I know this topic will be controversial, but I'm hoping the mods will monitor it carefully.

I saw an interesting comment on a CNN article today, in response to an artist creating Jesus Popsicles. The author is unidentified unfortunately, but he makes a valid point.



Note - this topic is NOT about how valid one religion is over another, or the merits of any religion, see my Note on Religion topic regarding this. However it IS relevant here to how, despite theoretically having a separation of church and state in the USA, it seems the US is becoming closer to a theocracy than it ever should. Consider this, every President has to publicly state they are a Christian of some denomination, or they will never be able to obtain office (it's a simple fact, a Muslim or atheist could not become president in the current political climate.)

Add to this the volume of the arguments of prayer in schools, the refusal to say the pledge of allegiance (which, by the way, many people in the US would call indoctrination if a similar pledge was being forced on school children in countries we don't like) because of references to God, the abortion and gay marriage issues (which the primary opposition of such is religious) - it seems to me that far from the 'War on God' some Christians claim is happening, I think there is a very active war on the separation of church and state, and an active effort to create a christian theocracy in the USA.

It is a bothersome thing really when voting time comes around, to realize that no matter which candidate you pick you will be forced to vote for this.

I've seen the same sort of fanatical behavior out of atheists as well. Sure, it takes different forms, but the same fervent attack of opposing views is there. Please understand, I'm not talking of what I would term the 'good atheists' who simply don't believe and have nothing to prove to anyone else of a differing opinion. I'm talking about the ones hosting 'de-babtism' ceremonies and rituals to wash away some oil that a group of Christians used to bless a highway with.

Then you have your far, right winged Christians who are perhaps slightly more insufferable, because just as the group I listed before, their fervent and dogmatic beliefs must be spread, dissenters be damned. Regardless of what the founding fathers had to say on the subject of separation of church and state, these people believe they know what they really meant, and that they totally meant that everything should be based off of strict, Christian values. Never mind that each denomination has a different take on what is a sin and what isn't apart from the biggies listed in the ten commandments. Anyone different in any way should be treated with fear, suspicion, and ridicule. You know, because Jesus didn't really mean all that crap about 'love thy brother'.

The longer I watch politics in this country, the less hope I tend to have for a decent future. It's become more polarized than perhaps since the height of the cold war. We're given the illusion of choice in this country while each side tries to show why theirs is the only logical mindset. There is good and bad, and depending on what fence line you're on depends on what's seen as good. Republicans cry and bemoan the democrats' support of abortion, claiming the sanctity of life. Democrats cry and bemoan the republicans for support of the death penalty, claiming that it's wrong to take a life.

There is no choice in the American political system, only the illusion of it. The Patriot act started under Bush had it's powers expanded by Obama who had promised to do away with all of it. So, screw it. No more voting for the lesser of evils. No matter who gets into office, we're SooLaJWF (shit out of luck, and jolly well fucked).

Cthulhu 2012

There is one possibility, that is worse than a theocracy. It could be that we're headed towards fascism. I say this wanting to avoid Goodwin's law, talk of nazis, and so on.

Consider that in fascist [and most totalitarian societies] society the line of distinction between religion and the state is blurred, to the benefit of the state. One could say that is what is going on with American politics right now, with all these attempts to push religion into things like public school textbooks, health care policy, etc.

While that is going on the federal government has made it a major legislative goal to throw the Bill of Rights in a landfill [particularly as of the last few years]. Unlike the Patriot Act which was created in a rush after the 9/11 terrorist attack, these policies come a decade late to the party with Ben Ladin dead, the Iraqi War [which didn't have anything to do with terrorism] basically over, and the military slowly being pulled out of Afghanistan. There is no pressing need for these things, no eminent danger. Yet both parties and at least two branches of the federal government are convinced we need:

1. The elimination of due process. Pres. Obama demanded Congress give him the authority to use the military to detain anyone [even US citizens on US soil] suspected of terrorism for as long as they want. No trial, no charges, no evidence necessary. Sen. McCain gave him this threw the NDAA. This past week next year's NDAA was passed, and every attempt to remove this past of last year's NDAA failed.

2. All these anti-privacy internet bills, like SOPA and CISPA. At the same time as all this is going on Pres Obama has been trying to force an international cyber spying treaty through the back door [ACTA]. The federal government has been refusing to follow the Freedom of Information Act on ACTA and will not respond to FOIA requests pertaining to certain parts of this secret treaty due to "national security concerns."

3. The NSA was finally given the green light to build the biggest cyber datamining processing center ever conceived by man. This serves multiple purposes from using classified technology to try to crack all encryption methods available to the public, to recording everything they can get their hands on & shifting threw the trove of data to see who they want to consider a risk and who they want to leave alone. Every email you ever send, every image you ever upload, every phone call you ever make: Recorded and stored and processed. No court orders, no search warrants.


