"You say the current rules aren't difficult, and I'm sure that's true, but so what? I don't see the point that you're making there. The rules under my dream would be non-existent."
I understand. My point was that in the real world it doesn't work. The moment you let government tax churches, it would start taxing them unequally. And it would only get worse from there. If there was ever a genuine "slippery slope" in the world, this is it. And man, is it slippery.
I don't think anybody's saying our current system is perfect. But the alternative just isn't any better. There's WAY too much potential for disaster. I wouldn't even say potential, honestly. I'd say inevitability.
I'm aware that lots of people love it. Some of them are friends and co-workers. I'm just not one of those people. I consider it a command-line necessary evil.
I'm really not trying to say it's overall bad. I just prefer to do things differently.
Vim has loads of states. They just aren't official "modes".
You are in insert mode, nothing pressed. That's a state. You press shift-y. "Y" appears in the text.
You are in command mode. That's a state. You press "y". It does something completely different.
But wait... you're also now in a different "state"! If you press "y" again, it will do yet a third thing: copy a line of text. But if you hadn't pressed the first "y", it wouldn't do that. So pressing "y" the first time puts it in a special "state".
Vim has a boatload of special states. And they are anything but obvious or visible. That's bad.
"First, churches are not their followers... the followers do pay taxes."
Not on money they give to their church. So it's really 2 tax exemptions, the one for the individual deducting money given to the church and one for income to the church not being taxed.
No, it's not 2 exemptions, it's just one. You are a member of the church... for practical purposes the money isn't changing hands. You put the money in the church pool, and the church does what you consider to be good works with that money (including the payment of the pastor or priest or whatever... that's overhead). In that respect a church is not different from any other non-profit club to which you belong.
The theory is that you are doing good community works with your donated money. But regardless, you can't get around the Constitutional prohibition... nor should you. A law is a law is a law, even if it's a tax law. And the Constitution forbids any such with respect to religion.
Even the Westboro Baptist Church believes it's doing community service. I don't happen to think so, but my opinion doesn't count. You can't shut them down without also shutting down the Catholics. And once you start down that road, of deciding which religions or churches are "worthy" and which are not, you have run afoul of just exactly what the founders were warning about.
"The ideal, as intended by the Founders, is that a government body does not perform a religious ritual of any kind at its meeting."
I have read uncountable historical documents that say otherwise.
Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying it's right or wrong. But historically, that is just plain untrue. They held prayers before some of THEIR OWN meetings... though not everybody participated.
"Yes, but you missed the point by exactly 180 degrees there."
No, I did not miss the point. See my second comment to the person to whom I replied originally for a better explanation.
As soon as the government started taxing religion, it would start to do so unequally. And that just leads to worse. It is a very slippery slope, and our founders understood that.
"I think you may have misunderstood the comment. What we have now is lack of separation - the state, usually the courts, decides what is and is not a religion... "
Huh? Where did you get this idea? No, they don't. The Supreme Court has very clearly ruled that the government does not have Constitutional authority to decide what constitutes a religion and what does not. Essentially, if someone believes it, it's a religion. Because the simple fact is that nobody can prove otherwise. Trying to rule any other way would be de facto supporting some religions over others, which the Constitution expressly forbids.
"... or a religious establishment and consequently how it will be taxed."
See, that's where it is. You are conflating two very different issues. You are referring to the government's definition of what a church is. That is a different matter. In order to be tax-exempt under the law, a church has to have a congregation and meet regularly, among other things. I actually looked into this a few years ago, because I was considering starting up a "Sunday Drinks and TV" church in my community. (Yes, really.)
But make no mistake: the government isn't deciding whether it's a valid religion or not. It's judging whether you are actually running a real church, or just trying to evade taxes. That's a completely different thing. And actually the rules are pretty reasonable, because of that whole religion thing. The government has to be very careful what it does in that regard.
