I agree with Obama completely, what was once faith in God and a higher purpose has turned into hate, intolerance, and vitriol against others.
“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ.
“Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us,” the Illinois senator said.
“At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design,” according to an advance copy of his speech.
America has always been a place where people of any faith could find a common ground in our society. The polarization brought on by the bible-thumpers has poisoned this country.
#34 – You prolly respect most people you meet offline aswell..
No wonder you vent here (online).. Cheers!
I come here to test my spelling
This stuff has been percolating a while now, and finally oozed out after “you’re either with us or against us.”
I suspect that Dvorak was the earliest troll sighted on USENET. I tried to ignore him then…
Hurry for Obama for telling it like it is. How correct he is.
I’m liking this candidate more every time. He is taking on the Religious power brokers in this country, our own version of middle east “Sheik’s” that feed their power and influence with hate and division.
Excellent post.
Blablablabla
Religion is a blight on modern society period. It was an effective crowd control mechanism and money maker for it’s leaders in the past. That’s all it was, anyone who can’t see that can bleat at me all they want, that’s all it every was and all it ever will be.
I just can’t understand it when reasonably rational people start blathering about “their” religion.
How arrogant and self centered do you have to be. “I’m special, when I die an imaginary part of me continues to live on forever”
Give me a fucking break, pathetic, the whole frigging religious thing is a pathetic sop for weak minded individuals who can’t accept their own mortality.
That’s not even to mention the suffering and billions of deaths caused by it.
bobbo, you got it exactly. The right wing propaganda machine is all about us vs. them. The “liberal” as defined by Limbaugh, Coulter, and O’Reilley does not exist. Its a conservative invented boogeyman to manipulate debate.
46—Well now shoot. Cant have much of a discussion with you either. Repugcons must be sleeping late (or on their knees in church?)
50—I agree, we can’t have a more glaring example of the evils upon us than BushCo. Its a wakeup call no one can say wasn’t clear.
Just in–CSpan so no link. US Income up for 2005. Top 10% went up, Bottom 90% went down. Dont know if that is absolute, inflation ajusted, percentage or what==but that trend has been clear for a few years now.
It was liberals like Obama who created the religious right. There was the Supreme Court throwing out states’ abortion laws, and banning school prayer, but the biggest factor was the Carter Admistration threatening a crackdown on religious schools.
52–I think I know what you mean by the SC throwing out abortion laws ((ie, they let each state make their own laws with certain minimum standards to be recognized)), and banning school prayer ((when coerced by school leadership)) but what did Carter do?
>>It was liberals like Obama who created the religious right.
Either that, or it was the “religious” right that created liberals like Obama. School is not the right place for religious indoctrination; most people think that reproductive decisions are the purview of those individuals who are affected by those decisions, and trying to ram some Holy Roller’s ideas of what is “right” down other people’s throats is repugnant to most Americans.
And I’m not sure what sins you think Jimmy Carter committed, unless it was to point out that the “Christian” right is in no way related to real Christianity, Christ, or anything else that reasonable people would consider to be good (http://tinyurl.com/3bqlsh)
“The Right has hijacked irrational superstition,” says irrational, superstitious politician. “Childish wishful thinking and belief in ludicrous primitive nonsense are being abused by those other guys.”
Wow. What a progressive.
It’s off topic but since you asked…
#53 – but what did Carter do?
He prayed for guidance from Jesus Christ, his Lord and Saviour, every day, because he was an Evangelical Christian, and likely the single most honest man ever to serve his nation as President.
Conservatives love to harpoon the Carter presidency as a dismal failure and they point to interest rates and “stagflation” and an energy crisis and announce that Carter was a terrible president, and so Democrats are terrible politicians…
Then you point out the overwhelming successes of the Clinton administration and they counter with “presidents can’t control economies”.
Republicans think we are all sheep but we can easily see through their bullshit if we care to just remember what they say.
>>and likely the single most honest man ever to serve his
>>nation as President.
Ah, no WONDER the necons hate him! That’s apostasy to them!
