I was reading about the holocaust. Interestingly enough when all the foreign national Jews were trying to quit Germany during the initial phases of persecution, it was difficult to evade the Nazis because most nations in Europe at that time put a person's religion on their passport. Americans were lucky in that there was no such mention on US passports.
A friend of ours recently moved to Germany. Part of the visa application asks the applicant about their religious beliefs. Furthermore, according to him, one has to pay taxes to support the popular religions of Germany. An individual gets to choose whether a portion of their taxes go to the Lutheran Church or the Catholic Church.
I was listening to Cherie Blair on NPR. She mentioned that one of the reasons it's expected for a British Prime Minister to be a member of the Church of England is due to the fact that the Prime Minister gets to appoint the Archbishop of Canterbury.
This level of religious interference on the part of government seems so foreign to me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I'd heard you mention the auto-tithing thing from Germany before, but I hadn't heard of the other cases. I'm quite partial to my religion, but I'm also very happy to have separation of church and state in the US.
I guess when a certain religion is the majority in an area, it's hard not to influence politics at least indirectly. And maybe it's okay in many cases. But overtly linking the two just seems dangerous to me.
I guess you've also made an argument for privacy. But that also makes me think about what privacy means. I personally don't mind if people know my religion or who I voted for or whatever, but if everyone shared everything, even if privacy is legal then it would be easy to distrust anyone keeping a secret. Should I be obligated to keep some privacy in order to protect those who have a legitimate need to keep privacy?
I think that if anyone in a society is religious then there will be no perfect separation of church and state. It should be preserved as a fundamental right that 1) people should be able to practice their religion and 2) the state will not endorse one religion over another.
Your statements about privacy are interesting. I think that if there is a need for privacy then there is something fundamentally wrong with society. When I keep things secret it's because I don't trust someone. Imagine how much progress we can make as a society if we were able to trust each other implicitly not to be stupid or to exploit others.
I think government should be as transparent as possible and state secrets minimized.
To directly answer you question, I would say, No. If someone has a legitimate need to keep more secrets than I do, that reason should be sufficient. What do you think about it?
I'm not sure on the privacy issue. Just with the topic raised about how Jews were more easily abused because they couldn't keep their ethnicity/religion secret. If I were part of an abused group, and I refused to answer the question about whether I belonged to that group, doesn't that make me look suspicious?
But I agree that government should be as transparent as possible. I'm not sure where the "as possible" line should be.
And if we could all go without secrets, that would be great, too. And I guess I'm usually not the best at keeping secrets, either. (And I usually feel no qualms about disclosing my religion or for whom I voted or whatever.) I was just wondering about it.
Post a Comment