As I say, I looked into the requirements. Essentially you have to prove you have a congregation and that you meet regularly, fill out the government paperwork for tax exemption, and keep proper books regarding expenses and donations. There are a few other minor things, but not many.
I don't doubt that some people abuse the system, but jeez, look at some of the giant corporations that don't even pay taxes. Let's have some perspective here.
But as for your dream of getting Westboro Baptist Church declared "not a religion", that will never happen. You MIGHT be able to prove they aren't a real church, or that they're cheating on taxes, but I doubt you could do the former (because the rules aren't harsh at all), and the latter is difficult.
"You misunderstand me: I don't want the Separation of Church and State to be erased. I sure as hell don't want 'state mandated religion' or 'state endorsed religion' or any such thing."
No, I didn't misunderstand you. You misunderstood me. By promoting the taxation of religion you are in fact promoting these things. Because this is one of those times that a slippery slope argument is real.
As soon as you allow taxation -- the very DAY it was allowed -- you would start having discriminatory taxation. And it would continue to get worse. (What, you actually thought the IRS was honest? We have some very recent history proving otherwise.)
Government would start supporting (or the opposite: taxing) some religions more than others. And it would start controlling what was taxable: this kind of service, or that kind of service? How much should people tithe? Should tithing be in a separate category? Hey, wait a minute... doesn't that religion or that church promote terrorism?
And the other way around: soon, you'd have churches lobbying Congress. Why not? They're taxpayers like everybody else, yes? Why shouldn't they have a say in how their tax money is spent by Congress. Pretty soon, you'd see the richer churches getting perks that the other churches don't enjoy... and on and on it goes. It would never end.
Our Founders understood this. Don't mess with it. You'd end up hoist by your own petard.
"I never know if you are lying or just confused. But what you say is not correct. Neither that there is any dispute, nor that you've ever pointed me to any page that says otherwise.
Confused or lying? Lying or confused? All in a single post."
Okay. On the outrageously infinitesimal probability that you have argued with me so frequently but missed the hundreds of links I have posted, here are just a few of them. First, about the physics. (If you are unfamiliar with how this relates to AGW, I suggest you look up some of the discussions of the physics of CO2-based AGW according to climate scientists, including the Stefan-Boltzmann law.)
Then, let's see... there are so many to choose from. I have 120 bookmarks of these from just the last couple of years... most of which I've linked to here. And more written down from years prior. Hey, here's one. About that "97% consensus". (Note here: this information did not come from Christopher Monckton, but he did write about it. The same points are available in more painstaking detail elsewhere. I linked to this same information from a different source a few days ago. The point being: don't try shooting the messenger. I'll just laugh at you. If you can refute the message, go ahead.)
Because, you see, according to an actual survey of AMS members, it turns out that their opinion of AGW is actually based more on their "perception of consensus" (rather than science) and their "political ideology" (rather than science). Wow. I would never would have guessed that latter. Just kidding. I most certainly would have. But isn't that what you accused ME of? What a coincidence!
Wait... this wouldn't be complete (it isn't anyway, not by a long shot) without just a hint of the boatload of evidence that Steve Goddard has been compiling about dishonest temperature information being fed to us by our erstwhile "authorities" on the matter.
"For that, I sincerely thank Microsoft for so kindly pointed out that security flaw."
"Kindly"? Are you serious? There was nothing "kind" about it. It's anti-Android PR for Microsoft. Why the hell do you think Microsoft was involved with looking into it in the first place? The goodness of their hearts? Puh-leeeeeze.
"The CA model for X.509 certificates has been shown to be utterly broken for protection against intellengence agencies, they clearly have both access to some of the private keys of "trusted" CAs as well as the leverage to have "trusted" CAs issue arbitrary certificates in their home jurisdiction. There is no way in which this would get better by switching to X.509 compared to PGP."
Exactly. Ultimately the problem -- as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread -- is not so much the encryption, but people. Sooner or later it comes down to trusting somebody. A person. And they have repeatedly shown to not be trustworthy.
If there is a way to get people out of the equation altogether, that would be a huge boon.
(By the way: if she thought it was important, Erinn could have written a script to periodically access the files in question and verify their contents with a simple hash, then alert her if the hash value changed. She didn't.)
"If you can prove that a CA is signing bogus certificates for intelligence agencies please do so - nobody had been able to show this so far and it would move the debate forward at a critical time."
Why would you have to show this? They HAVE been shown to sign bogus certificates for their own profit. So we have no reason -- none, zero -- to think they would not do it for other reasons too.
"The chain of trust is broken. This because today a certificate is only authorized by a single source, not by several. In addition to this the model has the flaw that it does not easily allow a point to point scenario where only two parties are involved."
The "web of trust" has always been broken, because it was designed broken. You have no choice but to trust Certificate Authorities, for example, but CAs have proven themselves over and over and over again to not be trustworthy. Sometimes in rather blatant ways.
Some CAs were caught issuing multiple certs to the same domain. Even worse, some were caught selling the SAME cert to multiple domains. And so on.
The problem is the same as it always has been, everywhere: people.
"If it is authorized by congress then the military can legally do what it wants to civilians."
No. We have this thing called the Constitution. Congress does not have lawful authority to violate it.
Congress actually passed a lot of unconstitutional laws after 9/11. We are only now getting around to testing some of them in court... and they have been falling down, one by one. Slowly, but falling.
The Congress of the United States does not have legitimate power to do anything it wants.
"The less obvious violation is what they are using the data for... which is to help them prevent a terrorist act. Something they should not be involved in."
What's even less obvious is that they are probably using it for other things, too. When have they not, given the chance?
It's like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau supplying information to the IRS. They weren't supposed to do that. But they did.
I was wondering about that myself. What about these drones that the military has "loaned" to local law enforcement at times, or when they hangar and fly local police drones from a military base? I've read about those happening at least several times. And I sure as hell was under the impression that it was illegal.
For that matter so, I think, is the inverse situation: how the hell did we end up with National Guard personnel going overseas? They are State employees, not Federal troops.
"Maybe they just wanted a database that was more accurate than the riffraff online investigation sites offer, it is public record anyway."
No, it isn't. Certainly not all of it, anyway.
In my state, even police are required to log a reason for looking up a license plate. Most data about the public is not a matter of public record.
Having said that: some things are, of course. The fact that someone has been arrested is temporarily public record, so that you can see whether your boyfriend needs to get bailed out again when he doesn't show up for a day. And so on. And conviction records are public. But not all arrest records remain public because not everyone who is arrested is convicted... it's a great way to discriminate against innocent people.
I think -- but I am not sure -- that convictions for traffic violations are also public. Which includes guilty pleas.
Here's the main reason I don't use Vim (or Emacs, for that matter): it's a "stateful" editor.
Insert mode? Command mode? Etc. etc.
I can do without.
Now, arguably, if all you have to work with is command line, that's one way to make it work, and work well. But most of the time I'd rather make use of modern interfaces.
"In the Bible, Christ preaches that his followers should pay their taxes. You know 'Render unto Rome what is Rome's...". I believe that fundamentalist christian churches should volutarily be paying taxes, even if the law does not require it. "
First, churches are not their followers... the followers do pay taxes. And second, taxing churches would create the kind of government-church relationship that we have chosen to shun here in the United States, for good historical reasons.
No, no, no... billions and billions of times. (Yes, I know: Sagan never actually said that.)
Here's the problem with that, and it's such a HUGE amount of history that it shouldn't even need to be mentioned. But it seems that it does, so here goes:
History says very clearly that once you allow government to get involved with religion, or religion with government, pretty soon you have government-mandated religion, or religion-run government. And both of those are Very Bad. Religions have never -- ever, ever -- been good heads of government. And it's pretty obvious why government-mandated religion is just as bad.
That is why we have effective separation of Church and State in the US. But many people misunderstand it.
