https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/10/mike-johnson-urged-a-religious-test-for-politicians/
The new GOP House speaker also compared environmentalists to the devil.
There should be a religious test for politicians.
If you're too religious, you should not be a politician
That is the opposite of what this country was built on; freedom of religion.
Being religious should not disqualify anyone, but if you push past separation of church and state then and only then should you be disqualified
When you start talking like Mike Johnson about how people need to follow his religion and how our government needs to enforce his religious values, you're too religious to be allowed in government.
Being too religious should absolutely disqualify you, just like believing the world is flat or any number of other complete nonsense should disqualify you.
So… you’re saying ….
If they’re too religious… they should be disqualified…
The line for you being that they try to force their beliefs on others. Which, personally, I view as a given when their campaign platform includes “Christian Values” (or any other religion’s values,)
If you can’t make a secular argument…. It doesn’t belong in government.
The Puritans came here to seperate THEIR church from the state, after that it became them imposing their religion on natives.
The actual country's founding in 1776 was. Far from religious, and many of the founding fathers were not religious or outright anti religion
Bring religious should be a disqualification. You have a higher master you serve. You can't be trusted to put the country and the citizens first.
Religious beliefs are not disqualifying, but if that's your whole way of being, you should not hold public office. Render unto Caesar.
There's a Canadian politician I refuse to vote for because he's seihk, wears the turban and religious regalia. Of course you get called racist, but I wouldn't vote for a Jewish person in Orthodox garb, or a Christian carrying a Bible everywhere. It tells me that you put your religion above everything, even your constituents.
Of course there's an India/seihk scandal going on right now. Having a super religious seihk in power would have made that one a way bigger shit show.
I don't understand what people think of when they read...
If you're too religious, you should not be a politician
but it's literally part of what you're saying. Why the downvotes, because they're naming specifics of what signals to them being too religious? Make it make sense, Lemmy.
It’s because adherence to religious dress codes is not a clear indicator of fundamentalism or evangelism. Women who choose to wear burkas, niqabs headscarves etc are not immediately downtrodden and subservient women who agree with religious sexism. A Sikh man choosing to wear a turban and not shave his body hair is not a clear indicator that he’s a fundamentalist in any way.
Judge politicians by their words and actions, not by how they look. There are many religious zealots who wear simple suits and dresses.
You took the ACTION of putting on garb that says your religion is above everything else. I will judge you for that on the political field
You took the ACTION of putting on garb that says your religion is above everything else
Incorrect assumption. A dominant religion in any given society will influence cultural and societal norms. Sometimes, perhaps even more often than not, the reason for wearing religious clothing is social conformity. That doesn't necessarily mean that the wearer is a fundamentalist or even religious at all. There are even atheists who wear religious clothing just because the community they belong to excepts them to do so and they don't want to stand out (applies to all genders). And that's just one of several possible reasons other than the one you assumed to be the only possible explanation.
At the end of the day my argument is that I want politicians of any stripe or religion to leave their religion at the door. Anyone who puts their god's will into their decision making process (which all religious people do) has no business in politics
You know what? Yes. And if you’re found to be swayed by your religion while making law? You should be barred from office.
I'd like to test him about feeding the hungry. Sheltering the homeless. Comforting the widow. Coveting your neighbors goods. Doing to others as you would like have done to you. I'm not even fucking talking about religion, either.
I'd like to test him about the desire for control and dictatorial tendencies. He would fail every time
I wish these chucklefucks would realize not all of us believe in god let alone the same one they pray to.
They seem to forget one of the main reasons people founded this country in the first place. Freedom OF religion includes freedom FROM religion.
The US Constitution was set up and amended in such a way that religions could not be interfered with by the state, but such that religions could invade the state and exert influence there. It’s not so much a Freedom from Religion as it is a Freedom for Religious People. Goddamn puritans.
No, that's what Barton wants people to believe. But when you read what the Founders had to say about church and state, they made it pretty clear they wanted to keep religion out of the state as well.
“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
- John Adams
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. ... But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding....
meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.
- Thomas Jefferson again
If they are good workmen, they may be from Asia, Africa or Europe; they may be Mahometans, Jews, Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists...
- George Washington, to Tench Tilghman, March 24, 1784, when asked what type of workman to get for Mount Vernon, from The Washington papers, edited by Saul Padover
...I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.
- George Washington, to United Baptists Churches of Virginia, May, 1789 from The Washington papers, edited by Saul Padover]
For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
- George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island | Wednesday, August 18, 1790
While we are contending for our own liberty, we should be very cautious not to violate the rights of conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the judge of the hearts of men, and to him only in this case they are answerable.
