Posted on 03/16/2012 10:23:47 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
Religion is very good at telling you what to do and how to live. Your leisure time, if you so choose, can be completely absorbed in matters of ritual, practice and belief. Nobody stops you.
I’m biased, but I believe the Jewish faith has a particular genius for this. There are morning prayers and evening prayers, complex dietary laws, 613 commandments direct from God covering every aspect of life, plus an ancient language to master, enormous books of commentary to study and debate.
You do get to sleep, however.
Don’t get me wrong; other faiths will keep you busy, too. Muslims pray five times a day, have their own dietary restrictions, plus other duties, such as pilgrimages to Mecca. Christians have services and confessions, summer camps and vespers, candles to light, shrines to tend, hymns to sing.
Whichever faith you practice, there are real, undeniable benefits: Following a religion gives you not just lots of stuff to do, but structure, community and meaning. I’d never be hostile to faith — life’s a tough, long road. You need something to pass the time and find comfort during adversity. Religion is as good as anything else, if not better.
That said, not everybody wants to embrace ritual and arcane belief, and so religious practice is voluntary. Children can be forced to go to Sunday school — I forced mine — but adults are on their own, so most shrug and ignore big swaths of their faiths. Most Jews do not keep Kosher, most Christians don’t regularly attend church, most Muslims never make that trip to Mecca.
We take it for granted, but this freedom to pick and choose what we believe and do is a privilege not found in all corners of the world and a fairly recent development, historically, one that countless heroic individuals over centuries fought and died for. They struggled to pry the hands of powerful religious leaders away from the tools of legal compulsion, which is what government does.
Government fills your time too, with its own expectations and requirements. But these are not exhortations. They’re laws. The IRS doesn’t have pastors hectoring the public about the importance of paying taxes. It doesn’t need them; it can put you in jail. Mayor Rahm Emanuel doesn’t bother with advocates standing at street corners, handing out tracts urging you to drive the speed limit. He’s installing cameras. Who needs the threat of hell when you’ve got the cops?
Thus anyone — such as Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who blows into town Friday — who suggests we get church and state back together, who wants the stick of government to enforce a particular faith, is guilty of the worst kind of historical ignorance. He’s a doctor juggling vials of smallpox, a drug company urging pregnant women to calm their nerves with Thalidomide, a Southerner suggesting that black folk might be happier as slaves. His big issues — fighting birth control and gay marriage, condemning sex for pleasure — are not good social policy. They’re not important for the effective running of our country. They’re aspects of his extreme brand of Catholic doctrine, and he’s pretending that people aren’t completely free to embrace or reject them on their own, and they need to be helped by the government using its coercive authority, and that the reluctance of the law to enforce his religion, say through health care policy, is oppression. It’s not.
Americans are a polite people — to a fault, really — and used to the clamor of various religions. We usually don’t argue about the trappings of faith, out of respect, so can overlook it when, for instance, a certain group is screaming “abortion is murder” and changing laws to yank non-believers into line, when abortion is not murder; it is a legal medical procedure that most women in the world have access to and most women in America expect to have available.
Many Americans who value their freedoms, who do not want an American Taliban to begin enforcing one religion, are terrified by Santorum. That seems premature. To me, his popularity is a trick of the eye. Santorum won the Mississippi Republican primary this week, receiving 94,000 votes in a state of 2.9 million. Since most people are not focused on faith but busy with their secular lives, they can initially overlook that a social extremist and religious fanatic is striding toward the White House, his only goal — judging from his rhetoric — to corrupt our government and use it to enforce his own faith’s strident moral predilections. But I have my own strong faith; faith that the American people will eventually wake up, notice what’s happening and send this guy back to church, where he belongs.
That's nonsense. Santorum didn't bring up the contraception issue and isn't out on the campaign trial taking about internet porn. The liberal media, Obama and Romney-supporters like Drudge and the Daily Caller and making an issue of all that.
And, your opinion isn't based in the polls. Rasmussen had Santorum within one point yesterday. He is ahead in four battleground states 48-44% in a Rasmussen poll out today.
Finally, he gets to the payoff.
This is a left-wing McGuffin, one they all use -- and it's proof positive he's preaching to the choir, riling up the "stay out of my (gay) bedroom!" folks . (As if Treasury agents would stay out of your/my bedroom if I/you told them someone was printing do-it-yourself Benjamins in there.)
The idea of an American Taliban is ridiculous, laughable -- the U.S. has already experienced more religious stringency and exclusivity in the heyday of Congregationalism in New England, Presbyterianism in the Middle Atlantic States, and Baptist churches in the Southeast and South.
The idea that any of these groups -- now or ever -- would "go Taliban" when they didn't in the past with better followership and better church attendance, is a bad, really bad, joke.
What it is, is a boogeyman for a certain group of scientific materialists, which is used to remind them not of the menace of theism, but of their own intellectual pride, arrogance, and rejection of theism and theists. It is they who are intolerant, and this stuff about "American Taliban" coming to get us, is just cover for their own nastiness, which is being measured out to believing theists every day in the public space by intolerant materialists.
The Pew people just proved and published that it's liberals who are the nasty, intolerant ones ..... but I kinda missed that story on ABC News last night, and the day before, and the day before that!
Yeah, that used to be called "public morals" back before homosexuals and libertines began using the power of government to enforce their vision of depravity as the basic public morality.
Instead he's babbling about English in Puerto Rico, and banning internet porn, and who knows what's next.
The author is clearly attempting to set the premise, a neat, but often poorly applied debating trick.
The premise should not be accepted n any way. It is currently the state that is attempting to put state and church together by telling the church what they have to buy plain and simple.
The church would rather not be directed by the state and instead be left on it's own. It is not infringing on anyones rights by not paying for abortions, etc. It's simply choosing to not do something.
Only in a spinmasters mind can that be twisted into Santorum wanting to implement Catholic sharia law across the US.
We need to reject their premise at every stage - especially when it is so obvious...
So let’s allow ther Federal Govt to enforce a POTUS’ vision of how we should live our lives. Isn’t that what we’re fighting against? Or does it matter whch side your on. The Right can use state power to coerce behavior. I am for defining the limits on federal behavior and protecting individual liberty. I always thought that was what FR was about.
A good barometer of a true conservative is the outrage level of the left.
Gee.
You are upset that the left uses government to force their morality on you.
So, you’re response is to pick someone that wants to use government to force their morality on you.
Tell me again how that makes *ANY* sort of sense!?!
That’s just like hating Obama(D)... and then voting for Obama(R). It’s the same coin, but different sides.
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Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
- C.S. Lewis
Seriously, you need some help.
Well, to a lefty, theirs is superior... and they’ll take up arms to defend it.
To a conservative, ours is better... and we’ll take up arms to defend it.
So... as our founding fathers understood, we are not a homogeneous nation, with one set of ethics/morals/mores that all ascribe to. Therefore, do as they did, which was to leave those issues to the regional level.
After all, the plantation owners of Virginia found the New England Puritans to be strange... and the Puritans found Virginians to be far too permissive. And while the names and places may have changed in the past 200+ years, the heterogeneous nature of American society hasn’t.
The ELCA and Reform Judaism follow pretty much along the same lines ~ Gays Good/Straights Bad, ..... More Taxes, No Home Schooling, Whole Leftwingtard agenda.
Part of that agenda is to never miss an opportunity to lie about serious Christians.
Bingo. He just comes off as politically tone deaf. This is not a good trait when going up against an opposing candidate who is, if nothing else, very politically astute.
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