And there are people, like me, who think it is bad public policy but think that it does not fall afoul of the establishment clause.
The technical legal term for the concept at play here is the “Fuck-it Bucket.” Those things are technical violations of the First Amendment, they just aren’t important enough to get worked up about. And I’m an atheist, BTW.
No shit? Well, there’s a shocker…
What?
I dunno what “It” you’re talking about here, but nothing about saying that we’re talking about Christians (which I’ve said) implies that “God” means “That son of God, Jesus” (which I haven’t said).
This is a thread about the arguments for ceremonial deism. Identifying and comparing the ways of interpreting the constitution is not relevent if none of them can be rationally used to support ceremonial deism. Even if somebody mentioned them before.
Admittedly, the two arguments are interrelated. If “God” means “any old god or group of gods that you might be imagining” (which it doesn’t), then there are valid interpretations of the establishment clause that would permit congress to make laws favoring it. For example, under some interpretations, congress can make churches tax-exempt, if all churches get the exemption. (Er, for some value of “church”.) Other interpretations would say that the exemption is unconstitutional. However once you start talking about a specific god to the exclusion of other religions’ gods, the debate evaporates: it’s unconstitutional by any rational interpretation. Leaving only the interpretations used to support ceremonial deism.
It doesn’t have to constitute just one religion - if congress makes a law that respects three specific establishments of religion, they’ve made a law that respects an establishment of religion. Only if the law doesn’t respect any establishments of religion would it be clear. So this is just another red herring.
Note that I’ve just opened the door for you to start a debate on what “respecting” means. Note that I’m unlikely to be impressed with any definition that doesn’t consider favoring it over and to the exclusion of other religions like hinduism or confuscionism and pholosophies like atheism to be “respecting” it.
If you’re trying to split the hair between “the first reformed church of the holy Volvo” and “the religion practiced by the first reformed church of the holy Volvo”, you’re going to need a very fine knife indeed. And with it, you will be able to cut all meaning whatsoever out of the establisment clause.
I think we’re just talking past each other, and I can’t understand half of what you’re saying here. I’ll just note that the Supreme Court has somehow managed to define an interpretation of the constitution that allows ceremonial deism. Call them irrational if you want, but they’re the ones with the final say.
Umm, Abington Township School District v. Schempp (Madeline Murray O’Hair’s case, Murray v. Curlett, it never really got to the SCotUS, it was consolidated with Schempp) the “school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools” case was decided in 1963. A year after Engel v. Vitale, the “official school prayer and required recitation” in public schools case in 1962.
Only off by two decades, could have been worse I guess.
Ya might want to brush-up on your SoCaS case law before you make embarrassing comments about it. (For instance, both Abington v. Schempp and Engel v. Vitale had more support from theists than atheists.)
CMC fnord!
If the “(G)god([del]s[/del])” in TPoA and TNM is supposed to be all encompassing, I’m sure there’d be no complaints if we, say, rotated through a list of deities regularly, “one nation under Allah/Odin/etc”, right.
There’s plenty to chose from!
Ceremonial deism only weakens any church/state separation or anxiety thereof if we ignore the meaning of the words. “Ceremonial” is not “religious”, any more than a high school graduation is a religious observance. There are gradations along a spectrum, to be sure, there is no bright demarcation saying this is a ceremony, this is devotion. That, like so many of these things, remains wholly subjective and personal.
But I see no reason why anyone should insist that no such thing can exist, that any formal public ceremony that invokes divine favor is somehow religious. By such thought, rationality overturns reason: it is a rational argument, but hardly a reasonable one. Are we to think that the statue of Justice that so overwhelmed John Ashcroft is a religious artifact? Should lawyers wash Her feet and pray for a mistrial? Wasn’t his objection not that she was a goddess but had a kicking rack?
[quote=“Der_Trihs, post:79, topic:532253”]
In this context as in most others, "“God” clearly means the God of the Bible.
You do realize that “In God We Trust” is a late addition? And it’s ON the dollar. Nor has belief in God kept the country strong, rather the opposite; it’s held the country back in many ways.
God on the money and in the pledge has nothing to do with the founding fathers. As for corruption; given that they allowed slavery and genocide, and in many cases owned slaves, they were already vile and corrupt human beings. Not a group that should be looked up to as moral leaders.
Yeah, sure. I’m sure all the people who didn’t want someone else to ram their religion down their children’s throats “lost”.
It always was. God is not protection from corruption; God IS corruption. God is a self indulgent fantasy and nothing more. The corrupt, greedy people you complain about are typically believers, like most of the population. Far from making them less greedy, being believers means they can excuse every act they make with “God wants me to do it”. God isn’t going to correct them, because he doesn’t exist.
God, as a power higher then ourselves protects us from ourselves. We are all supposed to be equals and be treated fairly. Our government was set up to give us a free society where we the people can vote and elect people of our choice to serve. God gave us free will and God is not corruption. People we elected may be corrupt or have the countries best interest at heart.
I’d like to know who these greedy believers are I complain about? We have free will and it would be very wrong to say, God made me do anything. It is just as easy to say, The devil made me do it. I don’t understand your point?
