I'm all for a separation of church and state myself. I just don't thinmk that means the state should be hostile to faith, or suppress every public expression of it. I don't see looming theocracy in every Christmas manger scene on a courthouse square, or in prayers on the Senate floor, or in Ten Commandments plaques everyone just ignores in school buildings.
At the same time, I do not think religious faith, or any church, should ever let itself be co-opted and used and exploited by the state to justify or support aggressive goverenment power grabs, at the expense of the rights of the people.
I think I've been on about this before, but I'll say it again: I believe that the most-/worst-abused part of the Bible,
by far, is Romans, chapter 13. One particularly nasty example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRIDNQNsUss Thomas Jefferson said:
"I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Thomas_Jeffer ... es_it_mean And I feel myself bound by essentially the same oath. Back when I called myself a libertarian I was bothered by Ayn Rand's hostility to and contempt for religion. I never shared that, and I never considered myself a Randian. But for decades I believed there was no conflict or contradiction between what I thought of as libertarianism and Christianity. As time went on, though, the anti-religious (and particularly anti-Chritian) element among lebertarians came to predominate, to the point that recently I ceased to call or consider myself one.
Almost everywhere I go it is just assumed that Christianity (at least, any relatively undiluted form of it) is inherently oppressive and tyrannical, just itching to impose an oppressive, tyrannical theocratic dictatorship the first chance it gets. I don't believe that. I set very great store by liberty of thought and action, and I want to believe God does too, or that at least God is not hostile to it, and that He was serious when He said He wanted sons, not slaves. I
I know there were people in ages when all or most believed a lot stronger, and knew there way around a Bible better, than most do now. And yet some of them, at times, found reason to rebel against the powers that were then. (See: the Wars of Religion of the late 1500s, the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War (a.k.a. Parliamentary Rebellion, etc.), the Glorious Revolution of 1688-'89, and the American Revolution/War of Independence.)
I'm not saying everyone who fought on the anti-establishment side in all those wars was necessarily driven by religious motivations, but a lot of them were religious, and yet somehow didn't think the 13th chapter of Romans was universally applicable. I mean they thought there was a time when rebellion was the right thing to do, and that the time had come.
I've been on about this before, I know, but I don't think compulsory "virtue" is worth anything, or pleasing to God. In that sense films/books such as
Serenity and
A Clockwork Orange could be considred profoundly Christian works of art (whatever the expressed religious or anti-religious views of their authors). See my post in the Books, Film, and Music forum about Serenity being misunderstood.
' The Alliance's main problem is that it seeks to govern everyone, regardless of whether they desire to belong to the central government or not.
What the crew of Serenity, and specifically Mal and his lifestyle, represent is the idea that people should have the right to make their own decisions, even if those decisions are bad.
The Operative embodies the Alliance and is, as Whedon described, the "perfect product of what's wrong with the Alliance". He is someone
whose motives are to achieve a good end, a "world without sin". '
'[Joss] Whedon has said that the most important line in the film is Mal's contented promise to the Operative at its climax: "I'm going to show you a world without sin." Whedon's point is that
a world without sin is a world without choice, and that choice is ultimately what defines humanity.'
'The primary and most controversial idea in A Clockwork Orange is voiced repeatedly by F. Alexander and the prison chaplain:
without choice and free will, man is no longer human but a "clockwork orange," a deterministic mechanism.'
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." -- Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World "It is with your approval that criminals --
honest criminals whose hands you are unfit to touch -- are being taken from the jails to which British judges sent them, on the conviction of British juries, and packed off to Belbury to undergo, for an indefinite period, out of reach of the law, whatever tortures and
assaults on personal identity you call Remedial Treatment." -- C.S. Lewis,
That Hideous Strength DWM
"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)