Here, we come to the exact point of how Neuhaus and Stone Island have attempted to redefine citizen to be equivilent to chistian, or better yet require being christian to be a citizen.
As everyone here has implicitly understood (even Radrook's post pages back agreed), citizenry is defined by a person's actions within a society. If they conform to that society's will, they are a good citizen. That doesn't mean the society is good. This seems to be what Neuhaus found detestable. As such, he wished to redefine good citizen to mean a person who will function in the best interests of all based upon some external code (regardless if the society adopts to that same code).
Now, the trouble is what external code do we adopt and why? For convienience, natural law and god is invoked in some shear horror show of circular reasoning. During the argument, it is claimed that this code must come from god becuase it exists and that since the code exists god must be real. Along the way, by defining citizen in terms of what a person believes, Neuhaus gets to claim that atheists are excluded from the good citizen club.
If allowed to continue, there is no reason for Neuhaus to stop at excluding atheists. By changing the standard of good citizen from from Belief in natural laws to belief in christian natural laws, we could start to exclude Jews, muslims, hindus, Buddhists,... from being good citizens. Afterall, if we assume that these axiomatic laws must have a generic divine origin (one with no proof to exist), why couldn't it have a specific divine origin (one that equally has no proof).
Stone Island and Neuhaus continually beg the question, why does this code equal the one true code. The answer is, it doesn't. There is no "one true code". It's merely an axiomatic set of standards which were used to establish the society we currently live in. These axiomatic standards work, mainly becuase empirical observation of other sets of axioms were found wanting.(theocracies, monarchies, oligarchies, ..) This doesn't mean that our current system is the one true system, but the best we've come to. Indeed, the primary principle that the USA was built upon was the notion that this system might not be the best, so they built in corrective algorithm to allow the government to adapt to changing needs. Even within the history of the US, the definition of a good citizen (formerly a white male who could own slaves and viewed women as secondary unworthy of voting rights) has changed.
There is no standard set of beliefs one must have to be a good citizen. There are standards of beliefs one must be to be a good theist. Neuhaus and stone island equate these concepts, and in so doing demonstrate a naive prejudice that must be exposed openly to prevent it from ever fostering. Our society operates on the principle of free speech. As such, I expose these prejudices and am a good citizen for doing so.
