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Is theocracy good?
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There are different levels of theocracy

Theocracies are not an all or nothing thing – there is a gradient of religious influence across different countries.
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The Argument

From Bhutan to Britain, there are many states in the world in which the clergy play a formal role in politics. In others, explicitly religious political ideologies are increasingly important but the country does not meet the purist definition of a theocracy. Many states have an official state religions, such as many middle eastern countries having Islam as their state religion. Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand have Buddhism as their state religion and Malta and Leichenstein have Catholicism. The British monarch is the titular Supreme Governor of the Church of England and is crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the 26 most senior bishops have seats in the House of Lords, although their actual political power is negligible.[1] Even countries that do not mention religion in their constitution, religion still can have an undue influence upon society structurally through tax exemptions and functionally through grants and privileges. For example, Australia and New Zealand have been called soft theocracies, where the church-state relationship in both countries is mostly about access to taxpayers' money.[2]

Counter arguments

Premises

[P1] Many countries are theocracies on some level, as religion are incorporated into the state on some level.

Rejecting the premises

References

  1. https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/nick.megoran/pdf/theocracy.pdf
  2. https://www.nswrationalists.com/soft-theocracies.html
This page was last edited on Monday, 30 Mar 2020 at 10:40 UTC

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