Posted on 08/29/2005 11:52:59 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Blair has appeased and prevaricated. Now, as the death cult strikes again, he must oust religion from public life
Two weeks on, London is stricken once more. The death cult strikes again, unstoppable in its deranged religious mania. This time no deaths but a savage reminder of the unknown waves of demented killers lining up to murder in the name of God.
Whatever they intended, the message was loud and clear: they can and will do this whenever they want and it does indeed spread very real terror. The police have said there are many more of them. The security services have already revealed that they know absolutely nothing. In the growing fear and anger at what more may be to come, apologists or explainers for these young men can expect short shrift. This is not about poverty, deprivation or cultural dislocation of second-generation immigrants. There is plenty of that and it is passive. Iraq is the immediate trigger, but this is about religious delusion.
All religions are prone to it, given the right circumstances. How could those who preach the absolute revealed truth of every word of a primitive book not be prone to insanity? There have been sects of killer Christians and indeed the whole of Christendom has been at times bent on wiping out heathens. Jewish zealots in their settlements crazily claim legal rights to land from the Old Testament. Some African Pentecostal churches harbour sects of torturing exorcism and child abuse. Muslims have a very long tradition of jihadist slaughter. Sikhs rose up to stop a play that exposed deformities of abuse within their temples. Buddhism too has its sinister wing. See how far-right evangelicals have kidnapped US politics and warped its secular, liberal founding traditions. Intense belief, incantations, secrecy and all-male rituals breed perversions and danger, abusing women and children and infecting young men with frenzy, no matter what the name of the faith.
Enlightenment values are in peril not because these mad beliefs are really growing but because too many rational people seek to appease and understand unreason. Extreme superstition breeds extreme action. Those who believe they alone know the only way, truth and life will always feel justified in doing anything in its name. You would, wouldn't you, if you alone had the magic answer to everything? If religions teach that life after death is better then it is hardly surprising that some crazed followers will actually believe it.
Moderates of these faiths may be as gentle as the carefully homogenised Thought for the Day preachers. But other equally authentic voices of religion, the likes of Ian Paisley or Omar Bakri Muhammad, represent a virulent intolerance that is airbrushed out by an official intellectual conspiracy to pretend that religion is always or mainly beneficent. History suggests otherwise. So do events on the streets of London. Meanwhile the far left, forever thrilled by the whiff of cordite, has bizarrely decided to fellow-travel with primitive Islamic extremism as the best available anti-Americanism around. (Never mind their new friends' views on women, gays and democracy.)
It is time now to get serious about religion - all religion - and draw a firm line between the real world and the world of dreams. Tony Blair has taken entirely the wrong path. He has appeased, prevaricated and pretended, maybe because he is a man of faith himself, with a Catholic wife who consorts with crystals. But never was it more important to separate the state from all faiths and relegate all religion to the private - but well-regulated - sphere.
Instead David Blunkett said he wished he could spread the ethos of religious schools everywhere and Labour has done just that. The 3% of the population who are Muslim may well feel excluded in a country that makes so many special allowances for Christians when slightly more Muslims go to the mosque than Anglicans attend a church once a week.
A third of all state schools are religious. The National Secular Society, a lone voice in monitoring their onward march, reports that Labour has let 40 more nonreligious state secondaries be taken over by the Church of England in the last four years, with another 54 about to go. The Office for the Schools Adjudicator said in a recent report that the only reason faith schools often achieve better results is because of "their practice of selection from churchgoing families". That attracts the pretend churchgoers, but selection, not religion, is the magic.
In the face of this hypocrisy it seems a small thing to let Muslims have more schools too. Only this week Ruth Kelly (devout herself) announced plans to go ahead in her autumn white paper with more Muslim schools. Bombs, she said, would not stop her policy of offering more "choice" and allowing more faith groups, including Muslims, to run schools. A Hindu state school will open soon in Harrow.
But this is not choice. Only yesterday an angry email arrived from a parent on the south coast protesting that the only choice of primary school was a C of E, a Catholic and an oversubscribed ordinary school. Disqualified from the first two, failing to get into the third, their child is sent miles across town; three nonreligious schools would have been genuine choice. A YouGov poll shows that more than half of voters oppose this. While Northern Ireland struggles with sectarianism festering in religious schools, this is no time to foster yet more segregation.
