Recently while at a Library in Tennessee I met a women who is
a Muslim, with all of the traditional clothing, who homeschools her children,
her husband has a job, and they live quite normal lives here on the outside
except for their clothing.
America was once a melting pot, but now it is a salad bowl.
At once time in America it was illegal, basically, to be anything but a Protestant
in many places. Now you can be an atheist, or a Mormon, or nearly anything as
long as your understand the American contract.
The American Contract is that you have the right to life,
liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the right to defend those rights, so
long as you do not violate those of others. The freedom of speech includes the
right to be offended. While we may not like something someone else is doing,
they may equally not like what we are doing; power can never be used to remove
our own right to be offended.
If someone wishes to be a Muslim,
and to celebrate the month of Ramadan,
which is going on right now, you have the right to do so. The American Contract
protects that right. A religion that encompasses nearly a quarter of the
world’s population will be as varied as the many different groups calling
themselves Christian. Because one member in one place does something should not
be seen as a reflection of the entire group. Sometimes they disagree with each
other so much that they come to blows, as in Syria’s current Civil War.
The right to speak your mind bears
with it the right to be contradicted.
Andrew C. Abbott
You say that a person may exercise and defend his self-assumed definition of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--so long as he does not violate those of others. What religion defines the three rights and their violations? The Qur'an has its own definition, the Hindus likewise, and the various factions of atheism have their own, be they statists, anarchists, or whatever. In the American Contract Christianity imposes the bonds of its own "religious freedom" on other religions. There can ultimately be no equality of religions, in mind or in practice, within one nation. There is no neutral worldview that transcends all religions. Such an idea is so self-contradictory I think it is the deceptive propaganda of a statist religion.
ReplyDeleteI hope your defense of religious freedom is in a strictly civil sense. Too many people transfer what makes sense in civil law to their very moral outlook; that is, they conclude if a person is free from government's condemnation to exercise their religion, he is free from God's condemnation likewise (as though government was God). In God's eyes a Muslim has no right in his heart to believe his destructive falsehoods, and an evangelical Christian has no right to excuse his state.
And be prepared to defend (or rethink) your view of religious freedom in the face of the rising theonomist movement, which takes scriptures such as Deut. 17:2-7 seriously.