Once upon a time, it seemed,
Pure Christian was the state;
Through all of Western culture—
There is really no debate.
In prayers and invocations,
Hymns and readings by the score
Why, the Western world was Christian—
But it isn’t any more!
Now it’s “secular” or “godless”—
Yes, the words are much the same—
We are Christian or we’re nothing
(And it’s atheists to blame!)
While our own denomination
Looks on other sects as fakes,
For the purpose of this logic
Christian-ish is all it takes!
We will argue with the Catholics;
With the Baptists we will fight
With the Quakers and the Calvinists
We would not last a night
And beyond this brief horizon
We are plain and simply bored,
So the Hindus, Jews, and Muslims
Are quite properly ignored.
When a government is secular
It does not take a side;
It won’t give special treatment
(Though God knows we really tried!)
So it’s obviously atheist!
Against us! (Well, not for us)
Though the sects we disagree with
Are a vast, expanding chorus…
Since the seculars in government
Won’t bow down to the lord
(In the way our church demands, of course)
Our wishes are ignored!
Thus, the seculars are atheists!
Let’s just ignore the rest;
There’s my church, and all the heathens;
All the hell-bound, and the blessed.
I really have to stop drinking cough syrup reading creationist sites. Especially creation.com.
Not long ago, the great Western democracies were unashamedly Christian in their politics and education. Of course, not everyone was a genuine Christian (re-born of the Holy Spirit and adopted into God’s family). In addition, not everything done by those nations was ‘Christian’, but the worldview of almost everyone was basically biblical.
Consequently, state institutions sponsored Christian celebrations. Parliaments had daily Christian prayers. School assemblies had prayers and Christian hymns, and the readers used for teaching reading contained many Bible passages.
This has largely been lost. Apparently we can’t have Christian activities anymore; state-sponsored things have to be ‘secular’. But what is ‘secular’?
Secular: “Not connected with religious or spiritual matters” (oxforddictionaries.com). So secular effectively means materialistic or ‘God-less’.
Well… if your religious view is simply us/not us, then maybe. (yes, there is more at the site. Go ahead, read it. Or not, and save some time.)
If “secular” means that the government does not take sides, I see that as a good thing. If your religion says “all who are not with us are against us”, then secularism is your enemy. You expect the government to take your side, and it does not. Must not.
“Secularism = atheism” is a particular, and narrow, religious point of view. But here it is. Jesus Fucke, just read the site. Worse, read the comments. Nothing obscene, just utter concrete ignorance. And yes, they would say the same thing about me. But I am paying attention to evidence, and they are ignoring it. So I have no problem saying my view is better.
Yeah, anyway. The site equates secularism and atheism. It does so by glomming all “Christian” views into one lump (which is patently untrue), ignoring all non-Christian religions (a sizable chunk!), and labeling all not-our-version-of-Christian people as “atheists” (or secularists, it’s all the same)
****
What’s hilarious? Creation.com is wrong–just plain wrong, demonstrably wrong, egregiously wrong… and yet I’d bet Cuttlehouse that the Creation.com people are far more happy about last night’s elections than I am.
What a bunch of whiners. “We can’t inflict our particular cult’s dogmas on everyone, which is persecuting us.”
This sort of thing baffled me with some Assembly of God folks I worked with thirty years ago. If nobody but born-agains is Christian, are they saying Christianity didn’t actually exist until very, very recently? All the centuries when it was the dominant religion (whether Catholic or Catholic/Protestant) of Europe didn’t happen or don’t count?
NB rhetorical question: I knew better than to ask ’em then, and am just refreshing my eye-rolling laughing at this nonsense now.
They assume a lot about how much meaning these official prayers before meetings and so on had for people back then. Unless human nature has radically changed it’s lkely that some saw it as an annoyance to get through, others didn’t think much about it at all and the devout had a brief moment of sentimentality.
Fundamentalists act like these ceremonial nods to the dominant religion (which would NOT have been the tent revival or storefront church Christianity most modern American fundamentalist groups are descended from, anyway) were some kind of deep mystical experiences that filled everyone in the room with goodness and light.
Why is it so important for organization involved in essentially secular activities to have a brief, rote recitation related to a religion in order for that religion to provide meaning and guidance to those who believe in it? Why would a god if it did exist accept such a lame exercise as “worship” in the first place?
ftfy
The Secular Web website is run by the Internet Infidels and is unashamedly pro-atheist. So, yes, some atheists do equate secularism with atheism.