Lately, my housemate and I have been having a heated debate about religious inclusion. He takes the position that governments should have an inclusionary stance towards religious groups in the interest of getting them on your side, and eventually liberalizing them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. Furthermore, he maintains that the benefits of this bridge building outweigh the risks to our separation of church and state. While he very cogently points out that secular government is not a mutually shared ideal, and therefore cannot be used as a nucleation point for reconciliation, I still believe that we can’t give these people any leeway: an inch of theocratic encroachment eventually amounts to a mile. He says I’m stonewalling religious people.

What initially ignited the debate was the the Israel-Palestine situation. He says that if Israel has any chance of ousting Hamas, it needs to beat Hamas at its own game; that is, move into Palestine, provide social services, and build mosques. His plan is essentially for Israel to appoint more liberal imams to run the mosques, and shepherd the masses to a more moderate interpretation of Islam.

I think this is a terrible idea, because it doesn’t address the core dispute between the people: the holy-land. Muslims want Jerusalem back, and while it’s true that the mutual antagonism over the years has obscured the root of the problem, it’s really a religiously motivated land dispute. Period.

Take for example the Sinai war. Soon after the creation of Israel, the entire Muslim world lined up at the side of Palestine, and basically attempted to choke Israel to death. They refused to let Israeli planes into their airspace, and wouldn’t let any ship coming from or bound for Israel dock at their ports. This ultimately culminated in Israel lashing out and invading the Sinai Peninsula, but it’s a good indicator of the importance of Jerusalem to the Muslim faith: it transcends borders. Any solution that does not take this into account will ultimately fail.

This is why if you went in and supplanted Hamas with Israeli funded religious and social programs, you could only get rid of suicide bombers and extremists temporarily. If there is anything we have learned from the existence Israel, it’s that you can deny a people their religious holy-land for a very long time, but they will continue to stew about it.

It’s clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its core a religious problem, and as long as people are allowed to confound religious political issues, it will remain a political problem too. This is why regardless of the side you support, the values you should espouse should be separation of faith from government. I don’t see how demanding reasoned, secular diplomacy is stonewalling when your opponents are religious nutjobs refusing to even sit down and discuss diplomatic solutions with an ‘illegitimate state.’ Having qualifications for what should be considered rational discourse is not stonewalling.

Anyway, our debate moved on to Obama’s new ‘faith-based office,’ which I believe is an absolute waste of time. I know it’s in the interest of everyone to move forward together, but I don’t understand why we have to kowtow to people who unabashedly admit that the US would be better off as a theocracy. We have standards for rational discourse, and just like we would have a hot fire under our asses to shut down Nazi talk in Congress (sorry…Godwin’s law…), we can’t tolerate people telling us that their invisible sky fairy opposes stem cell research. Or that some holy book written by some bronze age desert people offers genuine insight on gay marriage and abortion. I’m sorry, that just isn’t the kind of reasoning I expect from the governing body of the most powerful nation in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t seek to confront their beliefs — telling them that they’re idiots would be unproductive. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to base their political convictions on empirical evidence, and therefore keep god out of government. The problem is that if you place any limitation on these people they take it as an affront.

Take senator Jim DeMint, who is claiming that this stimulus package is actually an attack on people of faith because it specifies that any school facilities that receive federal funds for renovation may not subsequently be used for religious activities. He claims this is an infringement on existing liberties, because the activities are currently permitted, and may not be in the future.

Well no, not exactly. If you were getting free fruit from your neighbor’s tree, it wouldn’t be an infringement on your rights if that neighbor decided to cut you off. He would just be exercising his prerogative to keep his own fruit. In the case of the federal government, they aren’t supposed to be giving funds to religious institutions anyway, so this is really just enforcement of a previously ignored stipulations.

If you give Christianists an inch of political ground, they are bound to take a mile. They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That’s why I think faith needs to keep its place.