Pensee

I just passed a street today that was named "St. Augustine." It got me to thinking about all of the public things (street names, schools, counties/parishes) that are named after Catholic saints. For instance, I came from St. Bernard parish (one of many parishes named after saints) and I know MS has several counties named after saints.

Isn't this an establishment of religion? Namely, the Catholic religion?

Toto

California has many cities named after Saints or other Catholic figures (Our Lady the Queen of Los Angeles) but this reflects its history rather than being an attempt to establish a religion IMO. After all, does the name San Francisco conjure up St. Francis or godless heathen hippies and elected gay officials?

It might be different if a new city were named after a saint.

Buffman

Religion is part and parcel of human history. Many of its contributions to that history have been positive and productive. Some have been brutal and horrific.

The Taliban blew up two extremely ancient symbols of Buddhism because they were considered visual insults to their fundamentalist Muslim theology. I hope no one would ever suggest that all the symbols of Christianity be eliminated because they might be considered constitutional violations of the 1st Amendment. (I suspect that we would run out of dynamite before we ran out symbols.)

Captain Pedantic

I come from a place called St. Austell (Cornwall), but I never did find out who St. Austell was. My mum thinks he may have been some kind of martyr, but like I said in another thread, I'm not really interested in saints unless they did something cool like walk five miles carrying their own head or something.

Anyway, since there is only, to my knowledge, one Catholic church in St Austell, I don't think it really suggests that it is a hotbed of Catholic influence.