The increase of secularism and why it's bad · 10:43pm Apr 8th, 2016
There have been a lot of court cases over the past couple of decades, as well as run-ins and incidents in schools, that concern the fact that, everywhere, religion is being made to "be quiet" in public. People are charged with discrimination in court just because they, being private business owners, refuse to make cakes or other baked goods for... festivities that they cannot conscientiously approve of, even though they referred the customer(s) to another store that would sell to them (Links here and hereand here). Student face trouble in schools when they try to create Christian clubs and organizations; a number of people were told that they needed to receive "rehabilitation" when they said that they could not accept things like homosexuality, with the threat of their being expelled, if not from the school, then from the program, if they refused (Link here). Pharmacists who refuse to stock Plan B (a medicine that allows abortion to take place) face losing their jobs(Link here).
All this and more the secularists, ACLU, and others tell us is done regarding the so-called "separation of church and state," and they have the gall to commit these courtroom atrocities in the name of "progress," calling themselves progressives.
First off, separation of church and state is not in the Constitution. You won't find that phrase there. Thomas Jefferson wrote them in a letter to a Baptist convention in 1802, in which he was promising, in opposition to what modern groups claim the term means, protection from government interference in religion. The first amendment does promise that Congress will not establish a religion through law, nor will it prohibit the free exercise of religion. Yet our society is drifting swiftly away from it, believing in the "morality" of doing whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and because Christianity comes with a Creator and a code that condemns immoral behavior, it is under fire in the media and the courts. Secularism says that people can make their own moral codes; given how many crimes are committed in a day and how many lies are told and how many people suffer at the hands of others, whether in subtle or overt manner, as well as how many other clearly evil things are done, I'd say that that philosophy is fundamentally flawed, no pun intended.
Another thing that eats away at the moral fabric (assuming that it even exists or ever did) of our country is the fact that, although Muslims get places in schools for prayer and students, Muslim or not, get assignments made regarding Islam, (Link here) Christians aren't allowed to form clubs in schools that are religious, or practice their faith in a way that conflicts with the no-morality principles of today's society. Anything that opposes the secular system - which some would say is just atheism veiled - is attacked. And no, I am not attacking Islam here, just the hypocrisy involved in the case above and others. If Islam gets a special place in a school, Christianity should as well.
These are the reasons, among others, that I oppose secularism, and its results.
None of this is grounds for hate. I do not intend for this to be a hate page. We are still called to love our enemies, and that's what we must do. Part of that love involves trying to correct what is being done wrong. Jesus, when he encountered sinners, forgave those who were willing to change; His message to those who were doing wrong was to stop (as per the story of the adulteress in John 8:1-12 and that of the blind man in John 5:14). Some won't listen, and it can be hard to stick up for what we believe. However, the eternal rewards are worth it through love and faith in Jesus Christ; it is through Him that we should try to make a change, and not through our own pride and self-righteousness.
I hope you all have a great day, and please be respectful to one another in the comment section below.
Politics...it's always politics.
At least we've still got a Christian majority. I think I saw somewhere that only 5-10% of Europeans go to church regularly.
I agree with this. Although I don't believe we are called to love everyone, as I've mentioned before. But I don't really think neither you or me want to go through that dispute over again.
Cheers mate! Keep on doing what your doing!
3857839 Thanks!
3857811 I hope its not that bad. Still, thanks for being here and taking the time to respond
3857858
Yw.
I always love to talk anything and everything Christian.
Life is but a game. A game that unless you know how to play it, or how not to be played. You are a pawn.
S.W.B.
3858156 Check to your king
3858222
I sacrifice my pope, you make your move taking it, I use my knight to attack and take your(what ever it is) out.
S.W.B.
3858241 Heh heh
Here we go! Big post, this kind of thing occasionally catches my interest.
1. The Wedding Cake
In what way is refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple legally distinct from refusing to make a sandwich for a black man at a diner? A short search yielded an article I think sheds valuable light on the situation, including another cake legal case where the religious side won. I hope you will appreciate the difference between the two situations even if you don't agree with me and the courts that that is the right place to draw the line.