Devil made me do it the first time, after that, pretty much my own idea.
Don’t forget in this discussion that under freedom of religion, saying the pledge is optional.
+1. Your post is so sensible that the debate in this thread cannot touch upon it. Current jurisprudence has, as you say, come so far left that you would think that the first amendment read “Congress shall not mention religion in any way, shape, or form!”
Christianity has done everything from interfering with scientific research, to defending racism and slavery and homophobia. It’s been a plague upon the world, including America.
No, it’s the hard work of millions of people fighting prejudice, the deaths of the prejudiced over time, and a Republican President who was so awful that even a black man was considered better than more of the same. Miracles had nothing to do with it.
You think it’s OK to persecute kids and people in general for belonging to the “wrong” religion, or none? Because that’s what happened; it’s not just atheists who support the separation of church and state; it’s also all the religious people who don’t want the state used as a tool to force some other religion on them and their children.
And it’s been a good thing - to the extent it is actually enforced - because religion is a destructive force upon the world. Religion corrupts and destroys, it promotes and excuses evil and stupidity; reducing the influence of something like that means it can do less damage.
:rolleyes: Again; “In God We Trust” is a late addition to our money. It has nothing to do with the founding of the country. And saying that God is “who we answer to” is identical to saying that we answer to no one.
And as for your claim that God exists? Prove it. Prove that out of all the thousands or millions of gods humanity has fantasized about, yours just happens to be real.
Unless, of course God tells us to do otherwise; and since “God” is imaginary and has no actually opinions, that basically means “we can do whatever we like and feel righteous about it” Religion hasn’t been the force for justice and equality that you are trying to pretend; it has been the opposite. And God doesn’t protect anyone from anything.
Virtually all the greedy people you were complaining about. They, like the rest of the population are almost all believers.
Yeah, sure it is. :rolleyes: And the kids who refuse tend to be persecuted for it. That is part of the point; it singles out those who won’t go along for harassment and the occasional beating.
De minimis non curat lex (loosely, “The law does not concern itself with trifles.”)
A randy young lawyer named Rex
Had a dimunitive organ of sex.
When charged with exposure,
He replied with composure.
De minimis non curat lex
Establishing religion is not the same as establishing a religion.
Hopefully that makes it clear why it is that the government’s espousal of religious belief entails that Congress has made a law concerning an establishment of religion.
Precisely. It’s not “Congress shall make no law respecting establishment of a religion” (i.e., not setting up an Established Church), it’s an establishment of [no article present] religion" – setting up nothing that functions as a focus for religious belief.
This is obviously true if you interpret the language as narrowly as possible. On the other hand, the phrasing of “God” in both instances clearly amounts to a government sponsored monotheistic view. The fact that the majority in the US has some sort of monotheistic (instead of deist or polytheistic) view probably should not mean that the federal government takes steps to enforce or promote that view.
Personally, I don’t care either way, since I’m not a US citizen, but would I think the intent of the non-establishment clause is to prevent federal interference in religious matters as far as is practically possible, and the pledge especially is obviously a violation in that regard.
That’s really bad reasoning. The opposition to Roe is that it creates a right out of whole cloth. I don’t believe it does, and I think Roe is probably required by Griswold, but I accept the argument is out there.
The opposition to Ceremonial Deism, on the other hand, is that the court is being willfully blind. That it is coming to a decision directly contrary to that required by the constitution out of fear of unpopularity. If the Court said the Pledge was unconstitutional, and took In God We Trust off the coins, they’d probably to be consistent need to get rid of Christmas as a federal holiday, and also get rid of chaplains in the military. These things would create such a backlash that we would not have a Supreme Court in its current form.
The two situations simply aren’t comparable. Roe is (incorrectly) held up as the posterchild of judicial activism and legislating through the bench. Ceremonial Deism, on the other hand, is the Court putting its head in the sand, much as it did with Korematsu. There just isn’t a comparison to be made between the methods, even if your beliefs as to Roe are correct.
That depends. To what degree is the Declaration of Independence a founding document? If the DofI lays down the moral framework for the break from England and the formation of a new nation built upon the ideals it espouses (which I think it does), then monotheism is something that can the government can promote without establish any religion or belief system.
I think it’s the other way around. They were trying to keep the federal government from religious interference. By not having an established religion, they did that. That doesn’t mean that the government could not promote that which it feels is beneficial to the society. Also, keep in mind that some states had official religions. And that was not viewed as problematic. If you didn’t like a particular state you could move to another one.
I’m not that informed about US history, but no matter the intention, monotheism does exclude other popular religions (and atheism, but strict atheism probably wasn’t important enough to be considered at the time - deism was). You can claim that the US federal government is perfectly OK in promoting monotheism because monotheism isn’t strictly speaking a religion, but neither is Christianity or probably even Islam. The plain fact is that in promoting monotheism, the pledge is excluding multiple religious points of view (including deism, atheism and all polytheistic faiths).
I addressed most of this above, but I was careful to state all my objections as applying to the federal government only. Even though I think it’s a silly distinction to make when your states are as large as the US ones.