Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "The Satanic Temple's Protest for First Amendment Rights" video.

  1. This was taken to a rather odd extreme, but the core message is good and clear: the state should always be secular. Keep your personal beliefs out of it, politicians. And by the way, the 10 commandments are not even close to being the first set of written laws, not by a long shot. We're talking thousands of years here. It's not because the state shouldn't have things in common with christian values, or that it's wrong to believe in 10 commandments, but because a state that is inclusive of all people should respect all religions by not considering politicians' religion of choice to be the one that applies to everyone else. That is called a theocracy, and you really don't want your government to become that, lest you want to have your personal rights capped at middle ages levels, or are ok with some dystopian future like what is portrayed in Handmaid's Tale or something. So religious iconography has no room in public spaces, because if you allow one, you must allow all others, as it is public space, which belongs to everyone, including people who are not christians. It's best to just keep all out, so it becomes neutral ground. It is as important to defend this, as it is important to defend democracy itself. It is quite a hard concept to understand for some religious zealots, but it is an important one, and why we aren't living the same way people did back at the times of cruzades and religious wars. If you can't understand that religion is one of the biggest enablers of wars and most irrational ways of running things, you do not deserve the lifestyle and the comfort you have today. By the way, it's also why some democracies came crashing down in middle eastern countries - because they had fragile and tenuous democracies that didn't take secularism seriously, or that they were overtaken by religious extremist factions. So some of those countries got taken over by theocracies that allowed everything from religious based terrorism to the massacre of religious minorities. If you don't know about this, just look at the history of countries like Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen and a few others. It is quite curious when you realize that some of the most religious countries with theocracies are also some of the most bloody, violent, terrorist enabler countries with some of the most tragic histories of massacres, totalitarianism, corruption, and complete wage disparity. It is quite telling. And if you think this is only about Islam and islamism, you better check your history books once again because that's the only real difference - time. Christian theocracies were as bad, if not even worse than Islam based theocracies are today. What has really saved democracies from becoming similar to Islam based theocracies are today is secularism. So, even if it looks kinda dumb initially, one of the things that actually allows democracy in the US to prosper and go forward is exactly that groups like these exist, and that they are able to pull up stuff like this. Provided that it's basically as ridiculous as people making protests or demanding laws based on faith alone, as long as it's kept outside what the state does. We more and more need strong institutions that will not allow particular religions to have a say in state matters. And unfortunately, this seems to have been becoming more and more true through the entire world. We are once again walking towards a world where religion dictates too much.
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