So what do we do about the madmen? Bombs do change things, maybe not in the extremists' favour. A great shift in attitude seems to have swept through many Muslim groups who signed the full-page newspaper statement yesterday headed "Not in Our Name". Many were equivocators on the fatwa that had Salman Rushdie locked away for years. At the time Iqbal Sacranie himself said: "Death, perhaps, is too easy for him ... his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks forgiveness to Almighty Allah." Nowadays Sir Iqbal is a leading moderate, showing how tolerance grows, given a chance.
The statement read: "We will not allow our faith to be hijacked by a few extremists. British Muslims should not be held responsible for the acts of a few individuals." Entirely right . Yet - like members of the same family - like it or not they are stuck with responsibility for rooting out wild men hiding in their midst and questioning what elements of their religious practice have proven so lethal. But no one can police minds and no new draconian laws to silence thinkers and preachers will ever stop dangerous ideas.
All the state can do is hold on to secular values. It can encourage the moderate but it must not appease religion. The constitutional absurdity of an established church once seemed an irrelevance, but now it obliges similar privileges to all other faiths. There is still time - it may take a nonreligious leader - to stop this madness and separate the state and its schools from all religion. It won't stop the bombing now but at least it would not encourage continued school segregation for generations to come. And it might clear the air of the clouds of hypocrisy, twisted thinking and circumlocution whenever a politician mentions religion.
polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
The below article quoted the Office of the Schools Adjudicator as saying in a recent report that faith schools achieved better results only because of "their practice of selection from churchgoing families". That is not the view of the Schools Adjudicator. The reference in its report was to evidence given to a select committee by the National Foundation for Educational Research.
"freedom of religions" and the US 1st Amendment and the Bill of Rights exist because of a zealous, evaneglical, right-wing, bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone preacher named John leland.
No atheist EVER created a free nation. All atheists have ever created are the ost murderous tyrannical nations in the history of mankind, such as the USSR, China, Cambodia....
We are free BECAUSE we are Christian.
It is delusional to suppose otherwise.
Uh, Sweet Polly seems to omit the accomplishments of secular states like Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba...
Hates both Briton and America. That's the Guardian.
". . .It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. . . ." -- Samuel Adams, Founding Father & American Patriot.Today, that tireless minority setting brush fires are the left-wing extremists led by the likes of the ACLU, the environwackos, NOW, NAACP, GLAAD and other homosexual rabble rousers... It is they who have succeeded in establishing the State religion. Not Christians. Christians today have less influence than ever. The extremists have infiltrated and control every major media, educational and government institution (except AM radio).
But that wasn't always true.
Do you know what happened when Protestant Christians had 100% control over the US government? They had far, far more control over the government 200 years ago than they do now, do you know what happened?
Did they create a theocracy then? No! They could have. Nobody could stop them. The country was far, far more loaded with bible-thumping evangelical Christians then.
Do you know what they did? They wrote the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights! That's what the Protestants did.
You have allowed yourself to be totally consumed by the lies propagated by the anti-christian marxists that now influence our society so heavily.
open your eyes, man.
Linda Bowles recently said this: "Two basic reasons underlie the attempt to separate America from its spiritual roots. First, the liberal goal of state socialism is incompatible with a citizenry who look to themselves and to God, rather than the state, for the satisfaction of their needs. Socialism requires that citizens do obeisance to the state as the Source from which all blessings flow. The supreme State can have no other God before it. The second reason for outlawing religion derives from the lobbying of those who wish their sins declared virtues. They seek the validation of the law, in the futile belief that the legal right to be wrong makes wrong right."
We certainly do have a new State religion. It has already been established, incrementally, over the last 40 years.. It is secular humanism. It is being taught in all public schools and enforced by the government in all corporations that do business with the government.
Secular humanism is a set of beliefs. It is a creed around which so many build their lives. It is a religion now, but they will fight to avoid calling it a religion so that they can maintain their status and their control within our institutions.