- George Washington letter to Benedict Arnold | Thursday, September 14, 1775
Surely if they wanted to keep religion out of the state, they’d have written that into the Constitution or one of the early amendments, right? It’s not like they didn’t have the power to do so. They specifically chose not to, knowing that their government could easily invaded by religion, which indicates at least that they were ambivalent to the idea.
Those quotes are all well and good but what matters is the letter of the law. These men wrote the law, and the law doesn’t forbid religion in the state. It doesn’t matter what a politician says, but what they do - and what they did allowed for what we’re seeing today. It was obviously on their minds as they spoke about the idea of wanting to keep church and state separate, but then they did nothing at all to safeguard the state - the only protections are for the churches.
They were either in favour of the church being able to control the state, or wilfully ignorant that this could happen unless it was forbidden in the Constitution. If they wanted to stop this from happening, they would have.
There is a 'no religious test' bit in the constitution It turns out that the only religious test the constitution sanctions is DON'T PROPOSE RELIGIOUS TESTS
That's the one that tells us you can't be trusted with secular authority
We'll start by asking him to list all twenty commandments, since conservatives usually claim that they love them so much.
Most "Christians" are also unaware of the extra ones, despite them being listed in black and white in the bible.
In Exodus 20, Moses is given the tablets containing the ten commandments, which are listed off in the text of the bible in that chapter and are the ten that "everyone knows."
Then, in Exodus 32:19, Moses gets so pissed off at witnessing his people worshiping the golden calf that he breaks the tablets that have the commandments carved on them. In Exodus 33 he goes back up the mountain to ask god what to do about it. In Exodus 34, god goes as far as to say unto Moses, "Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest." Throughout the chapter he does so, listing off a screed that contains a couple of the original commandments (no other gods before me, and remember the sabbath) but the rest of his directions are quite different from the first list.
Further, there is a recitation of the first ten commandments in Deuteronomy 5, where a different explanation for the sabbath day is given. In Exodus god claims the sabbath is holy because he created the world in six days and the seventh day is a day of rest, but in Deuteronomy he says the sabbath actually holy because the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt and god gave them rest in the form of their freedom. Moses further goes on to say after this recitation that these were the words god spoke and he "added no more," which as we saw in Exodus 34 is bogus.
I guess actually it's 18 in total, then. We can treat it as a trick question for Mike Johnson.
There's an interesting detail to the whole "Moses breaking the original tablets in response to the golden calf worship."
This parallels the alleged reforms of Josiah.
Josiah "finds a new book of laws" and then suddenly carries out major religious reforms. He performed human sacrifice slaughtering the priests of the high places on their altars to defile them. He hides away the Ark, the anointing oil, the manna jar. He gets rid of the Asherah worship.
And he gets rid of the golden calves in Bethel and Dan while getting rid of the old laws and bringing new ones.
Oh, and he institutes the Passover narrative.
So suddenly in the events around Moses, the central part of that Passover narrative, is a scene that has old laws being destroyed in response to golden calf worship and new laws taking their place.
Very sus.
Even more sus is that Josiah's reforms appear to be anachronistic given the correspondence over a century later between Elephantine and Jerusalem.
We should really be taking Hecataeus of Adbera's claim that the scriptures of the Jews had recently been significantly altered around the Exodus narrative under the Persian and Macedonian conquests more seriously.
Edit: Also if the Shapira scroll is legit, there was originally an 11th commandment.
SMH. I can't stand when fantasy authors have such shoddy and inconsistent worldbuilding. Doesn't anyone proofread and run the manuscript by beta readers anymore?
Fun fact, the King James version (which wingnuts love to swear adherence to, maybe because of all the flowery language) was supposed to be the edit that fixed many of these worldbuilding gaffes. Obviously, it categorically failed to do so -- it even still includes both mildly contradictory accounts of the creation of the world in Genesis, which another poster here already mentioned.
It also includes contradictions on pretty much every part of the gospels in relation to each other but, to be fair, that's the case in all of them.
Does beg the question of why they didn't align them when they had the chance. Some times the word of God is more malleable than others I guess.
The original King James version included the apocrypha, which are found in the Catholic versions, but booksellers realized they could sell more copies if they left out the apocrypha. That's why most copies today don't have the apocrypha.
They did try to align them. Mark original ends at the Tomb, eventually scribes started adding details post-tomb to Mark. Which is why the Mark Gospel we have now reads like it has three separate endings.
