Are you for or against the separation of church and state?

[Esquilax]

Esquilax, as much as I may hate living in a society where religion would rule, for example, Islam or Christianity, I don't think the minority has the right to force people to be hypocritical and dishonest with their beliefs. I think Muslims should implement Shariah law for example. This is because they are told they are infact unjust if they don't. This is because they are told explicitly to do it. To say they believe in Islam and ignore what revelation teaches, is teaching them to be dishonest and hypocrites. I rather tackle the root of the evil, then cover it up, with a dress. That's just me.

I'd agree with you up to a point. The problem I have is that you're drawing a fairly arbitrary line, and in doing so perpetrating the great illogical act that so many in society do, of giving religion a free pass. Lots of people have beliefs that they consider to be just and, in fact, righteous, but we as a society put the hammer down on those because they're dangerous; why are you putting religion into this separate classification?

I'm not going to Godwin here, but there are plenty of examples of this: if I have a belief that it's in my best interests to force my family to drink acid, you'd want the law to put a stop to that, no? I'd hope you would, because that's crazy. But it's still a belief, and one that, no matter how diseased, is still one that my hypothetical self holds as moral.

Religious beliefs are simply larger scale versions of that: what if one of the violent sects of any religion got into power? Would their pogroms be justified because they believe it to be right?

The fact is, society restricts beliefs all the time, that's the basis of the justice system; you might believe it's okay to murder someone, but you'd be wrong. Religions need to be held to a higher standard even than that, because they're the organizations that recruit large swathes of the population into believing the same unjustifiable things. This or that magic book cannot be the reasoning behind legislating away people's rights; the law must be based on what's physically demonstrable.

Your right to your beliefs ends at precisely the point that they infringe upon mine. That's an equal society.