The bedrock of the US is protection of the rights of the individual, including freedom of speech, not freedom of religion, which is only one aspect of that. The right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of one's own happiness was not about religion.

Religion is malleable because it is based on arbitrary feelings from the beginning. But it isn't malleable in practice for the subjects under the rulers in a theocracy who enforce their feelings.

The matter of characteristics of a religion required to qualify for 1st amendment rights is nothing less than recognizing rights for freedom of any thought, not just that called "religion", while recognizing that whatever one thinks it doesn't justify violating other people's rights in the name of "religion" or anything else. Religion should have no special status as either a kind of thought or exemption from proper laws. That is a "fight worth having", but it begins with spreading the right ideas, not a futile attempt to enact the politically incorrect, which today would lead to a lot more and a lot worse than "finding yourself in court".

No religion serves as a principle of legitimate government.

But when religious doctrine is enunciated and enforced by the state it is the law.

Only a "front"? It is "anti-civilization, anti-liberty, anti-freedom, anti-life, and anti-progress"!

Your pronouncements promoting religion as the meaning of all freedom of thought in action and all values as "god" are false and ridiculous. Almost everyone else here, having at least read Atlas Shrugged, knows what values and thought applied to action means. It need not be repeated in every post rejecting your proselytizing of religion.

Secular thought is not "setting aside moral virtues". Washington et al did not laud the mysticism of religion -- they valued secular virtues that had become part of American Christian culture with its mixed premises, despite the religion that had been the philosophy of the Dark Ages, not America. They most lauded the egoism implicit in the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of one's own happiness, which clashed with the altruism still paid lip service to. For all its emphasis on reason and individualism in the Enlightenment, its philosophers did not produce a proper explicit ethics challenging tradition, which in turn led to the anti-Enlightenment. The country has suffered from that ever since as the American sense of life with its implicit egoism and empirical reason has been pushed down by a more explicitly promoted altruism and mysticism.

In pre-revolutionary Iran, under the Shah, all religions were equally accepted, the majority Shi'ites, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, even the Baha'i. But maybe that doesn't count under your question, since the Shah as our puppet ran a mostly secularized society. We lived there from 1975-1979 and saw it for ourselves.

In a theocracy the clergy are politicians as a matter of religious dogma. It's not an accident.

Reason rejecting faith is not another kind of "religion" and rejection of the supernatural is not imposing a "limitation". Please stop the religious proselyting on this forum. You know it has no place here.

A society based on religious faith is done for. Such emotionalist thinking has no place in making government policy. A nation based on widespread acceptance of reason and individualism does not tolerate theocrats exploiting government power in the name of their supernatural claimed "existence" beyond the "limitations" they accuse the rational of somehow imposing in rejecting the nonsense. Yes, it is irrational to seriously "wish" for "continued existence" in a supernatural realm; they can do that wasting their own lives if they want to but have no right to use it as an excuse to impose on any one else in the name of representing the "governed".

There is also no evidence that the imagined 'afterlife' is desirable, but it's all irrelevant; those who confuse knowledge with whatever they want in their fantasies will claim anything they want to about what is "desirable" just as they claim whatever they want in everything else, including the fire and brimstone they imagine in order to try to frighten those who reject the fantasizing in a metaphysical good-cop bad-cop scheme. The irrational faith mongers do not have "just different beliefs" no worse than anyone else; they are irrational on principle and entirely cognitively irrelevant.

Rationality is required to live. It is our means of survival. The philosophical question is how to be objective and rational in thinking by following the right principles, not writing off humanity with a slogan of "men are irrational" in order to excuse those who want to be irrational with the "I'm no worse than you are" fallacy.

Keeping church dogma out of the government is about the moral principle, not a "fallacy". The 'guilt by association' is a consequence after it's too late for those subjected to it.

"Is it irrational to wish for one's continuation?"
I am for leaving alone non-falsifiable claims, such as your claim of an afterlife. I take issue with part of how you get there. You say an afterlife is desirable, but that in itself is not evidence of its existence.

"men are irrational."
Regarding your point about humans never being wholly objective, I agree with that, but I think we should try our best.

"Instead of falsely labeling an idea as a "church" doctrine, a secularist doctrine, etc., it's simpler to avoid the guilt-by-association fallacy and just state what the moral principle under discussion is. "
Yes! I agree. Talk about the individuals, not the whole group.

Yes. But has there ever been a Muslim controlled state (when the Muslims were the controlling body) that treated non-Muslims as equals? ...Again; I'm just asking, and I'm asking because I'm under the impression that it is not possible within their 'rules'.

I an glad, too, that freedom of religion is the bedrock of the US. But that arose for a reason, too: many of the states (Massachusetts, Maryland, and Pennsylvania most notably) were founded to promote one version of Christianity or another. But in order to deal with people from other states, religious toleration was required.

