Further First Amendment Attacks

The Founders knew they needed a moral people to maintain and defend freedom. They didn't want to offend anyone so they talked broadly about the God of Nature. But now people are acting as if freedom of religion should be freedom from religion. And that the establishment clause that was to prevent a pope-king from getting in control of the country's religion has turned into a messiah-president and the disestablishment of religion.

The general ridicule of religion in the main stream media (MSM) has been going on for some time has appeared to have weakened church attendance.

Recently the attacks on religion and morality have been kicked up a notch with same-sex marriage and with Connecticut preposing legislation to take control of the Catholic church's finances, and if they control the money they control the whole thing, duh.

So what happens instead of your inalienable rights coming from God, your provisional rights come from the State, who can alter or revoke them at any time. Suddenly you are Lando dealing with Vader on Bespin.

The communist countries tried to replace religion with the State and it didn't work out so well. They finally fell and fell hard over the course of less then a week.

The Soviet Union was poor, and not because of their lack of natural resources (they have huge reserves) or the lack of intellectual talent (their computer scientists were able to figure out and program stolen computers that often arrived without manuals, have you tried running a command line interface lately?). Obviously they had a problem with their economies and a lack of basic freedom was it.

It is interesting to realize that communist countries only had one primary city that concentrated most everything except the really nasty industries. In Soviet Russia the Government, Money and Innovation were all concentrated in Moscow, in the capitalist countries they tend to be in widely separated cities. And they both happened that way because that is how they developed.

I remember in Germany they had a Religion tax, that they used to run the state religion. Charitable giving was pretty low because it was perceived that the government was taking money for religious reasons, which would use it for charity. It did work out that way. State Religion overhead for some reason tends to run pretty high. It was like any other bureaucracy it existed to sustain and grow itself and kept the charitable giving to the minimum necessary to keep it in the news and the appearance of doing something.

In a free society you cannot make people be religious, you shouldn't have to encourage or discourage it just stay out of the way, except when people start trampling on each others rights like killing them for leaving the religion. Obviously this treads on their right to life and the government can step in, but don't step in if someone wants to leave and does.