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Boy do I love living surrounded by these loving christians.
Born too late to explore the earth, borth too early to explore the stars, born just in time to have my rights taken away by belivers in a bronze age supernatural death cult.
Fucking amazing.
I was corrected on this recently. The Hebrew Bible was written by Iron Age folks. As was the Gospels.
FYI
The old testament is just a riff on old Sumarian myths, so... still pretty much bronze age.
Half of Noah’s ark is in Gilgamesh. He meets a man that the gods are punishing for doing the whole Noah thing with immortality after he crosses that underworld ocean with that giant stack of paddle sticks. Flood , dove with olive branch and all. I think he was trying to help his buddy Enkidu if I remember correctly. Poor Enkidu :( he should have stayed a beast and lived his life with the deer.
That's a very positive outlook that humanity will survive to explore the stars without being killed by religious fascists.
You live in amazing times where we are inventing and learning new shit all the time. If you're not exploring now when that exploring is relatively very safe, you wouldn't be the one sailing off to the new world hundreds of years ago. People can be miserable or content in their own time, no matter what that time is.
Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
—Thomas Jefferson
When a religion is good, conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, apprehend, of its being a bad one.
—Benjamin Franklin
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thomas-jefferson-religious-institutions/
I agree with your sentiment, but please don't spread misinformation regardless of intent.
Proper quote:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
(From your snopes link)
Didn't this religious asshole take an oath to uphold the constitution that literally decrees separation of church and state‽ Grounds for a firing.
Constitution only says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Jefferson coined the term in a letter regarding the 1A.
Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but in any case "separation of church and state" is how we have always interpreted it.
religious whackjobs in the government attempt to rebrand 'religion' to 'faith' in an attempt to claim all americans should suffer from it.
it will only cause me to hate 2 words instead of the one.
You should already hate faith. Faith is what the religious use to justify doing nothing themselves.
Hell, faith is the reason half of them are sitting around hoping for Armageddon...
faith is what i have in my wifes love for me. i dont want to hate faith, just its abuse.
I view it as confidence.
@originalucifer faith is conviction in the absence of knowledge and that is down right scary.
Capital-F Faith is directly contrary to science and reason. It's believing things to be true without question or proof.
You can be spiritual and also be a logical person who listens to reason and science. But when you devote your entire worldview to Faith, then you should absolutely NOT be in a position to make decisions that affect other people's lives.
We really need to get these republicans out of office.
Kind of like “well regulated militia”, right Mr. Speaker? 🙄
American churches and religious organizations have secured themselves so much public funding and political campaign power this past couple decades he kind of isn't wrong: the separation detailed as important by many of the founders has been dumped.
Of course a guy who can't separate fapping from family also can't separate politics from religion.
Set aside for the moment that the Founding Fathers absolutely wanted there to be a separation between church and state because they had just come from a land (England) where the ruler (the King) was the leader of the church (Church of England) and where they saw the abuses this caused.
Would Johnson and all the other "no separation" folks really be fine with the government meddling with their faith? After all, if there's no separation between church and state then not only can the church influence the state, but the state can influence the church. Get rid of the separation and the federal government could decide which holidays you observe and in which ways. It could proclaim what the contents of the prayer books are and when/how you pray.
Would they be fine with all this?
Of course, they assume that they will be writing the rules, but would they accept it if someone else was? Perhaps I, a Jew, would declare that they can't eat pig products. (In reality, I'd never impose my religious beliefs on others, but let's say I did hypothetically speaking.) Perhaps a Muslim Government Religious Committee Member would add a few rules. As would a Buddhist. Heck, let's get atheists and satanists involved as well. I'm sure they would love to write some "religious rules" that the Christians nationalists would need to follow. Would Johnson and company happily go along with this because "no separation between church and state?"
Would they be fine with all this?
And in today's lesson, we will learn the term "double standards": yes they would be fine with this because they think they are the state, also they think they are basically god's will and anything contradicting that will be fought tooth and nail. IF they should ever see another religion even approach their level of power, then they will attempt everything in their power to restrict that religion's advances because they were always proponents of a separation of ( at least that other) religion and the state. Any inconsistencies in that worldview are not, as it may seem at first glance (or second [or third and all thereafter]) pure hypocrisy because it's obviously an ENTIRELY different situation when they are affected. As soon as their power is then consolidated again, separation of church and state shouldn't be taken THAT seriously anymore - it's not that important as long as the RIGHT religion is the state...
Y'know, since the other theocracies around the world are so chill.
"Thomas Jefferson was wrong."
The separation of church and state doesn't require a separation of faith and state. Separation of faith and state wasn't Jeffersons point...
The house comes to consensus on all sorts of shit, often based on faith, while being composed of members of a variety of churches. Been that way for centuries, and can continue to be that way. The first amendment doesn't prohibit government from making laws based on faith or faith based values. It prohibits government from making laws respective to a church.
Which is all to say that Johnson bringing a bible to the dais is questionable, and boeberts assertion that the church should direct the state is flat out wrong.
Government can have faith and religion. It's always had faith and religion. Jefferson didn't advocate that congress be staffed by atheists, he advocated that it be staffed by people of any faith or religion, because the first amendment says exactly that. That was his point...
Let's do separation of Johnson and State instead, please
Mike Johnson is a filthy traitor
Even if you agree with his sentiments, calling it a misnomer is itself a misnomer.
The expression "separation of church and state" in American politics is from Jefferson's response to the Danbury Baptist Association (of Connecticut), in which he reassured them that the First Amendment meant that other larger religious groups would not be permitted to use the power of the federal government to oppress Baptists.
Religious persecution had been a live issue in New England, where the Congregationalist Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had earlier expelled Baptists, Quakers, and other religious nonconformists from the colony.
You can read the full text of the Danbury Baptists' letter to Jefferson, and Jefferson's response, here on Wikipedia.
To summarize greatly, the Baptists say "We believe in religious liberty, but we've seen persecution before; and we worry that the federal government will be used to impose someone else's religious views on us. We want a government that only punishes people for harming others, and can't be pressured into imposing religious laws."
And Jefferson says "Yes, that's why we put this First Amendment thing in; to build a wall of separation between church and state."
This goes along with someone else's question above in response to Boebert - "which church?" It's ironic that the biggest benefactors of separation are religions, and they're the first to try and dismantle it.
The founders of the Constitution and others back then disagreed on a lot of issues and had a few false starts, as well as expected us to continue to modify laws as society changed. But they certainly agreed on no religion within politics, they lived in a world where that had been shown to be problematic over and over. We can see it now as religion creeps back in to our current politics as well as worldwide in other nations.
Fucking jebus moron. Wrong, ignorant, arrogant, idiotic. republiQan.
Calling modern American Republicans like Mike Johnson a Christian is a misnomer.
Jesus would be whipping this motherfucker for what he thinks of and does to the less fortunate.