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Getting On : All My Politics
Religious Freedom? | from Oddman - Thursday, February 09, 2006
accessed 1368 times Recent Poll: "Parents should be forbidden by law not to teach their children about their personal religion until the child reaches the age of 18."........WTF? The recent poll over whether "parents should be forbidden by law not to teach their children about their personal religion until the child reaches the age of 18." is quite chilling. Where did this idea come from? U.S.S.R? China? Cuba? Seems quite overboard to me. With so many problems stemming from religious beliefs, we could well do without it? Or can we?
I don't associate my morals with religion, but I know many people who do base their morals on their faith.
I'd like to hear the general opinion on religious freedom. |
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Reader's comments on this article Add a new comment on this article |  from
Wednesday, March 22, 2006 - 08:13
(Agree/Disagree?)
The Enclave(restrictive cult) under U.S. Law
Existing U.S. legal precedent, though, may provide some grounds for handling expansive demands for Islamic enclaves. U.S. legal views of internal enclaves derive from the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled the concept of separate but equal to be unconstitutional.[18] While the case revolved around the right of black children to attend white schools, it promulgated a concept that is anathema in today's world of multiculturalism: neither the state nor any constituent group could claim equality through separation.
Enclaves can exist, though. As courts have ruled on issues relating to equality under the law and upon the autonomy of religious practice, two distinctive features of internal U.S. enclaves have taken shape: first, the boundaries of the enclave should be recognized by local inhabitants. Second, the enclave cannot supersede the constitutionally protected rights of the citizens of a state.
Because most rights secured by the constitution are protected only against infringement by government action, the Supreme Court has avoided establishing a bright-line test as to the limits of religious liberty. Any religious group or individual seeking to establish an internal enclave has the right to limit residency, promulgate local rules, and perhaps even collect fees or taxes to support nominal community services.
Such enclaves do not hold final sway over the rights of non-residents, however. In Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Company[19] and Flagg Brothers v. Brooks,[20] the court outlined constitutional protections for private citizens in which any entity, religious or otherwise, exercising governmental authority over private citizens remains subject to the provisions of the First and Fourteenth amendments. In both cases, the court affirmed that citizens of a state retain their right to "due process of law" under the Fourteenth Amendment, even when inside an enclave. These holdings, however, do not prevent enclaves from restricting the individual freedoms of their inhabitants.
The Supreme Court has ruled upon the limits of religious liberty. In Cantwell v. Connecticut, the court outlined the circumstances in which the government could act to restrict religious independence. The court held that the free exercise clause "embraces two concepts-freedom to believe and freedom to act. The first is absolute, but in the nature of things, the second cannot be. Conduct remains subject to regulation for the protection of society."[21]
Christopher L. Eisgruber, professor of law at New York University, explained. He argued that, "the Constitution permits government to nurture ideological sub-communities founded upon premises inconsistent with the constitution's own commitments."[22] He maintained that such dissident sub-communities can provide important "sources of dissent"[23] and asserted that even if an enclave embraced ideals contrary to constitutional ideals, it should still be granted the right to pursue its own vision of good. For example, he wrote:
[Though] it is regrettable that young women in Kiryas Joel [a Satmar Hasidic enclave] will grow up in a starkly sexist culture, and it is regrettable that the Amish children of Yoder will find it very hard to become astronomers or lawyers . it would also be regrettable if the United States were not home to any sub-communities which, like the Satmars or the Amish, rejected principles of justice fundamental to the American regime.[24]
According to Eisgruber, tolerance of the intolerant is fundamental to the freedoms espoused by Western liberal democracy. While Islamists might use such logic to argue for the permissibility of Shari`a communities, such tolerance has limits. Enclaves do not have carte blanche to act. Both the state and national legislatures must retain control over the extent of accommodation, and there should be no subsidization of the enclave by the government.[25] Such limits ensure that the government can constrain those sub-communities that might espouse more radical, violent, or racist views.[26]
It is usually when the U.S. government moves to uphold the rule of law that most Americans first learn of an internal enclave. Few Americans knew of the philosophy espoused by anti-government activist Randy Weaver until 1992 when the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms raided his compound at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, killing Vicki Weaver, their infant son, Sam, and the family dog.[27] Nor did many Americans know about David Koresh and his religious views until a raid the following year on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in which a resulting fire killed fifty adults and twenty-five children under the age of fifteen.[28] While tragic, such events involved cults or political splinter groups. The growth of Muslim enclaves raises the specter of such conflicts occurring on a much larger scale.
