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Comment by slyrus | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough. One's belief in creation myths, higher powers/beings, afterlives, etc... is not, per se, activism, but once you start gathering people on a regular basis to bring about societal/behavioral change (ya know, commandments, morals, laws based on religious ideas/notions/opinions, etc...), much less proselytizing, then, yeah, it's pretty much the definition (or at least the poster child) of activism.

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Lovely tangent; it seems you don't have any ideas about how this could be accomplished in a way that is consistent with the First Amendment (which was the entirety of my original comment)?

What are you talking about? The whole article implies that they're gonna decouple activism from teaching. Just apply the same playbook to religion? Oh what's that? It can't be done? Ah, I see. Maybe that was the meta-point behind my whole rant after all. You wanna have religious schools? Fine. You want (non-religous) activist schools? I guess that's fine too. But the notion that we're gonna get rid of "activism" and not touch religion in teaching/education/academia strikes me as absurd.

Slap some religious labels to the activism. Now the First Amendment is saved

You're absolutely right that people can claim shelter under the First Amendment by calling their beliefs a religion. Sometimes the courts will go along with their claims, other times they won't. But that doesn't change what @slyrus is complaining about, which is that people with sincerely held religious beliefs are allowed to run educational institutions.

No, once again you've misunderstood or mischaracterized what I'm getting it. Folks can hold their beliefs with whatever sincerity they choose, but when they mix those beliefs with teaching, it becomes a pernicious form of activism. So if people are gonna try to decouple activism from teaching, they better include religious activities, doctrines, and proselytizing in said activism. That's all. Or, to put it another way, if you're gonna allow religious activities to get mixed up with teaching, be prepared for other forms of activism to be mixed in as well. To put activism grounded in supernatural beliefs/prophets/sacred texts on privileged ground above other forms of activism makes little sense to me.

> No, once again you've misunderstood or mischaracterized what I'm getting it.

Actually, I'm replying to someone else, not you.

> To put activism grounded in supernatural beliefs/prophets/sacred texts on privileged ground above other forms of activism makes little sense to me.

I can see that! But the Founders felt differently, and they're the ones who wrote the Bill of Rights that, for the most part, still reigns supreme. Unless you've got a workaround that I'm not thinking of (IAAL, FWIW), there's not much point dwelling on the question of whether religion is a type of activism. As I said above: even if it is, it's constitutionally protected.

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