Ordinarily, praying to Jesus Christ as one’s Lord and Saviour wouldn’t gain the enmity of the neocons. The key, though, is to then turn around as say Jesus told you to start some wars, give tax cuts to your obscenely wealthy benefactors, engage in war profiteering, opress the downtrodden, ruin Mother Earth, take away civil liberties and rights, engage in warrantless spying on your citizens, and spend half your time in office clearing brush from your ranch.
From the standpoint of the “religious” right, it’s the honesty thing that was his big sin.
>>Why is it that the right always talks about personal choice,
>>they don’t think abortion is the personal choice of a woman?
Oh they’re all for personal choice. It’s just that THEY want to be the people doing the choosing. Then, either you accept their choice, or they’ll toss you in Gitmo.
Kinda like their version of “family values”.
#57 … Just so, Ben Waymark. I believe that was Obama’s point; that the public face of religion has been hijacked by the half witted coked up buggering evangelists, braying their massage of hatred from the megachurch bully pulpits.
That’s why I take issue with folks like Jägermeister, who seem to put inordinate faith in the public proclamations of the hatemongers. If someone hijacks a plane full of Americans and flies it into a skyscraper, it’s not the plane or the Americans that are evil. It’s the hijackers.
61,
“That’s why I take issue with folks like Jägermeister, who seem to put inordinate faith in the public proclamations of the hatemongers. If someone hijacks a plane full of Americans and flies it into a skyscraper, it’s not the plane or the Americans that are evil. It’s the hijackers.”
What the fuck does that mean?
>>What the fuck does that mean?
I didn’t think it was that complicated.
It means that if you take something that has the potential to be a beneficial force in the universe (like spiritual beliefs, airplanes, or Americans) and hijack it to serve evil purposes, at least in the public view (as the right-wing kooks have done with Jesus and Christianity), it does not mean that the underlying entity is evil. It just means that it’s been hijacked by something evil.
Capisce?
Condiment-Man
Irrational beliefs invariably lead to irrational acts. No one who is capable of and willing to forego fairytales – that is, to accept the consequences of valid arguments – will destroy human life for promises of some ludicrous reward in a nonexistent afterlife.
Rationality is the only cure for mankind’s problems. Putting a smiley face on irrational belief doesn’t change the fact that it stands in opposition to reality.
When you believe in things that are not based in reality, you can rationalize anything.
>>When you believe in things that are not based in reality,
>>you can rationalize anything.
And when you believe in nothing, you don’t even need to rationalize.
66,
But one can believe in things that are based in reality without having to accept someone else’s faiths in the intangible. I have my own satisfactory relationship with God, thank you very much.
65: And did the people who overthrew the Tzar in Russia and replace it with an equally oppressive system (this time based on reason and science instead of fairy tales or religion) why was their motivation? And when the Maoists in China shot all the doctors because they were members of the ‘middle class’ were they using reason or fairy tales?
Indeed, my limited understanding of psychopaths is that they operate very much on their own type of reason, but lacking emotions and empathy (neither of which are particularly reasonable things) they are quite capable of quite evil deeds.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that all atheist are psychopaths**, just that believing or not believing in something will not cure the world of its problem. Being understanding and empathetic towards people, even people with different views will help. Having courage to stand up to people and state your case will help. Being kind and helpful and loving will help. Even rationality and thinking things through will help.
Dismissing people’s beliefs as fairy tales simply because they are not your beliefs doesn’t really help much at all. It kinda puts you the same league as the religious zealots, just without the religious part.
Rationality is not going to cure mankind’s problem. Rationality will simply continue to create new ideologies or even possibly religions which will be distilled through the human brain and sometimes do wonderful things and sometimes will do awful things.
-Ben
**And for the record, I have nothing against atheists…. or psychopaths…. some of my best friends are atheists, and the rest are all psychos….. 😀
>>But one can believe in things that are based in reality without
>>having to accept someone else’s faiths in the intangible.
Hey, to quote Rodney King, “why can’t we all just get along?”. I started out this thing saying “believe whatever you want, just leave me the fuck out of it”.
You have your satisfactory relationship with God, I have my satisfactory relationship with God, so what’s the problem?
