Molotov wrote:Ah, no, actually, we are the world's original secular nation.
Not really. You're the world's original country with a document that binds future governments to a separation of Church and State. A separation of Church and State, whether
de jure or
de facto, is only one form of secularism (called today, usually, 'Western Secularism'.) India is secular, even though it has no such clear separation as does the United States, it has a legal recognition of any number of religions, of which any the government may be tied but to which none it may be biased against, if you see what I mean. The Roman Republic was secular in this sense, in many ways it way pre-religious in the way we understand religion (the ancients did not really separate the world into the temporal and the spiritual as we do now, it was all the same) but the government was not bound by an adherence to a particular religion, nor biased against a particular religion. Some of the ideas of the American 'founding fathers' were old ones indeed.
The "separation" idea is usually traced to the writings of Jefferson and is not present in the text of the Constitution. Prevailing legal thought holds that the prohibition of our Bill of Rights on an established religion also demands that the government, including state governments and county schools, refrain from explicit endorsement of religion, with exceptions for cultural icons not considered religious (such as "In God We Trust," one of our national mottoes.) My opinion is that that's an overly broad reading of "establishment" and has actually fueled fundamentalism by making many Christians feel they're under attack by jurisprudence. But that's neither here nor there...
When I said we're a secular nation, I meant something much simpler: We as a nation are not founded on any religious principles. And yes, secular government existed in antiquity but it was extinct in the West until brought back in America. (I'm open to any counterexamples, if there were any other secular regimes in Western nations between 381 and 1789.)
Well, that's one of the reasons, but a more important reason is that it actually was and continues to be a good idea.
That's a political opinion, and like a religious belief, there's no point arguing. Much as I like guns and think Britain's stance draconian, I think America's silly. Regardless, America's position is because of an outdated document, not because of the either the current political necessity, the current political culture, or the cumulative experience and wisdom of the past. It is just because of the beliefs of a few men, who thought they could rationally plan a society based upon abstract principles and ideals.
For the Founders, the right to keep and bear arms was hardly abstract. They had seen with their own eyes the attempts of the royal government to disarm the population, and it was mainly because of the ready availability of weaponry and ammunition in the colonies before the British government's crackdowns that America remained free, and became independent. You can agree or disagree with America's right to keep and bear arms, and similar rights like Germany's right of resistance, but don't pretend they're baseless. (And if anyone doubts the feasibility of militia defense in this day and age, I remind you that the US Army, the strongest military force on the planet, was having quite a bit of trouble with disorganized rebel militias in Iraq before it started working with the populace to create its own militias.)
I don't recall anyone saying superior.
You did, but I think it was tongue in cheek. Not 'superior', you said something like Britain might have been better off with a Bill of Rights. It was a few posts back.
Ah, so that's what you mean. I didn't say superior. Rather, I thought you were implying that America's hypocrisy had not been good for the world, and I pointed out all the good that America's high ideals, fully realized or not, had helped to create.
and if you made a list I'd imagine that you'd find modern liberal democracy owes more to the American Revolution than British parliamentarianism.
I don't think so, considering that British liberal democracy has been the model for the most successful liberal democracies in the world, excluding Britain, we have Canada, Australia and India as obvious examples. The American presidential model has influenced many countries in the post-colonial modern period, but I'm not sure how successful this has been (see many (mainly) Latin/South American countries, many African countries, some Eastern countries).
Well, when you say Britain was the model, what are you saying exactly? Australia and India both have written national constitutions. Canada's Constitution Act carries many of the same functions. I'm having trouble of thinking of a single democracy created since 1776 that has not adopted a written constitution of some sort as the basis of their government. Even Germany, which in 1949 was unwilling to call its founding document a "constitution" in the absence of a single German republic, has its Basic Law.
The nations you mention (all Commonwealth nations with specific historical ties to Britain) did adopt several aspects of the British model, but nations with less historical tradition of democracy have typically drawn more on the American example. However, in
all cases with the arguable exception of Canada, the American innovation of a written Constitution is used as the basic foundation of each democracy.
Not to say America should rest on her laurels, but I'm somewhat satisfied if we designed the most viable model for the foundations of democracy, even if the edifices built on those foundation adopted several British details.
Several states provide for it in their own constitutions, and the people of those states may opt to keep those as constituted or amend them. It's the sovereign right of the peoples of those states.
It's still constitutionalism, the blame lies with codified and written constitutions which are difficult to amend, presumably from which these 'sovereign rights' are derived in the first place. Silly, so far as I'm concerned, and in my sort of professional opinion
So any legislature should be able to abolish any individual right whenever they feel like it? I'm honestly not sure what you're saying -- written constitutions are a bad thing? I guess, living in Britain, you're in about the only nation that could argue that.
To be honest, I get extremely sick of people over here who claim that the Bible is somehow related to our founding documents. You can believe whatever you want, but the fact is that our Constitution was written in large part by Deists who believed that the Bible was either metaphorical or false. And yet they somehow got together with Christians to create a functioning government for a civil society. Odd how that works, isn't it?
I didn't mean to suggest that the writers somehow colluded with the fundamentalists to write the constitution, but that the reverence in which you hold your constitution is similar to the reverence held by American Christians for scripture, and it's entirely likely that your present culture, and your present political culture, has been influenced by your forebears (quite a few of whom were religious nutcases which we were desperate to get rid of. What do you call them, the Pilgrim Fathers?)
Do you mean "Founding Fathers?" Please don't get the Founders confused with the Puritans who founded four out of thirteen of the original states. By the time of the Revolution, the foremost religion in New England was Unitarianism, which might have started out as a Puritan sect but is a far cry from the Calvinist Pilgrims. And of course Puritans were a relatively small minority in all nine other colonies, including the very first.
I think it might actually be the other way around -- that the fact that our political system and basic rights are explicitly stated to be
written might discourage some of our fundamentalists from making the conceptual leap beyond words on a page. But that's not to say I regard the prior step -- a codified Constitution of government -- to be superfluous. Without that, we'd still be convinced our rights were whatever a court was willing to grant us.