I agree that "worship" should be primarily a private rather than public affair but I'm not sure that ALL references to God, Jesus, religion, spirituality etc. should be removed from public view, especially in art or music. That sounds like a dangerous form of censorship to me.
Absolutely bang on, agonus.
I know what you mean Serenity, but it's a tough call for public servants to make on what's appropriate and what isn't. It really can't be denied that America was founded on theistic (albeit not explicitly Judeo-Christian) principles
Whoa now, agonus. You may be mistaken there. What has changed in over 200 years is the perception of the Americans running your country, not the mindsets of the people who founded America and ran it initially. The USA was founded on secular principles. That is why it is so successful as a free country and the only world superpower (for now). Consider this conversation about religion in the armed forces as a subset of the larger conversation about the founding of America.
James Madison, the author of the First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting any law respecting an establishment of religion, was also an author of Article VI, which states unambiguously that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust." His later Detached Memoranda make it very plain that he opposed the government appointment of chaplains in the first place, either in the armed forces or at the opening ceremonies of Congress. "The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles." As to clerical presence in the armed forces, Madison wrote, "The object of this establishment is seducing; the motive to it is laudable. But is it not safer to adhere to a right principle, and trust to its consequences, than confide in the reasoning however specious in favor of a wrong one ? Look thro' the armies and navies of the world, and say whether in the appointment of their ministers of religion, the spiritual interest of the flocks or the temporal interest of the Shepherd be most in view?" Anyone citing Madison today would very likely be thought either subversive or insane, and yet without him and Thomas Jefferson, coauthors of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, the United States would have gone on as it was—with Jews prohibited from holding office in some states, Catholics in others, and Protestants in Maryland: the latter a state where "profane words concerning the Holy Trinity" were punishable by torture, branding, and, at the third offense, "death without benefit of clergy." Georgia might have persisted in maintaining that its official state faith was "Protestantism"—whichever one of Luther's many hybrids that might have turned out to be. from God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens,