samet@sfmag.UUCP (A.I.Samet) (05/24/85)
> If this country was set up as non-religious and has laws to prevent > mixing of church and state, then even if the entire nation is of one religion > certain laws should still not be passed. Blue laws should have never been > legal. I guess there was a time that people really didn't care too much about > the separation of church and state. There are some real problems in agreeing on what is religious and what values or practices are religious in nature. In theory, any widely held value system might qualify, even atheism or separation-of-church-and-stateism. In practice, some applications of church-state separation are arbitrary, reflecting prevalent values and biases of society rather than rigorous logic. The major religions in America are opposed to murder, theft, and adultery. Someone could conceivably argue that laws against these things stem from western religious values (the 10 commandments). The counter argument is, of course, that these have redeeming social value apart from their religious nature. Many would answer this by arguing that laws against adultery are primarily religious. We've seen this type of debate concerning abortion. People once tended to view it as murder, but the climate of opinion changed as people drifted away from religious values. This serves to illustrate the inherent relativism in deciding which practices or values are religious in nature. Society seems to apply this law somewhat selectively, according to the climate of social values, its moods and needs. Consistent application of separation of church and state might mean dropping xmas and new years as national holidays, removing tax writeoffs for religious donations, or other consequences which society just won't hear of. We shouldn't be surprised if there are basic weaknesses or contradictions in the separation approach. It's not perfect, only an attempt to improve over abusive situations which existed in Christian Europe when the Pilgrams came here. It may be impossible or abusive (as in the case of abortion) to insist on rigorous separation. While the overall benefits may outweigh the costs, we can still step back and realize that it's not Holy, although it may be a sacred cow. Yitzchok Samet