Sunday at The Square
Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher had an interesting conversation on faith, perhaps relevant to this year’s Faith, Politics & Neighbors. Ashton Kutcher had made the point that he feels that the fact that Proposition 8 was on the California ballot at was is a violation of the separation of church & state. Jon Meacham, Editor of Newsweek and author of a Village Square recommended reading book “American Gospel“, who just finished touching on a biblical case for gay marriage (thus likely not an extreme conservative) disagreed:
There’s a complication with that argument because you can and should separate church from state, you cannot separate religion from politics, anymore than you can separate economics from politics or partisanship from politics. Because religion is what a lot of people believe, how they see the world… What James Madison and Jefferson and others so brilliantly did is they built a country in which we could manage and marshal these forces and put them in proper proportion. Where I think, bluntly, the secular left goes wrong sometimes – they – you [looking at Maher]– is you take on extremists with an extreme position.
Maher went on to say that all people who believe in irrational things are cuckoo, possibly thus making Meacham’s point?
2 comments November 16th, 2008
