Are pretzels the ACLU's next target?

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Madaglan

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Nowadays it seems like traditional Christian and Jewish symbols are taboo, while New Age and pagan symbols are increasingly in acceptance. Crosses, the Ten Commandments, religious statues–all must go from public property. According to many, including nominal Christians, there must be a clear separation between Church and State. The argument is that no religion, regardless of its demographic strength in an area, should be held above other, minority religions as an expressed religion of the government.

This is a very dangerous, and I think, faulty argument. It is true that there must be some separation between Church and State, but I do not think that the full separation that the ACLU and others strive for (a complete separation) is warranted, and much less humanly practicable. The government must determine, before it passes any legislation, what is best for its people. Religion influences every person in how he understands morality and what is best for mankind. Even the atheist, who rejects religion, nontheless holds a religious position, even though it is atheistic. The government is not a robotic body but is directly influenced by the interaction of beliefs, including religious beliefs, among its members. Since no man lacks some form of religious belief, it is necessary to conclude that there never will be a separation between religion and state, and that to attempt to efface all religious symbols is nonsense, since even if the government is full of atheists or pagans, it will only replace Christian symbols with those that emphasize the human person as a controler of his own destiny. Even the absence of material religious symbols is a religious symbol in itself. The same kind of thinking that is applied to iconoclastic Protestants can be applied here: just as the iconoclasm of Protestants suggests a certain attitude towards material and the body, so too does the lack of material religious symbols say something about the concept of the divine. Would the ACLU recognize the lack of material religoius symbols as invisible religious symbols? Of course not, since the ACLU is, I believe, more concerned about replacing Western theistic traditions with its own religious traditions.
 
The battle the ACLU wages against Christianity is not a battle for equality, but a battle to remove Christian monuments and to replace the Christian religion with a man-made and constructed religion–one that is perhaps communistic, and one that operates on Enlightenment ways of thinking rather than Christian ways.

Unfortunately many Americans equate equality with justice. However, equality is only justice insofar as it is distributive–that is, as it gives “equal return to equal proportions.” A minority believer should receive the government protection he needs to practice his belief and live his life without undue molestation, but I do not believe that there is a right (much less is it intelligent) for the minority’s beliefs to usurp the beliefs of the majority as the moral front which the government uses as a demonstration of its principles of morality. Only when the minority view becomes a majority view should it have this right.

If two hundred years from now the majority of people in a given community are pagan, then there is at least some justification, on a logical level at least, for taking down from public buildings crosses, the ten commandments, etc. and replacing them with pagan symbols. When and if this happens, I hope that Christians are allowed to practice their beliefs unmolested, and are allowed to continue their practices.
 
The fact is, today this American society is predominately Christian in traditions, even if Christianity is in ebb. I do not see justice in the ACLU pressuring the government to take down Christian symbols from public places when the culture is still strongly Christian, if not in belief, at least in traditional understandings. So, if the ACLU wants to be fair, then it should discontinue its actions against the government’s use of Christian symbols and instead legitimitely prosletyze enough people in this country to its views to create a majority that is relatavistic and perhaps pagan or atheistic. Then, without the resent of the majority of Americans, could it legitimately alter the religious symbols of the government, which in fact have the often unrecognized important purpose of defining the government’s goals for its people. There should be a paralell between what is allowed to occur in the government and the majority beliefs of the people.

We, as Christians, must not fall into the trap of thinking that the government should be free from religion. We must continue to evangelize our non-Christian Americans and remain strong in ourown Christian faith, so that we hold a majority in the country.

Anyhow, that’s my take on the subject. I am glad to see that many Christian and Catholic law associations have taken up the ACLU, but I honestly believe that we can only win this battle so long as we hold a majority presence in this country. If we don’t, it will be the reverse of what happened during Constantine’s day.

BTW, Pretzels, at least the three-holed ones, were first created by German monks to teach the Trinity (at least that is the story I have been told.) But don’t let the ACLU know that, or else they’ll remove them from school vending machines!

I welcome any critical comments of what I have written. I am especially interested in how others see the battle against the ACLU. Are Christians to respect the traditions of others who reject Christianity, or do Christians have a duty to God to impose religious symbols (and by consequence, moral goals) on the government?
 
I think the subject you bring up here is a good one, and deserves much more in depth attention than a mere forum thread can possibly give it. I agree that it is a travesty that the ACLU is “out to get” Christianity, along with all of its outward physical manifestations.

Equality in our society, I think, does mean that each viewpoint is allowed to have its say, and that an overt imposition of ideology (ACLU included) is contrary to American ideals. However, I think that the ACLU is attempting to cover up the fact that America is an historically Christian nation. It is shocking that our history of moral certaintiy and a powerful Christian ethic is being “sanitized” away and replaced with the materialism and the god of secularism. Even de Tocqueville saw that the strength of early American civilization was the moral ethic inspired by its churches, which the public display of outward symbolic manifestations is a natural byproduct. In denying and attempting to remove these symbols, we are in turn denying our history as a nation.

Working for the additional imposition of religious symbols in the public is questionable in my mind, though I do believe Christianity does have a place in politics, if only to counter the advance of secular humanism. I think regardless of our heritage, Protestant or Catholic, we need to fight to keep the symbols of our nation’s founding ideals.
 
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