Disturbing Court Decision
One frustration I have with BJU and with my local church is their attitude of constant paranoia about…, well pretty much everything outside of the church. For a great example of this, check out an old book called Saturday Morning Mind Control, which postulates the virtually all kids programing at the time had some sort of occult origin. Besides the entertainment industry, the primary focus of their paranoia is the government.
Normally, that’s a good place for paranoia. I’m a minarchist, so distrust and dislike of the government is second nature to me. But the typical fundamentalist position is not mere distrust, it’s fear.
Preachers are always insisting that the government is trying to take away the freedom of religion, based on the fact that the courts have been enforcing separation of church and state. You should have heard the unadulterated praise for Roy Moore and his “bold defense” of the ten commandments memorial. And don’t even get them started on prayer in public schools. I even heard one preacher invoke Godwin’s Law by accusing the gay and the feminist lobbies of planning to round up Christians in boxcars and ship them off to concentration camps.
You see why that might be frustrating?
But now I’ve heard a story that doesn’t bode well for religious freedom, but that I doubt I’ll ever about hear from the pulpit: Some idiot judge has forbidden a man and his ex-wife from teaching their child their religious beliefs.
Why won’t I hear about this in the pulpit? Because the parents are Wiccans.
This outrageous decision was a part of the couple’s divorce decree, but neither the father nor the mother–both of whom are Wiccans–asked for it. They are both forbidden to expose their child to “non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.” The judge did not define the term.
What was the judge’s justification for making such a ruling? Apparently the boy attends a Catholic school. The judge received a report from the Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau, which contained the following quote:
There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones’ lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages.
After reading this, the judge apparently decided that he had the right to decide what religion the boy should or should not be taught.
Fortunately, “Getting the judge’s religious restriction lifted should be a slam-dunk,” according to an Indiana University law professor. “That’s blatantly unconstitutional. Obviously, the judge can order them not to expose the child to drugs or other inappropriate conduct, but it sounds like this order was confusing or could be misconstrued.”
But the fact that a judge is so uneducated about the limits of his power that he’d pass such a measure does not bode well. There’s got to be some way to get him out of power; if not, I rest assured that the man will never rise above the position of a divorce court judge, because no legislator will ever be foolish enough to try to advance him to a higher court.
I hope.
(Via Dean’s World)
May 29th, 2005 at 11:59 am
Sounds like the judge in question has a view of the Wiccan religion learned from DARK SHADOWS and movies that end in a single digit number. While the Wiccan religion has its extreme side (as does Christianity), it is an earth religion very similar to Shinto or any of a dozen other pagan earth relgions. I think it is filled with error, but I agree with you that no judge in a free country has a right to bar parents from teaching their child their own religious beliefs.
It does seem likely that his decision will be overturned.
When I was your age (sounds so strange, but yes it’s true), we were all afraid that the big bad Democratic party that ran our government would one day be sending our young men and young women out to fight wars for other countries, all in the name of some misplaced agenda of “globalism” that they would call “global freedom” and we knew as “one world government.”
Now that George Bush has done just that while pleading God and country and has sent American soldiers onto foreign soil to fight for Iraqi liberty (while telling US soldiers at the start it was to protect their own homeland), that particular nightmare has come true. But most Fundamentalists are so dazzled by George Bush’s Bible waving that they have failed to see that he has launched us onto a one-world government campaign pretty effectively, and has done so, not only in the name of liberty, but in the name of God, Christianity, and the Bible.
Who, I wonder, will overturn that decision?
May 30th, 2005 at 7:27 am
Well, to be fair, the Iraq war has been one of the most successful engagements in recent history. And we have eliminated Iraq as a potential nuclear/biological threat, even if they didn’t have WMD’s.
I do find it disturbing that so few Christians realize that Bush doesn’t reflect conservative values at all. I thought Republicans were for smaller government, yet they’ve passed huge new Medicare entitlements, massive education bills, and gone from a surplus to a deficit. Again, to be fair, the whole country has experienced an economic downturn. But while families and companies were cutting back, the government…kept growing.
It’s like everyone thinks they can relax because we have a professing Christian republican in the White House.
And it doesn’t help that the opposition is typically so rabid in their attacks. It comes out as Bush-hating instead of as a calm discussion of issues.
May 30th, 2005 at 4:19 pm
I’d like to address your first point, regarding some Christians’ paranoia about “pretty much everything outside of the church.” One point that many Christians miss when considering these types of issues is that while depending on which sense of the word you mean, there either is or isn’t always a conspiracy afoot. In one sense, I would have to agree with you that there is no conspiracy of Saturday morning cartoon providers to poison the minds of our children.
In a different sense, however, I would have to disagree with you and state that there truly is a conspiracy afoot. The conspiracy is not one of cartoon scriptwriters, but of Satan and his minions. He is of course going to do anything he can to undermine God’s authority and principles. So I’m sure that it is clear to anyone with a Christian worldview that Satan has done a great job of influencing Hollywood and most other major media content providers with his agenda. He’s convinced most people that “me first” is the right attitude, that “I deserve” everything good in life, that no one can hold absolute moral standards without being a bigot and “intolerant,” etc. Saturday morning cartoons undoubtedly reflect Satan’s illicit agenda to some degree or other (not that I’ve watched any Saturday morning fare recently myself).
So I can see how some Christians can come up with conspiracy theories. There truly is an evil character out there who is trying to corrupt all of us using whatever means he can. Unfortunately, he is succeeding all too well these days!
