Want Your Religious Ideas Put into Government? You May be Sorry
They never seen to consider the consequences of inviting government into religion. It's as if they are telling themselves, "We are so holy. It's good for us to use government against our enemies. They will never have the opportunity to use government against us." Good luck with that.
Christians in Scotland are so mad. The government is paying for a campaign against ideas held by many branches of Christianity. These Christians would have been better off just bragging about their own mighty moral standards and leaving everyone else to decide on theirs.
The government is sponsoring ads addressed to people who are prejudiced against ethnic minorities, atheists and gays. The ads tell such people Scotland is a country that does not endorse prejudice. The Christian faith, or parts of it, is the target.
Religious people often claim their ideas about gays and abortion are not religious. And, they say, laws making abortion more expensive and difficult to obtain is different than endorsing a religion which they know is unconstitutional. Government can make it clear which religion is approved and which not approved without endorsing either. It can do this by marketing one and discouraging another.
That exactly is what is happening in Scotland. Christians are inviting that kind of retaliation here when they push their views into government.
There you go, once again. Anyone who challenges your super moralistic views on gay rights and abortion is advancing a "religious" viewpoint and must, therefore, be ruled out of order, tout court. Or to put it another way, "religion" has no place -- absolutely no place -- in public policy making, a position that would be quite acceptable to anyone with a Bolshevik mentality. And besides you get to decide what is "religious" and what is not, what is to be suppressed and what is acceptable. Does it ever occur to you that your take on public policy issues (homosexuality and abortion in particular) is as moralistic (religious if you will) as any morality that you condemn in those who oppose you. In other words, you have a self righteous morality which you think is superior to Christian morality. Ironically, tho' it turns out that your morality is clearly a kind of derivative Christian morality, albeit taken out of context and absolutized into a leftist ideology. My advice, then, remember that when one plays with swords, one should be cautious, remembering that most swords have two edges, cutting both ways.
ReplyDeleteHi "Unknown", thanks for the comment. --If I did not publish an earlier comment of yours I'm making amends here. I sometimes don't publish rants about me because they can be simply shooting the messenger. Your allegation that I want my moral views to prevail instead of those of the Christian right is an interesting take and probably probably will be seen by many as having some validity. I see my views as simply differentiating between what rules are workable, functional and in the best interests of the broader society and those that are not. Outlawing abortion outlaws the ability, to a degree, of women to time the births of their children. Also, making abortion murder will make women into suspects whenever they have miscarriages. Thus, I find outlawing abortion to be unworkable. I don't see unworkable as a moral issue but you may disagree. There is something similar in gay marriage. We need the highest contributions to the public good we can achieve from every citizen. Taking away rights from a group of citizens reduces what we all receive from them. I guess it was "workable" to withhold equal opportunity from black citizens and withhold the right to vote from women, our country survived. But, the general public was the worse for these religious based laws.
Deleteno doubt about it, you have a morality, a set of assumptions about what is objectively right and what is objectively wrong. call it pragmatic, utilitarian or whatever, it is still a moral/ethical worldview. remember the old fashioned sticky fly paper: stuck to you no matter what. morality is the same: everybody is stuck with some moral code, like it or not. BTW I don't consider my posts as "rants".
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