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Originally Posted by LionHarted The First Amendment does not say anything about religious beliefs. It says that the 'government' (as an entity, not as the individuals within it) cannot support or establish a 'religion' (as an entity, not the individuals within it--or the individual beliefs, which they might easily have had without the religion's existence). |
Which is exactly what separation of church and state is. See how easy that was? No need to blame atheists or anything.
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Originally Posted by LionHarted And, to answer your question: before I ever started. |
There must be a "WHOOSH!" smiley here somewhere...
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Originally Posted by LionHarted But I'm talking about the way the idea is applied (or at least, how people think it should be applied) today. |
And how exactly do you see it being applied? You seem to be operating from the perspective that the separation is used only as some evil tool of atheists to stifle religion, ignoring the fact that it always has and continues to have major impact on the civil rights of all Americans, whether religious or not. There will always be edge cases that abuse such institutions in society, but they're insignificant against the greater civil rights issues we're protected against. The same reasoning you push would have us ban cars for being tools of death because a few people use them in homicide.