Church and State

[bedstuy]

I think America basically gets it right.

There should be a separation of church and state, allowing minor symbolic things like "In God we Trust" and "God Bless America."  Those symbolic "10 Commandments" issues get waaaaay too much focus when they're literally just symbols.  I see that as a metaphorical God which is just a figure of speech almost.  I'm not offended by that sort of thing.

I am offended by people trying to make their religious beliefs into the law of the land.  What a religion says is totally irrelevant to what the law should be for everyone.  It should be taboo to say, "my religion says life begins at conception so that should be the law."  The same goes for gay marriage or any other issue.  Religion can inform your thinking, but you ultimately need a secular reason for any law.  Republicans seem to forget that and they want to impose their Christian Sharia law on atheist gays who couldn't care less about what their God says.

For religious schools, I'm fine with them existing.  But, they ought to meet basic minimum standards.  They ought to primarily focus on instruction about reading, writing, math and science (not religious science) and do it in English.  Sending a child to a school that only focuses on reading the Torah or the Koran is abusive and amounts to neglect.

[bedstuy]

I believe that the state¹ should seek to destroy religion, which puts me at odds with probably everyone else in this thread. Religious ideology is simply too dangerous to allow to be left alone, even in a socialist context, as the Polish case (where the faux union Solidarnosc was little more than a front for the Catholic church and American imperialists) pretty well illustrates. To that end, I am definitively in favor of state atheism and the suppression of religious belief insofar as is possible.

It goes without saying that I am opposed to any and all state subsidy for any religious organization, for any purpose. I am in favor of the expropriation of all property owned by religious groups, prohibiting religious schooling, and prohibiting public worship services entirely. I have no issue with private religious ceremonies or services, but I am against public religious meetings and support a ban on proselytizing. Priests, rabbis, imams, and members of religious orders (which should themselves be prohibited) should be denied the right to vote or hold political office and one should have to be an atheist to hold public office, period.

Religious belief should be openly ridiculed in schools, state organs, and should be challenged by state-funded journals and organizations. In doing so, however, the state should recognize that the underpinnings of religious belief have a materialist underpinning and every effort should be made to raise the overall productivity of labor and expand social welfare provision and science education, so as to dispel the root causes of religious belief.

The general idea should be to freeze religious belief where it is at present and constrict its possible growth by a direct ideological offensive against it and making every effort at the socialist development of the economy, which would do in what remains.



¹Implied here as a theoretical workers' state, i.e. the only kind of state that I would support any of the above measures being taken under. Within the confines of bourgeois democracy, I believe that the utmost separation of church and state and total non-interference in religious matters is the best policy, because allowing the bourgeois state to get involved usually means that certain segments of the population (i.e. members of minority faiths) get the short end of the stick and end up being stigmatized/discriminated against/become an 'other' in society that ultimately divides the workers' movement and undermines solidarity.

You're crazy dude.