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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (232419)	5/12/2005 4:58:54 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575597

Ted, Its very borderline. He was attempting to intimidate his parishioners into voting a particular way by threatening to kick them out of the church. Many of his parishioners were elderly. The elderly are particularly seen as vulnerable to such manipulation. Actually, it's the newer, younger members of the congregation who were being "manipulated" (as you put it). The older members responded to the so-called threats and manipulations by ... uh ... whatever they did to make the pastor resign. Case closed, the older members get their church back, and the pastor and his young followers can go to some other church or start their own, one that is obviously more politically involved. (Whether you can legally call it a "church" for the purposes of taxation is another issue, but hey, there are lots of other tax-exempt organizations out there that are politically involved.) The Taliban threatened people with retribution if they did not behave in a particular. Kicking someone out of a church is "retribution"? Now that's a stretch. Like I said, the board of deacons made the mistake of hiring the pastor in the first place. They later corrected that mistake, but not before a lot of bitterness set into people's hearts. Everyone in the church is at fault here, but to compare that to the Taliban is bogus. What I think is that you and JF are just upset at the notion that the pastor would even dare mix religion and politics, especially so blatantly as the young pastor did. To me, however, any religion is free to coerce or force someone to take on certain political views. And any follower of such a religion is free to stay or leave. That's what the 1st Amendment means to me, not that we have to build a "wall of separation between church and state" everywhere we go, but that the state cannot force anyone to believe or follow a particular religion (or lack thereof). Tenchusatsu