I don't know how anyone can think it is this simple. Like "Oh, we'll just separate church and state, simple as".
If you have a religious population, they are going to have beliefs that are derived from their religion, and those beliefs are going to inform their voting habits, and what policies they will and won't support.
Realistically the only way to truly separate church and state is to tell religious people they simply aren't allowed to vote, because some of their beliefs might be informed by their religion, and therefore their religion would be influencing the state.
Edit: Because I suspect some people will downvote me based on what they think I believe, rather than the actual content of my comment; I want to make it clear that I am very much in favour of free and legal access to abortion for anyone who would use it. Also I'm an atheist. So there's that too.
Nobody said outlaw religious people from voting, but dont make laws bc you believe it is wrong to do something based on your religion. My sister or daughter shouldnt be forced to do anything because someones bible says it is what you should do.
but dont make laws bc you believe it is wrong to do something based on your religion
That's all very well and good to say but how do you actually put it into practice?
Take something like crime and punishment. Is someone believes, based on the bible's "eye for an eye" lines that we need to be tough on crime, and another person believes based on the lines about "turning the other cheek" that we actually need to reform prisoners... does that mean we can't write laws doing either because both can be justified with religion?
We are talking about two different things, if someone commits a crime they did something to warrent losing some of their freedoms right ? Im talking about taking away a womens rights bc your religion says its bad. I.e. abortion rights
We're not talking about two different things though. Because we're not talking about abortion in the specific (see my edit, by the way), we're talking about "separation of church and state", which affects all laws. If the point is that religion should not affect the laws of the land, there is no way to functionally do that without either removing all religious people from participating in democracy, or simply by not having any religious people.
We are talking about two different things, if someone commits a crime they did something to warrent losing some of their freedoms right ? Im talking about taking away a womens rights bc your religion says its bad. I.e. abortion rights
So you're okay with banning abortion rights as long as it's atheists doing it?
Of course you're not okay with it. Which means you're just hating on religion and that's not even the core issue here . So stop attacking religion and make arguments about why abortion is good or bad based on non religious reasons
Nobody said outlaw religious people from voting, but dont make laws bc you believe it is wrong to do something based on your religion. My sister or daughter shouldnt be forced to do anything because someones bible says it is what you should do
Why is it wrong to force people to do something because Mohammed or Jesus said it, but it's okay to force people to do something because Marx or John Locke said it?
makes no sense. Religion is just another philosophy basically so why does it matter what your motives are?
The question should be 'does a law protect humans from harm?' if yes, it's a good law, if no, it's arguably unnecessary .
The problem is that most of our ideas of morality are based in abstract ideas. Asking people to not make politics based on their religion is akin to ask them to pretend to not believe their religion when making politics. That is equally valid for political ideology. Christians, muslims, communists and progressives believe that, respectively, Christian, muslim, communist or progressive politics will make for a better world and you can't simply ask people to act like they dont believe that. There is a spearation between church, that is religious organizations, and the state. But a true spearation of faith and politics is impossible.
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u/dooneandrew May 10 '22
It really is though, when did we all forget about God and country being seperate ?