Indeed, I can only view this thread in a mirror. But I’m fine as long as no-one mentions “dog”… oh, f—
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That’s the thing, though, it is really easy to fall into the trap as seeing one’s own culture as normative while that of another as aberrant. Religious education in public schools and church taxes look just as strange to us, and the level of state subsidy for private religious schools in Germany is a dream of the Christian right in the US.
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I would never say that the German system is superior to the US (we have other contributors doing this here on BBS), mostly I’m baffled about the differences.
I stand by my opinion that public religiousness is much less common here, compared to my (media-biased) view on the other side of the pond.
Most likely it would be nightmare, not a dream. Yes, we do have church taxes and mandatory religous education, but rights and duties are interwoven. Church tax? You have to become a statutory body*. Religious education? Sure, but the teachers are appointed by the state, the church only co-decides.
Twelve Tribes has massive problems with the German system as they are trying to work around the “duties” part of the deal.
Is it a good system? No idea. But I as an agnostic would probably be unhappy in the US: The constitutional separation of church and state combined with the loud public Christianity is painful.
* Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts, I have no idea if this concept exists at all in the US
It helps to not think of the United States as a homogeneous whole, but more like the European Union, with differences in culture, tradition, population, taxation, regulation, from state to state.
Popular support for " loud public Christianity" is slowly dying out, and the really intrusive evangelicals are rarely found outside of the South.
Phoenix isn’t known for being particularly religious, so this ardent defense of public prayer by the City Council probably says more about the councilmen than about the people of Phoenix.
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They could certainly use a refresher course on Matthew 6:5-6.
Even Californian levels of public religiosity look rather extreme from outside the US.
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[quote=“renke, post:43, topic:73299, full:true”]
But I as an agnostic would probably be unhappy in the US: The constitutional separation of church and state combined with the loud public Christianity is painful.[/quote]
I think that as with any local noise one tends to tune it out. This becomes harder at election time, but the US has no lock on stupidity at election time. I’ve lived all over the US (as well as a few other countries), and on a daily basis the religious stuff impinges on my attention very little, for example less than in the UK where my morning news was always being interrupted by some kind of fatuous “thought for the day” and where I couldn’t shop for groceries on Sunday because some bishops thought I should be doing something else.
The USA is kind of like a loud uncle who talks without a filter at parties and doesn’t much care what anyone else thinks of him. We are easy to caricature, and rather than making any effort to correct the caricatures when faced with them we tend to laugh at them ourselves or wear them as a badge of honor. I think this confuses people in other countries. We are famously ignorant of the rest of the world, but going back at least to de Toqueville there is a long tradition of people in the rest of the world thinking they know more about the US than they actually do.
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Well, not under that name!
At the state and local level we do sometimes have public functions officially handed off to private entities; I can’t think offhand of anything similar at the national level.
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ha, touché!
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It was also the time that American churches, wetting themselves over fear of commies, agreed to flip Jesus’s doctrine from socialism to cheerleading the rich, in order to try and throw elections to the GOP, who they thought were their only hope, if that’s a fair summation of Brad Hicks’s memorable series of articles, Christians in the Hands of an Angry God.
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Prayer is inherently “an establishment of religion”. It’s the explicit establishing of the religious belief in God, or what ever is being prayed to."
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It’s ok, we’re allowed to shop on Sundays in the UK now, but yes “Thought for the Day” is still a thing, but they will allow any old religion to have a go (despite the UK being a nominally christian country with our own state religion and everything).
A bow to Satan is as appealing as a bow to Jesus; both are imaginary.
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