http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/12900371.html

Oh, and Matt, personally it’s the mainstream religious sects and cults that worry me. The non-mainstream ones tend to have very little power.

In any case the current President thinks an invisible wizard who lives in the sky personally advises him on policy — and people support him for it! “These people” won power years ago.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/12/romneys-cult-of.html
Cached version: http://www.furl.net/item/29114798/cached

They call the speech “a milestone in the service of reason”. And they so nearly have a point.

Was it perfect? Almost.

In a big-tent speech clearly aimed at inclusiveness, Romney left himself open to criticism by leaving out non-believers. A single sentence recognizing that tolerance for all faiths also includes tolerance for the faithless seems an unwise oversight. As explained by someone close to Romney, however, there was never any planned tactic to exclude non-religious people. Implicit in the idea of religious liberty is that one freely chooses to be religious or not. Also assumed was that even non-believers would respect America’s tradition of religious pluralism.

The other weakness — just to get them both out of the way — was a single line that was unnecessarily confounding: “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.”

That’s just flat-out wrong. It wasn’t a single line; it was many lines. “Our constitution was made for … religious people,” he said, and “any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty has a friend and ally in me”, and that bit where he said secularist were “wrong” despite saying “no religion should dictate to the state”. What does he think secularism is? His stated position is dead-against his own policy.

Also, they point out “he tried to allay mainstream Christians’ concerns, saying that he shares their belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the savior of mankind” — that’s the wrong way to do it. He’s already said he won’t let religion define his candidacy, and that he wouldn’t let religion dictate his politics. That should be enough — and it should make his opinion of Jesus irrelevant.

And let’s not get started on Thomas Paine: “The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion”(The Age of Reason, 1794)