Separation of church and state in the EU

“There is a movement in the European Union that wants total religious neutrality and can’t accept our Christian traditions,” said Archbishop Zvolensky, [the Roman Catholic archbishop of the Slovak capital] bemoaning what he sees as a rising tide of militant secularism at a time when Europe is struggling to forge a common identity. 

There go those "militant" secularists again. What an irritant they must be, huh? So what made Zvolensky so upset?

[T]he National Bank of Slovakia announced that the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, had ordered it to remove halos and crosses from special commemorative euro coins due to be minted this summer. The coins, designed by a local artist, were intended to celebrate the 1,150th anniversary of Christianity’s arrival in Slovak lands...

Ah, I see. The nasty old EU won't let Slovakia plaster government-issued coins with halos and crosses, thus blocking the god-given right of Christians to place their religious symbols wherever the hell they please. Those darned militant secularists! They're always ruining everything.   

Yup, it's the same old story. Christians want to paint the world with crosses and gods and mentions of heaven and grace and sin. But those nasty secularists keep stopping them! To deluded Christians, this is "religious persecution". Horrors!

Christians will never understand that they can't force the world to worship their god. They see their pushing of religious iconography into the public sphere as a god-given right. It's not. It's religious piggery.

Feel free to worship your stupid, nonexistent god, but leave the rest of us alone. That shouldn't be so hard to understand. But to religiously damaged minds, apparently it is.

“I need to voice a serious and disturbing suspicion: that the E.U. is under the control of Satan or Satanism,” said Rafael Rafaj of the Slovak National Party, a far-right nationalist party. 

The view that the European Union serves Satan has become a popular theme for some extreme Christian fundamentalists, who cite the Bible’s Book of Revelation as proof that dissolving national boundaries signals an approaching apocalypse. 

Sigh.

Indeed, popey guy. Indeed.

AP headline:

Vatican Praises EU Decision on Crucifixes in Classrooms

Indeed! So let's see what made the popey guy smile. The Vatican is happy that the EU decided (insanely) to allow crucifixes to be displayed on the walls of public school classrooms in Italy. So much for the separation of church and state. Popey guy likey.

And no surprise. If the EU had decided it was fine and dandy to display Coca-Cola signs in Italian public school classrooms, I'll bet Coca-Cola's chairman would be pretty happy, too. At no cost to them, their image could now be burned into the minds of all public school students in Italy. You can't get better branding than that.

And so the evil popey guy is pleased. As the CEO of the sleazy Roman Catholic church, he damn well should be.

The EU has made a stupid decision with wide ramifications. Like blasphemy laws, this sort of thinking belongs in the Dark Ages. It is the opposite of democracy. Today the popey guy is laughing in some dark and airless corner of his palace. He is one happy popey guy. And that's a very sad thing.