It’s a bit Yankee Doodle, also long for Facebook (so I did not post it there), but it discerns the difference, which is critical to freedom, between 1) dependence on the grace of an autocratic state and 2) the assurance of mutual regard and the defense of all by all by way of a studied secular democracy.

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Every state supports an ethnic or religious majority whose beliefs, calendar, customs, are supported in the construction of the laws of the state that then acknowledge, permit, or secure that identification to greater or lesser extent.

In Christian (majority) North America, laws corresponding with secular-humanist values derive their strength — frankly, their popularity and utility — from protecting all against all, including the tyranny of the majority: The occurrence of the Christmas celebration on December 25 shutters most businesses, but none private are compelled to close and no one who is not Christian is compelled to worship involving Jesus.

The principle: religion by individual volition at private expense.

By way of a constitutional and studied secularism, we keep everyone’s church, mosque, and temple doors open.

Kings and their like in autocratic political leaders may or may not choose to favor or protect all as befits their ambitions, desires, and their self-aggrandizing personal self-concept. The constituents of a genuine secular democracy will not — not ever — permit such leaders to power except through subterfuge or, as appears to have happened in Germany, the leveraging of their own venal supremacist ambitions.

In essence, a democratically free people do not leave to the grace of power their own interests in faith or the treatment of minorities.

Equality is assumed; matters involving human rights are presumed even while argued in the legislatures representative of constituent sensibilities overall (local laws, for example, address the death penalty plus a host of laws, from prohibitions about drugs to sentences for crime, that lend themselves to local or state — as opposed to Federal — standards).

Greater liberalism and grace within a theocratic mode in governance, whether explicit or implied, may be appreciated but there is less insurance against one enterprise in faith dominating all others, removing also the motivation for all to defend all against the overreaching ambitions of each.

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I have spoken, lol.

🙂

I believe most Americans would say about the same thing in regard to the virtues of the legal history, theses, and laws propelling “Out of Many, One” in the living constitution of my great and good national state.

All autocratic states — no exceptions — leave power to fate by way of who ascends to the position of a supreme human authority.  The king or president-for-life may turn out a good man, or not, but either way, the state’s constituents have been transformed into the leader’s subjects and must then live with the leader’s caprice and temperament a long time, unless or until driven to revolt.

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