Kasz216 said:
Mr Khan said:
Max King of the Wild said:
Now, if you were to state that a persons shouldn't force their religion onto other people and make them practice it like the monarchs in the 16th century then I'd agree. But I absolutly do not agree with policies shouldn't be made based off of religion... because thats just silly. Religion gives people a sense of morals... non religious people would obtain it a different way that is just as equally flawed. |
We're saying the religious shouldn't use their authority to stump for political purposes, or latch their faith onto one specific policy and say "this here, this is what God wants."
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What makes a religious authority different from a union authority, or CEO, or School district leader.
If thier faith says one specific policy is the way it should be... why shouldn't they say that?
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Because politics is necessarily material, and it political motives are often material in desire. The church embraces these agendas for less-than-noble reasons by politicizing, like what the Catholics did in the runup to the 1500s that led (in part) to the Protestant Revolution. When mixed with politics, religion becomes subservient to politics, not the driving force behind political motives, but the moral authority to back another agenda.
Religion has long abused their moral authority to hold back progress in democratic countries. Hell, the Catholic Church is most of the reason that France killed their own democratic transition in 1848, because the suffrage-granted peasants were told "vote for the monarchists" by their priests, and they did. Or in America in the run-up to the Civil War, the Abolitionists were largely religious, but Southern faith-leaders also used Christianity to justify slavery. One of them was betraying their faith (and that's looking at it objectively. One religion can't hold both of these views simultaneously, removing the morality of slavery from the equation entirely).
