Regarding Europe, I just wanted to say that Ireland has been just starting to get out from under out from under the yoke of the Church, so at least there’s that…!
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Even in Germany the Bavarian cross thing is an absolute outlier. No other German state is remotely likely to follow along and even the Bavarian people, for the most part, think this is a stupid, stupid idea.
Christianity in Germany is on its way out. For the last few decades, people have been leaving the churches (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) in a steady trickle. The churches – especially the Roman Catholic church but to a lesser degree the Protestant churches, too – have a very hard time recruiting clerics, to a point where there are not enough of those to fill posts vacated by retirement, and church districts need to merge to ensure that there is a properly trained priest available. Another fifty years and the Christian religions in Germany will be marginalised to the point of insignificance, and not because of the Muslims.
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Thanks for “crucifices”. Never knew the correct plural. Always thought it was crucifixen.
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Yes, Bavaria is the Catholic part.
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Good luck with arguing with your mom about that… I don’t recommend it. I don’t know what the law in Germany is, but the French law banning religious garb in school includes the hijab, yarmulkes, and “large” crosses. I don’t know how that works out in practice. And, since it only applies in public schools, it wouldn’t apply to nuns.
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Remember what Lenny Bruce said about the cross as a symbol: “if Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
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This cross and Christian stuff has nothing to do with religion. It’s just a plain old fuck you to anyone that isn’t a rabid hater like these people want them to be. This stuff needs to be confronted and stopped because that orange idiot would love to do this shit if he gets the chance. These people are really scary.
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What? The fucking government takes your tithe as taxes and turns it over to the church in Germany. What is this separation of church and state you’re talking about?
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In other words, it’s heritage not hate.
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How about an Ankh? Just say you’re Coptic…
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I understand the Second Commandment has something to say about this.
I think you nailed it there. Since it’s generally not a safe assumption that the adversary can be shamed out of a course of egregious bad faith, or they would never have embarked upon it; the best option is often to demonstrate, as pointedly as possible, that abandoning any semblance of good faith to ram your smarm through leaves you open to retaliation in kind; often by people whose feelings are not so delicate as yours; and the need to preserve a veneer of plausibility will (in absence of an audience so sympathetic that you can get away with anything) tend to very much constrain your freedom to make ad-hoc adjustments in response to the creative interpretation of your little plan.
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That would make a good t-shirt
…nailed it…
Heh.
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Actually, hanging the flag upside down has a real military purpose, to whit, as an indication that all is not right with the installation above which it is flying, to warn others of the state of distress that exists.
An example of this is shown in the last scene of the film In the Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones from 2007. All the flags in the US should be flying in this configuration right now.
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And there’s an issue of consistency (and constitutionality) at play here, because based on the principles of separation of church and state, no official authority is habilitated to say that something is religious or not, which debases any ban based on religion as arbitrary and/or hypocritical.
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The general answer to that is that it is the religious who state that whatever it is is religious or not. Which is why you get all the lovely debates about whether a cross is “religious” or not.
For some Christians it is. For others it isn’t.
If you turn up stating that you have to wear your strainer in service of the FSM as a religious requirement, that’s generally good enough for the state to be able to say that’s inappropriate in a purely secular space.
If you turn up in your secular workspace wearing your strainer and claim that it’s just a fashion statement, they’re perfectly entitled to either tell you not to wear it because it’s a breach of the dress code or equally that it is a religious article because other FSM believers think it is.
It’s a really good catch, that Catch-22.
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I thought the Devil was in the details?
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Which means those who don’t tell, especially for never being asked, have more leeway than others, especially those for which the answer is a foregone conclusion.
Currently, in French public schools, you can’t wear a hijab or a cross, but you can wear a Sacred Chao, or any symbol that’s currently off the radar. This is arbitrary and in contradiction with equality before the law.
ETA: okay, maybe the Sacred Chao is a bad example, since I’m not sure followers of Discordianism are able to tell if it is or isn’t a religion.
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Yeah, funny stuff. But it’s not the actual symbol that bothers me. What bothers me is trying to figure out what it has to do with Bavaria’s heritage.
Obviously we know the answer and I’m just being facetious. It has to do with the heritage of being founded as a dutchy of the Holy Roman Empire in the 6th century CE and even today over 50% of Bavarians are Catholic. The heritage they speak of is their religious heritage which is obvious to everyone but they want to play a game of make-believe and they expect everyone to play along with them. It’s an open fiction and is insulting to everyone involved.
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