That explanation is completely irrelevant to your initial claim there as well the claim I made that you responded to. The only thing that your example shows is that a secular state doesn't necessarily imply a healthy environment for sound scientific research.
Yes, exactly my point, just because a nation is ‘secular’ doesn’t mean they are ultra intelligent or that they will not find something else to blind themselves with. Just because I quote from you doesn’t mean I’m giving you a rebuttal.
Something I never claimed to begin with and that doesn't in any way disprove that a religious state doesn't either. My original claim is that a religious state tends to be a counter productive environment to scientific research and education because it is a fairly obvious observation that science and religion do not get along on many areas and their "methodologies" (as far as that even applies to faith based philosophies) are mostly incompatible.
A state where key decision makers claim to be acting in the name of God and guided blindly by Judeo-Christian values (regardless of whether they believe them personally or whether they just need to keep up appearances, something I will get to later on) is never going to approve of things such as stem cell research and is not guaranteed to defend the scientific method in areas where it clashes with the religious dogma in question (see evolution vs. creationism/ID).
And yes you can always argue that in theory it is possible to combine the two but that only really works on an individual level where the person in question can make their own personal moral and philosophical concessions to somehow make it work (as an atheist I don't know how they do it, but there certainly are respected scientists even in the field of biology who are also Christians) but as a government policy I don't see how that is ever going to work. Not to mention that there are other issues aside from scientific development that make a religiously influenced government undesirable in general.
I never said that you did say anything like that and I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you that a religious state is bad for science, what I’m saying is you can have your religion and still embrace evolution. Whether or not you believe Jesus Christ is your savior doesn’t have to cloud your knowledge on base pairing rules, natural selection, fossil evidence, and all other forms of properties that exist in the physical world.
First of all, Christianity has changed over the centuries. At first it was claimed by the Church that the earth was flat, if any European claimed the contrary, he or she would very likely have been burned at the state, or found guilty by the Inquisition and experience horrors unimaginable by many.
That goes for astronomical knowledge as well, the church dogma proclaimed that the sun rotated around the earth despite knowledge to the contrary. The church based their claim on biblical scriptures,
Joshua, 10 v12, 13 proclaims “..Sun stand thou still upon Gibeon….And the sun stood still in the midst of heaven..” The church took this as a sign that the sun rotates around the earth, but the reality is much different, the earth spins on it’s axis around rotates around the sun. This lead to scientist such as Galileo Galilei to face persecution for stating the heliocentric theory.
So my point is, the Christians of today better not claim the earth is flat and then sun rotates around the earth, just as they better not try to discredit the fact that genes in a population of organisms change over time, that traits become dominate through natural selection, genetic drift is random, humans of billions of years of non-human ancestry, we share a common ancestor with Chimpanzees and so on. In a nutshell, they need to revise their thinking, I want people to believe evolution and not see it as some wacky pseudoscientific perspective and this will not happen if you try secularize everybody. Skip religion, go straight to science.
So judging from this reply and your others in this thread your whole point is that the US Government is only "pretending" to be Christian because the overwhelming majority of the American public is?
Politicians follow political trends, for the most part, to get elected, they hide their personal beliefs if it will get them in trouble with the public or other powerful political elements. As far as the entire government pretending to be Christian, I can’t speak for all politicians but historically speaking, politicians have done just that, take a look at Abraham Lincoln. With today’s American federal government, they most certainly aren’t making choices on their Christian thought process, not in a traditional sense that is.
I have two problems with that line of reasoning.
1.) Where is the evidence? What are you basing all these assumptions on? Assuming that the vast majority of the US Government is Christian is an entirely reasonable thing to do because it is what they claim to be. Now I'm sure you're right that is going to include people who simply say they are Christian because it is not yet socially acceptable enough to be an atheist in America, but how can you make any claims as to how many people that entails and what their true motives are?
A small tip of advice, don’t take what the politicians claim to be very seriously, I’m sure you wouldn’t find it difficult to see politicians talking out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to religion, abortion, gay marriage, etc. What is the evidence to support a claim to what their true motives are? Well, the documentation is endless, you can read their speeches, analyze their legislative history, the bills they do or don’t support and why they do or don’t support them, you can read their dairies, request interviews, you can become a political biographer etc. You will see them contradict themselves over and over, it doesn’t matter because a lot of people never call them out.
2.) More importantly, if for argument's sake we accept that all you claimed there is true, how does it really make any difference? Do I care that George W. Bush is not really a new born Christian but instead an atheist pretending to be Christian? In the end he has to follow the same course of action that he would have if he really were a Christian. So whether it's all pretence or not, in the end the US Government is still firmly govered along the lines of a Christian state. Whether the drive originates in the American people's expectations and demands for their representatives or whether it originates in the personal views of the representatives themselves really doesn't change the consequences in any way that I can see and is more of an academic matter than anything else.
Zionism and to what extent it influences the US Government's decision making process is an entirely separate topic as far as I'm concerned and really doesn't influence the aspects that we were discussing in this thread. That has more to do with foreign policy than anything else.
So to sum up the point I originally made:
Is the religious situation in America as bad as for instance some of the Islam regimes? No. Is it anywhere near as good as it could, and given its large influence and power in the world, probably should be? Not by a longshot. There are plenty of Western European countries that have already shown that it is quite possible to run a secular government unconstrained by religious agendas, bigotry and backwards thinking while at the same time giving its inhabitants the freedom to practice their religion of choice freely.
You are right, public pressure does in many cases effect the governments decision making, with regards to Christianity, it certainly has an effect on federal funding for stem cell research, but it doesn’t effect other branches of science so much. To solve this problem would be advice all religious people to revise their thinking on scientific matters on evolution. Here is the thing, there is a hate crime bill that has been introduced to Congress for years trying to give the federal government more powers to enforce hate crime laws against gays, because state law is inadequate. That doesn’t sound very Christian to me, if anything, America is governed by the laws of political correctness then Christianity. The Jewish lobby influences domestic policy as well, they have influence over state and federal legislative bodies through bribery and money, it is perfectly legal for them to give politicians money to vote a certain way.