Tantamount to creating a state religion? What? That's nonsense. Having the government regulate religion is very much like having it regulate any other entity. There might be minor abuses, such as an official of one religion trying to be a dick to churches of another religion, but that can be dealt with in turn. and is still vastly preferable to violence like this.
And regulation =/= violence.
and having the government fund such groups? waste of money. You'd be better off organizing them from the bottom up, because trying to make that kind of thing from the top down is an exercise in futility.
So what do we call it when the government decides what is and is not an acceptable thing for religions to do? There's an organization called the TSA, and every year their decision on regulation become more and more draconian to the point that people are calling for it to be dismantled. It started out just the same way: preventing people from bringing obviously harmful objects onboard aircraft, and has progressed steadily towards excessive regulation. Yes, yes, slippery slope and all that, but when it's a proven phenomena (please find me a regulatory agency that deals in criminal matters that
doesn't progressively encroach on peoples' basic rights) which happens time and time again then I see an issue with giving government direct power to regulate religion.
I mean, we can say that the government will be severely limited, but when the rubber meets the road the only feasible way to force these groups to change their ways (through a bureaucracy) is eventually through actual force. Then what happens if a religious group says something that is not necessarily harmful, but the director of the agency under the current administration deems to be so? It's happened before innumerable times in other agencies, why not this one?
@The Maestro
I feel the need to point out that I don't believe freedom is a zero-sum game. That implies that all freedoms are of equal magnitude, but I'd argue that if one man has a mini-gun in a room with 100 people, forbidding this man to fire indiscriminately creates a net gain in freedom. I know that's a detail that isn't relevant to your overall point, but I feel like it's a point worth noting early on in a philosophical discussion, which seems to be where you're going.
The minigun analogy breaks down if we give them all guns, because now everyone is on an equal footing. I would, however, prefer to avoid a gun debate because those never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have a productive discussion or outcome. Ever. Suffice to say that analogies are a poor way of proving a point except to illustrate what you are saying. I get where you're coming from, but the solution to a problem is never to take power away from one person by using even more power from another source, it is to give power to everyone so they may contest the conditions themselves. This connection I will make more clear in a moment.
That is the exact opposite of what I'm saying: forbidding a tiny group of people doing something (man with minigun), and thereby giving an opening for more and more restrictive regulations on the larger group (the 100 other people he threatens) is exactly the problem. Big governments always, always harm freedom. I don't mean big government like healthcare, I mean big government as in it gets to monitor/regulate what people (as distinct from business regulatory agencies like the FCC) do without their necessary consent.
Take, for example, the fact that all (and I mean
all) agencies dealing with criminal justice are known to routinely abuse their power. E.g., police cannot be put on camera because of 'wiretapping' restraints that extend from either state law or, failing that, the patriot act. This power given to them (the power to censor public filming of their actions) has led to literally countless cases of police abuse being unprovable and therefore unpunishable. Take, for example, the DHS tracking people without their knowledge or consent or being required to submit a warrant
of any kind. As well, my previously mentioned TSA issues. Oversight only fixes the problem after the fact.
If any government agency is going to be given the power to potentially violate peoples' first amendment rights (and lets not kid ourselves, we are giving them the potential to do that at the very least) then there will be abuses of the system. People always have the best of intentions from their own point of view, but many times that is disconnected from the reality of what is actually good.
So, I guess the connection here is that we give non-governmental organizations (NGO) the support and help them empower those made powerless by restrictive religion, instead of using even more power to remove the authority of those abusive religions. Grassroots is right, it's bottom-up that most effectively kills the abuse of power.
What it comes down to is that Angle, you say top-down funding of an NGO is not going to work. Well why the hell is a top-down government organization going to work? They will use the sword, perhaps judiciously at first, but as I've clearly demonstrated with specific cases, the sword's arc will swing ever wider...
Duke 2.0 makes a similar point: even strict guidelines on what beliefs are not acceptable will take on new meanings as time progresses. Case-in-point: second amendment debate. That short, two or three sentence paragraph is subject to wildly varying interpretation depending on who reads it. Can you really look me in the eye and say such misinterpretation of a much more massive doctrine (either of the regulations or the beliefs of a church) will not happen at least semi-regularly? Can you tell me it won't lead to severe issues that easily outweigh the good done by preventing the minuscule percentage of abuses of religion from propagating?
EDIT: Time for me to sleep, I have work tomorrow and will be on the road most of the day. I'll be back tomorrow night to continue this discussion.