it ripples out based on who else is reading this communication, if you or I relate it to our spouse or a friend, whether or not it affects that friend enough to relate it to another friend and so on. This greater synergy of informational awareness, leads me to define the conglomeration of users as an aggregated system that is a greater being.
Perhaps the word ‘Extelligence’ is better than ‘Intelligence’ for what I am describing.
We could also compare the number of Southern Baptist churches vs. the number of atheist meeting places, or the number of religious programs(or stations) on radio and television that condemn atheists on a semi-regular basis vs. programs by and for atheists, or the number of state and federal congressmen and women who profess to be Christian vs. those that are openly atheist.
I think most cries of persecution are the bleating of paranoid sheep. I hear the same manner of bleating from both sides and it appears ridiculously ludicrous to me in all cases. The Christian Right has been proven to be far less influential than anyone thought they were over the past couple of years as scandal after scandal rocked the Republican power structure. I haven’t heard of an atheist being dragged behind a truck. Kids are openly gay in High School and aren’t getting beaten up, that’s an improvement over even ten years ago when I was in High School. No one is kicking in the doors of Christian churches to stop them from worshipping.
Basically, I see it as a sort of S&M relationship between two groups of extreme paranoids that thinks the other side is plotting to get them. The majority of this country is Christian, but the thing people seem to forget is that the secularism that was built into the Constitution was put there by a bunch of Deists and Christians, to protect religious freedom for Christians to make sure that no unified church would rise up and start squashing the other ‘heresies’. A lot of Christians realize that they have as much stake in the government remaining secular as Atheists do.
Too much stock is put into these things. We talk about ‘Christian’ politicians, but lets be honest, most of these guys are opportunists. They glom onto a social establishment and use it to advance their careers. Stephen Colbert had a congressman on who wanted to put the ten commandments in the Capital, and Colbert asked him, “What are the Ten Commandments?”, the guy couldn’t think of a single one.
So people vote in blocs, so what? It’s nothing new. Most Christians are just doing it because it’s the social order that they know. They get caught up in the gestalt of some sort of values issue once in a while, it’s cathartic, but not too many evangelicals are really thinking too terribly deeply about what they believe in. Meanwhile you have atheists who think they are smarter, but really aren’t, judging all religious people by the lack of intellectual life in the Evangelical community. It’s a big circle jerk.
Most people do very little thinking, on any side of an issue. Demagogues get people to move in herds. It’s nothing new. Our secular democracy is not under threat from that at all. The real threat to our secular democracy is Kleptocrats like the Neocons who are looting the treasury to finance their private wars. It has very little to do with actual religion, and everything do with the dominion of the state. Bush got elected by appealing to the masses lower natures, but it’s about dollar hegemony, not spreading the Christian faith.
I think if more atheists were as smart as they think they are, they’d be encouraging Christians to be better Christians, because what they are complaining about mostly is that a lot of people are mindless barbarians.
The irony of it all is that the seperation of Church and State was essentially invented by Jesus Christ.
Wait, we’re supposed to proselytize now?
Crap, I’m already behind on my quota of converting straight guys into nellies, now I’ve gotta convert Theists too?
I damned sure want more than a lousy toaster for this…
</tongue firmly planted in cheek>