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Originally posted by MBFlyerfan:
No we can take this all sorts of ways. I am offended by rap music being played at loud volumes by cars with giant subwoofers. So maybe we should ban it. I am only a minority in this, but we must protect the offended minorities at all costs.
I'm not sure I get this example. Yes, you CAN ban the volume. Just not the material. Plenty of cities have banned loud music.

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And as for "In God We Trust," will someone please explain to me how this establishes one religion over another. Which God?!
It doesn't. But is that the Christian God, or the the Muslim God, or the God that Deists believe in? To me, they are all the same. People just believe differently as to how to acknowledge it.

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One more thing. When the founding fathers wrote that ammendment, you can be damn sure they were talking about different sects of christianity. This, after all is what many of them came over here for to begin with. So they could practice thier christianity in peace.
How can anyone be sure? Isn't that what the courts grapple with all the time? A good portion of the founding fathers were indeed deists. Others, of course, were theists. There is a HUGE difference there.

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Free from a state sponsored version of whatever type of christianity was sanctioned. Free from being persecuted for not following the government line.

It did not mean the government needed to be all atheists. It meant they could be whatever religion they wanted to be without forcing thier 'subjects' to be the same religion.
Personally, I think you are confusing an employee of the government with the government itself. Nobody cares what the individual is, or what the individual does. Going by what you are saying (if I'm understanding it correctly) is that Bush should not be attending church - or at least it shouldn't be shown in pictures or television. But that isn't what the argument is about. It's that each individual is free to worship as they please, or be FREE from other people's beliefs. Bush goes to church as an individual, on his own free time (well, relatively speaking...how much free does he really have). He's not attending church at the Capitol building.

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I still do not see how having a ten commandments on a step forces people to be christian or jew. And if people feel like it does, then they should get their weak minds over it. And then prove to me how it has forced them to be jewish or christian.
But why does someone feel like it HAS to be there? Should they not get their weak minds over it and realize that spirituality/religion is within themselves and that is more powerful than any hunk of stone in a rotunda?

Not having it there is being secular (aka neutral). And that is what the government (not the employees of the government) should be.

WE are the employers of the government. How would you feel if one of your employees was a Wiccan, and decided they wanted to put a Wiccan monument in the middle of the foyer to your business? Would you allow it? Or would you ask them to keep it in their own office? Or, to keep it on a Judeo-Christian level, what if that employee wanted to put a crucifix on the wall of the lobby? It may not be the company's view, but it sure looks like it if it's on the lobby wall.
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"Nature has constituted utility to man the standard and test of virtue. Men living in different countries, under different circumstances, different habits and regimens, may have different utilities; the same act, therefore, may be useful and consequently virtuous in one country which is injurious and vicious in another differently circumstanced" - Thomas Jefferson, moral relativist