Separation of Church and State - where to shop for pigs' trotters...

Remember when I had my leaving bash in London? I am sure you do since I subjected you all to THAT crazy crazy drawing competition! Anyway some of you at the time told me how worried you were that Americans were just too religious and too righteous to be objective about the world and themselves.

I have to confess that at the time I was quite worried of that too, but just as Americans think of us Europeans as quaint and somewhat dirty ( Trish from my encounter on the plane told me so!), so we Europeans have some preconceptions about Americans too.

One of those is the separation between state and church. We Europeans think that Christian integralists are taking over America. Well the truth in my opinion is that it is not so.

Remember when I was at McDonald’s and the two spot squeezing girls came in? I was reading USA Today and besides the spot squeezing hubbub, one thing that caught my attention on the day was an article I was reading.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/10/so-what-does-th.html

Belatedly I would like to draw your attention to it since I sheds a very interesting light on Church and State in the US. It argues the case that the two were meant by the foundings fathers to be clearly separate and more importantly - in the eyes of the writer - that they should stay separate. What I find particularly interesting is that to say so is Oliver Thomas, a renowned Baptist minister (Baptism by the way is not exactly the most liberal religious movement in the world).

On a slightly different note, near my house there are two supermarkets – one is called Albertsons and the other one is called Sprouts. They are like day and night. Below is what Albertsons sells....yum! Sprouts, on the other hand, is a very organic store and when I went in I saw signs for a debate lined up for this weekend on gluten…one of the topics of discussion was: “ Can gluten transfer during sex?”…



A presto

Thunderpants