One nation and one religion
And we call that “theocracy.”
Sounds great, right? Like Pakistan, like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, like Afghanistan…like Ireland until quite recently, like El Salvador now. Mullahs or priests – always male, of course, and not “identifying as” male either but the real thing – telling you what you can and can’t do.
And in related Michael Coup Plotting Religion-Fascist Flynn news…
Bah, autocorrect. That should have been Religio-Fascist.
Worship however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Conform to any consenting church who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace, security, and ignorance.
But force disbelievers out of their free thought for stating that Christianity is bullshit?
#thoughtcrime
(with sincere apologies to JKR) ;)
Which one? Do you want a new civil war? Because if you want a civil war, this is how you get one. Declare a religion to be the One, True, Religion. This didn’t bode so well for the Catholics under Elizabeth I or James I.
Americans get criticized for worshiping the Constitution, but while it has many flaws, it works much better as a governing document than the Pledge of Allegiance.
The clip cut off his next words, which surely would have been “and we will have this one religion when Jesus returns in Glory and every shall knee bow, every citizen confess — completely convinced and content to say so.”
Because that’s their secret weapon. Otherwise, it’s all just a bunch of force involving matters of conscience and we all know that no Christian minister would want that.
Mike @ 4 – or for the Protestants under Mary, which is part of why Elizabeth and James were so ferocious toward the Catholics.
I’m betting that if this fool is criticised for what he said, he will invoke the first amendment’s free speech element to express his political views, with no awareness that the same amendment has a freedom of religion element.
People like Michael Flynn put the lie to SCOTUS’s “ceremonial deism” dodge. That’s precisely why SCOTUS has been dead wrong on “under God” in the pledge, the IGWT cases, the goddy openings of public proceedings — including the Congressional chaplain and SCOTUS itself (“God save this honorable Court”) — and many other accommodations and concessions made to theocrats. Don’t negotiate with terrorists. The U.S. Constitution is intentionally secular.
It’s like the theists’ “you just don’t understand sophisticated theology” argument. They don’t care that the “definition” that they give is so nebulous and general that it’s indistinguishable from either material nature, on the one hand, or gossamer incoherence, on the other, … as long as they still get to call it God. Once you let that camel’s nose under the tent, it’s bait-and-switch, equivocation, gaslighting, intellectual dishonesty, and outright lying, all the way down. Again, don’t negotiate with terrorists. Don’t allow their vocabulary and framing.
TWAW is identical, drawn from the theocratic playbook.
Exactly, don’t bring that giant wooden horse the enemy left behind into the city.
To add to what Ophelia said at #7 (though I have no intention of condoning the savagery with which such as Edmund Campion were treated – though it was no worse than the treatment of certain Protestants under Mary: after all, neither Mary nor Elizabeth were in the happy position of being able to read Stephen Pinker’s ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’): there were both rebellions & plots against Elizabeth, aided & abetted by Pope Pius V’s bull against Elizabeth, whereby English Catholics were encouraged, really, to commit treason: for example, the Northern Rebellion; Barge Incident; Ridolfi Plot; Throgmorton Plot and the Babington Plot, which last resulted in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. History is never simple. The Pope’s Bull, coupled with Spanish machinations, had the effect of making life worse for English Catholics. Previously, to quote from an online encyclopaedia, ‘the queen effected a compromise that became known as the Religious Settlement. This settlement had three parts: the Act of Uniformity (1559) established The Book of Common Prayer as the official order of worship in England; the Act of Supremacy (1559) declared the queen the supreme governor of the English church; and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) established official Anglican doctrine. The Religious Settlement required outward conformity to the Church of England, but it tolerated Catholics so long as they kept their beliefs to themselves.’ Pius’s Bull put paid to that, to a degree. It should be noted that Elizabeth consistently supported one of the greatest English composers, William Byrd, who was Catholic, and made little secret of it (though much of his greatest music was ‘secret’, since it was written for a church in hiding). James I, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, was also willing to be tolerant, until the Gunpowder Plot occurred.
maddog, that’s what I like about some fundamentalists. Many of them hate the idea of the civil religion, and dislike crosses being allowed because they “aren’t inherently a Christian symbol” (of course they are). They want religion to be allowed because it is religion, not because it isn’t, and they don’t want their symbols declared not to be sacred.
When they are out front and honest, we know what we are dealing with.
I honestly think that most of these patriots in the US who want an official religion should read Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” for this line:
Of course people like Flynn don’t like religious refugees, since they’re all probably terrorists anyways.
Ophelia, I referred to Elizabeth and James because Flynn is a Catholic.