Glenn Reynolds today linked to a piece he wrote a couple of years ago that I am largely in agreement with: Loose definitions .
People forget that maybe the first attemto to separate church and state was made by Jesus: "Render to caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's." For me religion has more to do with prayer and repentence than with campaigns for laws or censorhip, and more to do with ritual and symbol than with precepts and prohibitions.
The problem with "Render to caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's." is that a lot of people take that to mean that EVERYTHING is God's.
ReplyDeleteWell, that doesn't seem to be a mistake Jesus made. And there are those who think everything is Caesar's.
ReplyDeleteWith all due respect, this wasn't as big of a problem until Caesar started dictating for God. Abortion, prayer in school, gay marriage, etc. were all to some extant court imposed solutions that rubbed a great many Americans the wrong way.
ReplyDeleteIt is hard to envision the creation of the so called Religious Right without these undemocratically imposed solutions. The repercussions of these first shots in the culture wars reverberate still today.
To quote Rambo, They drew first blood.
Point taken, Kevin. I think a lot of people fail to appreciate the resentment caused by having mostly unelected judges co-opting the legislature. Also, it's not as if there was ever any great grass-roots groundswell to eliminate prayer or the Bible from schools, for instance. This was courts deciding that the majority didn't simply have to respect the minority, but had to defer to it.
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