2. Clubs
Students should be free to socialize among themselves on their own time; but if they want to form officially sanctioned groups under the school's banner I think it's reasonable that the school be able to have some kind of control over what those groups promote and do.
3. "Rehabilitation"
I admit I only looked at this for a brief time, but it seems to me that in this particular case the authorities running the program were concerned that her religiously derived opinions about homosexuality etc. would impede her ability to help certain people with the counseling that she clearly wanted to pursue a career in. If she opened a clinic and some depressed homosexual came to her and she said "you're depressed because you know deep down that God doesn't like it when guys do it with guys" that is not likely to help the patient. Do I misunderstand the particulars of this case? This doesn't appear at a glance to be a clear black and white situation either way in my opinion but certainly I don't think the "secularist" position is indefensible here.
4. Separation of church and state
I will admit that people who use that private letter as ironclad ipso facto proof of complete commitment of the Founding Fathers to utter secularism are overdoing it. But this does not mean that the intent was only to restrict government meddling in religion and not religion meddling in government. For instance, James Madison in 1819 referred to "total separation of the church from the State". (Some at the time the Constitution was written saw the amendment as only limiting the federal government and not the various states, and that restricting the states from meddling in religion would result in "universal indignation"; however, one must keep in mind that the states were far more independent and the federal government far more narrow in scope at the time, and in any case if I'm not mistaken the 14th amendment now has stretched those restraints to the state level as well.) I think the 1878 Supreme Court got it right when they said "Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order." In this case, social duties and good order has been deemed to include whites letting blacks into restaurants as well as bakeries making cakes for straights, gays, and transsexual anniversaries.
5. World is going to hell in a handbasket and it's all the fault of secular atheists.
I think trying to engage on this point in addition to the others would be over-stretching. Maybe if we get to agreement or otherwise finish on the other points and still have energy for more...
6. Islam in schools but Christianity still getting cold shoulder.
I am pretty sure that this isolated case (of a program meant to educate children about the culture of early Islam doing so inappropriately but with no intent to convert anyone or promote Islam as a religion) does not point to a general trend of Islam being favored over Christianity in schools or elsewhere. I agree that neither Islam nor Christianity should be promoted by schools, though teaching about the historical significance, impact, and importance of both of them as well as other religions is good. It would be idiotic to ignore the historical importance of religion when teaching children about world history, just as it would be foolish to ignore the historical importance of evolution when teaching children about biology.
Oh, forgot the Plan B one. In that case, apparently it's on a list of standard medications that the state of Washington has decreed should be easily available to patients in need and that anyone who wants to style themselves dispensers of medications to people in need has to be able to dole out the stuff on the list. The argument that "they can just go to the pharmacy around the corner and not bother us good Christians" is undercut by this excerpt:
If you want to sell books, you don't have to carry 50 Shades of Gray. If you want to sell prescriptions in the state of Washington, you do have to carry Plan B. There are plenty of regulated industries in this nation and this is a regulation I think is appropriate in the context of people might really need it. In some cases, sure, there might be ten pharmacies within walking distance and you could just go to the hippie two blocks away from the Jehovah's Witness. But in other cases it might be fifty miles to the next one and you don't own a car and the pharmacist doesn't believe in vaccination. It's a public health issue and a public good issue.
3862308 I suppose we disagree. On the first point, I found a couple paragraphs that highlight the issue;
I think that sums up my outrage on point 1. I do not believe that the message in the first case was derogatory or discriminatory, merely a protestation of truth. I am not against blacks being treated the same as whites; that should be a given anyway. I am in opposition to a practice that I believe to be morally wrong.
On point 2, my point is tied to point 6; Christian groups are not allowed where Islam is given a free hand. Even if it is limited at the moment, I worry that such a practice will spread, and if it does, then the idea of freedom of religion will be proven to be the dead letter that it already is, or, if it is not, soon will be.
On point 3, I believe it was well implied that the girl in question would have her Christian beliefs challenged, ridiculed, or rebuked by those she would have been taught or counseled by. That's what I was getting, anyhow. As I said in the original post, this is not a thread that supports hatred of gay people, but one that opposes the practice of homosexuality.