As long as you don’t try to tell my wife what her reproductive options are, or that “Jesus” wants me to send my children to die in a senseless trophy war, or that its’ OK to ram somebody else’s belief system down my children in school, I think we’re good to go.
Neocons loathe Carter because he was a crappy president and is a leftist tool. It has nothing to do with his faith or lack thereof.
Geez.
Lord Jesus this place is a fever swamp. No wonder John is so damn cranky.
Also, an earlier comment of mine ‘disappeared’ – I suppose John moderates out all outside links.
You will not understand what I am about to tell you, nor will you listen, but I’ve got just enough spare time to type it out.
Religion is not about feelings. Religion is not about fairy tales. Religion is about a metaphysic which transforms the physical. Because of the nature of religious truth it is erroneous to attempt to discredit a whole religious philosophy based on anecdotes. You must confront the history and concepts dead on and either accept them or reject them. Some things go entirely hand in hand, while others do not. Because of the hierarchical nature of the cosmos, it goes without saying that the further you are from its center the more contradictions there are. Genesis, or any ‘creation myth’ does not pertain to the exterior inasmuch as it does the interior. The Greek creation myth for instance is highly telling. It is, in short, Oedipal. Religion pertains to what is true, what is beautiful and what is good. All three are interconnected and rely on one another. There is only one path to God, though it is infinite. Scripture contains many surface contradictions which are mental ‘transitional spaces’ which force one to either think intuitively (such as a Koan would do) or to think on a higher level. Without this ‘stepping out of the system’ man learns nothing. The fact that we can even deign to deny God implies his existence; inasmuch as we are ‘man’, so there is a God. It also goes without saying there is One, that he is Absolute, but he is also Infinite. His very nature is Love, but it is only his Power that permits him to love unconditionally. We are bound by Necessity, he is not. The soul is mortal, the Spirit immortal. When we die, we are gone. God calls us to two things – salvation, that is, alignment to his location, to face the light of his being, which exposes our flawed nature, and secondly theosis, to be made into his likeness through trial and tribulation, to become righteous and without flaw. The destination is infinite, and so is the journey. Except, the journey ends when you die. The only way to know you got there is if you are there. In short, the choice is ours, and always ours, to become what we always were.
Okay. If you got what I’m saying, good. If you didn’t, that’s fine too. You can’t find the rabbit by cutting it up.
#70 – Bullshit.
#71 – Not really any less bullshit.
Overintellectualization of fairytales is still fairytales. The only thing we have is reality, whether you’re capable of facing it or not.
>>Neocons loathe Carter because he was a crappy president
>>and is a leftist tool.
Haw haw! Yeah, those Southern Baptists are well known to be Trotskyites and commmie pinkos. Har!
As to him being a “crappy president”, he sure beats the fuck out of the dimwitted nookyular dipshit who’s in there now! Christ, that guy is an embarrassment to western civilization. As a Cro-Magnon though, he’s right up there in the 50th percentile.
>>His very nature is Love
#71, you might try telling that to the “religious” right. I guess if by “love”, you mean jerking off in a hot-sheet motel with a prossy, or fucking a male hooker while high on crystal meth, they’re down with that. Otherwise, the mantra is “make war, not love”. As long as they can profit off of it.
71—Boy, that was a load. I was going to compliment you on your deist screed, but I checked your website, and you aren’t making this up for this post are you?
From your post–“You must confront the history and concepts dead on and either accept them or reject them.” I agree, and guess what? I reject them. Chris Hitchens was the first person I heard use the term for what I have been for a long time: “anti-theist.” Even if god did exist by whatever fairytale you wish to formulate, NONE of those tales lead to any reason to worship the guy. OK–all powerful, all knowing, loves me, stands outside of time and space====WE GOT NOTHING IN COMMON!!! Beside, I think the more worthy of love and respect you are, the more you allow and help other people to be who they want to be, not who you want them to be. Sorry.
So, the earlier question at #52==what did the worst President before BushCo do to “crack down on religious schools?” In context from the post I can imagine this is the conclusion drawn from his refusal to let them discriminate against other religious sects and still get federal funding or some such backasswards evaluation? MikeN==where are you??????