Talk politics.

Hey the western world was kind of shitty until we told the Catholic Church to piss off and stop interfering with secular governments. Most of the Islamic world doesn't have any real concept of the separation of church and state and certainly things like freedom of speech and freedom of religion are somewhat alien.

I would argue that the less guided by religious mythology a culture is, the better it is.

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From what I recall, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates were pretty liberal, and had secular law for non-Muslims, though there was no separation of Church and state: the Anglo-Saxons don't really get close to that place until the C17th and good old Cromwell who lets Jewish folk back in to England.

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Actually, there was a bit when the Caliphate tried to force a state Islam on the Muslims. They said "NO U" and thus Islam had separation of Church and State for over 1,000 years.....

And be he powerless or not, your head of state and head of church are the same man. When are you going to join we in the United States in having an Anglican Church without a King to prop it up?

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And be he powerless or not, your head of state and head of church are the same man.

And is unelected. And we seem to prefer it that way, until, of course, we care to change it. And just to rub the injustice of it all in, there are more practising Roman Catholics in England than practising Anglicans.

Being culturally Catholic myself, could I give a damn? No.

You guys may have a constitutionally enshrined separation of church and state, but such seems functionally meaningless given your society. Especially in the South.

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Contemporary Fundamentalism is what the Union gets for conquering us. They leveled much of the South and all kinds of religious extremisms came out of the woodwork when the South remained and remains the poorest individual sectional bloc.

But either way, limey, you guys don't have separation of Church and State so until you do as the French did and create it, don't lecture people who have had this for hundreds of years while you still persist with feudal atavisms.

If it was a Frenchie, I'd actually listen to his bitch-whining about our culture, because y'know, the French actually *have* some of the stuff we should. The UK with its theocratic monarchy and the strongest aristocracy in Europe? I fart in its general direction.....

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And let's be clear on another thing-most of the US's wars in the 20th Century after WWII were attempts to clean up the messes Europe made in the Third World and also to strengthen our own empire (the two are extremely related). I mean, we killed Lumumba because the Belgians ran a shithole, the mess in Iraq is the UK's fault, Afghanistan was invaded by the British three times to keep it from falling into Russia's sphere of influence, failing three times I might add, there's the whole French debacle in Vietnam and then there's the reality that well, the Middle East went to shit after you guys tried to run it as parts of your empires the way everything else did.....

There's a reason that much of Africa and Asia is nightmarish. That reason is your colonial misadventures (except the Philippines and certain Polynesian islands *we've* messed up/forcibly stolen).

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So....I get bitch-slapped for agreeing with you? You Yanks have never gotten over Napoleon losing, have you?

Religious fundamentalism must be one touchy subject where you are. However, to return to the fray. [Puffs out chest and tries to look self-important.] Alas, I must agree with you about the French: they do not have a culture of stupid anti-intellectualism; they believe in education of a competitive kind; and are almost as irreligious as the British. Odd that one of the last bastions preserving the connection of church and state should find it's expression in an avowedly secular culture like Britain's, but there you go: perhaps we like being criticised for our adherence to meaningless old-fashioned shibboleths whilst simultaneously ignoring the ukases issued by the head of the Church of England, through her henchman, the villainous Doctor Rowan Williams.

Obviously given our nefarious agenda, we'll reconquer the known world and force you all to play cricket.

But I can't help feeling I haven't put my finger on the problem. Which is, I'm sure, something to do with the Anglo-Saxon culture's general stupidity.

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No, actually we didn't so much want him to win as to keep you guys occupied while we grabbed Canada and presented you with a Fait Accompli.

I'm simply pointing out that Britain maintains some atavisms that really don't reflect well on any pretensions to modernity on the part of Perfidious Albion. But hey, thanks to you guys bankrupting yourselves in debt to us in WWII we get to clean up your messes....*shrugs.*

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Part of the political settlement of the war debt, as you know, meant we withdrew from colonial territories on a hugely accelerated basis, and with all that such implies.

