To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don't understand Islam to be a church.
I don't know that the Libertarian Party has an official position on the separation of church and state.
I talk about a Christianity that is enlightened enough to separate spirituality from the rest of life. Not just church and state, but knowledge and church.
Christians - at least Christians in a liberal democracy - have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state.
State assaults on the separation of church and state are nothing new.
The United States may be a religious nation. But it is also a nation with a strong commitment to separation of church and state.
When Pat Robertson says there is no constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state, I say he is wrong.
It doesn't say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state.
One area where American Jews have something to teach Israel is religious pluralism, something that living in a democracy with a separation between church and state has helped us fine-tune.
There the union of Church and State tends strongly to paralyze some of the members of the body of Christ. Here there is no such influence to destroy spiritual life and power.
I donate heavily to the church and various churches in the Detroit community and food banks.
I gotta say, the Catholic Church has churned out a lot of great artists and directors and actors, so if that's all they do, that's fine by me. If they're good at churning out tortured artists, that's great!
That's what they do in Europe. You go down to the city hall and you become legally connected. You have a civil union there. Then, if you're religious, you go down to the church, and the church blesses the union. That gets the problem solved.
The church is the only mechanism for mass mobilization. That's why the civil rights movement came out of the church.
If the church says you are not allowed to steal, and we will ostracize you in our midst if you did, if what a man has does not measure up to what he has, if we found that a man has more money than he should have, if a man is earning a salary of a civil servant or a public servant and he has houses everywhere, we have to hold him to account.
Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.
Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.
I was raised by both parents up to 17. We had a good family. We had a middle class family, good teaching and good surroundings, raised by the church, where I went every week whether I wanted to or not.
I was raised in a working class family of Baptist faith, and I went to college on a church scholarship where early teachings were reinforced. Abortion was wrong, I was taught.
Growing up, I was vaguely aware of things that went on in church, because I was in the boys' choir at the local Episcopal church. But I got the clear message that I was supposed to learn music there, and not pay too much attention to the rest of it, and I followed those instructions very carefully.
