You haven't dealt with bureaucracies in other countries if you think this is bad.
Of course, in most of them, this would simply be an invitation to pay people off. I'm undecided on whether its better or worse that you don't have that option in the US.
As such, while you are technically correct that they are different entities, they are not independent from each other and discussing one without discussing the other is leaving out a big part of the whole. It's like discussing politics without discussing the government, or vice versa.
I'm not "leaving them out", I'm just making a clear distinction: churches are organizations, religions are sets of beliefs. Separation of church and state means a legal separation of the organizations from the state, nothing more nothing less. It does not mean government imposed regulation of people's beliefs, which would contradict democratic principles.
That same influence is there in many other countries with a stronger seperation. It is, however, less public and official.
That is what separation of church and state means: the state does not give churches the authority or resources to mess with education, health care, and politics. They can influence those things only by convincing people one-by-one to follow their teachings.
When church and state are separate, once people stop believing, churches automatically stop having influence. In Germany, most people have stopped believing, but churches still wield enormous influence because that influence is legally guaranteed to them and because Germans have an inclination to deferring to perceived authority.
But I don't think the letter of the law is the source of the problem, I think it is a symptom.
If that were the case, then churches (=the organizations) should have less political power in Germany than in the US, Germans being far less religious than Americans. But the opposite is the case. While religion is a powerful political force in the US, churches as organizations are not (if not for any other reason than that there are so many of them).
The problem is that religion has way too much influence on our society despite having been debunked.
I'd say that religion has little influence on German society: what German churches preach publicly has little to do with Christianity. When you confront German Christian politicians or church leaders with the many objectionable and offensive aspects Christian dogma and theology, for the most part, they weasel out and say that that's not really what their church is teaching. That's why trying to attack the problem by exposing religion as a fraud is not going to work: most Germans already reject Christian dogma and theology.
Debunking and exposing Christianity for the fraud that it is is a viable strategy in the US for reducing the influence on religion on the state because churches only have influence to the degree that they have actual believers. But Germany's problem is the connection between church and state, and that connection today is mostly based on power and money, not religious belief.
But if you want to fix religion, politics is a bad place to start, either.
You're not going to get fix religion. The French tried, the Russians tried, and others tried too, and they all failed. Most people need some simple way of making sense of the world--it doesn't have to be right.
Yes, if you want to fix politics, religion is a bad place to start.
Religion by itself is just one of many irrational beliefs that people hold. Irrational beliefs only become dangerous when they are imposed on others, and it's that imposition that needs to be stopped.
On paper. That is my point. Sure they have the laws. But how much does it really do? Just take the example I already mentioned - the US has a very strong seperation in its constitution, but I don't see the religious influence being any less, on the contrary.
It's separation of church and state, not separation of religion and state. Churches and religion are two very different concepts.
The state in the US does not favor, promote, or support churches. Generally, people happen to be more religious and politicians love to talk about Christianity, but that's their private affair.
In contrast, the German government strongly favors, supports, and promotes two churches (Catholics and Lutherans); they get vast sums of public funding, control of parts of the educational system, control of a large part of the health care system, automatic access to political decision making, and significant influence on the media.
Furthermore, Germany has a long tradition of purging those who don't belong to one of the two state churches. For example, the 19th century, a lot of people had to flee to the US to escape religious persecution in Germany. And Hitler tried to get the Jews to leave (and then just gassed them when that didn't work). Today, Merkel tells people who don't conform to the official religious dogma that they don't belong in Germany.
So, Germany has less religious influence on government, but it has a lot more church influence in government. That's no contradiction: German churches just happen to be not very Christian or religious. That doesn't make them any less dangerous: lack of church/state separation is a problem because churches are powerful, undemocratic and unaccountable organizations, not because religion happens to be irrational.
Actually, it isn't. We have freedom of religion in the constitution, but no constitutional seperation
I didn't say Germany had total constitutional separation. I said that Germany has failed even to implement its own limited constitutionally mandated provisions. All major German parties are actively and deliberately flaunting the German constitution.