While the court has interpreted the establishment clause to empower the government to constrain dissident sub-communities when necessary to protect public safety, it has been wary of addressing legal issues requiring intrusion upon the religious polity. Because the First Amendment provides for religious freedom, the court has confined itself to ruling upon three basic issues: property disputes between national religious hierarchical organizations with affiliated breakaway entities; accommodations under the free exercise clause; and the prohibition against the establishment of a state religion. New challenges, though, may lead to new interpretations.
To read the whole article;
http://www.aina.org/news/20060321184708.htm
(reply to this comment)
| from vacuous
Monday, February 13, 2006 - 13:18
 (Agree/Disagree?)
Faith is said to be a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance. At its best it prevents well meaning individuals from thinking rationally about their most troubling concerns, at worst it is a continuous source of violence and hate.
Fortunately much of the west has outgrown its tolerance for deliberate violence, torture and oppression in line with increasing secularisation. However there are still places in the world where women are denied every civil liberty (save breeding), where a childs total education consists of learning to recite from antiquitated religious fiction books, and people are put to death or hurt for imaginary crimes like blasphemy. Every large assault on human rights from the inquisition to the holocaust and anti-semitism can be traced to religious influence and a dogma-like adherence to an ideology...faith.
Criticising a persons faith is taboo and beyond rational discourse. It is impolitic to question a mans ideas on God and the afterlife in a way that criticizing his ideas on history or politics or physics is not. And so when a suicide bomber blows a bus in London, the role that faith played is discounted. The motives must have been political, economic or completely personal.
When a conviction exists in an inverse proportion to its justification, the basis of human reason and cooperation has been lost. If we have reasons for what we believe we have no need of faith, if we have no reasons for what we believe we have lost our connection to the world, reality, and one another.
(reply to this comment)
| | | | | | | | | | | | |  From Road Scholar
Monday, February 13, 2006, 13:48
(Agree/Disagree?)
"However there are still places in the world where women are denied every civil liberty (save breeding), where a childs total education consists of learning to recite from antiquitated religious fiction books..."
The latter sounds just like my childhood; the former just like the "womanhood" I was destined to growing up in The Family.
As a friend once kidded me, I am a Road Scholar -- everything I know I learned on the road. (reply to this comment) |
| | from SeanSwede
Monday, February 13, 2006 - 09:57
(Agree/Disagree?)
I wrote a letter to the European Union about my idea of making a law in the future about religion being classified and only for 18 and ups. I did get a response last year from them saying that it was a very intressting concept but that they had other issues to take care of in the mean time, like the war in Iraq.
(reply to this comment)
| | | | | | | from Baxter
Saturday, February 11, 2006 - 16:00
(Agree/Disagree?)
In most cases the only way to fully separate a child from the religion of its parents would be to separate the child at birth, which of course would be considerably more cruel to the child then exposing it to its parents faith.
I am not especially angry that I was raised a Christian. I am not sure i would be any more or less moved had I been raised as a Buddhist, Moslem or Jayan. My issue is not with growing up in a religious environment; I am angry that I was raised in a restricted environment in which I had no alternatives, and that my upbringing was earmarked by irresponsibility. Plenty of children grow up in religous families and have no unnecessary or undue baggage. It really is next to redundant that our upbringing included religious doctrines asserting that heaven was a pyramid in the moon, that the head of your 'church' communes with imaginary people and thinks he fucks goddesses..... you get where I'm going with this! Arseholes are Arseholes, with or without religion. It was bollocks, but maybe only slightly a greater degree of bollocks than is found in a whole lot of religions. If our parents had simply raised us with some small sense of normality, or just put us before their happy-go-lucky, irresponsible lifestyles (or not have had kids!) It seems perfectly logical to me that our parents could have believed all that horseshit and still been good parents -do we label all Catholics as dangerous to children on account of the paedophilic priests who give the denomination a bad name? I know quite a few former FGAs who are very good parents, and who have managed to have well-rounded kids, and who didn't completely fuck them up. There has to be a modicum of basic logic that a parent must be expected to follow regardless of personal faith - like, CHILDREN ARE NOT FREE LABOUR, or SEX IS NOT FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED PUBERTY......!!!! I don't blame religion for that bullshit, I blame whack fucking people for that shit!!
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| from wendell
Friday, February 10, 2006 - 22:54
(Agree/Disagree?)
I've grown up in the family. I am most thankful for the religous belief that they have taught me. In the end, it was obviously my choice whether or not I believed.
I thnk that it would be crazy to pass that sort of law, next thing there'll be a law saying what we should & shouldn't believe. Where is freedom of speech, thought??
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| | | | from Soviet Fish
Friday, February 10, 2006 - 13:27
(Agree/Disagree?)
