Pet peeve

The Netscape news poll for Saturday had this question and results:

Are "moral values" playing too big of a role in the U.S. government?
Church and state need to stay separate - 55%
All decisions should be guided by morality - 42%
I don't know - 2%

Now, the numbers are meaningless and not the point here. (Self-selected polls are unreliable, those drawn from an audience very likely not representative of the general public even more so; what's more, Netscape never tells you how many people responded so you have no idea of the size of the sample. On the other hand, I'll say that some of the AOL polls might have some significance even if they are self-selected among a possibly unrepresentative audience; I figure when you start to get a sample size of 300,000 or 400,000, as some of their polls have gotten, you might have some fair indication of sentiment.)

The point here is the choices: Either church and state are separate or decisions are guided by morality. The net meaning of those choices is that morality = religion = morality. And I find that misleading, untrue, even offensive to me and others like me who don't base their ethical and moral principles on some God-figure. I'm an atheist. I have been told to my face that because I'm an atheist, I can't - not even don't, but can't - have moral values, that I must judge everything in terms of cold calculations of practicality and self-interest. I have been told to my face that "morality comes from God." I was even accused once of "affecting religion" when I spoke of the preciousness of life.

I'm content to let any regular reader of this blog judge for themselves if my lack of religious belief has left me devoid of concerns and commitments regarding right and wrong. I'll just say this: We should never be governed by or as a civil society embrace religious orthodoxy of any kind. But as I've said several times, some things you do just because they're right, not because they're profitable. If you ever feel constrained by necessity to do something you feel is wrong, it should be because you knowingly made that unhappy decision, not because the wrongness did not figure in it.

So my answer to the poll would be yes to both: Church and state should be and stay separate and morality should guide decisions. I see absolutely no conflict there.