Do you really think the church will bow to political pressure
Most other western nations have been able to separate church and state far more effectively, against a much more powerful church. The fact that Germany isn't able to rid itself of its anachronistic system isn't because the church is unusually powerful in Germany, it's because Germany's democracy is unusually weak.
How could religion be a symptom of a missing seperation between church and state?
Wow, you really work hard at misinterpreting things, don't you?
I said that the status of religion in Germany is a symptom of deep-seated problems of German democracy. Those problems go far beyond issues of separation of church and state. You're not going to fix those problems by getting rid of religion.
My argument is that they use religion largely as a banner, and only in so far as it doesn't cost them too many votes.... However, at the same time a good share of the CDU/CSU doesn't really care all that much. Don't tell me that political and power aspects didn't trump religious fanatism on that decision.
Your interpretation of their behavior is wrong (and you aren't even consistent about it). It's not the case that these parties are Christian in name but liberal at heart; rather, they are Christian at heart, but pretend to be more liberal than they are in order to be acceptable to a wider range of voters.
And apparently they are able to fool you and many others. Until a couple of decades ago, all parties other than the CDU/CSU had stronger separation of church and state in their programs (after all, it's mandated by the German constitution); now only the communists object to the status quo. The CDU/CSU have been very active and vocal in promoting Christianity at the EU level. They even invited the pope to speak in front of German parliament, and I don't see a groundswell of protest.
I must have missed a lot of memos.
Yes, we already have established that you're living in a German media and educational bubble. Here is one of the many memos you obviously missed:
The fact that, so far, liberal elements have been able to keep the Christian parties somewhat in check doesn't change what those parties are trying to achieve.
they vote on parties in our fucked-up Partyocracy.
Well, so we agree then: Germany just doesn't function well as a democratic society. Once you admit that, what you do about Christianity is really like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And there is no shortage of other ridiculous and irrational philosophies to replace it, many of them already tried in Germany.
Separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of democracies and it needs to be implemented in Germany. Ridiculing Christianity out of existence is at best treating one symptom, it isn't fixing the real problem.
Yes, Microsoft spends tons of money on research. But you picked really bad examples, because what you chose isn't really research that was done at Microsoft, much of it is the result of research in academia that was then turned into a demo/product at Microsoft. A lot of it is also based on quite old technologies.
Are you kidding? If you're a CS graduate looking for a corporate R&D job, Microsoft is one of the few places left, and they actually still have some freedom and time to do research.
The company you should be complaining about is Apple: they closed their search lab 15 years ago, don't publish, and don't do research; Apple just puts other people's technologies into shiny boxes and makes a killing with it.
Which goes to show that tons of spending on R&D is neither necessary nor sufficient for making good products.
There's maybe 10% who really care, but if you were to go down the road of a real theocracy, say modelling the legal system after what the bible says, you'd be in for a surprise.
You are implying that Christianity in German government isn't so serious because it's not "real", unlike what you imagine theocracies used to be like. But since no government has ever received direct communications from God, necessarily all theocracies have been based on lies and corruption, from the Israelites to the Christian parties today. And people were no more stupid then than they are today: plenty of people understood that the Catholic church was a fraud even when it ran Europe, they just didn't speak up because they'd get killed.
And the German legal system is influenced by what churches currently say God wants, including restrictions on biomedical research, gay marriage, abortion, and many other areas. Your supposedly oh-so-liberal Germany is one of the more conservative Wester nations because of church influence.
It didn't. Also, drop the plural, there really is one christian party. The CDU and CSU are the same, the CSU is simply a local branch of the CDU and keeping them as two seperate parties is for purely power reasons (it gives advantages).
It's just a fact that the CDU and CSU are officially two different parties. "Dropping the plural" as you suggest is wrong. Please learn something about your own political system before you criticize others.
The actual christian parties, such as the Zentrum were important prior to WW2,
Here too you're trying to redefine terms to fit your bizarre world view. Fact is that the CDU and CSU are actual Christian parties, with Christianity spelled out in their party program, with their leaders promoting Christianity, re-Christianization, and government support for Christian organizations.
