TrippinBTM
11-01-2005, 11:53 PM
I'm having strange thoughts lately about the seperation of church and state. That's a new phenomenon, you know. Started maybe a few hundred years ago, I don't know if America was the first country to have freedom of religion and a generally secular society, but the whole thing seems to have started around then.
One looks back over history and sees a lot of bad stuff. But I can't help but notice that since we took religion away from the rest of life, more problems have been occuring. In the last few hundred years we've really begun to ravage the earth, wars are getting pretty extreme, "secular" (scientific) knowledge took off like crazy, adding to and aiding all our problems (better weapons made war more deadly, and also increased populations, so they bumped elbows more often).
It seems that this seperation is just further supporting the notion of dualism, the us-versus-them, I-against-everyone-else sort of attitude. Basically, the idea that we are seperate beings, alone, and pitted against everyone and everything else. Certainly this issue existed long before, but it seems to have been exacerbated. Not that I've done any real research into this, but it's how it seems.
One must wonder if having religion as an integral part of life would be a bad thing. Ancient cultures did not or could not see their religious life as seperate from political, economic, family, and other aspects of life. Really, spirituality was the foundation on which the rest was built. Nowadays, we've become aspiritual except for select days of the week; other than those times, we are drones working jobs, persuing our economic dreams. We have now institutionalized this dualism with the church and state speration. It is almost like we've torn the foundations away and are trying to maintain the rest of the building, like a castle built on air.
Still, I favor keeping religion out of government. I don't want a theocracy; not simply because I'm not a Christian (and you know it'd be a christian theocracy) but because it's in a way dangerous to mix the two things, they corrupt each other. But then, maybe the fact that they corrupt each other is a reflection on us as people and not on the institutions themselves. I guess what I'm saying is that the divorcing of spirituality out of the fabric of life as a whole is ruining us, and the world. Perhaps we don't need an official religion, but we need personal spirituality with us, all day every day. Like I read somewhere, the Native Americans didn't need a Sabbath to keep holy, because every hour of every day was holy to them.
Just some thoughts, please post your reactions to it, because I don't really have a question here. Just ideas.
One looks back over history and sees a lot of bad stuff. But I can't help but notice that since we took religion away from the rest of life, more problems have been occuring. In the last few hundred years we've really begun to ravage the earth, wars are getting pretty extreme, "secular" (scientific) knowledge took off like crazy, adding to and aiding all our problems (better weapons made war more deadly, and also increased populations, so they bumped elbows more often).
It seems that this seperation is just further supporting the notion of dualism, the us-versus-them, I-against-everyone-else sort of attitude. Basically, the idea that we are seperate beings, alone, and pitted against everyone and everything else. Certainly this issue existed long before, but it seems to have been exacerbated. Not that I've done any real research into this, but it's how it seems.
One must wonder if having religion as an integral part of life would be a bad thing. Ancient cultures did not or could not see their religious life as seperate from political, economic, family, and other aspects of life. Really, spirituality was the foundation on which the rest was built. Nowadays, we've become aspiritual except for select days of the week; other than those times, we are drones working jobs, persuing our economic dreams. We have now institutionalized this dualism with the church and state speration. It is almost like we've torn the foundations away and are trying to maintain the rest of the building, like a castle built on air.
Still, I favor keeping religion out of government. I don't want a theocracy; not simply because I'm not a Christian (and you know it'd be a christian theocracy) but because it's in a way dangerous to mix the two things, they corrupt each other. But then, maybe the fact that they corrupt each other is a reflection on us as people and not on the institutions themselves. I guess what I'm saying is that the divorcing of spirituality out of the fabric of life as a whole is ruining us, and the world. Perhaps we don't need an official religion, but we need personal spirituality with us, all day every day. Like I read somewhere, the Native Americans didn't need a Sabbath to keep holy, because every hour of every day was holy to them.
Just some thoughts, please post your reactions to it, because I don't really have a question here. Just ideas.