Parents are far too stupid to be allowed to raise children. Some do a good job, most don't. As some wise guy once suggested (may have been me, not sure) you should need a licence to have kids.
Alternatively the state could simply collect newborns to be raised by "professional" parents. This would also eliminate the whole "carer woman" problem as well, for there would be "carer parents". These would be paid by the state for there work, just like any other government employ. Of course the "parents" would be under constant surveillance, thus ensuring that the juveniles receive proper care. As far as religion is concerned, they would be taught absolutely nothing. The would discover this for themselves after joining there mature peers.
This system would also allow the state to effectively control its population growth. There would also be less problems with job placement as the juveniles would receive a "specialised" education, according to the needs of society at the time.
This system may sound soviet, but whats wrong with that? Russians for the most part seem fairly well adjusted, if alcoholic.
Of course this would be a temporary measure, until such a time that science discovers a way to hatch full grown and pre-imprinted humans from eggs.
(reply to this comment)
| From anovagrrl
Friday, February 10, 2006, 17:56
(Agree/Disagree?)
Do you have any evidence to support your claim that most parents don't do a good job of raising their children?
In the U.S., the state often collects newborns and other juveniles up to about age 16 through a process of parental custody relinquishment. These children enter state custody because of abuse, neglect, and/or dependency issues (e.g., schizophrenic parent unable to care properly for the child). Last time I checked the numbers, there were around 1/2 million or so such children in state institutions or foster homes, where they are being cared for by "professional" parents.
Although the goal is for all of these children to either return home to their parents, be placed with close relatives, or be permanently adopted, huge numbers of these kids bounce around the system of public care until they "age out." If you were to survey residents in a homeless shelter who are between the age of 20 and 28, you would find a disproportionate number (about 20%) grew up as wards of the state.
Here's an uncomfortable truth: Even very crappy parents can learn how to be good enough parents with some assistance. Despite the fact that many parents may appear to be stupid, the vast majority of those stupid losers love their children and are loved by their children in return. A child's natural family (prents, grandparents, aunts/uncles, siblings, cousins) has an incredibly powerful bio-social interest in helping another family member thrive and succeed that an unrelated public official or "professional parent" does not have and will never have.
The Family's pathological child-rearing experiment is no basis on which to judge even the worst parents in the System who lose their children through custody relinquishment. If Family parents had not been aided and abetted by a sociopathic organization that used the cloak of religious freedom with the artistry of grifters, huge numbers of people on this website would have been taken into state custody at some point in their lives. This is essentially what happened to many people who grew up in TFI anyway, inasmuch as unrelated aunties and uncles who functioned as unpaid, unsupervised foster parents raised thousands of abandoned children who had become wards of a theocratic state.
It seems to me you're proposing that the state do to all children the same type of thing that may have been done to you. (reply to this comment) |
| | | | | | | | | | | From Ne Oublie
Saturday, February 11, 2006, 03:45
(Agree/Disagree?)
I don't think over-dramatising is going to serve any real purpose, but his point is valid, that the only way to have real 'equality' is to suppress all individual freedoms and abilities.
Anyhow, doesn't anyone else find Soviet Fish's proposal eerily similar to what TF did? Taking kids away from their parents to be trained by 'shepherds', who then trained them exclusively for one 'specialised' purpose. And sharing Berg's fascination with Communism to boot!(reply to this comment) |
| | From You are kidding, right?
Friday, February 10, 2006, 14:14
(Agree/Disagree?)
So, because you got the shit end of the stick everyone else should to? I don't know what you went through but my life sucked and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Not even in the name of equality. There is no "beauty" in your idea. Have you ever seen the long term effects of institutionalization on children? I mean you no insult when I say that maturity will likely change your view in time Fish.(reply to this comment) |
| | | | | | | | from weegirlie
Friday, February 10, 2006 - 04:29
(Agree/Disagree?)
Personally I think parents should be able to teach about culture and religion to some extent, but they shouldn't be able to impose their own religion on them. A background of various religions should be vaguely discussed and the decision left to the child if they want to be religious. If a child does chose to be religious they should be left to do so in their own way, not encouraged or discouraged by their parents.
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| from Ne Oublie
Friday, February 10, 2006 - 02:18
(Agree/Disagree?)
While I'm at it, let me just add a reminder of the double-negative. SeanSwede asks:
"Parents should be forbidden by law not to teach their children about their personal religion until the child reaches the age of 18."
I take it then, that he has had a massive change-of-heart from previous posts and decided to propose mandatory religious education by parents up to age 18?
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| from Ne Oublie
Friday, February 10, 2006 - 02:08
(Agree/Disagree?)