The 'Scramble for Africa' was Europe's C19th shame, but let the country which is without sin cast the first stone. If we'd just annexed Hawaii I suppose things might have looked different.

And as a country we do maintain many atavisms, but I would doubt we're alone in that.

And none of this has much bearing on what is right and appropriate now. True, it is always proper to defend the good in a culture, and to criticise the bad in it. Neither your nation nor mine is without sin. We invented concentration camps in the Boer War: you gave out smallpox infected blankets to the aboriginal peoples of America, with whom our monarch had treaties prior to your successful revolution. We were fucking shits to the Irish, you maintained slavery after it had become apparent to most of the rest of the world that such a thing was abhorrent. The list of our respective sins is endless, and to some extent irrelevant.

For a pragmatist, what is right and proper is often not dependent on context: how to achieve it is almost always.

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Brazil had it longer than we did.

And yes, for pragmatists what you say is true. The problem is that the USA has two competing groups of idealists, one of which is evil and the other of which is vastly incompetent.....

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Which is why present-day China is perfectly a paradise without any degrees of social difficulty or just plain stupidity, right? State atheism did nothing to ameliorate the ills of everything from the Elbe to the South China Sea as I recall, or is this another case of "Mao and Stalin were really theocrats all along?".

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I should have clarified that religion is far from the only irrationality we cling to. Mao and Stalin were authoritarian assholes who made the state the object of worship but I wouldn't call them theocratic.

Now you can answer my questions if you don't mind.

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I would note that there were no questions in your first comment, only statements. All of which are false.

1) Nobody told the Catholic Church to piss off until about 1789 or so, by which point theocracy lost its bite to the degree it had and religion was replaced with the racist conceits of late-19th Century Europe. White supremacy replaced Christianity but both met the same need. With of course those who were still the uber-devout as prone to racism and defense of slavery as anyone else.

And in the 20th Century, well....between the fascists and the communists Europeans really showed how to shoot yourselves in the foot twice.

2) Most of the Muslim world exists under various secular Westernized dictatorships. The Muslim world includes everything from Morocco to Indonesia, and only two countries are actually theocratic: Iran and Saudi Arabia. The majority of it is various strands of secular dictatorships which repress everybody, Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike.

3) They must be equally to the West then, given that European countries censor things like Holocaust denial, given that the Grundgesetz outlaws certain political parties (albeit 30% of Germans would vote Nazi anyway so it's perfect political sense), and given that the West contains a lot of countries with state churches. If Theocracy is religion and the state together, then by that logic, a state which recognizes and patronizes a particular denomination is....

4) I've already answered your point that it's not religion that's the problem it's when Kings use it to safeguard themselves. But that results in the Catch-22 of religion and culture technically being near-identical the further away one is from the French Revolution.....

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All of which are false.

This is what I get for letting the History Channel educate me. Apparently I'm not learning as much from those specials about Hitler and the Spear of Destiny as one might hope.

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Trust me, the Hitler channel is not at all about actual history.

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So you're saying the info on Chupacabras and underwater UFO's is unreliable? Sheesh, can't trust media at all these days.

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telemann.livejournal.com

But tell you what, that show on "The United States, the story of US" is fantastic.

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I'll have to check it out. Part of my problem may be my late work days - my cable tv viewing tends to start after 11pm. That and I'm a sucker for chupacabra specials.

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1) Henry VIII, England, 1533. Reformation anyone. Started up the whole state/church thang really, which you have mentioned earlier. Before which the Pope was head of the Church and the monarchs kings in their own right but still all under his spiritual jurisdiction.

4) Louis was never head of the Catholic Church. Nor even the Catholic Church in France: there was a Cardinal for that. The flaw in your argument is that in France, the Church and State were separate. It was the feudal ancient regime bankrupting itself supporting the American war of Independence*, that precipitated the economic collapse that led, eventually, to Madame la Guillotine.

*Because what was bad for Britain was good for France. Such thinking needed a revolution. Then a long war, then a few more....

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