Welcome to Gaia! ::

It has been INTERESTING for me, lately, talking politics with people. I am NOT good at politics. I don't really KNOW politics. But people have been asking me about things I BELIEVE just because a Mormon is running for President. Mitt Romney. Will I vote for him? Probably not. I don't know enough about his politics yet to see if I even AGREE with the guy (just because we go to the same church does NOT mean we agree on political stuff). But it HAS given me reason to read more about him to find OUT if I agree with his views. Most recently I read this interview (not religious in nature at all... which works for ME as I KNOW his religious stuff, it's the OTHER stuff I am clueless about the man on).

So, how important is a candidates religion to you? Is it enough for you to vote for them? To NOT vote for them? What would you think if the president was the same religion as you? Would anything change?

My girlfriend had a very interesting perspective on this subject matter. While my own beliefs on this are still forming, I'll mention hers...

She thinks that when there should be separation of church and state, that should be FULL separation. The second a candidate mentions religion in connection with government, he should be out of the running. If a president says God told him to do anything (yes, she had Bush in mind), he should face instant impeachment. Also, she and I both feel that prayer to open or close any government meeting of any form should be completely done away with.

The religion of a person is not a reliable indicator of their stance on any particular issue given the tremendous diversity within the broad identification terms. I judge based on their ideologies, but whether or not that actually matches up with the common cannon of their religion is a moot point to me. The exception to this is perhaps extremism of a conviction, conventionally considered a religion or otherwise. I would no sooner vote for a militant Atheist like Dawkins than I would for Pat Roberson. Both are extremely religious in their own right - to the point that it begins to seriously cloud their judgement. Whoever is elected needs to be tolerant and extremism does not allow for tolerance; tolerance needs to cover not just religion, but a broader gamut of things as well.

If there was a Neopagan president? Hah. Yeah. That'll happen in my lifetime. It probably wouldn't mean much considering how broad Neopaganism is. But suppose they followed something closer to my own system? Well, for one, I'd be overjoyed to know our goverment would finally get off its a** in terms of dealing with environmental issues seriously for once... Gods it pisses me off to see Bush sit on his a** if not outright work against sound environmental policy. burning_eyes Not to mention that there wouldn't be any more BS like the pentacle headstone descrimination and we'd actually get a Neopagan chaplain in the military. Damn that'd be nice.



To me, that's not seperation, that's outright banishment. You might as well say only an Atheist can be president with that sort of policy (though persnoally, I consider Atheists, at least the staunch ones, to be at least as religious as the traditionally religious). The idea was to avoid a theocracy or imposing any one religious system on the people, not to punish people for having a religion and living by it.

Religion has been a very hot item in the current political scene and I have to say that this distresses me somewhat. Not because I think any real separation between religion and politics is possible... an absolute separation is impossible. I guess it's because I'm a religious minority that this irks me a bit. I'd rather see at least an omnidenominational approach from a Christian canidate, if not a more universalist one.