Should governments start regulating religion?

[JWeinCom]

Dulfite said:

John2290 said:
I think we as as a society should be done with religion, I'm not atheist and I think anyone should believe what they want but in my opinion there should be majour pressure on organised religions to stay out of any political scenario/ local election/law enforcment etc. We need to leave it behind us and move forward. Strong belief systems of any kind should be kept away from societal matters and politics imo, just look what Hitler done with just one deeply embedded belief.

And look what the Soviet Union did to it's people with the idea of no religion. Both sides are evil. Allowing people to have their beliefs and allowing them to be able to express them (individually, politically, etc) or NOT to is what the U.S. was founded upon. I don't want to be like Hitler Germany OR Soviet Union, I want to be us (as bad as that is at times, it is better than than other two).

Nonsense.  Nazi Germany was a Christian state with about 50 percent of its citizens being protestant, and 30 percent being catholic.  Regardless of the regimes personal beliefs (which we have no reason to believe were atheistic) they publicly used religion as a tool to motivate.  Books regarding evolution ("Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel) were on banned books.  The state endorsed religious instruction.  

I would not go so far as to say Naziism was a Christian movement, but it certainly was not atheistic, so do not imply that it is.

As for Soviet Russia, yes they were atheistic, although their position on religion changed at many points throughout it history.  Opposition to religion was largely based largely on the fact that the previous abusive regime was deeply interwoven with the Russian Orthodox Church.  

However, it is still nonsense to claim that Soviets did this to their people "with the idea of no religion".  The idea of no religion was ancillary to the communist movement.  The movement was about a system of economics and government, and not about religion.  You cannot say that what happened in Soviet Russia was due to atheism any more than I could say that World War 1 was caused by religion because most of the parties were religious.