Why Can't We Talk Religion?

We have all heard the saying, "don't talk religion or politics" as some warning about a pending Armageddon. Why is that? Why can't we talk about some of the most important issues we face as a nation as well as the world? Why must conversations about government and religion instantly devolve into accusations of hate and name calling? Is it because we have lost, if we ever had it, the art of debate and discussion? 

Politics and religion, especially where they mix, are what I like to call passion topics. I spend a significant amount of time staying informed and trying to engage people of different views. Is that anymore frivolous than say memorizing the stats of every Yankee player for the last ten years? I would argue that it is far more important and if you are going to compare the worthiness of someone's use of time, spending time being engaged in politics is far more important than being a sports fan. 

Now generally I don't post a lot of political or atheist stuff on my wall in facebook and prefer to keep such conversations to group discussion pages but I am constantly bombarded by people sharing on their walls gems like this...

all these people bickering about God's name in the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God we Trust" on our money. Well, sorry folks...but I believe! If you don't, that is your decision, I respect that... Just don't try to even sell that to me. I won't buy it. + God Bless You!

Look at how condescending this is and how belittling it is. Notice the word, "bickering" because it is used to say that the concerns of "these people" are to be ignored as nothing more than inane bickering. So it thus starts off with, "you and your issues don't matter." Then we get some empty words, "but I believe! If you don't, that is your decision" which basically amounts to, I got my way, too bad for you if you don't like it because it's your decision to not like it.

The kicker is "Just don't try to even sell that to me. I won't buy it." because what that's essentially saying is, "I can use the government to push my beliefs on you but don't dare use the government to push yours on me." 

That was a bit of a slap in the face and I've reached a point in my life where I will no longer just let stuff like that go without challenge. Thus my reply...

Then why are you using the government to try and sell me on God? Why are you allowed to use the government to push your religious beliefs and yet I'm not? It's not as if I'm asking that "under God" be replaced with "under no gods" for I would be against that as well.

I don't have a problem with you wanting to believe or even if you want to stand on a street corner and witness to your heart's content. But when you use OUR money and OUR government to do that, I think you have crossed a line. A line BTW defined by the US Constitution.

As always, I try to be as respectful as I can and not name call but provide an alternative view that they may not have thought about. More often than not the response looks like this...

Like I said above......I respect your feelings, but don't try to sell it to me. IGWT has been all over our money for ages and it is physically not harming anybody. It is paying your bills, feeding your family, giving you a roof over your head, buying you medicine and clothes......if the govenment's money is so bad because it has those words on it, then why does it do so good and it is something we all need? Wait, don't answer that because this is not going to go on anymore. I asked you not to try to change my mind. Please respect my feelings. Take it to your own wall. Thanks.

This starts off with more hollow words of respect and then as is so frequently done by "these people" they provide misleading information such as, "IGWT has been all over our money for ages" yet it has not. The first time a law was passed by Congress mandating that IGWT be on all currency was in 1956. Prior to that it had only appeared on some coins since 1866 after a five year effort by the religious to get God onto our currency. See here for more info. 

Some 90 years after the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence and some 75 years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights we see our first official government use of IGWT and thus is not something passed down from our founding fathers. Almost a hundred years later and Congress emboldened after having placed "under God" in the pledge, once again at the urging of religious leaders, mandated that IGWT be placed on all currency, no exceptions. It wasn't long after that when "So Help Me God" was added to the end of the oaths for military service. An oath that was little changed from the time of the Revolutionary war. If the Revolutionary War soldiers didn't have to say, "So Help Me God" why do we need it today? I digress at this point. Back to the discussion....

Then there is the "and it is physically not harming anybody" which is basically the frequent claim that "no one is forced or goes to jail for not saying the Pledge." Which is absolutely immaterial in church state issues. A law need not send someone to jail or physically harm them to fall afoul of the First Amendment.  

It's at this point that one of their friends chimes in with this...

u tell them [name redacted], I'm with u all the way. ppl can believe what ever they want, I don't care. What really pisses me off is they took prayer out of our schools. They can't even say the pledge, they have taken way too far. 

Notice how it starts with the "u tell them" which is essentially rooting on the initial rude comment.  

Notice what she is really pissed off about. That they, "took prayer out of our schools." This is one that I see over and over again. It's basically a straw man argument. It's meant to set it up such that no reasonable person would agree. The reality is that the only prayer taken out of school is teacher led prayer. Kids can still pray at school as long as they don't interrupt the normal school functions. They can still pray before school, during recess, quietly at their desk, say grace before lunch, and any number of opportunities to pray without being disruptive to the school. 

