RE: Where would you rather live?
August 29, 2010 at 9:07 pm
(This post was last modified: August 30, 2010 at 1:36 pm by TheDarkestOfAngels.)
(August 29, 2010 at 7:42 pm)Scarface Wrote: Theocratic = you must believe in god
Atheocratic = you must not believe in god
Trick question. The answer is neither.
Both are the result of the state telling me what my religious views are supposed to be and both can only be the result of the state having much more power over its population than a government should rightly have.
I'd rather live in a theocratic state that made it illegal to discriminate (similarly to modern civil rights movements) against a person's religion than an atheist state that forces everyone to have a particular set (or lack) of religious views.
Assuming, however, that I MUST choose between one or the other, I suppose I'd rather live in Atheocratic state because at least then I may not run into issues with the state in this regard, but to me it's like choosing one horrible dictatorship over the other.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
