letter to the editor

Nations under gods

Tue, 05/09/2017 - 9:45am

Dear Editor:

The seeds of the Islamic jihad are sown at Friday prayers. Each Imam in each mosque proselytizing to their members the commandments of Allah and the evils of the non-believers. The resulting horrors are well known.

Here we celebrate our “National Day of Prayer” with President Trump unilaterally lifting the constitutional prohibition of state sponsored religion. Make no mistake here, to allow clergy to promote a political agenda while at the same time granting a tax favored status to the same religious organizations is a clear breach.

To be precise, clergy and people of faith have always had the freedom to mix religion and politics in their speech. This is not an issue of freedom of speech but an issue of the state giving religious institutions an economic advantage over secular non-profits. Clearly this is our government telling us that religious political opinions are more valuable than the secular.

This pushes us further down the dangerous road toward theocracy. Organized religion is toxic to the idea and ideals of a free people.

Faith, by definition, demands the suspension of critical faculty; a credulity that often requires its adherents to accept unreasonable notions. In democratic discourse ideas should be critically examined and exchanged; but faith is a take it or leave it conversation.

Religion is divisive. Just as a shepherd divides the sheep from the goats; so do the adherents of a religion look upon the non-believers as those who, at best, are to be tolerated and at worst to be eliminated.

Finally, religion is authoritarian at its root. Moses did not come down the mountain with ten suggestions. Non-belief is a thought-crime punishable by excommunication and eternal damnation. Such totalitarianism is at natural odds the aims of democracy and freedom.

As a free people we have gone out of our way to accommodate many and diverse religious beliefs. However we should be wary of the religious impulse to govern, and be skeptical and critical of any religious authority who claims to have a monopoly on a god. Trump’s usurpation of our freedoms of religion ought to be vigorously challenged.

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay