The USA can lock you up if you're an atheist

So in the good ol US of A, the state can lock you up for not believing in god. Interesting. Gotta be something seriously wrong with this shit.


http://www.redding.com/news/2010/apr/10/in-america-we-dont-lock-up-atheists/


Newspapers have a natural love for the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects freedom of the press.

Even before the drafters of the Bill of Rights mentioned that key American principle, though, first in the First came the prohibition on establishing a religion. If that means anything, it means that the government cannot impose religious beliefs on citizens and lock them up if they don’t profess belief.

You don’t have to be an atheist or a drug user, then, to appreciate the importance to our fundamental American liberties of the legal dispute over whether a Redding parolee should have been sent to prison for refusing to participate in a 12-step program as part of court-mandated drug treatment.


The 12 Steps of AA

1: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.
2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5: Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.