A letter to the editor,
Within his first encyclical since being elevated to the Chair of Peter, Pope Benedict XVI uses some words that echo the United States Constitution’s 1st and 14th Amendment guarantee of freedom from State sponsored religion. In this moving epistle on the faithful leading lives within God’s gift of love, Deus Caritas Est, the supreme pontiff writes, “The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between followers of different religions.”
Some religious zealots are currently bent on pressuring local public school boards into requiring teachers to insert into their lesson plans a pet certitude of these true believers, intelligent-design creationism. This attempt to use government to promote their religious ideology should be troubling to all people who prize freedom of conscience.
State-sponsored proselytization is a greater threat to our religious freedom than it is a mistaken sally into the domain of science. Science has and will continue to weather all sorts of misdirected and dead-ended efforts, however our freedom of conscience may not fare so well. The override of this liberty would mark the entry of our nation into an intolerant period in which all sorts of intellectual and spiritual pursuits were subject to suppression.
Sam Osborne (319) 643-5388
My affiliation with the subjectof my letter? I am free and would like to stay that way.