The Spanish caliphate was known for its religious toleration, and pre-unification Spain was a center of Jewish culture. It was the Catholics who drove the Jews out--or burned them at the stake.

I'm not going rehearse all of Islamic history here, but other times and places have known tolerance, too. The Ottoman Empire was nominal Muslim and indeed, IIRC, claimed the Caliphate (i.e., to rule over all Muslims). But it was a mix of religions, much more tolerant than its successor states.

(PS - proscribe as used by the Founders meant to curtail or limit and that is how I am using it.)

This is your opinion, but it is based on a view which accepts only a limited existence. For those who believe that this existence carries on into another, they accept a whole other range of possibilities. Is it irrational to wish for one's continuation? Only an advocate of suicide says yes. Is it irrational to believe that what follows this life is better than what exists now? No one who lives seeks a worse existence now. Is it irrational to believe that actions in the here-and-now have consequences that carry over into the next existence? Not to anyone who believes in the irrevocable law of choice and consequence: of precedent and consequent. Those are the foundations of the "faith" you decry as irrational. They're not irrational at all - just different from what you believe.

Let us suppose the following question: would enforcement of a belief in limited existence upon society be any more just than the enforcement of the opposite? Reason cries "No". It would by very definition constitute an "establishment of religion". And it is for that reason that the Founders neither proscribed religious sentiment nor allowed for its funding as a function of good governance. They recognized the dangers in trying to force the conscience of men and they wisely resisted the temptation. They even went so far as to enshrine the liberty of such in the Bill of Rights.

"There is no place for religious beliefs, or any other arbitrary, non-objective emotionalism, as a method in government."

Governments are created by the governed to seek their interests based on their beliefs about what is good and what is evil. Are people going to be perfect in ascertaining what that may be? As evidenced by the millennia of civilizations which have come and gone prior to the Constitution, even the Founders admitted that it (the Constitution) was only the best they could come up with. As much as we might wish otherwise, men are irrational. Given that governments are a product of their constituents (even the best of them). What you are talking about is the notion that there exists a person - let alone a group of people - on this planet who is wholly objective. If you seek for such, I wish you well in finding them.

religion or religious as defined by Webster:
"relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity."
Taken this way it could be good, bad or perverse, as long as one is completely devoted. We tend to view religion in terms of , God, good and altruistic in the US. However, it could be something darker. It could be a dvotion to politics, to cult ideas, obsession with nature. In all cases, it seems to lead to something that soon surpasses reason, and becomes out of control in volence against others, as the group tries to force their views on others. Look at the violence done in the name of politics. Look at the violence and damage in the name of environmentalism. Then look at the ultimate goal of ISIS, All trying to demand other fall in line with the beliefs of their group.

When has Islam truly exercised religious tolerance? (I'm not being a smart ass, I really don't know of any instance that they actually had power and didn't treat infidels as second class)

And I am very glad that (despite being Christian) the Founders established a secular state which enshrined freedom of religion. Else America could never have risen to enjoy the status it has. And I would note that Islam has not risen for the very same reasons: a history of violence and intolerance.

Does Satanism count as a Theocracy? Sure. What is interesting to note about such, however, is that it violates the very principles of governmental creation in the first place: which is to seek the welfare and well-being of its constituents. Therefore it can not serve as a principle of legitimate government. In very fact, because it openly rejects the notion of a government being formed with the interests of its people in mind, it can not be a morally "good" society as a result. If someone were to claim that the Constitution protected such they would of very definition be arguing a contradiction.

Exactly! And this is the gist of the reason I find it peculiar that this isn't brought up whenever some politician starts going on about how wonderful the religion of peace is.

If you want to offer an alternative definition, please do, but simply opining what something is not neither adds to the discussion nor provides an opportunity for commiseration. I stand by my assessment, however.

Faith is guilty of irrationalism because of what it is, not "by association". If a principle espoused by religion happens to be true it is from a rational source in spite of the religion. Church "doctrines" are by their nature irrational by their very process, even if they happen to coincide with something correct once the faith and duty is removed from them.

A government based on defending the rights of the individual to protect his freedom of action does not "proscribe certain behaviors" based on whatever someone pronounces as a "belief in what is right and what is wrong". There is no place for religious beliefs, or any other arbitrary, non-objective emotionalism, as a method in government.

Freedom of thought in action is not "religion" and pursuit of values in a secular world is not a "choice of one's god".

Like freedom of speech, which is recognized to have practical limits, religion should not be free from limits. Obviously we would not tolerate a religion that espouses human sacrifice, we have resisted allowing religion to act as cover for polygamy (without outlawing the subject religion). The question for experts on constitutional law and religion is whether or not laws forbidding the promotion of a theocracy would hold up. I believe they would, since advocating theocracy requires advocating the overthrow of our form of government.