When 8 out of 10 people hold religious beliefs, you don't think it's unreasonable for the non religious to run into these beliefs fairly regularly? Wow, why not?
I think it is rather unreasonable.
This is one area where our country's cultures differ quite a bit.
Here's an example: one of our former Prime Ministers goes to my wife's church. I had no idea what his beliefs were until years after he retired when I looked down the pew and saw him praying. In all of his political career, I don't think he ever mentioned God or his faith once in a public speech. The issue just never came up. Apparently he's quite devout, but he never felt a need to wear his religion on his sleeve.
OTOH, look at the US: more often than not, a speech from your president -
any president in recent memory - is going to include some explicit reference to God.
But it doesn't have to be that way. People don't need to show off their religion.
As for the separation of church and state, we do not have a state sponsored or sanctioned Church. Tax dollars do not go toward supporting any particular Church. States do not have the right to establish a state sponsored religion, nor does the federal government.
No, they go toward supporting
every church. That's not church-state separation either. You don't have
a state sponsored church; you have
many state sponsored churches.
I am saying that all religions which don't violate laws should be respected and given "room" for expression as people see fit or feel led - as long as they are not violating the rights of others in the process. When I say "rights," I want to clarify that I am not aware that it's anyone's "right" to live a life completely insulated from the possibility of witnessing someone else practice or express their religious beliefs.
That's what you're saying? Because the comment I replied to - i.e. that people in Japan who don't like the fact that they have a state religion should just suck it up and deal, effectively - doesn't match what you're saying now.
I think it's inherently hypocritical to cite freedom of expression as the reason why one group of people should shut up and stop acting offended. Do you see the contradiction here?
I never said that all religions should have a place in government - I don't even know what that means. Please clarify.
I'm just trying to get a sense of what you're arguing for. You're throwing around catch-phrases that can be taken a few different ways.
I live in Texas. In Texas, Tex-Mex restaurants abound. There's a preponderence of them in fact. But when I travel to Iowa, there aren't very many Tex Mex restaurants. Does this mean that Tex Mex restaurants in Iowa are REPRESSED? I somehow doubt it. There's just not much of a following, apparently. If there were, there'd be more Tex Mex restaurants. Supply and demand.
If there's a local demand for yet another Baptist church to be built, you can rest assured that someone will build it.
None of this is what I'm talking about. Do you think it is?
My main concern in all this is for elected representatives to realize that they represent
all of the electorate, not just the people who share their religion.
In my town, there was a local demand for a large mosque. Voila! It was built - and a few years later it added a very large private school to it's grounds. Yes, in spite of the very large population of Southern Baptists around here, many of whom were quite, shall we say, CHAGRINED at the very notion that there are so many Muslims in this area who insist on openly practicing their faith. Dang it!
That being said, there was no legal opposition to the facilities. In fact, I've never heard anyone, publically or privately, insinuate that the mosque and school shouldn't be there.
Really? Well, then your town is one up on this suburb of Houston, where the prospect of a mosque prompted many nuisance complaints to try to stop or delay construction, a web site where home addresses were posted for members of the Muslim association building the mosque, and promises of pig races next door every Friday "just to offend the Muslims":
KATY, Texas — A plan to build a mosque in this Houston suburb has triggered a neighborhood dispute, with community members warning the place will become a terrorist hotbed and one man threatening to hold pig races on Fridays just to offend the Muslims.
Many neighborhood residents claim they have nothing against Muslims and are more concerned about property values, drainage and traffic.
But one resident has set up an anti-Islamic Web site with an odometer-like counter that keeps track of terrorist attacks since Sept. 11. A committee has formed to buy another property and offer to trade it for the Muslims’ land. And next-door neighbor Craig Baker has threatened to race pigs on the edge of the property on the Muslim holy day. Muslims consider pigs unclean and do not eat pork.
“The neighbors have created havoc for us and we didn’t expect that,” said engineer Kamel Fotouh, president of the 500-member Katy Islamic Association.
Fotouh vowed to press ahead with plans for a mosque on the 11-acre site, as well as a community center that would offer after-school activities, housing for senior citizens, a fitness center and an Islamic school.
“We just bought it,” Fotouh said. “And we are going to use it. We have the right like any one of them.”
Houston suburb angry over mosque plan - US news - Life - msnbc.com
There's not much of a demand for Bahai buildings in my area apparently. And I guess there's not much demand for places for atheists to gather together. If there were, there'd be a building, I can assure you - and there'd be no legal recourse for those who might oppose such a building.
Don't be so sure. There are plenty of subtle ways that things like that can be blocked or held up. If you have the ear of the local councillor/alderman/mayor/what-have-you, and he or she is willing to act in unscrupulous ways to promote his or her own religion, there's quite a bit you can do.
The trick comes from the fact that civil servants and political representatives often have discretion in their decision-making: the strict requirements of "what's on the books" isn't necessarily what's commonly put in place. If, say, a county decides not to grant a variance to a mosque when they would've done it for a church (and many development projects have variances to some degree), there's usually not a lot that the mosque can do to fight this.
Sometimes this might mean actually blocking the mosque altogether, or sometimes it might mean giving additional requirements that make the mosque too expensive to build or unsuitable for its intended use, but the effect is the same either way: no mosque, or at least fewer mosques. Or Baha'i temples. Or synagogues. Or whatever.