By denying the majority of people the ability to openly practice their faith within government settings we have replaced their religion with the approved values of political correctness. "Political correctness" is part of the doctrines of secular humanism, along with doctrines of "multi-culturalism, and "relative moralism".
The pursuit of "equality" for all rather than "equal oportunity for all" is a doctrine of the new State religion.
Please learn for yourself what true Christians are all about instead of listening to the enemies of Christians.
"Baptists cherish and defend religious liberty, and deny the right of any secular or religious authority to impose a confession of faith upon a church or body of churches." -- from the Baptist faith and Message of the Southern Baptist Convention
Christians wrote the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. A baptist preacher, John Leland, is most responsible for freedom of religion. He forced Madison to include it.
Baptist Christians ended slavery! Baptists were the first ever in the history of mankind to end slavery! Baptists were leading rebellions to end slavery long before the Civil War. Baptist Rev. Sam Sharpe led an armed uprising in Jamaica with 60,000 slaves in 1831. Baptists forced an end to slavery in Jamaica in 1833, 28 years before the US Civil War! How many slaves have atheist, socialists or secular humanists freed.
Christians won the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Martin Luther King was a Baptist preacher, a revolutionary.
Every freedom you enjoy today exists because of Christians who succeeded in getting their way.
"For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." -- Galatians 5:13
Every freedom that is being lost today is being lost because of the demands of socialists and because of the attacks on Christians.
Christianity has never been less influential in the US than it is today. We have far more non-Christians and Catholics than ever before. (Catholics have a history of supporting tyranny in defiance of Christ's teachings.) .Socialism is running rampant thanks to Pres's Bush and Clinton.
The Republican and Democrat parties are socialists that must be stopped. They are fundamentally anti-Christian. They are engaged in social engineering and forcibly redistributing wealth. That is unChristian.
Our society has never been more depraved or evil than it has become in the last 10 years. Violent crimes are occuring at about 4x the rate of the 1960's and about 10x the rate of 100 years ago when this nation had far, far more Christians (as a percentage of population).
Please look at the facts for yourself and stop don't let yourself be led by the nose by the anti-Christians (leftists+).
Become enlightened and join us in the war for freedom. Join the only people to have ever created a free nation. You do not have to convert to Christianity to support liberty. We welcome people of all faiths who will help us and demand that the US Constitution be re-established and enforced.
We are under attack. The US Constitution is under attack. Right now a group of secular humanist academics are engaged in writing a new Constitution that they will promote as being necessary in this day and age. It will drop the 2nd Amendment and will be loaded with secular humanist values.
These people who are writing the new Constitution are the same ones who are attacking Christians. They are the same ones who deny free speech on campuses.
Join the ONLY people who know they will go to heaven if they fight and die for the following values;
"Religious Liberty is the nursing mother of all liberty. Without it all other forms of liberty must soon wither and die. The Baptists grasped this conception of liberty in its full-orbed glory, from the very beginning. Their contention has been, is now, and must ever be, that it is the God-given and indefeasible right of every human being, to worship God or not, according to the dictates of his conscience; and, as long as he does not infringe on the rights of others, he is to be held accountable to God alone, for all his religious beliefs and practices."-- Dr. Truett, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, TX 1897-1944, president of the Southern Baptist Convention 1927-1929, and president of the Baptist World Alliance 1934-1935. The quotation is from Truett's famous sermon, "Baptists and Religious Liberty," preached on May 16, 1920 to 15,000 people from the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
The following is from the Baptist Faith and Message issued by the Southern Baptist Convention. It is a statement of the principles of Baptists. If you do not believe the following you cannot seriously be considered a Baptist.
Baptist Faith and Message: XVII. Religious Liberty"God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it. Church and state should be separate. The state owes to every church protection and full freedom in the pursuit of its spiritual ends. In providing for such freedom no ecclesiastical group or denomination should be favored by the state more than others. Civil government being ordained of God, it is the duty of Christians to render loyal obedience thereto in all things not contrary to the revealed will of God. The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work. The gospel of Christ contemplates spiritual means alone for the pursuit of its ends. The state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind. The state has no right to impose taxes for the support of any form of religion. A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal, and this implies the right of free and unhindered access to God on the part of all men, and the right to form and propagate opinions in the sphere of religion without interference by the civil power."
