Revelation 12:1-6
A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
Discuss.
Well, the desert in the middle east does grow the occasional mushroom.
I think that this passage is one of the Bible’s many very clear and direct instructions on how we are instructed by GOD to organize our society.
First, it clearly instructs us to make our core guiding principle the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Second, it is a harsh warning against a society that would allow poverty: when anyone goes without, then clearly someone else has too much. Greed, gluttony, avarice, disconcern for those who want – these are the Mortal Sins.
Third, the passage tells us: go out and be happy. A light heart is a joy to all. Be funny, make art, heal wounds and ills. Find a partner or two, any that suits your soul that is able and willing to say “yes” back to you, and make joyous love – these human bodies and minds are wonderous tools for love – eros, agape and philia.
Fourth, learn. Study, investigate, decipher the universe. Nothing is more pleasing to God than for humans to revel in the complexity and unspeakable beauty, to fathom the unfathomable, to know for knowings sake the workings of the natural world.
Fifth, tread lightly on the earth, be a steward to the glorious beauty that is our planet. Rapacious destruction and capitalist exploitation, driven by the desire for MORE, these are reflections of greed and a poverty of the soul. Guard well the trees and the bunnies and the fish, for they are God’s creatures, too.
A corollary to five, don’t overpopulate! Only so many fit, and until you start colonizing other planets, don’t have too many kids!
***
I think that this text from Revelation, that most clear and literal guide to what God wants from us, HIS people, is, as outlined above, a blueprint for a peaceful world, and we just have to implement it.
@1 LOL – indeed, sir.
Further, I think that Republicans are a physical manifestation of unbridled greed, beings that God had sent as an object lesson to His people for what happens to paradise when you don’t follow the Golden Rule.
Unfortunately, too many of His people were too stoopid to realize that that sort of behavior was NOT supposed to be rewarded. And so we get Love Canal, and Iraq, and Confined Animal Feeding Operations, and on and on…
I thought we covered this already.
Purple Haze, all in my brain…
If a sign appears in heaven, who sees it?
@6
Anyone who can’t differentiate species.
Man, who ever wrote that had some good drugs.
…where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
It’s obvious the Almighty supports maternity leaves. Gives each new mother 42 months of care or go to hell.
Lib @2:
Gosh Lib, if you can find all that in the jibberish of this week’s quote from Revelations, you are much more perceptive than I am. It’s not that I don’t like your interpretation, I most certainly like it a lot. But it’s just not clear to this reader how you get there from those six verses.
On the other hand, most folks are able to find pretty much anything they want in just about any verse of the Bible. So why not look for something positive and uplifting? It sure beats Puddy’s salacious interpretations in which he eagerly looks forward to having a front row seat on Judgment Day and gets to gleefully watch as all us liberals are cast into the Lake of Fire.
You might also take a peek at Ecclesiastes. I think you would find something very supportive of your five tenants. It’s about the only book out of the whole mess that I can take seriously.
Oh, wait. Obviously, this one requires a different musical interpretation:
Puff, the magic dragon
lived by the sea…
Unkl,
puddles does have quite the fascination with that sort of thing, doesn’t he?
@10
You make my point exactly – one can find anything in the verses of the Bible to back up one’s particular world view. Also, one often has to willfully ignore inconvenient things there as well (Rich man meet eye of needle; death penalty lovers and warmongers, meet do not kill, etc).
It’s part and parcel of the illogic and irrationality of focusing on that particular cultural artifact, using it as a cudgel with which to beat your enemies – usually ultimately motivated by greed and/or fear.
Actually, I suspect Revelation was probably written by someone a lot like Puddy or Cyn. A very small, angry man who saw the world moving away from himself and his values. His theology just wasn’t panning out and he felt the need to lash out with his prediction of cataclysmic trauma as his “God” returned to set the world straight and wreck vengeance on those he didn’t like.
Sound familiar? Yep. It’s pretty much their favorite book of this collection of nonsense because it dwells so luridly on the blood, death and destruction that will descend on their enemies. Funny how you hear very little about the joys of their vision of heaven, but you get to hear plenty about the wrath of God. That’s what they want to hear about; a good action movie with a lot of carnage.
Not exactly my concept of an all knowing, all loving, all powerful creator of the universe.
@14
I think you may be right. It feels to me like a great loss has occurred somewhere in their past – when you try to talk to people like that – people who seem to smugly revel in both others’ misery and their own ignorance – something happened to stunt and cripple their sense of humanity, of generosity, of community – like you say, leading to the focus on retribution and violence and condemnation.
If one is pre-disposed to anger and hatred of those they don’t understand, a defining characteristic of the Christian Right, there is nothing quite a enjoyable as hating alongside God Almighty.
Folks like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson have all made a very good living tapping into that vein of emotion.
And yes, Lib, so true. They revel in their ignorance. Any information that contradicts their world view is the work of the Devil.
Uh huh…a third of the stars in the heavens are flung to the earth, and the narrator survives to tell the tale.
I’m having a hard time taking this seriously.
@16
I hear you, Witz.
There are so many threads on which to pull in trying to unravel what is wrong with that worldview.
-Hysterical embrace of violent authority – that being either a wrathful, jealous god or a theocratic, repressive government.
