Can someone explain to me the nature of this analogy? It’s the “in the same way and for the same reasons” that I don’t get. How would the separation of E/S be for the same reason as the separation of C/S?
It is not an analogy, but a proper specification of the issue: in both cases the issue is the separation of the use of force from the pursuit of values. At the daily practice level, there is no neat division between material values and spiritual values, and the attempt by government to impose or ban one type necessarily leads to attempts to impose or ban the other. At the deeper ideational level, capitalism is as much an ethical and social system as it is an economic one (as well as requiring rational epistemology both to derive and practice), and so necessarily touches upon the same fundamental issues as religion. Thus the two pairs are intimately bound with each other, and will interact in countless ways. For instance, consider Attila and the Witch Doctor from FTNI and the conflict between them over who controls whom and how.
In terms of theory, when both church & state and economy & state are combined, that state is on the path to totalitarian control and the imposition of specific values upon people. The state in either case will claim the authority to dictate what its members hold as the right way for people to think, to value, and to act. Both accept the false dichotomy of man bifurcated into a material side and a spiritual side. The two differ only in which side they emphasise and the concretes that result from that side. The motive is the same.
In terms of practice, both are instances of the same root premise: there is a cause higher than that of the individual and which therefore has a claim upon that individual. The state in either case will try to impose those beliefs upon individuals in the service of that claim from the higher cause, through what values and actions are prescribed or proscribed. The two differ only in the details of that claim and, again, the concretes in question. The method is the same.
Separation in “the same way” means the strict delineation of what the government is for and why, barring it from stepping outside those bounds. It is not the government’s place to make value judgements beyond what is necessary for the defence of our rights. The same one set of Constitutional rules will say NO to any attempts at imposing those improper value judgements through specifying what it is politicians’ place to consider qua politician and what laws they may be permitted to pass and administer.
Separation for “the same reason” means recognition that both pairs lead to the shutting down of the independent reasoning mind, and that both pairs lead to oppression, misery, destruction and death, because they have the same one premise at their core. Both are variants of the same one general path to the implementation of that death-premise, and so they are to be prevented or eliminated by enforcing the separation.
JJM