Political Post

It’s been a few days since I posted, been busy at work and home. I have however been aggregating interesting web finds and ideas I’ve come across. I have a couple categories for posts so he’s the first one. The reason I set up this blog in the first place was so I had some voice on the cosi blogroll .

I’ve enjoyed seeing my posts show up there and I like reading what the guys are working on. One of the most prevalent authors there Oleg Dunlin . I haven’t met Oleg before but I heard quite a bit about him while I was at Clarkson and his posts are pretty interesting. However I disagree with this one .

The general opinion he expresses I agree with. There needs to be stronger separation of church and state, there is no place for the 10 commandments in courts (even though most of our laws support them), references to God should be removed from our currency, and most importantly the will of the people should not be over ruled by the religious beliefs of their leader.

However, there are a couple points that I disagree with as well. Specifically his support for a new French Law:

“PARIS (AFP) - The French National Assembly was set to pass a controversial bill that will ban the Islamic headscarf and other religious insignia from state schools, despite opposition from many Muslims and some human rights groups.

[...]

Though it does not specify the items that would be barred, an experts’ report listed the Jewish skullcap and “large” Christian crosses in addition to the Islamic headscarf. Sikh turbans are also likely to be included, and Education Minister Luc Ferry has said bandanas and even beards could be barred if worn with the wrong intent. ”

This is a freedom of speech issue to me although public schools cannot preach religion (they can and should teach about it) and they shouldn’t remove student’s rights to express their beliefs in public. Early introduction and familiarity with other ways of life is the best way to teach tolerance.

My second issue is with a comment he made about religious leadership. I loathe religious justification of government action, especially in it’s cruelest form of undertones and suggestions that our current president uses. This is a vague and nebulous statement but think about it, I follow Bush’s speeches fairly closely and I can’t think of an instance in which he said anything along the lines of ‘God has justified our actions in the Middle East’ or such, but many people immediately identify our actions with his religious beliefs. Oleg’s own statement reinforces this. Despite this unfortunate leadership I do not feel that religious people should be banned from running for office. Some of our great leaders were religious men; JFK being a Catholic comes to mind. He made a fairly famous speech saying that although his religion tied him to the Pope his duty lied with his country. (I know JFK wasn’t a terribly good catholic but it’s still an example.) I believe that it is up to the voters to decide who should be their leader are despite, or because of their religious belief.

To quote Oleg’s post:

“The point is that the separation of Church and State should be such that political decisions are not shaped by people’s faiths, and people’s faith is not shaped by political decisions of their elected officials. What I’d like to see is freedom of religion in people’s private homes and communities, but freedom from religion in the state and federal governments.”

I like the ideal but the fact is I don’t think you have much of a belief going on if it doesn’t play into all of your decisions. I wish I had a stronger conclusion to this post to wrap it all up but the best I have is this. It’s more complicated than that, we can’t just push it under a carpet and make it go away, not allowing the religious element in our societies to be public with their beliefs or share them with others is wrong. Not only is it a freedom of speech issue, it is also an unhealthy way to deal with a powerful and vocal section of our population.

Besides that pile of preaching I have a few other political bits to post.

- Q: Why is the US government so certain that Iraq has WMD?

A: Because they have the receipts.
- Move On ad controversy evaluate on your own.
- President Bush statement or Emperor Palpatine statement?