Christianity is an alibi religion for most people over here, and I as a militant atheist know a lot more about it than almost everyone who considers himself a christian.... Ridicule and laughter are the most potent weapons against religion
You're no more likely to succeed at fixing Germany's faulty separation of church and state by preaching atheism than the Catholic church is going to fix it by preaching Catholicism.
The correct approach is not to ridicule churches, it is to convince everybody that it is in their own best interest to separate church and state.
Unfortunately, these corrupt assholes will bring us something that is even worse than a theocracy - an unhealthy mix of religion, powermongering, bureaucracy and pseudo-democracy.
That is what a theocracy is.
Actually, the situation in Iran was a bit different, they were basically trying to get rid of a dictator that was oppressing them
And that is different from the German situation... how? Why do you think West Germany became dominated by Christian parties after WWII? After Hitler was kicked out, the Western allies were looking for a group that (1) had widespread credibility and acceptance in German society, (2) was not nationalist, and (3) was staunchly anti-Communist. And the church fit the bill perfectly and it got the job done. The problem is that once you let them in power, they don't want to let go.
The irony of course is that it was the votes of the Christian parties in the Weimar Republic that gave Hitler total power in the first place. Their motivation? Anti-communist hysteria, a fundamental distrust of democratic institutions, a belief in totalitarian structures, and guarantees of government funding and access to education (that have lasted to this day). Of course, they didn't want millions to die in the process, but they knew that the Nazis were dangerous criminals and still preferred them over democracy.
And that's the risk today as well: German intellectuals (like you) don't take the churches and their parties seriously enough, and falsely assume that Germany is basically a liberal country. And when push comes to shove, those "Christian" politicians will vote against democracy and human rights, for tighter connections between government and corporations, and for more and more totalitarian structures. And that's exactly what you see the CDU/CSU do already.
And what you see today is with Germany's economy humming along spectacularly. Imagine what those parties will do once the German demographic time bomb hits, Americans can't buy German products anymore, and the German economy and system of benefits collapses?
Yes, they are different, but that does not invalidate what I said.
You can't invalidate something that is completely meaningless to begin with. Talking about how "FOSS" software interoperates with "Microsoft" software is meaningless because they are two entirely different categories of things.
That's one of the lies we are being fed. If you dig just a tiny bit deeper, you find out that most of the "church-run" institutions like kindergardens, hospitals and the like are actually paid for by the government. The church is the on-paper provider of the facilities, but the taxpayers are actually paying for 99% of the bills.
You are absolutely right that the tax payers pay for it, but that doesn't make them the employer. The church is the employer: they hire, they fire, they set the working conditions. And they are exempt from regular non-discrimination laws and unionization.
Almost all of this influence is motivated politically, not religiously.
I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. When Merkel and Wulff speak of "re-Christianiziation" of Germany and Europe, what do you think they mean?
Assuming that Christian government less harmful today than it was back then because people are so much smarter is a bad assumption. Anybody with half a brain has known for two millennia that Christian churches are preaching bullshit and are intrinsically corrupt, and it didn't prevent the Dark Ages and all the other evil things Christian governments did.
And you only have to look to nations like Iran to see that having a proud culture and an educated middle class don't protect you from theocracy.
At least over here in Europe, most "members" of the church are members for two reasons and two reasons alone:
First of all, you cannot generalize about churches across Europe. The relationship between church and state in Europe is very diverse. France has strict separation of church and state, while Germany doesn't.
The church certainly matters. But its opinion on anything modern does not
As far as Germany is concerned, that is totally wrong. The churches are the biggest employers in the nation and they are the main health care providers. If you aren't a paying member of one of the two churches, you'll have a hard time getting a job in the care field. And if you're a patient, in many places, you can't avoid being subjected to the religious doctrine and policies of those churches.
The German churches also have a massive presence in both government and the media. The country is governed by two Christian parties and both the German chancellor and the German president have publicly stated that they want to use the state to spread Christianity in Germany. The two churches also billions in general funds, in addition to church taxes; they can start arbitrary businesses and are exempt from non-discrimination laws and union laws. And churches have successfully prevented gay marriage and abortion from becoming legal. Churches also are paid by the government to indoctrinate students religiously.
