this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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It's not the government's place to fund religious activity.
You know the modern conception we have of 'separation of church and state' is a fairly new political innovation that wasn't historically there. Originally, there was nothing that precluded a state from adopting an official religion, if it wanted to.
Even if it is a new innovation, it's clearly a good innovation and we should stick by it.
It's good because this place is home to lots of different people and to fund a single group of them, to the exclusion of all others, would be super lame.
Good perhaps according to your political sentiments. But that’s no different than anyone who scores a point in favor of what they deem to be progressive. “Anything that goes the way I want it to is a good thing.” Hardly a principled position if one cares about freedom and liberty.
???????? What... what is your definition of "good" if not this? The only way this could possibly not be true is if you want a bad outcome, for some reason. Everyone believes the outcome they want is a good one.
Also, if you care about freedom and liberty, the government not doing religious stuff is a pretty important principle for maintaining that.
I don’t agree with most of the domestic policies in the US, but I respect freedom and liberty enough to hold to it, even when the outcomes it produces oppose my political beliefs; by 180 degrees. If you abandon the principle which says states as experiments are permitted to adopt an official religion, should they choose to follow that path, you’re not someone that cares about freedom and liberty. Full stop.
This same argument is at play even among most liberal idiots who hated Donald Trump, but still refused to condemn the western democratic values and process that put someone like him into office. They either hold to the ideal, or they’re (more plausibly) too stupid to recognize such an explicit contradiction in their own beliefs.
I respect the freedom of individuals over the freedom of states. I therefore do not believe any country should have a state religion, unless you could somehow guarantee that there were no people in the country who would disagree with and be oppressed by the state religion. I care more about the right of religious minorities to not have a religion they disagree with imposed on them than I do the "right" of the majority to impose their will on the minority.
And I don't care for representative democracy, at least not in its current form, or the laws and institutions of the US, but come on now. Do you respect every politician who comes to power legitimately in your country? Of course not. That doesn't make you a hypocrite, and the same is true for liberals. Besides, many liberals--and again, I am not a liberal--openly believe that many of the processes that led to Trump being elected (such as the electoral college, gerrymandering, first-past-the-post voting, etc.) are illegitimate. It wasn't just "Western democracy" that got Trump elected; it was a very specific sort of Western democracy that a lot of liberals would prefer to reform.
What are states compromised of if not the very individuals they’re tasked with representing? Seems to me like you’re trying to use some very tortured logic to have it both ways. If Utah voted in Mormonism as the official state religion, I certainly wouldn’t like it nor want to live there. Nor would I ‘have’ to live there. But that comes with the territory of allowing states (not the federal government), to vote in an official religion, ‘if that’s what the people vote for’. And you’re not at liberty to deny them that. Your basic rights as a citizen you’re still entitled to under federal law, and no state can take that away from you.
Now if you don’t care about representative democracy, then fine; fair enough. But don’t hide your argument behind a pretense about how a political belief you agree with supersedes the will of the population, ‘even if it were opposed by the will and dictates of the citizens and they held otherwise’, and then claim to care about the principle, even if as a counter-factual. Of course I don’t like or respect ’every’ politician, but that isn’t the point of the argument. And I think the word “reform” is doing you far too much work, in disguising the intent of liberals who in reality, would desire to remake the entire political system in their own image. Even as a pretty far right leaning conservative (though not Republican) myself, I wouldn’t desire that, even on my side of the aisle.
But like... You're still treating the rights of states as if they supersede the rights of individuals. I don't understand this. Why should the majority of people ever have the right to oppress the minority? "Just move," you say, but it's never that easy. What if you can't afford to move? What if nowhere else will take you? What if nowhere else is any better? What if you just don't want to leave behind your whole life? Why should you have to move, anyway, when the majority can just practice their religion in peace without imposing it on you at no cost to themselves?
Surely you don't believe that if 51% of the populace votes to become a Stalinist dictatorship, they should be able to impose that on the 49% who are Objectivists. Or is "might/majority makes right" genuinely your argument here?
I don't see how getting rid of some of the less democratic aspects of American democracy is "remaking the entire political system in [liberals'] own image." To put it bluntly, I think America would be more or less the same hellhole it is today even if all those reforms were implemented. The human wood chipper that is American society would still be chipping away, just maybe at a slightly slower rate.
Also, I disagree that not everyone wants to change the political landscape to match their own views. Unless you happen to think our current system is perfect, of course you want that. That's what having an opinion is. You say you don't want to remake things, but not wanting to remake things is part of your ideology. Do you see what I mean? You're kind of saying, "I actually don't want things to be the way I want them to be," which doesn't make any sense.
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits government from encouraging or promoting ("establishing") religion in any way. That's why we don't have an official religion of the United States. This means that the government may not give financial support to any religion.
And as I linked to, that’s a modern political conception we have that historically wasn’t there and was wholly unfounded.
Well it is now bub
It's not a modern concept, but that is certainly what the modern christo-fascism movement wants people to believe so that they can assert their world view that "the U.S. is a christian nation".
Yes, the establishment clause is based in respect for religion and peoples' right to have whatever relationship with their god as they see fit. However, you would have to ignore everything that Jefferson and Madison wrote on the subject wholesale to come to the conclusion that you (e- and Mr. Hamburger) have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States
Simply on the face of it the establishment clause states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". If the state funds a religious school, how is that not the state "establishing" - by the very definition of the word - a religion?
Regarding a U.S. state "historically" being able to buck the Constitution and establish a religion, you'll have to throw in ignoring the 14th amendment... unless to you "historically" & "modern" mean before & after the Civil War, in which case if you're saying that things were somehow better before the war then I've got really nothing else to say to that nonsense.