Then there's the subject of turning our domestic law enforcement organizations into paramilitary units. As the wars abroad are either over or ending we have a surplus in military hardware & military funding. So we're sending them to our domestic police who then have to find a way to use them. The most visible effect of this is the increase of no-knock swat raids to arrest people for outstanding warrants. Traditionally in the US if you called in SWAT to bust down someone's door to pull someone to jail, it was because they were a major risk to the public. We're talking worst of the worst violent offenders, people in armed standoffs, hostage takers, etc. Not anymore. Now we use SWAT for picking up nonviolent offenders. Don't pay a court judgement on a debt? SWAT could bust down your door at 6am and haul you to jail. Don't pay some traffic tickets? You too could be dragged out of bed, pulled out of the shower, etc. The problem is when a bunch of people dressed in black carrying automatic weapons bust down your door and startle you out of sleep without saying who they are or why they are there; it scares people. That flight or fight response gets what would otherwise be nonviolent civilians killed as they react in a way that police consider a threat. Its even worse when law enforcement has a chronic problem with not being able to go to the right house. When a family of innocent, law abiding citizens who weren't supposed to be raided get raided by accident, you've just created a family of people who are likely to dislike law enforcement and/or the gov.

Which brings me to the subject of how we are using paramilitary police to combat dissident. In the 04 RNC in NYC NYPD had & deployed X-ray Humvees. Back in the cold war, the USAF had developed an RF transmitter to go in the nose of an aircraft that would vibrate the water molecules in your body, producing a heat sensation. This is the same principle that your microwave uses to make popcorn. The intention was to use this as nonlethal crowd control if we ever had to take a soviet city whose people didn't want to greet us as liberators. But this was impractical on aircraft, so they made a specialized humvee to deploy the system and have been using them in Iraq & Afghanistan. Think about this for a minute 1- why did a police organization, instead of the military have this? 2- this weapons system cannot target individuals and can only be used indiscriminately against a wide swath of area [everyone in the area will be subjected to it, unlike tasers or stun guns]. I get that in big enough protests, there's going to be a few bad apples like the wanna-be anarachists that tore up Seattle for the WTO. But the purpose of having law enforcement deal with protests is to handle the bad apples while allowing peaceful protesters to utilize their constitutional rights. This no longer happens. Our police since the RNC have been operating under the idea that they can just round up everyone by fencing them in, and then letting the courts figure out who was really breaking petty laws like trespassing or obstructing traffic.

But fascism isn't just about how the police operate, or whether the government is spying on everyone. A big part of fascism is how the economy works. One scary development that this economic crash has had in the US is ]the return of debtors' prisons. If a collections agency can get a judgement against you, which is easy since the bottom feeders illegally find ways to prevent you from being served correctly, they will go back to the judge a few months later and say "Jane Doe [who doesn't know she has a judgement against her] hasn't paid on the $200 she owes." The judge then says "Really? So what should we do about this?" and the collections agency goes "We ask you hold her for contempt of court for the amount of the debt." Then BAM! Jane Doe is [depending on what state she lives in] sent to prison for contempt of court, where she will be kept until the judgement [that she either didn't know about or can't afford to pay] is paid in full. Yahoo news recently had a story about a girl who had this happen to her, for a cancer treatment cost that everyone agreed was no longer even owed. But since the bill had been forwarded to a private collections agency before they realized it had been paid, she ended up spending time in prison.

Because most states are broke, many of these prisons are privatized and run for profit. This has directly caused government corruption. In PA the private companies running juvenile detention facilities were actually bribing judges to send more kids to prison. So instead of handing out community service sentences for petty crimes like they used to do, these bought out judges were literally sending kids to private for-profit prisons at the tax payers' expense. Hundreds of them. In Louisiana when the state went broke it were the state's police chiefs & Sharifs who brought in private prisons by being the original investors. For every person they send to prison, they make money. Off the taxpayers. Now that state has one of the highest incarceration rates of the world.

These prisoners are then used as slaves for big corporations where they are used to operate call centers, manufacture commercial goods, in addition to being used for public works projects. No surprise then that these big corporate prisons are against any domestic policy, no matter how dysfunctional it is, that would decrease the amount of prisoners under their roofs at any given moment.

Yet these are just the more obvious examples that most people have already heard of in some shape or form. We could also talk about the big push against unions of the last few years, the carrot & stick tactics aimed at getting people to breed more, scapegoating gays, illegal aliens, etc. for society's problems, or federal grants to put together a national system of tracking people via their license plates. Still have some doubts? Would it comfort you to know that some congressmen want to legalize domestic propaganda by repealing the acts that abolished it? Its not just that this is all happening: its that its all happening at once!

I agree with that. I know both sides have issues, but it seems to be the religiously conservative republicans/Tea Party members who are really pushing this through. It seems like the religious right has hijacked the Republican party, and moderate republicans (who are elected officials) have to play into this tom-foolery to get reelected.

When the President spoke out about his views on gay marriage, it seems like the country suddenly got a lot more religious. Friends of mine who I know don't give two shits about religion were suddenly like, "Yeah, Leviticus! Being gay is nasty, and they're going to hell." It definitely caused a divide between the religious and the non-religious, and it brought out a bit of hidden hostility the two groups have for each other.

