From The American Atheist Volume 35 No. 4
http://www.AmericanAtheist.org/

Frank R. Zindler

• Fearing that “imam and preacher schools” are breeding grounds for activists seeking to establish an Islamic despotism, Turkey’s Parliament has approved a measure reducing attendance in the country’s religious schools. The law increases from five to eight years the time students must spend in secular schools. 

• Perhaps as many as 300 Algerians have been massacred (in a single incident) by the Armed Islamic Group, a militant organization spawned in 1992 after the army cancelled an election that the now-banned Islamic Salvation Front appeared certain to win. 

What does this all mean for America? What does it tell us about democracy as a viable and sustainable form of government? 

The suspension of elections (thereby abrogating democracy) by the Algerian government reminds me of the innocent-sounding explanation given by an American marine during the Vietnam War: “In order to save the village, we had to destroy it.” In order to save democracy, it had to be abolished. It is an ironic aspect of true democracy that it gives freedom to people who seek to destroy freedom. All democracies are potiential suicides. Ours is no exception. 

It should not be supposed that Islam is the only enemy of the free society. Christianity, wherever it has come to power, has always been the enemy of liberty, and the number of people killed for Christ dwarfs the numbers killed in the Nazi Holocaust. (It must not be forgotten that Hitler was a Catholic, supported by both Protestant and Catholic clergy who cited Romas 13 as proof that their god wanted Adolf to be the boss.) We owe our own liberty to men of the Enlightenment, men who had outgrown Christianity and give it no place in the constitution they created. Nor did they create special privileges for religion when they wrote the Bill of Rights. Religion was given no preeminence over nonreligion. Knowing full-well the self-destructive capabilities of democracies, the Founding Fathers placed basic freedoms in the constitution -- amendable only by three-fourths vote of the states -- where they could be safe from the transitory waves of mob-rule that ever unsettled our society. 

Despite the precautions taken by the Founding Fathers, freedom is not safe in our society. Tirelessly, religious zealots wage their jihad against the Constitution itself. In this issue, American Atheists President Ellen Johnson tells of her efforts to combat Christian attempts to amend the Constitution to create special privileges for religion. Such an amendment would, of course, be but the nose of the camel in the tent. Were it adopted, it would in time be followed by amendments that further establish a privileged position for religion and further limit or abrogate altogether the freedom from religion. 

Will America ever come to the point that it, like Algeria or Turkey, will have to limit the powers of religion? Not likely. But what can be done to prevent America from coming to a situation such as Algeria, where outright shooting war against religion is necessary? Thomas Jefferson, who more than any other single person is responsible for the freedoms we cherish, realized that liberty can survive only if the populace be sufficiently educated and if information can flow freely. We too believe that, and so it is that American Atheists is chartered as an educational organization. So it is that we publish books intended to provide antidotes to the poisons of religion. So it is that we disseminate information in the form of this magazine and its sister publication, the American Atheist Newsletter. To paraphrase the Gospel of John, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall keep you free.”