An excerpt from an interview with a President in the future…
Amid conservative anger over the President’s proposals to curb religious violence, the President says he sometimes attends Church.
Asked if he ever attends Church, the President said he did so occasionally when visitors to his retreat were interested in that sort of thing.
“Up at Camp David, we do service all the time,” he said. “And I have a profound respect for the traditions of religion that trace back in this country for generations.”
“And I think those who dismiss that out of hand make a big mistake”.
The President’s plans for tighter religion control were drawn up after last month’s massacre at a Church in which a Muslim man killed 19 parishioners.
The President said, “I have profound respect for the first amendment and our tradition of freedom of religion, but we must realize that we have a religious violence problem in this country and in the world. More people have died in the name of religion than for any other reason. How much longer can we tolerate such violence?”
The President’s proposals include background checks on all religious attendees as well as a ban on certain ‘features’ of religious belief.
Critics counter that the Constitution prohibits interfering with the free exercise of religion and deciding what beliefs a religion can teach. They suggest that the vast majority of religious people in this country are good law-abiding citizens and abhor violence. They argue that religion can and does promote peace and respect for the rule of law. They question why they are being targeted.
Proponents argue that the Constitution allows reasonable limits to the beliefs and practices of religious people if aimed at reducing religious violence.
“There is no way ..
January 29, 2013 at 8:20 pm
"More people have died in the name of religion than for any other reason." WRONG! More people have died since the advent of atheistic humanism. He is an idiot.
January 29, 2013 at 10:15 pm
@ Kim Poletto: You are understating the case. Atheist humanists killed more people in 72 years than all religions combined killed in 6000. Not counting the dead from wars they started, Communists and Nazis killed c. 120 million people, which is just under six times as many as all religions have killed in all of human history, counting war-dead. And the major source of religious violence, the Reformation Wars, weren't really about religion; very few of the Lutheran princes actually cared about doctrine (those people went Calvinist), and the "Catholics" were mainly concerned to keep the Holy Roman Empire together.
Add in atheist regimes' war-dead, and their death-toll jumps to well over 200 million, which is probably nine times religion's score.
Finally, of course, if we take "Islam" out of the religion column, "religion" has killed fewer people than the single atheist regime of the Nazis, let alone Stalin or Mao.
Oh, yes, before anyone brings it up, State Shinto (i.e. Japanese Imperialism) is not religious violence, but secular. The ideology in question was Neo-Confucian, therefore atheist—it was a modification of the 19th-century Sonnô Jôi movement. Neo-Confucians prop up state cults for political purposes (see modern China's Patriotic Churches), but they fundamentally believe religion to be of human origin.