Religion: Sneaking in the Bureaucratic Back Door

People are using religion as a scapegoat to perform what would normally be illegal activities in the eyes of the law by saying that it should be protected by the First Amendment. Religious tradition is also harnessed in attempt alter laws to conform to conflicting personal beliefs. Logic and reason should be the conventions that dictate our human rules. Neither religion nor tradition should ever guide our science of law, and it is this ignorance that is muddling up the separation between church and state.

The Temple of Advanced Enlightenment is advocating for their religious belief to smoke marijuana. Many others around the nation are defending their incrimination for illicit drug use to this or even their own religious belief by citing the First Amendment. Potentially, a person might get off the hook for getting caught exercising his constitutional rights, while Alzheimer’s, cancer, and HIV patients are denied a scientifically backed medicine because it is illegal. (In the UK, Morphine is considered a Class-A drug—the same category as cocaine and ecstasy—but also a Schedule II Controlled Substance in both the UK and the United States, meaning that it is a currently accepted medical use in treatment, has the high potential for abuse, and that the abuse of the drug may lead to physical dependence.)

Science and law should never cripple when confronted with religion. The religious should be able to hold and express their beliefs but still conform to legal conflicts in the land they reside in. If legal progression impedes a denomination’s beliefs, doctrines are pushed forward to try and mandate their intolerance to everybody, because pushing away from tradition might force them to be tolerant against their will. It is because of religion that people are intolerant of equal human rights if their religion censures it. It is because of religion that eight-year-olds can be served booze without parental supervision just because of the tradition of communion in their church. It is because of religion that others are allowed to threaten us with torture and damnation, because it is an indirect supposition. There is even such vague wording in the Internal Revenue code that allow churches and private schools to be tax exempt, when some examples of both seem to be exercising blatant capitalism.

Religion is trying to murder science and rationality by sneaking in the bureaucratic back door. Fanatics are trying to “protect us” for this “greater good” that is retrograding and harming our advancement not just in technology, but in ethics. The people outside of this cause are being affected and forced into indoctrination. The people that lack religion and those of different sects would be imbrued by the will of a single group’s theology and ethics. Nobody should be able to slip around the law just for reasons of faith alone; otherwise we are enabling church and state to fuse.

Religion is not fact; it is belief and it is faith. The tradition that drives it should never be the foundation for something scientific. Science is falsifiable, religion is not. Traditionalists deny the science that disproves their notions, yet utilize science if it confirms their faith. This is a tragic method of denial that is hypocritical and deceptive. This shouldn’t be a place where the pseudoscience of religion has precedence within the law. This presence affects not just religious denominations, but burdens the remainder of the populace by forcing them into a will that is not their own.