The bottom line here is they are "really pissed" about a non-existent problem. Now if you saw someone that was unnecessarily pissed about something, wouldn't you want to let them know that their ire is misplaced? That's exactly what I tired to do by pointing out as I did above that only teacher led prayer has been taken out of schools. 

My replies...

to the original poster...

Let me start off by saying that this is one of my favorite subjects and I never hold any ill feelings towards those that I discuss this with.

If you mean by "ages" since 1954, that's when "under God" was added to the Pledge. It is not something that was handed down by our founding fathers like the First Amendment was or even E. Pluribus Unum (from many, one). IGWT was first mandated to be on all currency in 1956. The first time it appeared on coins was right around 1860. Almost 100 years AFTER the First Amendment.

It's not a question of the money itself being bad. It's a question of the government being bad by violating the First Amendment and the fact that so many like yourself see no problem with that. You tell me that you respect my feelings yet you advocate using the government to tell me that my religious beliefs are wrong.

I'm not trying to tell you not to believe in God. I'm not trying to take anything away from you except your special and exclusive right to use the government to tell others that they should believe as you do.

The only thing I would try to do is get you to see the inherent unfairness that results from government promoting one religious belief over another or even non-belief. How would you feel about our Pledge if it said, "one nation under Vishnu"? How about "In Satan We Trust"? Would you be OK with the government promoting those religious beliefs on OUR money?

to the second poster...

[name redacted], Public school children are still allowed to pray in school. The only prayer taken out of public schools is teacher and school led prayers. Do you really want some liberal school teacher leading your child in some liberal prayer? Any child can still pray in school as long as it doesn't interrupt class time. 

But for the sake of argument, if we were to return teacher led prayer to public schools, what prayer(s) would we return? Would you have a problem with a teacher leading a prayer from the Koran? We already know what will happen as we have the Philidaelphia Bible Riots to thank for that.

During that time all the public schools used the King James Bible to recite prayers from. The parents of the Catholic children were upset that their children were being led in prayers from the King James Bible. Houses were burned down. Churches were burned. People were killed.

The riot is also the genesis of why the Catholic church has such an extensive school system. They gave up and decided to school their own children. So while the protestant parents received free education for their children, the Catholic parents had to pay for their children's education just because they wanted to teach their own kids their own religious beliefs instead of having the government teach the majority (state) religion.

Finally, how can everyone believe what they want when the government is telling them what to believe?  

Then the real fun begins. The second poster replies with this...

No one told u ur believes are wrong. Read over the posts again. What u r saying wan't what what said. U just want to spout off at the mouth for some reason. Take your anger out to someone else. You r not wanted here. No one told u to comment on this, so keep u big mouth shut. We all have freedom of speech, so don't tell us what we can believe or what we can say. Save it for someone who gives a damn. I don't want to hear a lecture from u or anyone. Get a life and go away.

And if that wasn't enough they had to add this subsequent post to toss out one more insult...

I believe what is in my heart. Not what ppl want me to believe. So stick that where the sun doesn't shine.

Lets start off with the "No one told u ur believes are wrong." Well in fact that is exactly what has happened. When the government places "In God We Trust" on our money they are asserting a truth. Namely that as a nation, we trust in God. The government has said that it is normal to trust in God and thus not to trust in God is not normal and or wrong. So yes, in fact, the government has clearly said I'm wrong and they say it every time they place IGWT on our currency. 

Then there is the part about me not knowing "what what said" and just wanting to "spout off." First of all, I am very familiar with the English language. So much so that I don't use "believes" instead of "beliefs" but this is a common tactic by such people. Notice she hasn't addressed anything I have replied with and tries to say the words don't really mean what they mean. When words can mean anything anyone chooses, it makes communication very difficult. So that might be part of the problem with such discussions but I think it's much deeper than that. 

Then there is this, "take your anger out to someone else." This is where I truly get angry for this whole discussion started off with a slap in the face and what could be seen as an angry post yet I'm the angry one for bringing up rational points and real facts. This is yet another common tactic. 

When they say, "You r not wanted here. No one told u to comment on this" I must point out that "here" is not this person's wall but that of our mutual friend. I guess the whole facebook friend thing escapes them. But once again, this is a common tactic. They post something inflammatory and then when you have the nerve to comment on it all of a sudden they are possessive of what is not theirs. However, if you happen to be on an atheist forum and they come on to essentially troll, when people complain and request they be blocked they howl censorship. 

My favorite part is this though, "so keep u big mouth shut. We all have freedom of speech..." because it really shows what they think about things like freedom of speech and freedom of religion. What they are really saying is "I have freedom of speech, YOU don't and I don't care that you don't."

This is a conversation that I see many times. It essentially follows along these lines.

1. Christian makes inflammatory statement.
2. Atheist replies with thoughtful response.
3. Christian accuses atheist of being angry.
4. Christian tells atheist to sit down and shut up.

