I don’t know that I believe in the “separation of church and state” per se, at least not as it seems so often depicted, where religious institutions had better not interfere with the government and the government has to force the religious institutions into compliance with this rule. It seems rather unbalanced, somehow.
I do believe in institutional separation of all organizations, from all sectors. For instance, I believe that Microsoft should be barred from all attempts at dictating the policies of Sun Microsystems. In the same way, I don’t believe that any religious institution should have the authority to dictate the tax code and that the government shouldn’t have the ability to dictate the age of responsibility (when you are old enough to be baptized) to a baptist church, or who should be allowed to have marriage ceremonies at a Mormon temple.
Religious institutions are, de facto, forbidden to establish splinter nation-states within sovereign U.S., and conversely, we have an ammendment in our constitution that forbids the US Government from establishing a sanctioned religious institution. Many nations do not have such an equable agreement. However, institutional separation is as far as that agreement goes. Institutions get to have overlapping influences. Microsoft is completely free to create an operating system for servers and Sun is completely free to create programs and languages designed for home PCs. Steve Jobs gets to be CEO of both Apple and Pixar. Religious conviction gets to affect government policy and government laws very often dictate what kind of religious behavor is acceptable. We can’t be puritanical about our imagined wall between religion and government or the whole thing falls apart. If we had to be absolute monarchs over our spheres of influence, we would destroy the very spirit of cooperation and tolerance that the first amendment was designed to protect.
People can’t abandon their religious convictions the minute they leave their pews any more than they can flaunt the laws of the government the minute they enter the doors of their church. These things overlap–there’s just no way around it. Public morality is the field of both the church and the state. There’s just no human way to separate them. And so, when people go to the ballot box, they have to vote their conscience. How could anyone be expected to vote against what they believe?
You could say that a representative has to vote according to the majority of his constituents, but honestly that’s a little bit backwards. To do that he has to keep on second guessing and ends up never pleasing anybody. Instead, the constituents need to elect a representative who already has like convictions. That way everybody gets to vote their conscience, which is good, because ultimately everyone already does. They might bend on an issue they consider trivial, but nobody votes against what they feel is right when they think it’s an essential issue.
Of course, the people who have the best convictions are not always in the majority. I’m aware of that. We have historical proof: Slavery used to be hard coded into the Constitution. But that still doesn’t mean that anyone has the capacity to live their lives according to someone else’s convictions. The majority can oblige the minority on inessential issues, but nobody can compromise on what they consider to be absolutely essential. They just can’t. Honestly, we shouldn’t expect them to. That is, we shouldn’t be surprised or shocked when people act according to their convictions. We may be surprised to find what their convictions are, but never shocked that they act accordingly.
So what happens when the minority doesn’t agree with the majority on a core issue? The normal thing. People act according to their convictions, regardless of the law. Then the issue becomes not what our beliefs are, but how essential are those beliefs. The majority sets the law, the minority breaks the law, and either the majority determines that their conviction wasn’t so essential after all, or the majority enforces the law until the minority changes their mind. Things automatically escalate until someone decides that some alternative trumps their conviction.
In the case of the civil war, the South seems to have decided that total annihilation was ultimately worse than slaves’ emancipation and an abrigement states rights. Coversely, the North seems to have determined that repealing slavery and forbidding succession were worth the lives they paid.
Sometimes we fight at the ballot box, and sometimes we vote with swords.
neumatikos 
I prefer swords, myself.. They’re more fun.
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Ignore the siser behind the curtain. Neither is fun — swords are just more permenant. Good article but just to stick in my oar here’s a little article on the question of “extreme” in regards to political positioin.
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-religion/1177334/posts
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okay — I admit it….I can’t spell.
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See, I read that article and I don’t know that I agree with it. I think that, in most cases extremism is bad, except in those cases where the thing you’re extreme in is, by nature, moderate. For instance, I took a test a while back that proved that I’m a hardcore moderate. I take it as a compliment.
The author of that article starts off with a broken analogy. People DON’T praise and admire scientists who persue their intellectual aspirations to the extreme. We have a phrase, “Mad scientist” that descirbes those people. People who destroy life and other people’s property in the name of science are not admired or praised. They are hated and feared with all the other extremists.
Extremism can only be valued when it is placed in something that cannot be carried too far. I’m all in favor of extremism, but first you have to determine if what you’re being “extreme” about is stable enough to follow through on. You have to stay in the middle of the road–there’s a pit on either side.
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So, you saw the democratic convention on the telivition too? By the way, what in the world does Coo mean?
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My position is somewhat different. I think the term extreme is completely amoral — neither good nor bad. It is simply something taken to it’s ultimate expression. If that expression is good then extreme would be the absolute highest good. If it is bad then extreme would be the absolute lowest evil.
The difficulty is that the word extreme today is being used politically to mean something only on the “right” and always bad. And as the author points out, one reason that is possible is that those on the left are deceptively labelling themselves as “centrist”. And thus avoiding the taint of say, extreme Stalinesque Communism Therefore anything that is moderately conservative [or ironically Christian] is by definition extreme right. And thus associated with Nazi Facism. For the record I consider communism & facism to be simply two sides of the same coin. There’s not a scrap of spiritual difference between them though they do differ politically. Both feed the fires of government with the unwilling bodies of the populace. And neither acknowledges or respects any higher authority than the government — or any higher good than serving the society as defined by that government.
I personally prefer Reagan’s designators….not “Left & Right” but “Up & Down” with “Down” being complete totalitarianism and “Up” absolute anarchy. I would consider the perfect form of government to be somewhere north of center. Enough law to protect the innocent but with freedom to make mistakes and bear the consequences for them [without holding the government or society responsible] I admit I am more conservative than libertarian so I would be north of center but south or say, Neal Bortz.
Here’s an article that highlights the dangers of government power.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/ma20040629.shtml
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One last “extreme” thought: That when it comes to mad scientist & extreme environmentalist — as it did in the case of Nazi’s — that much that is evil comes cloaked in a disguise of apparent moral good and only the very discerning will recognize where it will lead when it reaches it’s ultimate expression or extreme
That is the case of many things that came about in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s. For many it was a moral good that removed God from the classroom and the consequences have come slowly and as we approach the extreme many are unable to see how close we are to sociatal suicide — much like amphibians being very slowly boiled to death.
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mmmm… swords…:p
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