Separation of Church And StateIn 1802, representatives of the Danbury Baptist Association wrote to Thomas Jefferson inquiring about his refusal to follow in the footsteps of presidents George Washington and John Adams, who declared religiously-based national holidays of fasting and thanksgiving. Jefferson’s response referred to a symbolic “wall of separation” between religion and the state, a phrase that finds expression again and again in the debate over the extent religion should play in the public arena.
The institutions of religion and government have been noted in most every world civilization since the inception of recorded history, and for better or for worse most all societies have attempted to marry the two. Whereas Muslims and Jews, for example, both operate under systems of government that could be defined as theocratic or God-centered, one of the fundamental attractions to theoretical American democracy was its refusal to go this route: enter the outdated concept of religious freedom.
Is Truth Relative?If laws govern the physical universe independently of human belief, how absurd would it be to assume that if there were a spiritual realm it would operate on a dissimilar notion of randomness or individual interpretation? If our attitudes and beliefs cannot refute the fact that two hydrogens and one oxygen will always equal water, where does the idea come from that our attitudes and beliefs can define God, the cosmos or the afterlife?
Rethinking Religious LegalismIt’s said there is a letter of the law and a spirit of the law. The letter of the law is what a particular law actually says, for example, "No person shall cross the street on a red light." The spirit of the law is the behavior a particular law was designed to produce. The letter of the law should facilitate our understanding of the spirit of the law. In this case, the spirit of the law is to get people across the street safely.
It is possible to observe the spirit of the law while breaking some letter of it. Let’s say you’re at the corner of an empty intersection. After looking both ways, you don’t see traffic in either direction but the light is red and displays the obligatory "red hand" signal, which is the universal sign for "don’t cross this street." Reasoning that it is safe to cross an empty street, you walk. You have just broken the letter of the law, which states that no person shall cross the street on a red light, but you observed the spirit of the law, which is to get across the street safely.