Rising Religious Intolerance

Again, Morbo at The Carpetbagger Report raises a topic I've been meaning to broach, this one involving a case where an Indiana court ruled that the Pagan parents of a child could not expose their child to non-mainstream religious education.

This isn't the first case like it in the last few years. A court elsewhere decided recently that a woman practitioner of Wiccan was not a suitable candidate for a local elected post. Elsewhere, courts have awarded primary custody do parents who attended a mainstream church over other parents who did not.

Dangerous territory? You bet!

Obviously, this matters because outside forces are getting involved in what is and isn't appropriate for children based on something so subjective as religious affiliation. But for all the talk the last few years about how this country was founded by white settlers, one thing that really can't be in dispute is that America as we know it today was made possible by people escaping religious persecution elsewhere. I do NOT agree that our founders - some of them my ancestors - intended this as a specifically Christian nation although most of them were indeed Christians.

So it matters on a national level if courts are taking it into account the religious affiliation of parents in deciding who is the better parent. The idea what one parent might be "better" if they're a fundamentalist or Roman Catholic Christian over one who may be a Jew, a Buddhist, or a Muslim is preposterous.

I've also posted about the emergence of clergy in the workplace and the increased acceptability of prayer meetings and Bible studies on federal property. More and more, I hear friends and associates say religion is coming up at work more often. One recently told me that their director of personnel (for a fairly large company) is now soliciting information from perspective employees on whether they regularly attend Church. Considering the company is technology based, I'm baffled.

As a Christian, I've seen enough bad Christians who go to church faithfully every week to wonder how that can be used as a standard to determine who's "good' or "bad".