All men who live in a country are before the law, and thus their beliefs are before the law, whenever they act upon their beliefs. If you prefer to think of it as men, and their actions based on their religions being before the law, I suppose it doesn't matter. The nice thing about the law being secular is that we don't care what your beliefs are- you can believe anything you want- you just can't DO anything you want. It is nice to constrain actions, imo, because some people want to push other people around- and some people want the right to be pushy, with their religion even, and while they can be pushy privately, government should not help them with the pushing (and keeping people from being pushy is, imo, not as pushy as that which it cures). Other people, of course, think government SHOULD push religion- but if we think about how many religions there are, and how many ways we could see the government pushing, it is probably better to have no pushing, save for the government pushing to keep government spaces free from pushing any one religion, or religion at all. But of course not everyone likes that.
And no, a state which thinks it sees WMD's where they do not exist, probably shouldn't be in charge of spotting a "better" anything, much less a "better" religion. I don't trust the government to track my car registration successfully, I certainly wouldn't want to trust them with more important choices. |
