Arizona Republicans Propose Bill That Would Not Allow Atheists to Graduate

Viktyr Gehrig said:

Arizona Republicans Propose Bill That Would Not Allow Atheists To Graduate High School



Awful damn hard to be a pagan and a conservative in this country when our so-called "conservative party" apparently hates you.

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Well...you are in a Christian majority country and Arizona as of 2008 was made up of 89% Christians according to the Pew Research center so there's going to be a lot of Christian elements in this nation and in the state so I'm not particularly shocked surprised or even appalled that the word God was used in the language of the bill.

At the end of the site you posted, they go on to say that the 'religious' language will likely not even be a part of the final draft:

As written, the bill does not exempt atheist students or those of different faiths from the requirement, though Thorpe has pledged to amend the measure. “In that we had a tight deadline for dropping our bills, I was not able to update the language,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Arizona Republic. “Even though I want to encourage all of our students to understand and respect our Constitution and constitutional form of government, I do not want to create a requirement that students or parents may feel uncomfortable with.”
Arizona Republicans Propose Bill That Would Not Allow Atheists To Graduate High School

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So religious concerns are a non-issue in my opinion. I'm more concerned with legislators wasting their time on a pointless Bill that accomplishes nothing and has the potential for causing a lot of problems.

Smeagol said:

I might be mistaken but some pagans have a definition of god that it completely different from what Christian think of, if I'm not mistaken. According to what I've been told, a god in paganism is a spirit entity the pagan creates in order to serve the pagan, which is almost the opposite of the Christian faith.

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I'm not familiar with that definition of deity-- sounds like a New Age thing to me.

Viktyr Gehrig said:

I'm not familiar with that definition of deity-- sounds like a New Age thing to me.

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I met a girl online who was Wiccan, a form of paganism. According to her.

She really opened my eyes as to the real confusion many non-Christian have in distinguishing between religious people (partitioners of church culture) and being an authentic child of God through faith in Jesus. I'm of the opinion that possibly half of all Christians aren't 'Christians'. Not complaining thogh.

Foolish. Should not pass. However...not ironic that the author of the article is a schoolteacher in Chicago of all places...a city if ever there was a need for a little hope and a few prayers...

This bill prevents Anarchists, Fascists, Theocrats, Communists etc. from graduating.

Seems to be it's made to stifle political ideas.

Viktyr Gehrig said:

Your parenthetical is not appreciated-- as I noted, I am not atheist but pagan, an Ásatrúar, and I am devoutly religious. And yes, my faith absolutely does prohibit me from saying "So help me God" or swearing any other oath on the Judeochristian deity along with any other non-Germanic deity.

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So when you do take an oath, if you ever have taken one, who do you call on to swear that you will adhere to that oath?

Grant said:

So when you do take an oath, if you ever have taken one, who do you call on to swear that you will adhere to that oath?

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Myself. When I swear an oath, I am staking my honor on my given word. For a serious enough oath, which I would never swear to a government, I would swear by the blood of my ancestors; if I broke such an oath, my life would be forfeit to the one I swore to.

I wouldn't dare swear by anything that did not belong to me.

If I swore an oath it'd be on my nuts, so that if I broke my oath, they'd get to cut my balls off.

Much more effective than swearing an oath to God, IMO.

I think differently, if there is no god then essentially you are reciting gibberish when you say 'so help me god',etc. Furthermore you could just walk in with a shirt with 'I am god' on it, or a picture of Thor/insert pagan god here. Then there will be various legal challenges over the years, really a waste of money passing the bill.

There is NOTHING conservative about the GOP today, they're nothing more than another big Government Party that is set to control every aspect of your life.

Ronnie and Barry are both turning over in their graves at what the GOP has become these days.

Let's see what Mr. Conservative himself said and his warning -

"If they succeed in establishing religion as a basic Republican Party tenet, they could do us in."

"By maintaining the separation of church and state,the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars . . . Can any of us refute the wisdom of Madison and the other framers? Can anyone look at the carnage in Iran, the bloodshed in Northem Ireland, or the bombs bursting in Lebanon and yet question the dangers of injecting religious issues into the affairs of state?"

-- Barry Goldwater

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The GOP is rapidly becoming politically irrelevant

The problem is, people act like "conservative" and "neo-conservative" are the same thing. They're not. In fact, they're largely polar opposites. There is nothing conservative in the Republican party, it's a wholly neo-con party, which looks a whole lot more liberal than anything actual conservatives would do.

When do we get an actual conservative party back in the U.S.?