GOT MY E-MAIL TODAY...




Blogswarm Promotes Support For Church-State Separation And Religious Liberty

This weekend, April 6-8, various well-known bloggers including BlueGal, Mock, Paper, Scissors, Neural Gourmet and Talk2Action will be participating in a "Blog Against Theocracy".

This blog-a-thon is intended to show support for separation of church and state and true religious liberty.

The blogswarm has drawn a strong commendation from First Freedom First, a joint project of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and The Interfaith Alliance Foundation.

Since First Freedom First was launched in 2006, some 130,000 people have signed a petition highlighting the dangers posed by religious coercion in public life. Among the noteworthy Americans to have already signed the petition are Walter Cronkite, Phil Donahue, Laura Flanders and Judith Light.

This weekend's blogswarm, while not sponsored by First Freedom First, reflects FFF goals.

Organizers say there are no real guidelines to the blogswarm. The idea is to post at least once from Friday to Sunday against theocracy and in favor of the constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state.

Once bloggers have posted, an email with the URL of the post may be sent to bluegalsblog@gmail.com and the link will be posted on the Blog Against Theocracy blog.




The First Freedom First Team


Donna Red Wing and Eric Shutt of The Interfaith Alliance Foundation
Beth Corbin and Bethany Moore of Americans United for Separation of Church and State






my thoughts.






i'm going to start off by stating that i am not anti-religion. i am pro-freedom of religion. that means any religion or the freedom to believe in nothing at all.
it's a precious right and it needs to be defended. defended even from people of good intentions, let alone those that are arrogant enough to believe that somehow god has chosen THEM to defend that god or to convert everyone to their version of god by any means necessary!

me, if i were god, i'd find that to be insulting. that a believer in me thought my powers so weak that i would need man to help me carry out my divine plan and the other part of all of this that would offend me would be the forcing of anyone, ANY ONE, to have to believe in me to be able to survive, to thrive or to just fit in.
i would want people to come to me willingly and with love, not fear, fear of a neighbor, a government or a fiery afterlife.

we have a gift of freedom in this country that few around the world can even comprehend. a freedom that frightens some people, even here, so much so that they try to scare or bully us into giving it up in bits and pieces.

no, i am not anti-religion or anti-faith.
i honestly want anyone to believe in whatever fulfills their life and harms none.
so, if someone out there believes in garden gnomes as the image of the divine, good for them and i hope that at least one of their holidays includes chocolate because i have been to many different religious ceremonies in my life and will hopefully be able to continue to do so and chocolate, to paraphrase b.franklin, is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy.
i have felt a divine presence at all of them.yet, some of the holiest people i have met have believed in nothing but the humanity of man and set about to live up to that humanity, not because of a love of god or a fear of a hell but because they said it was the right thing to do.

i could go on, but i tend to be a rambler. sherry



But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782