How can I be sure

[SeattleUte]

Originally Posted by Archaea

Wow. Now anytime we cite an example of a non-religious person committing a heinous crime, he's really like a religious person. That's a wonderful leap of faith on your part.

Just admit you're out to lunch on this one, and cut your losses or you'll come out looking like Rocky on grapevine.

Religious people are no more likely to undo the Constitution than nonreligious people are. Your question was intended to be inflammatory and absurd. If you believe there's any truth to it, then you must on meds or something, or in need of an early morning scotch, friend.

I don't think I posed a realistic concern, but not for the reasons you state. It's not fair to compare religion restrained and informed by our enlightened civic society to religion not so affected. Religion is relatively harmless in this day and age in America. But even during Shakespeare's time Protestants were still hunting down Catholics and killing them and executing people who professed atheism. Mormonism has the same gene for dogmatic excess as any other religion. Dogmatic excess represented by fascism and communism is still dogmatic excess. Can you distinguish between radical Islam and facscism? History demonstrates that this is how religion mutates when you remove it from the enlightening and restraining effects of democratic institutions and attendant societal values. Again, such values and insitututions are the freakish exception in world history.

It may well be that Romney is less inclined than George Bush to disregard and disrespect basic liberties. But if so, it is because of his exposure to American democratic insitututions and values embodied in the Constitution including the Bill of Rights, rather than his particular religious uprbringing per se.