Your thoughts on Satanism and the petition for a Satanic statue.

[Catholic_Lady]

Cath - We get that you are personally unoffended by the religious displays of other faiths. And that's great. The reason I say you show a shocking lack of introspection is that you seem unable to look beyond the attack against your faith (as you perceive the Satanists' effort, and rightly so, I believe) and see what their reason for doing so is. Can you truly not grasp that putting your religion's symbols up, especially when the people doing so are saying out loud that their reason for doing so is "to show this is a Christian nation, Under God", is a slap in the face to everyone who believes in secular, pluralistic society? That it is Dominionism? You're okay with it because you're not personally threatened, since you belong (however loosely) to the dominant group that is doing the threatening. That's a shocking inability to really look inside and question the motives of your fellow faithful.

Here's how introspection might work for you: If the roles were reversed, and we lived in a philosophically atheistic society, and atheists put up a monument in front of a courthouse that symbolized the domination of atheism over religion, saying "And this nation has abolished belief in god!" when they did it, you would be screaming your head off as a member of the believing minority. If Catholics then got together to put up a religious statue, and the atheists got furious as a result, you would rightly point out that their own choice to put up an anti-religion monument opened the door for anyone's monument... and you would be bewildered by me if I could not understand that the issue is the monument itself, not whether or not I was okay with other groups putting up monuments of their own. The only offense occurring here is the attack on the secularism of the nation. And the fact that you can't see it is a baffling lack of introspection about your own religion's history and about the motives of the faithful, in this case.

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Hi Surgeon, sorry I don't get to all the posts sometimes. It's a lot of them to respond to, and I feel like I'm just repeating myself, as I don't know what other way I can explain where I'm coming from. 

You said this: "Can you truly not grasp that putting your religion's symbols up, especially when the people doing so are saying out loud that their reason for doing so is "to show this is a Christian nation, Under God", is a slap in the face to everyone who believes in secular, pluralistic society?" 

I have 2 things to say about this:

1. I'm having a hard time relating because I don't see myself feeling the same way if they had put a different religious symbol up. I wouldn't see myself feeling like it's a slap in the face if there was a Buddha up there, and to me, caring about that would just feel petty and butt hurt. So I can't relate to someone saying it's a slap in the face for the 10 commandments to be up there, because it wouldn't be to me if there was another religion's symbol up there. If the laws were not affected at all, I'd have no reason to think of it as anything more than a piece of concrete, or to care what a couple people who put Buddha up are saying. They can say whatever they want, for all I care. So long as the laws don't change and so long as I am not treated differently and so long as I'd be allowed to put a cross up there too if I wanted. Also, I feel like people are overeating a bit to my stance on this. My stance isn't that I support it/think it should be up there, and that I'd get mad if it came down. My stance is that I don't care either way lol. So no, I personally don't see it as a slap in the face. But if you see it as a slap in the face, and you want it to be taken down, ok. Lol, I have 0 objections to you feeling that way, and I have 0 objections to it coming down if that's what ends up happening.  

2. I agree, it's not a Christian nation. Yes, most people here are Christian, but as far as our laws are concerned, they are still based on separation of church and state. So that's why I said that to show that this is not just a Christian nation, other religions should be allowed to put their symbols up on public property too, if they want. And shoot, put the atheist "A" up too, lol. I don't care. I agree it should be allowed for any religious symbol to be on public property, or none. This would show that everyone has the same rights to represent their ideologies.        

So to address this: "If the roles were reversed, and we lived in a philosophically atheistic society, and atheists put up a monument in front of a courthouse that symbolized the domination of atheism over religion, saying "And this nation has abolished belief in god!" when they did it, you would be screaming your head off as a member of the believing minority."

Now hold on a second here. If you want to compare apples to apples, you'd have to compare the above monument to one that said "And this nation has abolished disbelief in God." Which would be ridiculous since it's untrue. However, if someone wanted to put "The Atheist 10 Commandments" somewhere, I couldn't care less. So long as other religions were allowed to publicly display theirs as well, if they wanted to, I wouldn't care.