Contrary to what many people seem to think, the reason for that separation is not to "keep religion out" of everything. At all. It is intended to prevent any kind of official government sponsorhip of a particular religion. Our Founders were intimately familiar with religious persecution, and it was their intent to prevent it. But it was not their intent to suppress religion.
Example: a nearby city government had prayer before every meeting. The prayers were generally given by a Catholic priest, probably just because there was a big Catholic church just down the street. Some people objected, and it went all the way up to the State Supreme Court. This is what the court said (paraphrase):
"There is no law or clause in the Constitution preventing you from having prayer. However, you ARE prohibited from supporting any PARTICULAR religion. Offering Catholic prayer before every meeting is de facto government sponsorship of a particular religion."
The city's answer: now, any religion that wants to participate can get put on their list. They either rotate through the list or draw them at random... I'm not sure which. But the upshot is that they still have prayer before every meeting, but it isn't necessarily Catholic or even Christian. I remember once they had prayers from the local Baha'i faith.
Now, nobody has any reason to object and there are no problems. Even the atheists don't seem to have a problem with it.
"Which versions of Firefox had upside tabs? I must have skipped more versions of Firefox than I thought, because I remember when they were under the address bar, but never upside down."
Slashdot Mirror
"You say the current rules aren't difficult, and I'm sure that's true, but so what? I don't see the point that you're making there. The rules under my dream would be non-existent."
I understand. My point was that in the real world it doesn't work. The moment you let government tax churches, it would start taxing them unequally. And it would only get worse from there. If there was ever a genuine "slippery slope" in the world, this is it. And man, is it slippery.
I don't think anybody's saying our current system is perfect. But the alternative just isn't any better. There's WAY too much potential for disaster. I wouldn't even say potential, honestly. I'd say inevitability.
"What do you think of IE vulnerabilities found by Googlers ?"
I wasn't saying Microsoft is any worse. Just that they weren't doing it for the sake of charity.
I'm aware that lots of people love it. Some of them are friends and co-workers. I'm just not one of those people. I consider it a command-line necessary evil.
I'm really not trying to say it's overall bad. I just prefer to do things differently.
"etc? vim only has 2 modes."
Vim has loads of states. They just aren't official "modes".
You are in insert mode, nothing pressed. That's a state. You press shift-y. "Y" appears in the text.
You are in command mode. That's a state. You press "y". It does something completely different.
But wait... you're also now in a different "state"! If you press "y" again, it will do yet a third thing: copy a line of text. But if you hadn't pressed the first "y", it wouldn't do that. So pressing "y" the first time puts it in a special "state".
Vim has a boatload of special states. And they are anything but obvious or visible. That's bad.
"First, churches are not their followers... the followers do pay taxes."
Not on money they give to their church. So it's really 2 tax exemptions, the one for the individual deducting money given to the church and one for income to the church not being taxed.
No, it's not 2 exemptions, it's just one. You are a member of the church... for practical purposes the money isn't changing hands. You put the money in the church pool, and the church does what you consider to be good works with that money (including the payment of the pastor or priest or whatever... that's overhead). In that respect a church is not different from any other non-profit club to which you belong.
The theory is that you are doing good community works with your donated money. But regardless, you can't get around the Constitutional prohibition... nor should you. A law is a law is a law, even if it's a tax law. And the Constitution forbids any such with respect to religion.
Even the Westboro Baptist Church believes it's doing community service. I don't happen to think so, but my opinion doesn't count. You can't shut them down without also shutting down the Catholics. And once you start down that road, of deciding which religions or churches are "worthy" and which are not, you have run afoul of just exactly what the founders were warning about.
"The ideal, as intended by the Founders, is that a government body does not perform a religious ritual of any kind at its meeting."
I have read uncountable historical documents that say otherwise.
Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying it's right or wrong. But historically, that is just plain untrue. They held prayers before some of THEIR OWN meetings... though not everybody participated.