But its opinion on anything modern does not, because everyone with half a brain, even those who are on paper members of it, realizes they know nothing about these things that is worth listening to.
And, yet, every German, you included, pays a lot of money to these churches and gives up a lot of power to them. And it's getting worse, rather than better, with all major parties other than the former communists now accepting the status quo, despite a mandate by the German constitution to end the special treatment of the two Christian churches.
And that's pretty typical for Germany: the intellectual elite has no idea what's going on in politics or in the country.
Freedom means nothing if you don't also include the freedom to lock others out.
Where does it say that they don't have that "freedom"? Is anybody suing them for a license violation? Motorola has the freedom to do something stupid, shoot themselves in the foot if they like, and no license or legal restriction is keeping them from doing that.
But the freedom to do something stupid doesn't mean freedom from criticism or bad publicity for your products. That's the way free markets is supposed to work: companies that make bad choices go out of business.
If Motorola actually did a decent job at rolling out software updates that they committed to, this would matter less.
But Motorola often rolls out buggy updates and fails to provide the updates that they said they were going to provide.
So, Motorola: either clean up your act and provide timely upgrades and updates, or get out of the way and let other people put usable software on your hardware.
You can't do that with other kinds of hosting either, so the amount of "lock in" is not greater than if you run things yourself or use traditional hosting.
You're comparing apples and oranges. FOSS is a category of licenses, while Microsoft is a brand and a company. Proprietary software in general also works poorly with other proprietary software.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't dealt with bureaucracies in other countries if you think this is bad.
Of course, in most of them, this would simply be an invitation to pay people off. I'm undecided on whether its better or worse that you don't have that option in the US.
Apple can't even transfer iTunes to the cloud, let alone anything as massive as Steve Jobs's ego.
If they can copy Google's search results without Google even noticing unusual traffic, then Bing's search volume has to be rather low.
Microsoft needs to copy the results in order to process them; that's sufficient for copyright infringement.
Rational, tolerant populations produce science and technology that allows us to live longer and more healthily.
Irrational, religious populations are growing much faster and use science and technology to conduct
The problem is that the rational, tolerant populations are sharing their advances with the irrational parts of the populations.
Looks pretty flat to me:
http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1296041214136&chddm=710470&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:GOOG;INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC;INDEXDJX:.DJI&cmptdms=0;0;0&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0finance
Heck, Microsoft is performing worse than NASDAQ
As such, while you are technically correct that they are different entities, they are not independent from each other and discussing one without discussing the other is leaving out a big part of the whole. It's like discussing politics without discussing the government, or vice versa.
I'm not "leaving them out", I'm just making a clear distinction: churches are organizations, religions are sets of beliefs. Separation of church and state means a legal separation of the organizations from the state, nothing more nothing less. It does not mean government imposed regulation of people's beliefs, which would contradict democratic principles.
That same influence is there in many other countries with a stronger seperation. It is, however, less public and official.
That is what separation of church and state means: the state does not give churches the authority or resources to mess with education, health care, and politics. They can influence those things only by convincing people one-by-one to follow their teachings.
When church and state are separate, once people stop believing, churches automatically stop having influence. In Germany, most people have stopped believing, but churches still wield enormous influence because that influence is legally guaranteed to them and because Germans have an inclination to deferring to perceived authority.
But I don't think the letter of the law is the source of the problem, I think it is a symptom.
If that were the case, then churches (=the organizations) should have less political power in Germany than in the US, Germans being far less religious than Americans. But the opposite is the case. While religion is a powerful political force in the US, churches as organizations are not (if not for any other reason than that there are so many of them).
The problem is that religion has way too much influence on our society despite having been debunked.
I'd say that religion has little influence on German society: what German churches preach publicly has little to do with Christianity. When you confront German Christian politicians or church leaders with the many objectionable and offensive aspects Christian dogma and theology, for the most part, they weasel out and say that that's not really what their church is teaching. That's why trying to attack the problem by exposing religion as a fraud is not going to work: most Germans already reject Christian dogma and theology.
