Some officially proclaimed “days” sound a lot better in the abstract than in reality. For instance, yesterday, in addition to being Martin Luther King Day, was also National Hat Day and National Strawberry Ice Cream Day. Today, January 16, is National Fig Newton Day, National Nothing Day, National Without a Scalpel Day, and National Religious Freedom Day. I can certainly get behind National Fig Newton Day. After all, observance is easy and tasty. National Without a Scalpel Day sounds a bit odd, but honors one of the greatest advances in medicine in centuries, the modern ability to perform many surgeries without making a large incision. Anyone can do nothing, so National Nothing Day is also easy, if perhaps a little silly.
The big one today is National Religious Freedom Day. It merits a public Presidential proclamation, and some presidential tweeting. It just sounds so essentially American, arguing that everyone should have the freedom to observe their own faith, according to its tenets. That doesn’t stop it from being a horrible idea.
President Trump’s proclamation includes the sentence, “No American–whether a nun, nurse, baker, or business owner–should be forced to choose between the tenets of faith or adherence to the law.” This sounds good, but the reality is far from good. What Fearless Leader is saying here is that religious belief should be held as superior to actual law. There has never been a time in history where this has worked out to everyone’s benefit. Civil law made murder illegal, but religious law said burning witches was just fine and the Church used to have the power to tell the civil authorities what to do. (The church, technically, never killed a single witch or heretic, as the ecclesiastic courts that handed down the sentence turned the prisoners over to the local civil authorities for execution.)
The problem is that those religious figures shouting the loudest that their religious freedom is being infringed are almost always those whose real complaint is that their freedom to persecute someone with different beliefs is being infringed. The President’s proclamation repeats the myth that some of our ancestors came here seeking religious freedom, a statement nearly always meant to refer to the Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Pilgrims didn’t have the slightest interest in religious freedom except for their own sect. Anyone else could go hang. If you disagreed with the religious/civil authorities in the colony, you either went into exile, like Roger Williams, made a show of outward conformity, or ended up on the gallows. The Puritans weren’t subjected to any real persecution in England, so much as they were expected to support the established church, which they believed to be corrupted. Not that many years after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, their Puritan brethren back home fomented a rebellion, launched the English Civil War, murdered the King, and installed Oliver Cromwell as a religio-military dictator. Things might have improved slightly for Puritans during that period, but they were fairly horrible for anyone else.
The United Kingdom of today, while it still has an established church, no longer tries to enforce conformity to that church. At least, not beyond the rather narrow confines of royal succession, which requires the monarch to be a communicant of the Church of England. Given that the monarch is also the titular head of the Church, it’s not illogical to make membership a requirement for the office.
To modern, militant American Christians, religious freedom today is strongly connected to suppressing gay rights. Christians dislike gays, which is curious, really, since the “prohibition” is Old Testament law, and Jesus never said anything on the topic. The New Testament condemnation comes from Paul, not Jesus. I don’t even find that surprising. If you’re actually paying attention, particularly in the hours before the crucifixion, it’s difficult to miss the gay overtones in Jesus’s life. Here was a man who never married, spent most of his time hanging around with a dozen other men, and, in the final hours of his life, informed the disciple “that [he] loved” that, from that time on, Jesus’ mother was now his mother as well. The final act of Jesus’ life was to die on a cross. The next to last was apparently an impromptu gay commitment ceremony.
The religious freedom that the President and his supporters are trying to impose is mostly the freedom to discriminate. They aren’t even remotely in favor of true religious freedom. And they forget that the only true guarantee of religious freedom is a strictly secular government. This is what our Founding Fathers created for us. For all the blather about how our laws and Constitution are biblically-based, even a casual look at the original sources calls that a lie. Probably the closest thing to an influence is the constitutional requirement for two witnesses in treason cases, which reflects a biblical law requiring two witnesses in a capital case. Except the Constitution also allows confession, while Jewish law forbids it. And there’s certainly nothing in American law that requires a perjurer to be punished with the same punishment as he was trying to inflict on his victim.
In any case, the United States wouldn’t even exist if our Founding Fathers had actually been strong Christians, since they would never have violated God’s clear command to just do whatever the hell the king told them to do. Kings got their powers from God, and disobeying a king was exactly the same as disobeying God.
The fact is, religion is incapable of moderation and inherently immoral. Each religion aggrandizes its own members, and denigrates everyone outside its reach. And if the Islamic fanatics of ISIS are being condemned by many American Christians for their actions, it may be as much because the Americans wish that they could do the same thing, not because they think there’s anything wrong with persecuting and even murdering non-believers. Christians have a nearly two thousand year history of doing exactly that, only becoming “civilized” in the last couple hundred years, and only because most Christians live in countries where secular governments have managed to limit their power. Where Christianity is not limited by an effective government, they still like to kill people who disagree with them. There are places in Africa and Oceania where Christians are still burning witches at the stake, or slaughtering neighbors who don’t share their faith. The efforts to impose the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda were heavily sponsored and encouraged by American missionaries.
The truth is, what we need even more than freedom of religion is freedom from it. I’m not going to say that, without religion, there would be no wars, but there would certainly have been a lot fewer of them in the last twenty years.
And, yes, I know this is after midnight, but only in the Eastern time zone.
I’m not a kid anymore, but I’m still in good shape, and Jim is in his sixties and hung like a fucking horse. Don’t knock older guys. Some of them are still pretty good in the sack. A lot of young guys cum too quickly. Older guys tend to last longer, and lasting longer means I get to cum more times before he does. Mostly thanks to porn, a lot of younger guys will eat pussy now, but, again, the older ones seem to do it better. Other women, to be brutally honest, do it best.