Point 4; True, this should be a land where freedom of religion is allowed, and where true discrimination is not allowed, but that should never mean freedom from religion. George Washington made sure his soldiers had bibles and wrote an order saying that it would be folly for the Americans to insult God by their impiety; Abraham Lincoln and many abolitionists were men of deep and abiding faith, as was the hero of civil liberties, Martin Luther King Jr, who was an ordained minister and was the father of the Civil Rights movement that won equal rights for blacks.
Point 5 is something that I see going on and getting worse.
In regards to plan B, I don't think abortion should be legal in the first place. If allowed to grow and ultimately be born, a fertilized egg will become a human child, baring genetic defects and sickness. Abortion is murder of a living being that has every potential to become a brilliant child, eventually adult, with the ability to change the world. I have no idea how many brilliant scientists, philologists, songwriters, artists and others were erased from a promising life of existence because of abortion.
As for evolution, that theory has only been around for somewhat over a hundred years; I must point out the irony that the Earth has gone from 6,000 to 4.5 billion years old in the space of a little over a century. Just because "everyone" believes it doesn't make it true, and it should not be assumed by archeologists, geologists or anyone that evolution is true when they go to inspect the case. "Everyone" used to believe in the geocentric theory (Earth-centered universe) as well as the phlogiston theory (the idea that all combustible materials contained the ultimately fictional substance phlogiston); both were proven wrong. There are also a sizable number of scientists who, based on the facts they are confronted with, reject evolution for creationism, including Henry M. Morris, and many others in ages past, including Samuel Morse and Lord William Kelvin, who rejected evolution and were successful scientists and whose inventions and patents are either used today or were blueprints for even better things that later scientists perfected.
Anyway, to finish off, I respectfully disagree with most of what you've said, but I in no way despise you for pointing it out. I hope this changes your mind, and if it doesn't, well, I tried. I hope you have a good day
I'm glad we can have this civil discussion. I think we made some headway on quite a few of these points already!
1. I'm not sure I understand. Are you suggesting that it is impossible for it to be derogatory or discriminatory as long it is a Bible verse? Something can be derogatory even if true, you know; I'm sure a bakery could have a policy that would let it refuse to put "Dennis Hastert is a child molester" on a cake. Also, more importantly, how is refusing to make a cake for a gay couple different from refusing to make a sandwich for a black man? Or a baker refusing to bake a wedding cake for a mixed-race couple because of his objections to miscegenation? You didn't really address the question I originally posed as far as I can see. Although perhaps you have no disagreement with the second ruling; is that the case?
2. I think there is more freedom for Christian groups than for Muslims and other minority religions in this country generally. There are abuses against both (all) sides, mostly from incompetence and very few from malice I believe. Since Christians are still a comfortable majority in this country, it stands to reason that there are more Christian idiots to mess up in this sort of way (just based on odds). Perhaps you think the opposite because your attention has been drawn to where Christians have been wronged and not to the other cases. I don't really have a horse in the race personally. I will definitely agree with you that the discouragement of personal religious expression that is neither disrupting classes nor corrupting the school's neutrality is bad and should be stopped. (For instance, students should be allowed a moment of prayer before taking a test if they want to, whereas teachers leading students in prayer would be improper.)
3. We clearly have different ideas about what exactly that student was facing. I suppose we could still discuss, if you want, what would and would not be appropriate to do; I think I would agree about it being wrong to do to her what you think they were proposing to do, while disagreeing that they actually wanted to do it.
4. The sticking point here, I think, is what is meant by "free from religion". People should certainly not be stripped of their religion. However, the government should not favor one religion over another; this inevitably leads to not favoring religion over non-religion, for how could you equally favor Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, the Greek pantheon, Hinduism, Shintoism, and all the rest except by being neutral to all? If the government has no place in putting one religion over another, it has no place promoting religion at all; in light of this, agents and agencies of the government should observe that restraint when acting in their official capacity. Do you disagree with that analysis? But government being free from religion in the sense that it does not affiliate itself with or promote any religion doesn't mean that our nation has to be free from religion or that our people have to be free from religion, including the people who make up the government.