Debunking and exposing Christianity for the fraud that it is is a viable strategy in the US for reducing the influence on religion on the state because churches only have influence to the degree that they have actual believers. But Germany's problem is the connection between church and state, and that connection today is mostly based on power and money, not religious belief.
But if you want to fix religion, politics is a bad place to start, either.
You're not going to get fix religion. The French tried, the Russians tried, and others tried too, and they all failed. Most people need some simple way of making sense of the world--it doesn't have to be right.
Yes, if you want to fix politics, religion is a bad place to start.
Religion by itself is just one of many irrational beliefs that people hold. Irrational beliefs only become dangerous when they are imposed on others, and it's that imposition that needs to be stopped.
On paper. That is my point. Sure they have the laws. But how much does it really do? Just take the example I already mentioned - the US has a very strong seperation in its constitution, but I don't see the religious influence being any less, on the contrary.
It's separation of church and state, not separation of religion and state. Churches and religion are two very different concepts.
The state in the US does not favor, promote, or support churches. Generally, people happen to be more religious and politicians love to talk about Christianity, but that's their private affair.
In contrast, the German government strongly favors, supports, and promotes two churches (Catholics and Lutherans); they get vast sums of public funding, control of parts of the educational system, control of a large part of the health care system, automatic access to political decision making, and significant influence on the media.
Furthermore, Germany has a long tradition of purging those who don't belong to one of the two state churches. For example, the 19th century, a lot of people had to flee to the US to escape religious persecution in Germany. And Hitler tried to get the Jews to leave (and then just gassed them when that didn't work). Today, Merkel tells people who don't conform to the official religious dogma that they don't belong in Germany.
So, Germany has less religious influence on government, but it has a lot more church influence in government. That's no contradiction: German churches just happen to be not very Christian or religious. That doesn't make them any less dangerous: lack of church/state separation is a problem because churches are powerful, undemocratic and unaccountable organizations, not because religion happens to be irrational.
Actually, it isn't. We have freedom of religion in the constitution, but no constitutional seperation
I didn't say Germany had total constitutional separation. I said that Germany has failed even to implement its own limited constitutionally mandated provisions. All major German parties are actively and deliberately flaunting the German constitution.
Do you really think the church will bow to political pressure
Most other western nations have been able to separate church and state far more effectively, against a much more powerful church. The fact that Germany isn't able to rid itself of its anachronistic system isn't because the church is unusually powerful in Germany, it's because Germany's democracy is unusually weak.
How could religion be a symptom of a missing seperation between church and state?
Wow, you really work hard at misinterpreting things, don't you?
I said that the status of religion in Germany is a symptom of deep-seated problems of German democracy. Those problems go far beyond issues of separation of church and state. You're not going to fix those problems by getting rid of religion.
My argument is that they use religion largely as a banner, and only in so far as it doesn't cost them too many votes. ... However, at the same time a good share of the CDU/CSU doesn't really care all that much. Don't tell me that political and power aspects didn't trump religious fanatism on that decision.
Your interpretation of their behavior is wrong (and you aren't even consistent about it). It's not the case that these parties are Christian in name but liberal at heart; rather, they are Christian at heart, but pretend to be more liberal than they are in order to be acceptable to a wider range of voters.
And apparently they are able to fool you and many others. Until a couple of decades ago, all parties other than the CDU/CSU had stronger separation of church and state in their programs (after all, it's mandated by the German constitution); now only the communists object to the status quo. The CDU/CSU have been very active and vocal in promoting Christianity at the EU level. They even invited the pope to speak in front of German parliament, and I don't see a groundswell of protest.
I must have missed a lot of memos.
Yes, we already have established that you're living in a German media and educational bubble. Here is one of the many memos you obviously missed:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/jul/20/genetics.europeanunion
The fact that, so far, liberal elements have been able to keep the Christian parties somewhat in check doesn't change what those parties are trying to achieve.
they vote on parties in our fucked-up Partyocracy.
Well, so we agree then: Germany just doesn't function well as a democratic society. Once you admit that, what you do about Christianity is really like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And there is no shortage of other ridiculous and irrational philosophies to replace it, many of them already tried in Germany.
Separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of democracies and it needs to be implemented in Germany. Ridiculing Christianity out of existence is at best treating one symptom, it isn't fixing the real problem.
My favourite stuff is the use of monads to represent software transactional memory, but the implicit concurrency stuff is also pretty shiny.
The natives are easily impressed by shiny glass beads.
Yes, Microsoft spends tons of money on research. But you picked really bad examples, because what you chose isn't really research that was done at Microsoft, much of it is the result of research in academia that was then turned into a demo/product at Microsoft. A lot of it is also based on quite old technologies.
Are you kidding? If you're a CS graduate looking for a corporate R&D job, Microsoft is one of the few places left, and they actually still have some freedom and time to do research.
The company you should be complaining about is Apple: they closed their search lab 15 years ago, don't publish, and don't do research; Apple just puts other people's technologies into shiny boxes and makes a killing with it.
Which goes to show that tons of spending on R&D is neither necessary nor sufficient for making good products.
There's maybe 10% who really care, but if you were to go down the road of a real theocracy, say modelling the legal system after what the bible says, you'd be in for a surprise.
You are implying that Christianity in German government isn't so serious because it's not "real", unlike what you imagine theocracies used to be like. But since no government has ever received direct communications from God, necessarily all theocracies have been based on lies and corruption, from the Israelites to the Christian parties today. And people were no more stupid then than they are today: plenty of people understood that the Catholic church was a fraud even when it ran Europe, they just didn't speak up because they'd get killed.
And the German legal system is influenced by what churches currently say God wants, including restrictions on biomedical research, gay marriage, abortion, and many other areas. Your supposedly oh-so-liberal Germany is one of the more conservative Wester nations because of church influence.
It didn't. Also, drop the plural, there really is one christian party. The CDU and CSU are the same, the CSU is simply a local branch of the CDU and keeping them as two seperate parties is for purely power reasons (it gives advantages).
It's just a fact that the CDU and CSU are officially two different parties. "Dropping the plural" as you suggest is wrong. Please learn something about your own political system before you criticize others.
The actual christian parties, such as the Zentrum were important prior to WW2,
Here too you're trying to redefine terms to fit your bizarre world view. Fact is that the CDU and CSU are actual Christian parties, with Christianity spelled out in their party program, with their leaders promoting Christianity, re-Christianization, and government support for Christian organizations.
Christianity is an alibi religion for most people over here, and I as a militant atheist know a lot more about it than almost everyone who considers himself a christian. ... Ridicule and laughter are the most potent weapons against religion
You're no more likely to succeed at fixing Germany's faulty separation of church and state by preaching atheism than the Catholic church is going to fix it by preaching Catholicism.
The correct approach is not to ridicule churches, it is to convince everybody that it is in their own best interest to separate church and state.
Unfortunately, these corrupt assholes will bring us something that is even worse than a theocracy - an unhealthy mix of religion, powermongering, bureaucracy and pseudo-democracy.
That is what a theocracy is.
Actually, the situation in Iran was a bit different, they were basically trying to get rid of a dictator that was oppressing them
And that is different from the German situation... how? Why do you think West Germany became dominated by Christian parties after WWII? After Hitler was kicked out, the Western allies were looking for a group that (1) had widespread credibility and acceptance in German society, (2) was not nationalist, and (3) was staunchly anti-Communist. And the church fit the bill perfectly and it got the job done. The problem is that once you let them in power, they don't want to let go.
The irony of course is that it was the votes of the Christian parties in the Weimar Republic that gave Hitler total power in the first place. Their motivation? Anti-communist hysteria, a fundamental distrust of democratic institutions, a belief in totalitarian structures, and guarantees of government funding and access to education (that have lasted to this day). Of course, they didn't want millions to die in the process, but they knew that the Nazis were dangerous criminals and still preferred them over democracy.
And that's the risk today as well: German intellectuals (like you) don't take the churches and their parties seriously enough, and falsely assume that Germany is basically a liberal country. And when push comes to shove, those "Christian" politicians will vote against democracy and human rights, for tighter connections between government and corporations, and for more and more totalitarian structures. And that's exactly what you see the CDU/CSU do already.
