Church and State

[ironphoenix]

Ganked from goldsquare: an excellent opinion piece on the complex and difficult relationship between religious and government institutions in the US. The legal arguments are specifically American, but the underlying question is universal.

Even the question of what should, from a purely religious point of view, be the criteria for membership in a religion is a very difficult one for me. On a fundamental spiritual level, I take the words "Catholic Church" very much at face value, and open the doors very wide indeed, but how that relates to human institutions is ... fraught.

Comments

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

Sadly, there are some people and organizations that I think would do exactly that.

I don't think I'm enough of a hard socialist to think that everything is better done the way the government thinks it should be, though.

[zenten.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's better through the government. Governments don't get to decide who runs a charity though, they just have rules for what sort of rules can be used to determine who runs a charity.