Monday, February 14, 2011

Secular democracy: It should be a goal for us, too

We have cheered  revolutionaries in Egypt  who risked their lives for a secular democracy.  Come to think about it, that is what our country's founders wanted as well and they protected that goal in the amendment guaranteeing the separation of church and state. However, there are those in our nation and in Congress who want to impose their particular religious belief on the rest of us, as if we should be subjected to a particular interpretation of the Bible only their faction of one religion holds. They want us to accept the fact that abortion should be illegal in any and all instances, that life begins at a certain point they specify, and that science has it wrong: the Earth was created in 7 days or seven thousand years ago.  There are also those who like to proclaim that the "US is a Christian nation".

 Full disclosure: I am a Christian, too.However, this nation has  not established any official religion and it is clear that our founders were opposed, to doing that  as well, in writing the amendments.  We are a nation that is made up  of  individuals who believe in a wide variety of religions, or no religions, or not even  any God or gods at all. We are a nation that respects all of religious practitioners, including Muslims, which certain quarters have set upon a road of hatred based condemnation and fear, lately: loudly proclaiming their right to practice religions while indicting them as un American or beating the drums of fear that we now have a choice between Christianity and Sharia law,that Obama is a Muslim with loyalties to some Muslim Brotherhood as a way to explain him to their fellow travelers. It is as  if we were revisiting the era of McCarthy where we feared Communism was going to take us over and anyone to the left of our PC beliefs was a red commie to be hunted down and destroyed.   Oh My God...who looks down at this in wonder as both Christians and Muslims worship Him. We should set as our goal too:  preservation of a secular democracy.

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