And what you see today is with Germany's economy humming along spectacularly. Imagine what those parties will do once the German demographic time bomb hits, Americans can't buy German products anymore, and the German economy and system of benefits collapses?
Yes, they are different, but that does not invalidate what I said.
You can't invalidate something that is completely meaningless to begin with. Talking about how "FOSS" software interoperates with "Microsoft" software is meaningless because they are two entirely different categories of things.
That's one of the lies we are being fed. If you dig just a tiny bit deeper, you find out that most of the "church-run" institutions like kindergardens, hospitals and the like are actually paid for by the government. The church is the on-paper provider of the facilities, but the taxpayers are actually paying for 99% of the bills.
You are absolutely right that the tax payers pay for it, but that doesn't make them the employer. The church is the employer: they hire, they fire, they set the working conditions. And they are exempt from regular non-discrimination laws and unionization.
Almost all of this influence is motivated politically, not religiously.
I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. When Merkel and Wulff speak of "re-Christianiziation" of Germany and Europe, what do you think they mean?
Assuming that Christian government less harmful today than it was back then because people are so much smarter is a bad assumption. Anybody with half a brain has known for two millennia that Christian churches are preaching bullshit and are intrinsically corrupt, and it didn't prevent the Dark Ages and all the other evil things Christian governments did.
And you only have to look to nations like Iran to see that having a proud culture and an educated middle class don't protect you from theocracy.
... Apple screws you
It's not the size of the patent portfolio that matters, it's its quality.
Furthermore, nobody other than google knows how many patents they have, since the USPTO info just doesn't tell you.
At least over here in Europe, most "members" of the church are members for two reasons and two reasons alone:
First of all, you cannot generalize about churches across Europe. The relationship between church and state in Europe is very diverse. France has strict separation of church and state, while Germany doesn't.
The church certainly matters. But its opinion on anything modern does not
As far as Germany is concerned, that is totally wrong. The churches are the biggest employers in the nation and they are the main health care providers. If you aren't a paying member of one of the two churches, you'll have a hard time getting a job in the care field. And if you're a patient, in many places, you can't avoid being subjected to the religious doctrine and policies of those churches.
The German churches also have a massive presence in both government and the media. The country is governed by two Christian parties and both the German chancellor and the German president have publicly stated that they want to use the state to spread Christianity in Germany. The two churches also billions in general funds, in addition to church taxes; they can start arbitrary businesses and are exempt from non-discrimination laws and union laws. And churches have successfully prevented gay marriage and abortion from becoming legal. Churches also are paid by the government to indoctrinate students religiously.
But its opinion on anything modern does not, because everyone with half a brain, even those who are on paper members of it, realizes they know nothing about these things that is worth listening to.
And, yet, every German, you included, pays a lot of money to these churches and gives up a lot of power to them. And it's getting worse, rather than better, with all major parties other than the former communists now accepting the status quo, despite a mandate by the German constitution to end the special treatment of the two Christian churches.
And that's pretty typical for Germany: the intellectual elite has no idea what's going on in politics or in the country.
Freedom means nothing if you don't also include the freedom to lock others out.
Where does it say that they don't have that "freedom"? Is anybody suing them for a license violation? Motorola has the freedom to do something stupid, shoot themselves in the foot if they like, and no license or legal restriction is keeping them from doing that.
But the freedom to do something stupid doesn't mean freedom from criticism or bad publicity for your products. That's the way free markets is supposed to work: companies that make bad choices go out of business.
If Motorola actually did a decent job at rolling out software updates that they committed to, this would matter less.
But Motorola often rolls out buggy updates and fails to provide the updates that they said they were going to provide.
So, Motorola: either clean up your act and provide timely upgrades and updates, or get out of the way and let other people put usable software on your hardware.
You can't do that with other kinds of hosting either, so the amount of "lock in" is not greater than if you run things yourself or use traditional hosting.
You're comparing apples and oranges. FOSS is a category of licenses, while Microsoft is a brand and a company. Proprietary software in general also works poorly with other proprietary software.