We true, faithful Christians believe with all of our soul what the Bible teaches us. Atheists do not believe it better to die for liberty than suffer tyranny because death for them is the end, the ultimate confinement. Faithful Christians will enjoy even greater freedom when we die. Dieing for freedom will help ensure that.
"Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed." -- John 8:36"Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free,[a] and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage." -- Galatians 5:1
For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." -- Galatians 13-14
And we will suffer and fight to the death for our freedom and the freedom for our brothers, including you...
"Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator." -- 1 Peter 4:12-19"Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends." -- John 15:13
And in the end we will achieve this...
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law." Gal 5:22-23
Do not let the enemies of liberty tell you Protestants are responsible for the Crusades, or that Protestants want a theocracy. We are enemies to the socialists. We are the "rugged individuals" who demand the State be of the people, by the people and for the people. They are doing everything possible to destroy the influence of the Protestants.
Join the people who created the US Constitution and help us restore it. It has been destroyed by the current two parties. They must be thrown out.
Join the people who ended slavery. Join the people who established equal rights for all. Join the only people who will give their lives to let you practice your own faith in peace.
"The Christian Religion,... brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind." -- Thomas Jefferson, Mar 23rd, 1801 letter to Moses Robinson
She must have really loved the Soviet Union.
If we eliminate all religion from public life, that means it is illegal to say "Merry Christmas" or "God Bless You" while passing someone on the sidewalk, because the sidewalk is publicly funded.
In using the classic argument "Merry Christmas should be said in Church," the commie secularist liberals are saying that we should keep our personal religion hidden in our churches, and never brought out or expressed publicly.
Hey, Polly, you really want to see some carnage, try atheism.
Your figures are strongly to the low side, IMHO.
Unpersuasive -- the difference is technology and existing population levels is not adjusted in.
Hutus murdered 1 million Tutsis in Rwanda in about 60 days using mostly clubs and machetes...This happened about 10 years ago.
> you really want to see some carnage, try atheism.
I sure would like to see evidence of an actual atheistic country. So far, if there has been one, it's been a real small country. Even the Commies, who claimed to be atheists, weren't; they simply replaced one superstition with another.
Closest I've seen to an "atheist" country, or at least one driven by "atheist" ideals, is the US. However, a reading of the Constitution, the documents that determined what sort of country this would be, are more like "agnostic," in that they mention no gods at all.
The truth is, it is inbred into human nature to be religious. The communists simply replaced belief in God with belief in the state. The real oddballs are atheists, who cut against the grain of man's inherent nature to believe in something outside himself.
> The communists simply replaced belief in God with belief in the state.
Correct. An unsupported belief in the notion that people will work their asses off if you just don't reward 'em for it. The Plymouth Plantation crowd put that notion in the grave 400 years ago. Marry that faith to a belief that Da State is infallible, and BAM! You have yerself a religion.
> The real oddballs are atheists, who cut against the grain of man's inherent nature to believe in something outside himself.
Quite possibly so. Though I'd reword that a bit: "The real oddballs are atheists, who cut against the grain of man's inherent nature to believe in something comforting that is unsupported by physical or historical evidence."
Separation of church and state (though not in the Constitution in that formulation) is one of the biggest reasons American culture is less secular than Europe. Atrophied, state-run churches are taken no more seriously in Europe than most Americans take their atrophied, state-run government bureaucracies. By contrast, American churches separate the culture from the state in a way that is impossible for political elites in Washington and cultural elites in Hollywood to control. In the U.S., people feel the churches belong to them and the state belongs to the bureaucrats because the churches are voluntary organizations and the state is not. This and the fact they want to be God is why American elites hate any religion which doesn't worship them.
This is sometimes called the "free market" theory of American religion. I guess that's why no one at the Guardian can fathom it.
I was itching to say something like this all day. You got it, man. Now go hide.
What you are taking about is not "separation of church and state," it's the establishment clause (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.) There is a big difference between the latter and the former.
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