On Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 1:09:37 PM UTC-5, Uncarollo2 wrote:
A very, very large reason why our country is so mixed up is the transposition of personal belief into public policy, and inversion of reason into a subjective choice. Religious belief is meant to be strictly personal, an experience unique to each person (either as a believer or a non-believer) with the freedom to reach as many different personal conclusions as there are people, because it is by definition a subjective experience.

The two most influential factors determining one's spiritual beliefs are where you are born and your family's worldview.

Science is meant to be a unifying approach to thought and reason, enabling all different people to reach comparable conclusions. The two most important factors in ones ability to reason are education and religion.

Spirituality is specifically designed to be a personal journey, where as science and reason are meant to be journeys common to all. The consequences of confusing these two experiences (spirituality and reason) is the imposition of personal belief into public policy (Indiana legislating the right to discriminate against LGBT's) and the relegation of reason to become merely a personal choice (climate change denial, rejection of human evolution). We are losing both our moral compass and our ability to reason with one another. Our country, and the entire world is suffering profound consequences as a result of these fundamental mistakes.

Here is what happens when religion is used to justify political actions:

Since day one in this country, religion has been used as justification for discrimination of one form or enough another. Some key events begin in the early 1600s with the systematic extermination and expulsion of the Godless heathens known as Native Americans, culminating in 1830 with the Trail of Tears.

In the late 1600s, it was non-conformists to the religious laws and women who attempted to object to repression, ultimately leading to the infamous Salem Witch trials of the 1690s. The belief that they were tied directly to the Satanical world and posed a threat to Christianity, was justification for horrific punishment.

In the 1700s, we began the practice of slavery capturing Blacks in Africa and bringing them to America as slaves. They too were often called Godless heathens and many biblical passages were frequently used to justify the practice of slavery. It came to a head in the 1860s with the civil war.

In the late 1800s it was women seeking fairness, basic rights and some level of equality. Religion again, citing many biblical passages, was used to justify their subservience. They got the right to vote in 1920.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Blacks were targeted again and religion again was used to justify segregation and repression of their rights. It took the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to end this practice.

All the above groups, even to today still suffer from forms of cleverly cloaked discrimination, much of which is still deeply rooted in religious beliefs.

A much smaller group of individuals, homosexuals, have always suffered discrimination deeply rooted and justified in religion. These "abominations to God" have had to hide in the shadows and deny their own existence for fear of persecution and even prosecution and worse. It is finally coming to a head today and religious zealots are fighting it with justifications based on religious beliefs.

It's time we ended this insanity of using religion as an excuse to repress, persecute and discriminate against groups of fellow human beings, just seeking a little fairness and freedom to enjoy the rights guaranteed to all citizens. When we started this nation, why did we even talk about rights endowed by our Creator or say that all men are created equal, if we didn't really mean it?