Thursday, December 20, 2007

A Great Speech on Freedom and Religion

I never thought I would want to quote the President of the University of Utah. But, I believe he is a BYU grad and he was speaking at BYU-Idaho, so it is OK. The link is here. This is a very good way to make the point Mitt Romney was trying to make in College Station in his Faith in America speech when he said: "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom."
Protecting one’s freedom of religion necessarily and inescapably presupposes the propriety of allegiance to something higher than that government. Any government that respects freedom of religion must necessarily wrestle with, and accept, its own limitations. If you believe that a government must provide freedom of religion, then you must also believe – and that government must also believe – that there are appropriate limits to government power, that there are parts of our lives into which a government cannot intrude.
There is also a warning for when a country starts limiting religious freedom:
If you see a government trying to suppress and control freedom of religion, then you know trouble is on the way. It is like the canary in the coal mine. It is the first signal that a government is beginning to abuse all the human rights or soon will.

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