Re: Is religion antithetical to democracy [formerly: Are Islam andDemocracy Incompatible?]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 21:34:37 -0600, neptune3 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

>And I must admit that it took me a long time to overcome the ideas
>drummed into me when I was in school that under a democracy people are
>more free than under any other political system, that under a
>democracy
>we are all free to think and say whatever we want, and that we have a
>greater responsibility as citizens of a democracy to make up our own
>minds about things independently, and so on. Actually, we still have
>some degree of individual freedom in the United States today because
>more than 200 years ago men whose temperament was far more
>aristocratic
>than democratic in the modern sense of the word were willing to go to
>war against their legitimate government in order to secure that
>freedom
>for us, and people with a truly democratic temperament, who have been
>gnawing away at that freedom ever since, haven't yet succeeded in
>suppressing it completely.

It's the bill of rights that guarentees freedoms, not the practice of
democracy.  

With out the bill of rights, democracy is two wolves and a sheep
voting on dinner.