Please keep these thoughts in mind if/when you discuss such issues with the paranoid people in question. Help them realize that it is not that Hollywood is having secret meetings to decide how to corrupt people’s minds. The real problem is that the folks in Hollywood believe the lies that Satan is tempting them with, and it’s only natural for them to promote the ideas they believe. We need to encourage more people with solid Christian principles to get into the content creation business so that we can have better quality entertainment than what is widely available today.
May 30th, 2005 at 4:49 pm
Well Jonesy, winning a war is not justification for having launched it. Of course we can stomp Iraq. But sending our young people out to “defend America” and then switching the cry to “defending liberty in Iraq” is a violation of the president’s authority, and it’s plain old dishonest. War demands justification for going to war: not a general threat but a real threat. Our “real threat” was a falsified threat. A lot of people have died—on both sides. And changing a culture thousands of years older than our own to embrace our values is going ot take something a lot more profound than guns, tanks, and bullets.
Jeri
May 30th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
Jeri: First, the threat was a specific one; look at Colin Powell’s speech before the U.N. in 2003.
Second, I think that your level of vitriol for Bush depends a lot on whether you think his intelligence was falsified–in which case he’s just plain evil–or whether his intelligence was mistaken, in which case he believed he was acting in the best interests of our country.
Was it a mistake to invade Iraq? Probably. 20/20 hindsight.
Now, I think we’re trying to make the best of the situation. Obviously it’d look bad for the President to say “I’m sorry, we were just plain wrong about this.” If he had admitted it, he almost certainly would have lost the ‘04 presidential election. I can see the campaign commercials now: “Bush: Wrong on Iraq; wrong for this country. Vote for Kerry.”
So, the PR spin switched to Iraqi freedom, since the WMD stuff turned out to be mistaken.
May 30th, 2005 at 7:07 pm
I don’t feel vitriol for Bush any more so than for Ted Kennedy or any other person who uses political power to push an agenda that is outside the limits of his office. I care about the boundaries of authority, and Bush has violated his.
None of this should be guess work, BJ. The fact is, whether the intelligence was wrong or falsified, Bush has pulled a switcheroo on the purpose of US military presence in Iraq. He has openly advocated that US soldiers fight for the freedom of Iraqi nationals in Iraq, even though those soldiers were called upon and sent there to fight for the safety of their own rightful government and nation. Bush is violating the limits of national sovereignty and has violated his office by now keeping us engaged and furthering an agenda of war when American safety was not in real danger (as opposed to possible danger) from another country.
Whatever the truth is about what he knew THEN; we know what he knows NOW, and yet we are not pulling out of Iraq. Furthermore, our soldiers have tortured and abused their citizens, and the US military has not allowed the sovereign laws of that country within its borders to prosecute the offenders.
Under a banner of liberating the citizens of another country, the US has killed innocent Iraqis, detained innocent Iraqis, tortured and sexually abused petty criminals, destroyed millions of dollars worth of infrastructure, and imposed military rule under US jurisdiction. That is not liberation. And we had no proper military reason (in terms of a just war) to act as a nation to “liberate” Iraq.
I know Saddam was bad, but this is a pyrrhic victory for the forces in Iraq that favored freedom. And now Saddam is out of power and the threat to the US from Iraq has proved to be false. Yet we are still there, pursuing a military agenda.
But for us, the most frightening thing is that Bush has openly advocated the use of American military to carry out such “liberations” for citizens of other countries against their governments. He’s a breath away from outright imperialism.
May 30th, 2005 at 8:11 pm
You, I think, would like a guy by the name of Boileryard Clarke. A few months ago, he and I had a similar discussion to the one we’re having now.
The vitriol comment didn’t quite come out right; I meant you in the generic sense, not you specifically.
I think we’re waiting for the right time to pull out of Iraq; if we pull out too soon, the region will be (further) destabilized, and we run the risk of having another Taliban on our hands. Better to leave a little late than a little early, I’d think. And since I’m not privy to the details of the situation there, I plan to leave the decision of when to leave in hands more capable and minds better informed than mine.
I’d strongly recommend reading a great essay by Bill Whittle called Sanctuary. It’ll take a while, but I think it’s worth your time. It helps to explain Abu Grahib and the deaths of innocent Iraqis in the course of the war.
That said, unless there is a clear and present danger from some other foreign country, I don’t think we should invade it. We don’t have the resources–much less the right–to liberate every persecuted group on the planet.
June 1st, 2005 at 4:11 pm
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June 7th, 2005 at 11:30 am
The idea of separation of church and state is purely American. The European countries like Germany and Sweden still charge a “church tax” on individuals. Most of the population do not go to church regularly. Sweden, is one of the most liberal countries in the world. They do not protest against the tax. In their mind, it is a mean to preserve their culture even they do not practice it. It seems that the more the people demand the separation, the lesser chance that it will happen.
June 10th, 2005 at 3:12 am
I don’t like the sound of this attack on religious freedom. If this thing stands, it would only be a matter of time before a judge says that Christianity is “outside of the mainstream.” But like you said. I don’t see this ruling standing.
As for the Iraq, right decision. There were WMDs in Iraq. Now their gone. Where to? I don’t know. Maybe buried in Syria or Iran.
And for the one-world government issue, I wouldn’t worry. If everyone hates the US as much as the media is telling us. How can we possibly have a one world government? And if it isn’t, why are we as Christians so appalled at the idea. We know it’s going to happen. God said so. Nothing is going to stop it except Him.
As for Bush, great president. I love him. Hillary in 2008 is what I fear.
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