What next? Are parents not to be allowed to teach their children their own culture? or language? Why not wait until they're 18, and then let them decide which they want to learn?
We have to differentiate between teaching the next generation to respect other cultures and religions, and depriving them of their own in favour of a conformist mono-cultural society. The problem is not with people having different beliefs, only when they don't tolerate the same in others.
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| from porceleindoll
Thursday, February 09, 2006 - 20:59
(Agree/Disagree?)
I don't teach my children any religion, but I have exposed them to different religious ideas. They consider themselves Christian, but I warn them often that it's not what you believe but what you are on the inside that makes you a good person. I want to raise my kids to be good for the sake of good, not for a God, goddess, judgement, punishment or reward.
I also want them to have that freedom of choosing to either believe or not believe in a religion when they come across it. I don't want to have it pre-determined for them, I feel it's something very personal for them alone, and I shouldn't be making that choice. They know I feel that way, and every so often we have religious discussions and I re-iterate that first of all, no religion or person has the right to make them feel like shit for believing or not believing the way they do, and that they should always question and think things through before they decide.
I agree in large with the idea that parents shouldn't teach kids their personal religion until they're 18, but I don't think it should be a law. Parents have that right to pass it on if they like, but they have to bear the responsibility if their kids hate them, leave them, disown them, or turn out morally wrecked.
From what I've seen, parents pass on the religion, but forget to pass on what it means to just be a good person for the sake of helping humainity. Any good deeds done are done in the name of the religion, and if you take away that religion, where does the good then come from? A child could easily throw it all out and decide that if good comes from religion then they prefer to be bad, as we have seen in our own lives or the life of someone we know with the cult.
I think children should be exposed to different religions, to belief styles, to a variety of choices without a heavy leaning put on any one choice or religion. I send my kids to Sunday School once in awhile, we also visit shrines and temples, they pray to Jesus, they pray to the local rain spirit, they have a very varied belief system. My hope is that they will grow up strong in who they are and not strong in religion, because I learned from hard experience that when that religion fails, it can quite nearly destroy you as you are left floundering to discover who the true you really is. I don't want to leave that legacy to my children.
I just don't hold to the notion that I am ultimately evil and only the belief in a god can make me good. I believe that I am basically good and that if I choose to believe in a god, it would not be to make me a better person, or to give me an edge on humanity.
(reply to this comment)
| | | | From Ne Oublie
Monday, February 13, 2006, 10:06
(Agree/Disagree?)
"The greatest good and most noble behavior that I have witnessed has arisen from the essence of others' being and the greatest evils I have witnessed have been committed in the name of religion."
I see religion as more of an excuse or justification for actions than motivation. Blaming or crediting religion for individuals' actions is to give it greater power than is due, and thereby plays right into the hands of those who would misuse it as a tool of control.
Each of the major religions preaches broadly the same ethical code of behaviour, one which is also broadly compatible with your Secular Humanism or Positive Atheism. And even without religion, every society is compelled to encourage and legislate those actions which they consider to be 'good', while punishing those whose actions are considered 'evil'. Whether the code is based on religion or humanism, there will always be those who consider some or all of these classifications to be unjust, but I don't think that the solution is to enforce a global conformity. I consider a government-enforced morality even more dangerous than a religious one, which is precisely the reasoning behind separating church and state.(reply to this comment) |
| | From Sir Rantalot
Saturday, February 11, 2006, 13:26
(Agree/Disagree?)
"Any good deeds done are done in the name of the religion, and if you take away that religion, where does the good then come from?"
Maybe, if by your example, you teach them good character and respect for all living things?
Don't you think it's better to teach a child that there is no great lala-land after death, that this is all we have? Isn't that giving them no meaning to it all better than giving them a false meaning? Don't you think it will be less of a shock to them once they grow up and start forming their own ideas? We ex-F SG kids fell pretty hard when we woke up to the real world, don't you want to avoid the same thing happening to your kids?
If you want to grow them up strong in what they are, and not to become a bunch of fluffy new agers, then avoid religion like you would the plague!
It's better for them to cry for a few hours because when their pet hamster died you told them that death is the end and it will happen to all of us, rather then having them discover that on their own at a crucial time in their development, say their teen years, or half-way through college.
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| | From
Saturday, February 11, 2006, 20:41
(Agree/Disagree?)
To those who worry that "Any good deeds done are done in the name of the religion, and if you take away that religion, where does the good then come from?," relax! Even if you're right, once you take away that religion, all the bad deeds done in the name of religion will be gone, and the effect will be cancelled out. No problemo! (reply to this comment) |
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