After step four there really isn't much to say because the Christian has demonstrated that their only intent is to share (shove) their opinion down our throat and simply walk away as if they have just revealed the truth and there is nothing more to say. They aren't interested in having their opinions challenged or having to explain their initial attack and any attempt to get them to only results in more name calling and personal attacks. 

So why can't we talk religion and politics? I think it comes down to the fact that so many people are unwilling to allow their beliefs to be challenged in any way, which is why they often respond with such viciousness. I also think that the reason they don't want their beliefs challenged is because they are simply not prepared to defend them. There is nothing worse than having to defend a concept you know very little about. Being that many of these beliefs are central to their being, defending them at all costs is a bit of a survival instinct. Unfortunately that survival instinct doesn't include keeping their rude comments to themselves.  

Why In God We Trust is so Dangerous

Jacksonville, Florida has given us our most recent example why the separation of church and state is so important. After the Mayor of Jacksonville nominated a Muslim professor, Parvez Ahmed, to the city's Human Rights Commission some of the city council members had issues not with his human rights record but with his religious record. 

During a city council meeting which of course started with a Christian prayer, Professor Ahmed was asked to come up and pray to his god.  Before you ask, "is that it?" as if that isn't enough, he was given a questionnaire.

The campaign to deny Ahmed confirmation heated up a couple of weeks ago when one of First Baptist’s members of the Council, Clay Yarborough, sent a questionnaire to Ahmed (and another nominee) soliciting views on such topics as gay rights and the appropriateness of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and on money. There had never been such a questionnaire for nominees before, and the questions had no obvious connection to the role of a commissioner.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/2523/pray_to_your_god_for_us:_christians_on_jacksonville_city_council_stir_anti-muslim_sentiments_

Can you imagine how belittling it would be to be asked to show how you pray like some carnival side show? What business is it of the city council? Did they think it would be embarrassing for Amahd should he throw down a prayer rug and start reciting prayers from the Koran? Or were they only curious about how "they" do it?  

Now why do you think Councilman Yarborough asked about "under god" and IGWT? It's because he can point to that as proof that this is a Christian nation that our government is founded on Christian principles and thus Christians are the preferred citizen. It is evident when Councilman Yarborough "admitted in interviews that he wasn’t sure Muslims (or gays and lesbians) should hold public office and that while prayers should “absolutely” be allowed in public buildings, only prayers said in the “name of Jesus Christ” are appropriate."

That pretty much ends the argument about what god "under God" and IGWT refers to. It also makes their justifications that "it can be any god" ring completely hollow. They are empty words to trick us into allowing them to continue to exercise special rights that are denied to non-Christians.  

I have long echoed the notion that our Constitution won't die from a single mortal blow but rather by numerous seemingly insignificant wounds. When "under God" was added, it invited IGWT onto our money which invited "So Help Me God" to be added to our military oaths, which invited the Office of Faith Based Initiatives and now an openly religious test to hold office all justified by every single "minor" transgression that came before. 

When Sarah Palin says our laws are based on the Ten Commandments and the Bible and questions the existence of the wall of separation between church and state and goes almost completely unchallenged it continues to build on the credibility that this is a Christian nation and that our laws should be based on the Bible. 

The fact that someone like Palin isn't run out of town on a rail for saying something so ludicrous is evidence that there are a lot of people that believe her. In other words, she isn't completely out of the main stream, unfortunately. 

We really only have two choices at this point. Continue to allow this slide toward a full blown theocracy where the laws are in fact based on the Bible or we must put the bricks back in the wall of separation that we have allowed to be removed.  

What Exactly is Big Government?

Much of the debate about government today is about how it is too big and how big government is bad. Yet, what exactly is big government? Is it the number of government employees? Is it the amount of money spent? Is it the number of agencies? Is it the number of laws on the books? 

I also often hear the claim, "government was much smaller than it used to be..." and my first reaction is that the population was smaller as well. In 1790 there were 3.9 million people in the US. By 1900 there were 76 million and now there are more than 300 million. 

Therefore it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the size of government in 1790 was much smaller than it is today. With a smaller population there is less interaction and promoting the general welfare doesn't take much effort. Like comparing a small town with a large city, it doesn't make sense because of course the large city is going to have a much larger government than the small town.

The only reason that we argue over big government versus small government is because those that are arguing small government really have no argument at all. The size of government is directly proportional to the task at hand. At least it should be. Often times the government is too small to accomplish a desired goal and other times it's much too large and is over resourced to the task at hand. 

