Atheism in the USA

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by henry quirk

I say, 'I'm indifferent to your *[fill in the blank]...I got no call to insult your religion but I also got no reason to adhere to it...you go be the best [fill in the blank] you can be and leave me alone to not be [fill in the blank]'.
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If it was just a matter of personal belief I'd agree with that. But it isn't. Christianity (in my country and yours) is a very powerful lobby. In the US you have a theoretical separation of church and state - yet a large amount of policy and law gets made on the basis of religious lobbying.

In Britain we have no theoretical separation of church and state. Our upper house (the House of Lords) is made up of the Lords Temporal and the Lords Spiritual. Christian leaders (bishops and archbishops) get seats in our legislature. They are a powerful voice. State funded schools in Britain must, by law, be run according to a 'broadly Christian ethos' and schools are supposed, again by law, to have a daily act of worship (though this has been interpreted in looser and looser ways to basically mean an 'assembly' for many schools). Terrestrial broadcasting licences carry with them an obligation to include a minimum quota of religious programming. And we still have anti-blasphemy laws.

As in the US, the main lobby for changes to abortion laws to make them much stricter, and the main lobby against changes in law to allow assisted suicide for the terminally ill come from religious groups - primarily Christian.

On an individual level each person's faith is their own. But as long as they get to shape the world I live in, and have a constitutional power beyond anything I have in my lack of faith - then the 'live and let live' ethos has already been fundamentally compromised.