[Agema]

I am not a Christian, and did not say I was.

What I dispute is Jimi and Tifone talking about things like "real democracy" in terms of actually restricting or denying popular mandate, as to do so is patently anti-democratic. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, far from it.

Modern Western democracies can impose cultural values. The French and Turkish constitutions for instance are aggressively secular and restrict aspects of religious observance in ways the UK and US certainly don't. But you wouldn't call them less democratic countries (although Turkey is politically unstable and has periodic blips). A nation may wish to have an overarching *religious* constitution, rather than one based on secular views as is generally the case in the West. But why should that make them less democratic, if they use a free and fair system of voting just like the US or UK?

I'm just saying that frequently people in the West erroneously conflate a lot of our general secular Enlightenment values into "democracy", which actually have little or nothing to with democracy itself.