Saturday, March 08, 2008

Americans United’s Lynn Joins UVA Debate On Religion And Government

Two activists and a pastor came together on the evening of March 6th at a debate in Richmond, Va. The event was hosted by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs.

AUs Lauren Smith tells us:

“One of those well-known activists was Americans United Executive Director, the Rev. Barry Lynn. He was joined by biblical scholar Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University, arguing for a complete separation of religion and government.

The question was a little too black-and-white, so Lynn made it clear from the outset that government sans religion does not mean government sans values. Values mean many things to many people and are often derived from religious belief; that, he said, is where religion’s influence on secular governance must end.”

Here is the link to the whole article at AU: Enlightening Exchange: AU’s Lynn Joins UVA Debate On Religion And Government

Here is the link to the video of the debate at Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia.

And the transcript link is at the end of Smith’s article at AU.

Also, I found these YouTube videos “Discussing Faith in Public Life - Part 1 of 5″. Rev. Barry Lynn is one of the members of the panel.

Parts 2-5 can be found at YouTube and discussion pretty much contains talk about early campaign which is now history.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ack! I'm sorry, I just couldn't watch more than the first minute!

Stardust said...

Hi greg, it is a bit hard to listen to the two spokesmen on the side of the evangelicals. It's always evangelicals who we have to debate this crap with. Lucky we have moderate Christians on our side who understand the separation of church and state thing.

Tommykey said...

And what these clowns can't seem to understand is that it is precisely because of church and state separation that religion fluorishes in the United States compared to other industrialized nations. It allows for the creation of a religious marketplace in which churches have to compete with each other.