Here’s a link to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to the Houston Ministerial Association in which he declares his position on the separation of church and state: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iihPUJcrUAQ
And here’s a link to an article his niece Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wrote about it, in response to criticism offered by Sarah Palin: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/03/AR2010120303209.html
Palin, for her part, argues that "morality itself cannot be sustained without the support of religious beliefs."
ReplyDeleteI don’t understand how one could think this. Last year, in the second to last meeting of a year-long class about faiths, I was shocked (and got pretty pissed off at) a girl who raised her hand and said, “but without religion, people have nowhere to get their morals from.” Granted, religion does a great job of instilling its morals into its constituents but that definitely doesn’t mean it’s the only way to get them. Throughout my life, in terms of religion, I’ve been all across the board. Seriously. All over it. My religious views changed but I didn’t write a new list of morals each time.
So atheists don’t have morals then? What if someone has a different religion than you; are their morals wrong? Whose morality are we talking about here? Palin’s quote seems dangerously close to snowballing into something bigger and scarier. I’m not a happy camper.
I was about to start my first sentence with "my boyfriend and I", but I figured that would make me lose a lot of credibility for what I was writing, so instead, I started with a disclaimer that tricked you into reading this. SO. My boyfriend and I sometimes talk about how we would raise our children, not because we plan on having them anytime soon, but because interesting topics stem from conversations on parenting. One thing we focus on is whether we would raise our children with a religious background or not. As I have mentioned several times before, I was raised in a very conservative Catholic household and attended Catholic school for all of my life until college. I very much appreciate what my parents and schooling have given me in the form of morals and education. But my boyfriend, though the son of a preacher man, was raised without a strong religious pull on the part of his parents. His father was always open to religious freedom and tried not to push one way or the other on his son. I know that my boyfriend has very good morals, based on my judgement which may not mean much since we have similar morals, but a lot of them have come out since we started dating. I do not mean to say that they weren't there before me, but the "recovered bro" did not always act for the betterment of humanity. Of course I believe that it is possible to have morals without religion, maybe even easier as some of these uber conservatives I have been researching seem really terrible. But it does seem to me that it may be easier to get there with a religious background. I do not practice a faith since college, but I do note that I would definitely not be able to define my morals so easily without that faith. So, though I disagree with Palin that morals can not exist without religion, I am more trusting of religion for instilling morals in children as they age. It frustrates even me, but I stand to defend those with these views.
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