Friday, October 29, 2010

Hmmm

Some thoughts on the First Amendment and whether it really does establish a separation of Church and State. The Ku Klux Klan makes a disturbing appearance.

3 comments:

Tyson said...

If you're looking for more hmmm ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theonomy#Goals

Jim said...

Well, we can't establish an official religion. And we can't make laws based purely on religious doctrines, and law enforcement can't be used to enforce religious laws. If that's not separation of church and state, then what is?

Jim S. said...

Thanks for the comments. Tyson, I have an MA in Theology from a fairly evangelical seminary, and the "theonomy" position never came up. They simply have no impact on evangelical Christianity, at least as far as I can tell. The reason they get mentioned is because some people look for reasons to claim that Christians are trying to take over or something. So I'm not really worried about it.

Jim, I agree with you. I think the First Amendment does establish separation in some sense, specifically the senses you mentioned. The problem is when people take this to extremes, such as students in public schools being told they can't engage in religious activity on school grounds, which seems to directly contradict the idea that the government should not prohibit the free exercise of religion. I wrote about my views on this before, but bear in mind I'm not a political thinker at all. Here's the link:
http://agentintellect.blogspot.com/2008/07/some-thoughts-on-first-amendment.html