Please re-take “Constitution 101″
Hudsonville, Michigan, where I attended high school, has attracted media attention over its mission statement:
The City Commission and Administration of the City of Hudsonville strive to serve God through the strengthening of family and community life and are committed to excellence in providing quality municipal services.
The city’s position was defended by the Grand Rapids Press.
I just sent an email to the city’s mayor, Donald VanDoeselaar:
As a former resident of Hudsonville, I’m disappointed to see the city espouse such flagrant disregard for the bedrock Constitutional principle of separation between religion and government.
Our country is a secular democratic republic, not a theocracy. Everyone is free to worship any deity, or no deity, as he/she sees fit. The proper role of the government is to attend to civic business, not to favor any establishments of religion.
If you want to worship an invisible man in the sky, that’s your business, but you have no right to officially endorse such belief in your capacity as a public official, or to use taxpayer funds to promote such an endorsement.
(Hat tip to Austin Cline.)
I agree with you on this one, Kevin (except for the snotty remark about “an invisible man in the sky”). The ramrodding of religion into civic affairs does no good to either religion or civic affairs. Besides,from everything I’ve read in the Bible and elsewhere about the place of religion in government, it baffles me to hear that people calling themselves Christians still think it’s a good idea.
By the way, I recently read an excellent rebuttal of The God Delusion, written by Alvin Plantinga. As someone who appears to have already made up his mind about such matters, you probably won’t find the article convincing. But I thought you might at least appreciate his use of reason and logic.
Karl
3 Mar 08 at 8:00 pm
Karl,
In regard to your disapproval of my condescension toward belief in the Christian god, I wonder if you would indulge me in a quick thought experiment.
Let’s say that our country were overrun by people who believed, very strongly, in the existence of Santa Claus. As an a-Santa-ist, you might very well grow tired of Santa-ists droning on ad nauseum about how there clearly is a Santa, and you are hard-heartedly rejecting the evidence for Santa, and you need to have more faith in Santa, and without Santa-belief, you must be an immoral person, and how Santa is going to barbecue you eternally if you don’t worship him, et cetera.
Let’s further imagine that while the more liberal of the Santa believers were content to keep their personal beliefs personal, a vocal minority of Santa-ists attempted to shove their beliefs onto everyone else by constructing sleigh scenes on public property, paying homage to Santa on currency and in the Pledge of Allegiance, and forcing schools to “teach the controversy” between rational geographers who say the North Pole is covered in ice and snow, and “Santa geologists” who insist that a giant toy factory full of magical elves is located there.
Would you treat this sort of irrational onslaught with deference and respect, or would you openly mock, deride, and criticize it? Mightn’t you feel the urge to write “snotty remarks” about the “invisible jolly fat guy in a sleigh”?
Frankly, given the way I feel about religion, my writings on the subject are fairly tame. I respect you, and plenty of other theists, as individual people, but that doesn’t mean that I have to treat faith-based belief as a position worthy of admiration.
I hope that clarified my position somewhat. I really don’t mean to anger my readers, but I have to call it like I see it…
Kevin
3 Mar 08 at 8:35 pm
Great post; I had no idea the Grand Rapids Press had come out in support of Hudsonville’s city officials. Good grief.
RollngGrnAde
5 Mar 08 at 12:13 pm
Hi Kevin,
That’s a funny thought experiment, but as an analogy, it’s laughable. And your position doesn’t need clarification. It’s already quite clear enough. Anyway, my comment about disagreeing with your snotty remark was an aside (though a necessary one); the main point of that paragraph was to say that I actually agreed with you. Oh well.
Karl
5 Mar 08 at 10:35 pm
Karl,
I knew you were agreeing with me about the main thrust of my post (church/state separation), and I appreciate your thoughtful comments along these lines. I just wanted to defend the basis of my remark.
Would you care to elaborate on why you believe my analogy is laughable? As I’ve said, I am more than willing to listen to arguments against any of my positions (religious, political, moral, etc.). If my non-theistic worldview is incorrect, I would be deeply grateful to anyone who could convince me of such.
Did I, in your opinion, misrepresent Christianity with my Santa-themed satire? If so, how?
Thanks.
Kevin
5 Mar 08 at 10:59 pm
Hey Kevin,
“Did I, in your opinion, misrepresent Christianity with my Santa-themed satire?”
Um, yeah. Are you playing dumb? Did you really not know that I thought your Santa analogy was a misrepresentation?
“If so, how?”
You see, we’ve come to the same impasse here that we have in past comment exchanges. The problem is that if you truly think that belief in God is equivalent to belief in Santa, then it makes no sense to debate the analogy, since it’s merely a trivial byproduct of much deeper and more fundamental differences — differences that are well nigh impossible to resolve in comment exchanges. If you genuinely want to know how reasonable people can discern a difference between belief in Santa Claus and belief in God, I suggest you start with the link I provided in my first comment, which is, in my opinion, a marvelous critique of The God Delusion. If you’d like additional or more developed arguments for the existence of God, I will gladly give you a few books that have been collecting dust on my shelves. Just send me your mailing address.
I wonder what you would think of someone’s suggestion that denying the existence of God is akin to denying the existence of love. Wait, that’s not offensive enough. Try this: denying God is like denying the Holocaust. See where I’m going with this? Please don’t try to demonstrate how off-base these analogies are. I know they are. What I don’t think is so off-base, however, is the meta-comparison. In other words, I suspect that the analogies I came up with would strike you (if you thought I was serious) the same way as yours strikes me.
I like you, Kevin, and I enjoy reading your blog. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t bother commenting. In my own cloddish way, my original comment about the “snotty” remark was an appeal to your sense of decency, a matter of tone. That’s all I really wanted to call your attention to.
Karl
6 Mar 08 at 9:17 am
The Santa analogy is apt because in the hypothetical scenerio we’re assuming that Santa-ism is as fully-developed as Christianity (replete with rituals and a history and texts, etc.).
The bottom line is that Christians support a level of obtrusion with their faith in government that they would never tolerate from other religions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ9To30Hz7A
RollngGrnade
6 Mar 08 at 10:13 am