Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!apple!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: coatta@cs.ubc.ca (Terry Coatta) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Church and State Message-ID: Date: 14 Sep 90 03:56:35 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 36 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu John DiMarco writes: > On the contrary, your suggestion that Christians should not vote or > participate in the democratic process according to their own (Christian) > principles disenfranchizes Christians! That would be the case if I had indeed suggested it, but I can't recall doing so. My intention was to suggest that Christians should not attempt to establish Christianity via laws, and that the positions they adopt should be defensible without recourse to the assumption that other people have similar religious beliefs. > The laws must be based on *some* principles. Whether or not those principles > are Christian is up to the voters and the people they elect. The principles of most western democracies are preservation of individual rights and freedoms coupled with an attempt to establish justice. Persons elected are not generally encouraged to tamper with this basic set of principles. Their task is to translate these principles into laws and actions which promote them. Your conception of democracy seems to be nothing more that ``majority rule''. This is not sufficient. Democracy is an empty form of government without adherence to basic human rights and freedoms. The essence of democracy is not majority rule, but compromise and consensus. The difficulty with introducing religious ideals or justifications into the political arena is that compromise and consensus are no longer possible. How does one argue with a justification like: ``God says we should act in the following manner, and so we need laws to enforce this behaviour.'' How can a non-believer view this as anything but enforced religion? This is disenfrachisement. Terry Coatta (coatta@cs.ubc.ca) Dept. of Computer Science, UBC, Vancouver BC, Canada `What I lack in intelligence, I more than compensate for with stupidity'