"Yes, but you missed the point by exactly 180 degrees there."
No, I did not miss the point. See my second comment to the person to whom I replied originally for a better explanation.
As soon as the government started taxing religion, it would start to do so unequally. And that just leads to worse. It is a very slippery slope, and our founders understood that.
"I think you may have misunderstood the comment. What we have now is lack of separation - the state, usually the courts, decides what is and is not a religion ... "
Huh? Where did you get this idea? No, they don't. The Supreme Court has very clearly ruled that the government does not have Constitutional authority to decide what constitutes a religion and what does not. Essentially, if someone believes it, it's a religion. Because the simple fact is that nobody can prove otherwise. Trying to rule any other way would be de facto supporting some religions over others, which the Constitution expressly forbids.
"... or a religious establishment and consequently how it will be taxed."
See, that's where it is. You are conflating two very different issues. You are referring to the government's definition of what a church is. That is a different matter. In order to be tax-exempt under the law, a church has to have a congregation and meet regularly, among other things. I actually looked into this a few years ago, because I was considering starting up a "Sunday Drinks and TV" church in my community. (Yes, really.)
But make no mistake: the government isn't deciding whether it's a valid religion or not. It's judging whether you are actually running a real church, or just trying to evade taxes. That's a completely different thing. And actually the rules are pretty reasonable, because of that whole religion thing. The government has to be very careful what it does in that regard.
As I say, I looked into the requirements. Essentially you have to prove you have a congregation and that you meet regularly, fill out the government paperwork for tax exemption, and keep proper books regarding expenses and donations. There are a few other minor things, but not many.
I don't doubt that some people abuse the system, but jeez, look at some of the giant corporations that don't even pay taxes. Let's have some perspective here.
But as for your dream of getting Westboro Baptist Church declared "not a religion", that will never happen. You MIGHT be able to prove they aren't a real church, or that they're cheating on taxes, but I doubt you could do the former (because the rules aren't harsh at all), and the latter is difficult.
Messed up quote tags. Apologies for that.
"You misunderstand me: I don't want the Separation of Church and State to be erased. I sure as hell don't want 'state mandated religion' or 'state endorsed religion' or any such thing."
No, I didn't misunderstand you. You misunderstood me. By promoting the taxation of religion you are in fact promoting these things. Because this is one of those times that a slippery slope argument is real.
As soon as you allow taxation -- the very DAY it was allowed -- you would start having discriminatory taxation. And it would continue to get worse. (What, you actually thought the IRS was honest? We have some very recent history proving otherwise.)
Government would start supporting (or the opposite: taxing) some religions more than others. And it would start controlling what was taxable: this kind of service, or that kind of service? How much should people tithe? Should tithing be in a separate category? Hey, wait a minute... doesn't that religion or that church promote terrorism?
And the other way around: soon, you'd have churches lobbying Congress. Why not? They're taxpayers like everybody else, yes? Why shouldn't they have a say in how their tax money is spent by Congress. Pretty soon, you'd see the richer churches getting perks that the other churches don't enjoy... and on and on it goes. It would never end.
Our Founders understood this. Don't mess with it. You'd end up hoist by your own petard.
"I never know if you are lying or just confused. But what you say is not correct. Neither that there is any dispute, nor that you've ever pointed me to any page that says otherwise.
Confused or lying? Lying or confused? All in a single post."
Okay. On the outrageously infinitesimal probability that you have argued with me so frequently but missed the hundreds of links I have posted, here are just a few of them. First, about the physics. (If you are unfamiliar with how this relates to AGW, I suggest you look up some of the discussions of the physics of CO2-based AGW according to climate scientists, including the Stefan-Boltzmann law.)
No, Virginia, Cooler Objects Cannot Make Warmer Objects Warmer Still.
