Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.
There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.
What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it's not worth talking about.
A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.
I believe that religion should be totally separated from the state. That's not the way it is today, not even in Sweden.
At the end of the 30 Years War then, Europe broadly decided to separate the sacred from the secular in its political culture. I know that is an oversimplification, but it is instructive, and it led to a growth in religious tolerance that has characterized the best of Western life since.
No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state.
It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.
They want to wipe - in fact, the Democrat Party in their own platform last year wiped even - any reference to God completely from their platform.
Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.
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