We shouldn't be arguing size of government except in terms of the needed resources to accomplish a given task or goal.  Take your state's DMV offices. The complaints are endless about how long we must wait to renew our drivers license or vehicle registration. Yet you never hear someone say, "I don't want to have to wait so long so I'm going to advocate higher registration fees so that we can have a bigger government to handle the demand thus reducing wait times at the DMV." 

Why is that? Why don't people make that connection? I mean it's one thing to say, "man I spent so much time today at the DMV but that's all right, I'd rather wait than pay a higher fee" and quite another to simply complain about how long it takes at the DMV and how big government can't do anything right.

The problem isn't simply big bad government, it's because the government isn't big enough. For example, it isn't enough to just reduce the paperwork overhead of each interaction but at some point you are going to hit a minimum interaction time just for the time it takes to say, "hello" and "show me your paperwork." 

That's not to say that I'm not interested in reducing red tape where it's possible but the fact of the matter is, there is a certain amount of time it takes that can't ever be reduced or eliminated. There are almost always opportunities to make something more effective and effective government is what we should be debating, not big government versus small government. 

Unless one is going to argue that no government is good, in which case they should be ejected from the discussion, the question we should be asking is, is government effective? We have plenty of data to determine where government is effective or not and we shouldn't be afraid to use it.

Sid Eschenbach has an excellent blog covering several of these points but his overall message is that the economic theory pushed by Republicans over the last 30 years has been throughly debunked by the data. We can see that the tax policy they have been pushing has not been effective. At least in so far as tax policy should benefit everyone and not just a few. 

When we look at the crash of 2008, was government effective in preventing it? Did the SEC do its job? Clearly they did not and clearly the Congress and the White House did not. One would be hard pressed to call their actions or lack thereof, effective. 

Let's start talking about how effective government is being. Are they getting too many or too few resources to accomplish an agreed upon goal? That way we can start looking at what we want to do and what it will cost us. Imagine if George Bush had said, "I think we need to invade Iraq and this is what it is going to cost us and we will have to raise taxes to cover it", what would the debate have been like then? Would we have been so quick to press our military into action?  

What about the health care debate? All we heard was, "big government takeover" and  "they will just screw it up." Never mind that if big government can do a better job than what we have now then why not have a big government takeover of health care? How do you know they will screw it up? There is plenty of evidence that government can in fact be beneficial and not screw it up. 

The next time someone starts complaining about big government, ask them exactly what they mean by big government and how do you define when government transitions from small government to big government? When you have to answer those questions it forces you to think about the effectiveness of government for how do you know how many people to employ if you don't know how effective the existing people are? How do you know how much is appropriate to spend if you don't know how effective your current spending is?

Too many people want to spend time at the bumper sticker level of debate and you will never get any answers from them for questions about what exactly they mean by big government. Ultimately they have nothing to offer in an adult discussion however, you may find a few that start to realize that it's not about big or small government but simply effective government and the more people that understand that, the greater the likelihood we actually get effective government.   

    

We are the Government

The very first words of the Constitution are, "We the People" in big bold letters. With those three words our founding fathers declared where the authority of the government is derived. For the first time in the history of mankind our founding fathers declared that the authority of government does not come from any god, king, or potentate but by the consent of the governed, We the People.

Therefore it strikes me as strange when people say things like the government is evil or they are all crooks because the crooks come from us and we put those crooks there and if the government is evil it is because We the People are evil. It's not as if we import our politicians and they are appointed by some far off king. 

Losing an election is not grounds to "take our country back" because it wasn't taken from you in the first place. You just lost. That's all. Nothing more. That's what democracy and elections are about. The guy with the best ideas wins. Or at least that is how it should be. 

When Obama declares that there won't be a presidential election in 2012, then you can start talking about tyrants and tyranny. Until then it's really just tin-foil hat talk and anyone that espouses such nonsense should be chased away from the public square. We do not let children into the debate and we shouldn't let these people into the debate for the same reason.  

Only about 40-60% of the eligible voters in this country actually vote. With such a lack of participation by We the People and with so many unable to articulate exactly what the government should be doing, is it any surprise that without guidance from We the People that politicians would do what they want instead of what we want them to do?

How are they to know if we don't tell them? How are they to know if they are left to continue to hold their office? In other words, without any accountability at the ballot box should we expect them to act as though they are accountable to the voters? Well they are. They are accountable to the fringe that ends up with disproportionate influence because they fill the void left by all those that don't vote.

If we want to return to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, all of them and not just the radical fringe and corporate interests, we need get out there and not only vote but vote smart. Know what your representatives are doing and vote accordingly. Don't just vote for D's or R's. Vote for the politicians that listen to their constituents and do their bidding.

They work for us but like employees who are not supervised and end up playing solitaire all day on their computer, we must closely supervise our representatives to make sure they are in fact working for us all.