Then, let's see... there are so many to choose from. I have 120 bookmarks of these from just the last couple of years... most of which I've linked to here. And more written down from years prior. Hey, here's one. About that "97% consensus". (Note here: this information did not come from Christopher Monckton, but he did write about it. The same points are available in more painstaking detail elsewhere. I linked to this same information from a different source a few days ago. The point being: don't try shooting the messenger. I'll just laugh at you. If you can refute the message, go ahead.)
"That's a 0.3% consensus, not 97%"
Because, you see, according to an actual survey of AMS members, it turns out that their opinion of AGW is actually based more on their "perception of consensus" (rather than science) and their "political ideology" (rather than science). Wow. I would never would have guessed that latter. Just kidding. I most certainly would have. But isn't that what you accused ME of? What a coincidence!
If you don't like reading about it on WUWT, here is a link so you can download the paper directly from the American Meteorological Society's own website.
How about some information regarding the actual CO2-based-warming climate models?
Hmm. How about: how IPCC has deliberately mislead the public.
And more of that: "IPCC Scientists Knew Data and Science Inadequacies Contradicted..."
Yet another reason bogus claims about expensive storms have been bogus...
How 114 out of 117 climate models studied exaggerated warming by a mean of over 100% (pdf). That one is from Nature.
No dispute? Hahahaha.
Wait... this wouldn't be complete (it isn't anyway, not by a long shot) without just a hint of the boatload of evidence that Steve Goddard has been compiling about dishonest temperature information being fed to us by our erstwhile "authorities" on the matter.
Well, hell. I could do this all day. So here's a list of more references you can read for yourself, all peer-reviewed. I'm not going to count them.
"For that, I sincerely thank Microsoft for so kindly pointed out that security flaw."
"Kindly"? Are you serious? There was nothing "kind" about it. It's anti-Android PR for Microsoft. Why the hell do you think Microsoft was involved with looking into it in the first place? The goodness of their hearts? Puh-leeeeeze.
"The CA model for X.509 certificates has been shown to be utterly broken for protection against intellengence agencies, they clearly have both access to some of the private keys of "trusted" CAs as well as the leverage to have "trusted" CAs issue arbitrary certificates in their home jurisdiction. There is no way in which this would get better by switching to X.509 compared to PGP."
Exactly. Ultimately the problem -- as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread -- is not so much the encryption, but people. Sooner or later it comes down to trusting somebody. A person. And they have repeatedly shown to not be trustworthy.
If there is a way to get people out of the equation altogether, that would be a huge boon.
(By the way: if she thought it was important, Erinn could have written a script to periodically access the files in question and verify their contents with a simple hash, then alert her if the hash value changed. She didn't.)
"If you can prove that a CA is signing bogus certificates for intelligence agencies please do so - nobody had been able to show this so far and it would move the debate forward at a critical time."
Why would you have to show this? They HAVE been shown to sign bogus certificates for their own profit. So we have no reason -- none, zero -- to think they would not do it for other reasons too.
"The chain of trust is broken. This because today a certificate is only authorized by a single source, not by several. In addition to this the model has the flaw that it does not easily allow a point to point scenario where only two parties are involved."
The "web of trust" has always been broken, because it was designed broken. You have no choice but to trust Certificate Authorities, for example, but CAs have proven themselves over and over and over again to not be trustworthy. Sometimes in rather blatant ways.
Some CAs were caught issuing multiple certs to the same domain. Even worse, some were caught selling the SAME cert to multiple domains. And so on.
The problem is the same as it always has been, everywhere: people.
"If it is authorized by congress then the military can legally do what it wants to civilians."
No. We have this thing called the Constitution. Congress does not have lawful authority to violate it.
Congress actually passed a lot of unconstitutional laws after 9/11. We are only now getting around to testing some of them in court... and they have been falling down, one by one. Slowly, but falling.
The Congress of the United States does not have legitimate power to do anything it wants.
"The less obvious violation is what they are using the data for... which is to help them prevent a terrorist act. Something they should not be involved in."
What's even less obvious is that they are probably using it for other things, too. When have they not, given the chance?
