Are religious zealots driving us into Dark Ages?
By George Rice
http://www.journal-advocate.com/Stories/0,1413,120~7821~3129634,00.html
Journal-Advocate columnist

We've turned into a tribe of cannibalistic critters hardly worth being
called human. And unless you spent the last six months on a far planet, you
know that's true. But I'm not sure it is something exclusive to Colorado.
Nope, I think it is universal disease, perhaps becoming pandemic (love that
word, but it's getting tiresome). Don't know what might have caused it, but
I'll take my first shot at the electronic media.

We've become so inured to sex and violence, both vocal and physical, on
screens in our living rooms that we accept it in person. Even worse, it's
affecting the way our kids talk and act, and they'll pass it on in
elaborated form to their kids. Another dark ages in the making.

Attach this to the rapidly developing concept that the world has to be
either black or white, and we have the most confrontational society in
history. No one lives in the real 'shades of gray' world any more. Either
you're pro-life (is anyone actually anti-life?) or you're pro-abortion (is
anyone, actually?) We need absolutes in order to simplify our lives.

The choices are a lot easier if you have only two possibilities. And then
you can accuse anyone who isn't totally in your corner of being
anti-whatever you choose to call yourself. It's a lot simpler that way.

The worst offenders are those who cloak themselves in righteousness of
religion. If you're not a born-again Christian, you're just one of the
others. And if you're one of the others, born-again is something foreign
and therefore bad. People who were, in my youth, "holy rollers" became
"evangelicals." And some have found a softer euphemism in order to invade
the hallowed halls of politics and education under the banner of
"intelligent design." I can only assume that some highly paid public
relations firm arrived at this epithet. And it has apparently succeeded in
the land of Dorothy and Toto, where anything calling itself intelligent has
a good chance of success.

Now a Colorado state legislator has opened the door a tiny crack to admit
this pandemic process into our schools. I gotta say that my first
impression of her presentation was good. Education should teach fertile
minds to question. Life isn't about answers; it is about questions. But
when I looked a little closer, she's inviting those young minds to question
whether Darwin's work was science, not to question whether intelligent
design is religious theory or true science.

Marx didn't think religion was science. He called it an opiate. Again,
black or white. Man creates God in his own image. Even those claiming
atheism believe in something. One such person I know worships money and
power, and another is merely seeking to be different. Every civilized
culture since man first built his own shelter has created for itself the
deity it was most comfortable with. Some of those deities have been kindly,
some harsh. Some were/are parental, some avuncular. Some were believed to
bestow power to emperors, and some were embodied within emperors. The
latter seldom ruled long, because being a god was a very desirable job. But
every theocratic
civilization, governed more by its deity than by its secular government,
has been oppressive, demanding, and cruel.

The Dark Ages culminated in the most heinous of crimes, all in the name of
faithfully following someone's interpretation of holiness. Are we headed
that same way? Are politics becoming so imbued with religion that it will
overthrow what we call our democratic process? I cannot believe that those
who are advocating a religious basis for serving in the legislature or
judiciary would want to live in a country where someone else's religion was
the standard.

It only works if it is their way. Black or white.

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Posting and reading from alt.politics.usa.constitution OR alt.education

You are invited to check out the following:

The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm

American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm

The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html

[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]

HRSepCnS á Hampton Roads [Virginia] SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/

[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members, there are members from
all over the U.S. and a couple from overseas as well]

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. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
. . .
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
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