I don't know, at this point it really seems like the democrats (not all, but some) are the lesser of two evils right now. Because in Michigan particularly, there was a HUGE surge of religiously conservative republicans elected to the state house (not US congress, but state congress), senate, supreme court, and the governor (although he is more moderate). I believe a few bills trying to join church and state were attempted, but never got through.

I really would have to move if religion and the law were joined together. But I would also have to move if religion was banned. Either way, the government would become far too controlling at that point for me to handle.

Regarding the U.S. and theocracies... One can only marvel at the religious insincerity of the theocrats in this nation. Particularly when we see conservatives (such as Baptist minister Robert Jeffress and others) vehemently stating that they would sooner have a Mormon worshipper of a "false god" (their words) like Republican Party candidate Mitt Romney, over a Christian such as Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama.

Or, as Jon Stewart paraphrased their sentiments: "I hate Barack Obama more than I love Jesus."

-- Nephele

With all the bass ackwards ideas they've been spouting lately, I've really had to question if the GOP is trying to not just fail, but completely implode. It's been many years since I had any faith in politicians, but some of the things said by the people running for the the Republican party in the last few years has actually managed to dumbfound me. I know it's the paranoid part of my brain talking, but there is a panicky, squeaky voice screeching "It's a trap! We're already in it, and they know what they say doesn't matter!"

If you'll pardon me, I'm just going to put on this here tin foil hat and rock myself in the corner.

It is simply the course that many nations and empires have taken over the long history of civilization. Also why I have been orchestrating my exit from the country in the past six months. The citizens are more worried about who is going to win American Idol than where their rights are going. The people are complacent. Complacency inevitably begets bondage.

On this, I have to agree with Pagan. If I would leave the country then I'd most likely do it in a heart beat and move to the Netherlands or to England.

It's damn scary when you stop to think about how religion is (and has been for a while) dictating US policy. There is a separation of church and state for a reason and I firmly believe in that division. Sadly many people don't, and as Pagan said- more people tend to care about the winner of American Idol than we do our American President. I sometimes think all this media is the nation's way to keep us sedated and out of their business as much as possible.

Any religion, when used for power, gain, control, selfishness has the potential to harm. America was founded on religious freedom and it needs to say out of politics. As Thomas Jefferson once said (as close as I can get from memory):

"Speak not of my religion. It is known only to God and myself alone. If it has been honest and dutiful to society, then the religion which regulated it cannot be a bad one."

We need to go back to the days when religion was not used to gain or destroy votes. Religion should be private- not a public spectacle to be used for corruption.

No wonder I dislike religion so much...I will jump for joy the day a person makes president who is publicly not affiliated with religion.

By the way, Prez, thanks for this topic.

By giving the religious sector of our community tax exemption, we have allowed them to fill their coffers to the brim. In this new post Citizen's United world, they can now take that money out of their coffers and stuff the pockets of the zealots they wish to have in power.

They also now have the money to blackmail sitting politicians into doing their will or running the risk of being primaried by someone who will.

It's really all coming down to who he who has all the money now officially gets to make all of the rules, and the right wing has a hell of a lot more money than anyone else in this country.

Maybe I need to make my move to Norway...

~spidey

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.

-Alexander Tytler

In ourcase the Christian right is the majority.

I was reluctant to post in this thread, mostly because politics and religion are not my favorite subjects for discussion. I have a definite faith I hold to, and Politics should stay far away from religion.

If the religious fanatics would listen to the words of Jesus who they claim to follow, he told them to "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesars and to God the things that are Gods'. Clearly if their god says religion has no part with politics they ought to listen to them.

I don't think that the fanatics are actually in the majority, they are just the loudest and most quoteable. Surely there are moderates available to be in office.I too do not want to live an America where religion rules, even if its the religion I am a part of.

I'm not sure you understood what it was that was going on there.

That line has been well and truly crossed I'm afraid. I'm not two days back from visiting Florida and American TV is amazingly flooded with, to my eyes, piss poor blatant propaganda. It's one thing to see it out of context and go "oh Fox" but to actually watch the adds for the "New Majority" spreading blatant lies on all networks... it's eye-opening.

Could you expand on this? I am genuinely curious.

I would say that I'm genuinely afraid of anyone in a political office who has a unquestionable belief in anything, be that religion, science, ideology, or anything else. I fear that our problems in society and often personally, stem from the inability for a leader to ever be wrong or accept new ideas and facts.

A politician can't accept new ideas that are counter to what they campaigned on 4 years ago. A scientist can't change his view after spending 5 years researching an unfounded idea. A religious person can't look at 2000 years of history and accept that the world is not the same place it was when a variety of books were written. A police officer can't make a mistake and accept responsibility for it.

We've created a demand and culture where anything short of a broken record is seen as week and wavering incompetence. So what do we get? broken old ideas and ridicule for change and understanding.

I don't think that I'd say Theocratic Double standard is the issue, I would say that our Standards are perhaps part of the problem. More our standard acceptance of change is the problem.

The only direction our 'leaders' have to go, is more extreme in the same direction they and those before them have always gone... It's a thought anyways