No one reads the KJV except people seeking a doctrine in biblical studies. Everyone reads the revised KJV. The original version was plagiarized off an earlier English Bible instead of going directly to the source material. So even when it was first published it sounded like an old time way of speaking. Also it contained non-canon books that publishers would later take out to save on costs.
Well to be fair none of these people knew they were writing the Bible. You are some ancient scribe. The local king/warlord wants you to take some old story or scroll and revamp it to argue how great he is. Can't really refuse a guy with a throne of human bones especially since a. He is paying you b. This is your chance to write a fanfic, maybe it won't suck this time.
Over and over the translations and copies were altered. As each group tried to prove that they had it right and everyone before them had it wrong.
Which is part of the reason why it is thought that the final editors, prior to the 3rd century, were fusing two different narratives together. Same thing happens in Genesis and to a lesser extent in Mark.
Start with "Which came first, people or animals?"
Genesis 1:
20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Genesis 2:
7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
19 And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22 And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
Indeed. Two stories from two regions mashed up into the Septuagint along with a number of other writings, much of it proven to be anachronistic, meant to unify a kingdom politically against its rivals under one religion and one god where before there were many of each. It's also why you see god being named in different ways in different books.
Yup. Genesis 1 is the Elohist creation myth, Genesis 2 is the Jawhist creation myth. But try telling that to biblical literalists.
Thanks; I couldn't recall the details of which was which.
Biblical literalists are in for some disappointment or further self delusion if told this, I am guessing.
meant to unify a kingdom politically against its rivals
Someone has been reading their Finkelstein, haha. I am not saying he isn't right I remain on the fence about it as of this time.
I feel like a major lesson from the Trump era is that no one has to take American evangelicals seriously when they talk about how their faith informs their politics. They can and will justify anything so it’s just a waste of everyone’s time to pretend they’re sincere in their beliefs.
This is it exactly. Start with what someone is trying to justify doing first and foremost. It doesn't matter what they believe. A nihilist fascist should be exterminated all the same
Ironic considering that Jews and atheists tend to be more knowledgeable than Christians about religion: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/07/23/what-americans-know-about-religion/
I fully support this. Anyone who claims to be religious - of any kind - will not get my vote.
Man, these guys just hate this country so very much. It's so obvious because they keep ignoring and/or gaslighting about one of the most important things about this country, and that is that it is a SECULAR country.
It seems like he was urging people to vote based on candidates' religious beliefs. This is not a "religious test" in the Constitutional sense.
What do you think the Constitution means when it says "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
That you don't have to profess any particular religious beliefs in order to qualify as a candidate for office.
This is precisely what Johnson is advocating. If you're not a Christian, if you're not his kind of Christian, he thinks you shouldn't be eligible for office. He's explicitly telling people not to vote for people who don't share their religious identity.
That's a religious test.
I think you misunderstand what the constitution does and doesn’t do. It defines the structure, powers and limits of the Government.
The clause means that the Government cannot instate a religious test on candidates for office. It does not dictate how individuals are allowed to decide which of those candidates they vote for.
He's telling voters what he'd like them to do. He's allowed to do that, and voters are allowed to take religious beliefs into account when casting their ballots.
How would you even enforce a rule that prohibited voters from doing that? Particularly on a secret ballot?
When preaching from the pulpit, people assume the authority of their god. He's not suggesting, he's telling them how they have to behave in order to be good Christians.
Don't make excuses for villains like this.
I'm not making excuses, I don't even support this guy. And if I were in his district, I would take his religious beliefs into account and vote against him. As would be my right.
I'm simply pointing out what is and is not covered by the US Constitution. The Constitution pertains to the government, not the people. It limits what the government can do, to include making religious tests a qualification for office, but does not say a damned thing about what the voters are allowed to consider.
If he’s preaching politics from the pulpit…
There’s a good chance a 501c corp needs to loose it’s 501c status
How about a religious test on this extra set of ten commandments and start by seeinh how the idiots in the House would even pass it.
No need to invent new commandments. Use the holy book they claim to follow.
James 5: 1-6:
1 Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. 2 Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. 3 Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. 4 Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. 5 You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.
Not done your best to eliminate wage theft and tax the rich? Fail.
Leviticus 19:34
The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.
Not voted in favour of equal (voting, residence, labour, ...) rights for migrants? Fail.
Exodus 22:25
“If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him.
Not voted in favour of mandating interest free loans to the poor? Fail.
