Sarkozy and religion
Posted on: February 16, 2008 - 6:22am
Offline
Sarkozy and religion
France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has embraced god as good for society in a few speeches. It's the first time a French president expresses his religious beliefs in public.
Even though it seems to be an oecumenic stance (in Saudi Arabia, he said everyone worshiped the same god), he believes that a lack of faith is a lack of moral values. I don't know if it is a political strategy to earn the confidence of conservative voters...
I would like to know what happened in the United States : there seems to have been a shift from atheism to theism during the cold war. And you now have a president who has to pledge allegiance to god when he gets elected... Does anyone have any details on this?
- Login to post comments
In the U.S., there has been a major shift in politics towards political action comittees and lobbying. Politics here are mostly dominated by who's willing to contribute the most campaign funding and run the most advertisements in favor of their position... the merits of the decisions being proposed are often never even discussed as politicians shove riders in unrelated bills to favor those who support their election campaigns. The public school systems here don't teach skepticism and critical thinking skills, so most Americans just believe what they see on the news. Christianity, at least some branches of it, understand how the system works and are good at pushing their agendas through the political machine. PACs like the Christian Coalition have done a lot of harm this way.
I really don't know what the OP means by a shift from atheism to theism since the Cold War. While its true that "In God we Trust" and "Under God" are new developments, the fact is that prior to the introduction of the 14th Amendment, which applied the Bill of Rights to all the states, any state could (and did) discriminate based on religion and could (and did) have official state religions. Plenty of southern states still have a religious test for public office that dates back before the ratification of the Constitution. And as for God in the Presidential Oath of Office, that's something every US president has tacked on to the end of words originally written without it (they just say "so help me God", or some such at the end).
To get back to Sarkozy, it is interesting that he's seemingly promoting faith in France, where Christianity was long presumed to be breathing its last.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell