So why don't nationalist types ever forced to prove that a country is more than just an articicial boundary drawn on a map for collective ego expansion?
Set up a day and time for your g/God/dess to do something I can see and judge. I am a thinking person, this shouldn't be too hard to do.
Nations are real. France is real. Japan is real. Ethiopia is real. Languages are real. Borders are real, people make countries and they create huge amounts of evidence to enforce their existence. It is what people decide, and sure, boundaries can and do change but they are real where they are.
[/quote]Why are they any more against social cohesion than a feather hat and moccasins? Are we to ban those too?[/quote]
Every country has codes of behaviour for dress and socializing. You have to live in another country to find out what we do here if is often considered quaint or useless in another country. Numbers are important, if I see many women wear burkas I will protest much more strongly.
[/quote] Then you seem grossly misinformed of the situation there. About 20% of the French population is now Muslim, but most of it is not from immigration but rather from the former French department of Algeria. That's right. Prior to Algerian independence, Algeria was a fully integrated department of France, treated as an extension of France and so its citizens were French citizens. As French citizens, they were free to travel to the French mainland in Europe, not as immigrants (after all, they were born in Algeria which was essentially an extension of France, and so by being born in Algeria, they wre in fact born in France). This and not immigration is the main source of Islam in France today.[/quote]
Good for France. We are permitted to make rules and decide on immigration, it is not a holy subject that any dissent is considered racism. This furthers my idea people consider the federal gov't the new Roman Catholic Church and any dissent which used to be heresy is now bigotry. This limits intelligent discussion on an important topic of the day. You won't be censoring me.