Something to bash on

[Occhidiangela]

But you emphasized him, and you're lecturing me.

Yes. He didn't base his comment on a careless falsehood. (See below for expanded thought on that.)

If our system of laws is based on reading something stuff dead people wrote in an attempt to try and interpret what it means, then we're doing no better than Christian denominations when it comes to interpreting the Bible and trying to find common ground. (Think "Evangelical Christian vs most-other-types-of-Christians" here.) Having to go back and interpret means those old farts weren't specific enough! When it comes to "separation of church and state," to me the question shouldn't be "What did the founding fathers really mean? What was the intent of that clause?" but "Is the notion of 'separation of church and state' a good idea?"

May I quote you on that? Well said.:)

It seems that everyone's already made up their minds on whether SoC&A good/bad, and they're simply left debating whether it's constitutional.

I take a third approach, which is "where is the balance point between freedom of religion and freedom from mandatory religion?" A simple digital answer, Jefferson's wall, strikes me as too simplistic. To every complex (social in this case) problem, there are simple, and wrong (or incomplete) solutions. The question any Christian can have is the same an Agnostic would have about the "slippery slope" of variation on "the Jeffersonian Wall." How often will the line be redrawn? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? The rhetoric and the sentiments behind the arguments don't always match.

But if folks prefer reading books of deadmen in hopes of reading their minds (necrobibliopsychomancy?)... well, have at it.

Neologism for fifty, Alex. :D

But luckily, I have a topuee for your "no touchee" zone. It's made from quail feathers that I found in a French drain.

The dog will end up eating that, so I'll just go thin, and then bald, with such grace I as can mange.

the exposition: You stated "There is no movement "to excoriate all religiosity from the public's view."

That is false. What you see is the tip of the iceberg. The tree has deep roots.

The deliberate assault on Christianity, in the war oif ideas at least, is well established. You could trace it back to the Saul of Tarsus and his persecution of the nascent Christian community (before he had "that experience" and became the Apostle Paul.) It waxes and wanes over the centuries. That for a while the Christian norms held ascendency as a common cultural assumption in much of "The West" did not result in the elimination of other strands of belief and thought, or of violent opposition to Christianity. That ebbed and flowed. Christians have been in a war of ideas, both internal and external, for a long time. Ferdinand, The King of Spain was not called "The Defender of the Faith" for nothing.

The explicit Enlightenment era assault which continues to this day, in the current public wrangling, is in part athiest based (note that I don't say the position of all Athiests) in that the root position taken is that Christianity is not only held to be a flawed belief, it is proposed as fraudulent (Da Vinci Code as a recent example of popularizing that theme) and is held to be injurious to society as a whole. I find that last bit ironic, given that the cultural unification Christianity provided coributed to why you and I aren't writing this in Arabic script today, while Persian Farsi speakers would be.

An example of that strain of thought, though not the only one, is the Communist position that religion is to be removed from society. The agrument is a variation on that theme, not that theme in total, as I soak in the current rhetoric. The presumption is that Christian norms, for all that they have been interwoven in to language, culture, and mixed with other (Germanic Pagan, Celtic, etc) custom over two millenia, should be selectively removed from the formal culture and the society in which they exist, and forced to the margins, or sent underground (where they started two millenia ago), yet many and any other Faiths and philosophies shold be tolerated for the inherent virtue of not being Christian. That level of hypocrisy would make even the Pope blush.

If the US weren't a republic in which a majority -- of various fractions -- is used to establish the laws, what the majority cares for wouldn't matter. The cold hard fact is, part of our system is still Jackson's Mobocracy. Majority isn't the only thing that matters, but it matters. The efforts to win the war of ideas, to change perception and belief, are undertaken to convert the majority to a new position, that of marginalising, limiting or rejecting Christianity as part of our cultural weave. (the Why varies, depending on which pit bull has his jaws on the problem at the time.) One battlefield is our college campuses. Another is "in the mass media."

So, why deal with dead men's words? Doctrine. Those dead men's words are the guiding principles of our system, guiding principles that left wiggle room when they couldn't agree on specifics, or could not predict them. The current debate is a disagreement on detail. So, one has to gather the wise heads and determine if On Principle a law is or is not just, and should be your earlier "good idea." Good idea is a subjective criterion. The best argument for amending the "founding language" is the successful amendment that rejected the compromise that allowed lawful slavery. The process required majority agreement, either in Congress, or in a referendum. ON slavery, it was a root cause of a war. So, there you have it, part of the why of this war: to win a referendum, you have to change perception and belief. We are not guaranteed absence of a civil war along sectarian lines by t hose dead men's words, though I sincerely hope we don't devolve in that direction. It's bad enough, all this venemous bickering.

Christianity in America, what De Tocqueville noted as a core characteristic of Americans, has since World War I confronted the problem of Wild Bill Hickock: when you are the top "cultural" gun, there is always someone out there gunning for you. (In the cultural dynamics struggle.) What would be news is the cessation of argument. The export of the Napoleonic era's political byproducts, which had by that time taken the form of both Socialism (Labor Unions were already around in the US before WW I) and Communism, included an imbedded and explicitly anti-Christian strain of thought. "The baby must go out with the bath water." It was termed a "Revolution" not "change to a better idea."

Proponents of that societal model are still around, though they are not ascendant at present. A recent editorial to our local paper suggested that Venezuela needs to export good Chavez style Communism to Bolivia, in order to help them reject the exploitative foreign investment (for example, Brazillian natural gas companies). Like most schools of thought, the "get God out of our society and drive it underground or away" has evolved, but the consistent idea that Christianity is an inappropriate match for the industrial age (and beyond) formal society world has been with us since at least Napoleon's time, if not before. (I suspect Gallileo would have some wry comments on that score. ) The terms of the argument depend on who picks up the torch to run with it, and what brand name of athletic shoes he or she wears. New Balance, I would hope.

Truman: There is very little real news, just the history you don't know yet. FWIW, I spend some of each day discovering yet again how much I don't know.

Occhi

EDIT since I missed the preview on first stroke.
EDIT II: lest you misconstrue the words, I am not calling you, or your argument, Communist. A communist is by definition secularist, a secularist is not necessarily a communist. The two approaches share some themes in common.