Thou Shalt Have No God Before Bush-Cheney
I recently wrote that the right wing in America is trying to discourage true spirituality---the kind of religion that encourages people to have compassion for others and to take a stand for others in the face of government oppression. The current administration is afraid of the kind of courage we witnessed in Burma from the Buddhist monks. It does not want to see fat, lazy contented Americans suddenly develop a conscience. However, Americans are a very religious lot. More religious than people in other industrialized countries, according to some accounts I have read. And we have no state religion, such as those they have in Europe, which can tell the people "Do what your government tells you to do!". Religion in the U.S. is more likely to tell you "Follow your conscience." Which is a bad thing if you are Bush or Cheney and you are trying to start up a fascist state. So, the right wing has hit upon a plan. By aligning itself with some religious hucksters and forming a state sponsored Church which will serve to validate the government, it hopes to quash the conscience of the American people.
While the religious right is fond of claiming that the Founders were religious men and women, they forget that they were opposed to the union of church and state, because they believed that the state corrupted religion. Here is how Thomas Paine described religion in its independent form (from The Rights of Man )
All religions are in their nature kind and benign, and united with principles of morality. They could not have made proselytes at first by professing anything that was vicious, cruel, persecuting, or immoral. Like everything else, they had their beginning; and they proceeded by persuasion, exhortation, and example. How then is it that they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant?
Since the American Revolution occurred during the Age of Reason, the same could have been said for any atheistic or agnostic system of moral thought. Paine does not assume that religion is good because it derives from God. It is compassionate and civilizing, because this is what humans strive for. This is what they demand in their moral belief systems.
What happens when the state takes over religion and makes it the one and only sanctioned Church?
By engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called the Church established by Law. It is a stranger, even from its birth, to any parent mother, on whom it is begotten, and whom in time it kicks out and destroys.
The Church which serves as an arm of the state is not a humane church.
