(January 5, 2015 at 1:05 pm)Huggy74 Wrote: Secularism as you put it, may be neutral or "indifferent" to religion by definition but not in practice.

So, what you want is to assume that governments which fail to practice secularism as it is defined are somehow practicing secularism correctly? You're actually asking us to accept that not practicing secularism is practicing secularism?

Quote: For instance, the first amendment guarantees the free exercise of religion, yet we have children being disciplined for exercising their right.

Let's all play the fact checking game!

Quote:Boy Suspended from School For Reading Bible During Recess

And unfortunately, Huggy is off to a horrible start, by linking to a fabricated satirical news story, and pretending that it's real! To quote the byline of The News Nerd, which is what he linked to:

Quote: About The News Nerd
The stories posted on TheNewsNerd are for entertainment purposes only. The stories may mimic articles found in the headlines, but rest assured they are purely satirical.

It's at the bottom of the page he linked to as well, but who has time to read to the end of an article when there's a persecution rush to get to, right? For what it's worth, the school district also felt the need to reply to this, stating officially that the school that committed this heinous persecution of Huggy's religion... doesn't actually exist.

Good job so far, you brave crusader for Christ!

Quote:Student suspended for saying ‘bless you’ at school

And here too, a little fact checking shows that this is probably a lie. The principal of the school shows that large parts of the student's story- the punishment she got, the being removed from class- never happened, and that she got reprimanded for talking in class, not for the specific content of the speech.

So, we've got a student already caught in a lie most of the way... why should we believe her at all?

I hope you have the good graces to be embarrassed by all this, Huggy.

Quote:Not to mention the law in France that bans wearing religious symbols in schools.
French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools
Being "neutral" would mean banning all symbols...

And that's wrong: nobody here is defending this as right, and it's not even a correct application of secular law. Aside from your 1 for 3 example count, you can't use examples that are not secular according to the definition, as rebuttals against secular culture. Christian doublethink may have conditioned you to believe otherwise, but the opposite of a thing is not the same as the thing itself: "Not secular," does not mean "secular" when it will help you win an argument.

Quote:None of the above acts affect government policy in any way, proving there is a clear agenda (if it's not an atheist agenda, then who?) against the public exercise of religion.
How is this being neutral or "indifferent" towards religion?

Well, given that your first example was a literal joke, and the second was a lie, and the third was not secular... I don't think you have a case at all, Huggy.

(January 5, 2015 at 1:05 pm)Huggy74 Wrote: Secularism as you put it, may be neutral or "indifferent" to religion by definition but not in practice. For instance, the first amendment guarantees the free exercise of religion, yet we have children being disciplined for exercising their right.
Boy Suspended from School For Reading Bible During Recess
Student suspended for saying ‘bless you’ at school

The first instance doesn't appear to be a matter of governmental policy, but rather, an overzealous teacher; as such, it is not pertinent to a discussion of secularism, because secularism in the context of this discussion is a matter of policy.

Also, with a little digging I found this:

Quote:So I called up Principal Peggy Dodds just a little while ago and got her side of the story before shit hits the fan in the conservative world.
According to Dodds, Turner was not given an in-school suspension. She wasn’t sent out of the classroom, either — she chose to walk out. And, most importantly, she wasn’t punished by the teacher for saying “God bless you” — however, the teacher did admonish her for “disrupting the classroom.”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyath...bless-you/

Additionally, there are other indications that she didn't do this to simply "bless" a fellow student after a sneeze, but that she rather wants to push her notions of god into the classroom ... in other words, she wants the school to be non-secular, and is using this as a wedge to open the issue.

The second case is a matter of the boy violating the school's policy of not practicing religion during school hours ("School officials say the student was warned several times that he could not practice religion during school hours, but refused to comply"). [edit: I apparently got taken in by the satire, too -- Parks]

Schools aren't religious centers. The attempt to inject religion into schools is asking them to go outside the scope of their mission, but I can understand the Christian attempts to do so. You have to catch people when they're young and naive in order to sell a line of bullshit like the Biblical story.

(January 5, 2015 at 2:02 pm)Esquilax Wrote: And unfortunately, Huggy is off to a horrible start, by linking to a fabricated satirical news story, and pretending that it's real! To quote the byline of The News Nerd, which is what he linked to:

Quote: About The News Nerd
The stories posted on TheNewsNerd are for entertainment purposes only. The stories may mimic articles found in the headlines, but rest assured they are purely satirical.

It's at the bottom of the page he linked to as well, but who has time to read to the end of an article when there's a persecution rush to get to, right? For what it's worth, the school district also felt the need to reply to this, stating officially that the school that committed this heinous persecution of Huggy's religion... doesn't actually exist.

Good job so far, you brave crusader for Christ!

My mistake, I just googled and grabbed the links that weren't from a Religious based website. Trust me, there are plenty of other links I could provide if you want.

(January 5, 2015 at 2:18 pm)Huggy74 Wrote:

(January 5, 2015 at 2:02 pm)Esquilax Wrote: And unfortunately, Huggy is off to a horrible start, by linking to a fabricated satirical news story, and pretending that it's real! To quote the byline of The News Nerd, which is what he linked to:


It's at the bottom of the page he linked to as well, but who has time to read to the end of an article when there's a persecution rush to get to, right? For what it's worth, the school district also felt the need to reply to this, stating officially that the school that committed this heinous persecution of Huggy's religion... doesn't actually exist.

Good job so far, you brave crusader for Christ!

My mistake, I just googled and grabbed the links that weren't from a Religious based website. Trust me, there are plenty of other links I could provide if you want.

Are they better than what you've already posted, or do they further serve to evidence how you don't know anything about the subject you're arguing against?

And trust you? Why on earth would we ever trust someone like you?

(January 5, 2015 at 2:20 pm)Fidel_Castronaut Wrote: And trust you? Why on earth would we ever trust someone like you?

Calm down, it's a figure of speech.

(January 5, 2015 at 2:24 pm)Huggy74 Wrote:

(January 5, 2015 at 2:20 pm)Fidel_Castronaut Wrote: And trust you? Why on earth would we ever trust someone like you?

Calm down, it's a figure of speech.

When you talk huggy the line between bullshit and not-bullshit blurs.

(January 5, 2015 at 2:18 pm)Huggy74 Wrote: My mistake, I just googled and grabbed the links that weren't from a Religious based website. Trust me, there are plenty of other links I could provide if you want.

The problem wasn't the speed with which you grabbed the links, but that you fell for and propagated known falsehoods because they confirmed what you already believed. The majority of these christian persecution tales are much the same; lies or distortions that theist news sources latch onto without ever knowing the full story, nor caring. If you were googling them, either you already knew what you were looking for, in which case you're a dupe who didn't bother to fact check, or you were looking for persecution of your religion generally, meaning you were just looking for examples that confirm your presuppositions, which both isn't an honest way to present a situation, nor is it effective as single examples, given without context or a broader social indicator, are not sufficient to determine larger trends. Either way, what reason do any of us have to trust any links you give in future? It only took me three minutes or so to falsify your last claims, after all; evidently even that much research is too much, both for you and the persecution brigade this stuff feeds.

Which doesn't even address the broader notion that, just as Not-X is not X, Not-Secularism is not Secularism, making your entire point moot even if it was accurate. "X, Y, and Z aren't doing A right!" does not imply that the ideological basis for A is ineffective, impossible, or incorrect.