7. (Plan B/Abortion) If we finish our unresolved prior points I would be willing to get into whether a blastocyst is a person. Setting aside that issue, you appear to have not given any objection to my defense of the Plan B rule as a legitimate government interest if you presuppose that abortifacents are legal. It is unfortunate if there are some people (some of whom happen to be Christians) who must quit their jobs as a result of following their conscience, but that doesn't make it an illegitimate act of government or religious discrimination, just like the troubles breweries faced during the Prohibition (of alcohol in the 1920s), or Mormons having to stop practicing polygamy following the outlawing of polygamy.
8. (Evolution) This is another one I think we should pick up in seriousness only after 1-4 are resolved or their discussion is otherwise concluded, but in the meantime I will say just a little. Evolutionary theory has only gotten stronger over time, unlike phlogiston which faced more and more challenges, losing credibility as experiments asked more and more awkward questions of it as our scientific instruments advanced until it was demolished by oxygen theory. The number of scientists who question evolution to the degree you are talking about is tiny AND are almost universally not in a field related to evolution. I recall that H. Morris was an engineer, not a biologist, and that his son is a geologist. Evolution is so intertwined with so much of biology and our current understanding of the natural world that if it is wrong, then either what the truth is has to be awfully close to evolution anyway, to the point that I doubt you could tell the difference at a glance, or humankind would have to be shown to have been completely blind as a global scientific community to some really basic fundamental things that millions of people have been overlooking for decades if not centuries that completely tears up everything we thought we knew about biology. And on the other hand, if someone could actually cause such an upheaval, they would be a world famous rock star of a scientist. In 100 years he would be like Aristotle, Kepler, and Einstein put together for biology. You haven't said anything about scientists 'hiding the truth', but if you have heard any of that kind of thing floating around you can safely discard it for the reason that the incentives to spill the beans are just too good to pass up. (And yes, that was just a little compared to how much time I expect we could spend on this topic.)
I was and am glad to have this discussion with you. I hope I am on the way to changing your mind as well, or at least getting you to ask some questions. There are some "hot issues" that I think get a lot of misinformation flying around in chain letters and whatnot.
3869505 I am at least pleased that this discussion was civil. Nonetheless, I am committed to my beliefs. I mean no disrespect or hatred. With as much respect as is due the occasion, and as can be mustered in this and other circumstances, I oppose and will continue to oppose evolution, secularism, and atheism with as much strength as I can bring to bear on the situation. Again, thank you for being civil and not just blowing up or outright blowing off my viewpoint. With candid if perhaps misplaced or premature optimism, I hope I have got you to ask some questions as well.
Have a good day, sir, and nice hat
3870636 But ... what, no more debate?
No one is 100% right on everything. Maybe I'll be convinced that student was really getting shafted; maybe you'll be convinced that not having public school teachers have their kids face Mecca is worth the price of not having those teachers lead their kids in prayer. (And there are always private schools.)
I thought there was some worthwhile discussion still to be had, not to mention unanswered questions. But if you no longer want to do it, so be it. Good day.
3870814 I apologize, but this blog post was meant as a warning, not as a debate page in particular. Someone will always find, or say the found, a reason to circumvent faith or try to minimize what's going on. My mind is made up on the matter of Christian faith, and it cannot be moved. Please trust me when I say that I have reasons other than blind faith to believe that what I've said is a reality, including the book The collapse of Evolution by Scott M. Huse and the writings of Dr. Charles Stanley, Max Lucado, and Neil T. Anderson.
For another, more "practical" reason for closing down the debate, I've had arguments in other blogs in a supposedly "Christian" group, which allows anyone to join regardless of faith or lack of it, and my anger level since the wee hours of this morning have been intensely high. I would like to bring the debate to a close in case I really lose control of my anger, for I don't want to offend you or anyone through such a thing. I hope to remain friends, or at least casual acquaintances, and I would like to gain control over my emotions and the situation before it is too late.
Again, I apologize, and I do enjoy a good debate, but when that debate induces anger, whether it was meant to do so or not, it's time for something to change, and I don't want to jeopardize a potential, godly relationship. I hope we can continue our discussion/debate elsewhere, PM maybe.
P.S.; I love the cute Luna pic