It's like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau supplying information to the IRS. They weren't supposed to do that. But they did.
I meant to add: in my opinion, it has all been a deliberate attempt by the Bush and Obama administrations to muddle up the Separation of Powers.
"Relevant "
I was wondering about that myself. What about these drones that the military has "loaned" to local law enforcement at times, or when they hangar and fly local police drones from a military base? I've read about those happening at least several times. And I sure as hell was under the impression that it was illegal.
For that matter so, I think, is the inverse situation: how the hell did we end up with National Guard personnel going overseas? They are State employees, not Federal troops.
"Maybe they just wanted a database that was more accurate than the riffraff online investigation sites offer, it is public record anyway."
No, it isn't. Certainly not all of it, anyway.
In my state, even police are required to log a reason for looking up a license plate. Most data about the public is not a matter of public record.
Having said that: some things are, of course. The fact that someone has been arrested is temporarily public record, so that you can see whether your boyfriend needs to get bailed out again when he doesn't show up for a day. And so on. And conviction records are public. But not all arrest records remain public because not everyone who is arrested is convicted... it's a great way to discriminate against innocent people.
I think -- but I am not sure -- that convictions for traffic violations are also public. Which includes guilty pleas.
"Test scores be damned if we can't even assemble lawn furniture at the end of the day."
Even more: test scores be damned if the answers are wrong or the methods taught are nonsensical.
Here's the main reason I don't use Vim (or Emacs, for that matter): it's a "stateful" editor.
Insert mode? Command mode? Etc. etc.
I can do without.
Now, arguably, if all you have to work with is command line, that's one way to make it work, and work well. But most of the time I'd rather make use of modern interfaces.
"In the Bible, Christ preaches that his followers should pay their taxes. You know 'Render unto Rome what is Rome's...". I believe that fundamentalist christian churches should volutarily be paying taxes, even if the law does not require it. "
First, churches are not their followers... the followers do pay taxes. And second, taxing churches would create the kind of government-church relationship that we have chosen to shun here in the United States, for good historical reasons.
"Yes yes yes this this THIS times a million! "
No, no, no... billions and billions of times. (Yes, I know: Sagan never actually said that.)
Here's the problem with that, and it's such a HUGE amount of history that it shouldn't even need to be mentioned. But it seems that it does, so here goes:
History says very clearly that once you allow government to get involved with religion, or religion with government, pretty soon you have government-mandated religion, or religion-run government. And both of those are Very Bad. Religions have never -- ever, ever -- been good heads of government. And it's pretty obvious why government-mandated religion is just as bad.
That is why we have effective separation of Church and State in the US. But many people misunderstand it.
Contrary to what many people seem to think, the reason for that separation is not to "keep religion out" of everything. At all. It is intended to prevent any kind of official government sponsorhip of a particular religion. Our Founders were intimately familiar with religious persecution, and it was their intent to prevent it. But it was not their intent to suppress religion.
Example: a nearby city government had prayer before every meeting. The prayers were generally given by a Catholic priest, probably just because there was a big Catholic church just down the street. Some people objected, and it went all the way up to the State Supreme Court. This is what the court said (paraphrase):
"There is no law or clause in the Constitution preventing you from having prayer. However, you ARE prohibited from supporting any PARTICULAR religion. Offering Catholic prayer before every meeting is de facto government sponsorship of a particular religion."
The city's answer: now, any religion that wants to participate can get put on their list. They either rotate through the list or draw them at random... I'm not sure which. But the upshot is that they still have prayer before every meeting, but it isn't necessarily Catholic or even Christian. I remember once they had prayers from the local Baha'i faith.
Now, nobody has any reason to object and there are no problems. Even the atheists don't seem to have a problem with it.
"Which versions of Firefox had upside tabs? I must have skipped more versions of Firefox than I thought, because I remember when they were under the address bar, but never upside down."
The current one, and past versions for a long time now.