-Denial of others’ humanity and of our human commonality and commonality with all life (I think one of the most destructive parts of their worldview is that humans are somehow above/better than the rest of life, allowing exploitation/destruction without expectation of consequences)
-Denial of rational thought and science and facts. The old Darwin=Hitler=the Devil. It is impossible to productively engage with people who demand that you first play whack-a-mole with every bit of insane nonsense that they heard from Beck or Hannity or Robertson or Dobson or their preacher.
And so much more…
I want some of what they were smoking when they wrote that!
Naisbitt in one of his old Megatrends books repeats a point made more than a century ago by Arthur James Balfour: Liberal scientists and their amen corner promote much liberal science as a religion in which they have blind faith.
==========
Part of the leftist political catechism took a direct hit in the 30 August issue of the otherwise reliably liberal New Yorker. About 60 years too late and decades after it will do any good, the liberal establishment finally tells the inconvenient truth:
– (Ian Frazier, On the Prison Highway)
That’s Franklin Roosevelt’s Uncle Joe. Despite propaganda and lies from the New York Times that led FDR to grant recognition to the USSR in 1933, the truth was known and sometimes told about Stalin’s terror famine. A few years later the truth was known about Stalin’s show trials and concentration camps.
But even then progressive Vice President Henry Wallace toured Kolyma and called it good. So did radical Farley Mowat. Neither admitted that thousands of Americans who moved to Stalin’s socialist workers’ paradise in the 1930s disappeared into his gulag and never came out.
Our kids at public school are steeped and marinated in the sewage of Tailgunner Joe, the godfather of Bobby Kennedy’s first child. But they seem to be clueless about FDR’s marriage of convenience with Stalin.
Even now, leftists identify Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, as the greater threat to 20th-century American values. When Ellen Schrecker wrote Many Are the Crimes, she was writing about our Red “Scare,” not about reds.
And while admitting that there was an evil empire, most of the Old Left and much of the New Left said there was indeed an evil empire. It was us, not them.
Lib @18:
Love your “whack a mole” metaphor.
Sure enough, right on cue, the first mole pokes his head out @20.
@10 Here’s another take on “biblical marriage”…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....r_embedded
@21
Yup.
Straw man, anyone? Utter obfuscation? False dichotomy?
Point is…what, exactly?
Particular Democrats did certain things…and therefore plutonomy is good?
Holding ourselves to higher standards than we do Stalin… and this cause for authoritarian theocracy?
Huh?
Moreover, the seeming rejection of Joseph McCarthy is certainly out of step with the Right wing, who are embracing him more and more in the open.
Liberal scientists and their amen corner promote much liberal science as a religion in which they have blind faith.
I’ll take blind faith for $200, Alex.
I want some of what they were smoking when they wrote that!
I don’t. It’s as if the author was on some really bad blotter acid.
@24
That’s something I’ve seen more and more lately from the idiot right: science is just as much faith as belief in Sky Daddy.
I think it’s a variation on the obfuscation with untrue facts: forces you to argue against a false equivalence, and thereby the real point is obscured.
OTOH, they may be so unable to grasp the scientific method, AND so wedded to received knowledge and know-nothingism that the difference between faith and rational inquiry really is obscure.
And another visionary high on Amanita muscaria wrote:
In the years that follow the war Dhṛtarāṣṭra and his queen Gāndhārī [Gaan-DHAAR-ee], and Kuntī [Koon-tee], the mother of the Pāṇḍavas, lived a life of asceticism in a forest retreat and died with yogic calm in a forest fire. Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva and his always unruly clan slaughtered each other in a drunken brawl thirty-six years after the war, and Kṛṣṇa’s soul dissolved back into the Supreme God Viṣṇu (Kṛṣṇa had been born when a part of Nārāyaṇa-Viṣṇu took birth in the womb of Kṛṣṇa’s mother). When they learned of this, the Pāṇḍavas believed it time for them to leave this world too and they embarked upon the ‘Great Journey,’ which involved walking north toward the polar mountain, that is toward the heavenly worlds, until one’s body dropped dead. One by one Draupadī and the younger Pāṇḍavas died along the way until Yudhiṣṭhira was left alone with a dog that had followed him all the way. Yudhiṣṭhira made it to the gate of heaven and there refused the order to drive the dog back, at which point the dog was revealed to be an incarnate form of the God Dharma (also known as Yama, the Lord of the Dead, the God who was Yudhiṣṭhira’s actual, physical father), who was there to test the quality of Yudhiṣṭhira’s virtue before admitting him to heaven. Once in heaven Yudhiṣṭhira faced one final test of his virtue: He saw only the Dhārtarāṣṭras in heaven, and he was told that his brothers were in hell. He insisted on joining his brothers in hell, if that be the case. It was then revealed that they were really in heaven, that this illusion had been one final test for him.
“Authoritarian theocracy …” Liberal straw man, anyone?
A screeching echo of Julia Sweeney, anyone? NPR Julia, who claimed to hear the jackbooted approach of theocracy from George W. Bush, but who was/is strangely deaf to born-again Jimmy Carter or to the bleating of Bill Clinton who waved his big black Baptist Bible in the breeze every time he got caught molesting the hired help.
(Hope this helps you blind-faith liberal scientists get a grip on reality-based reality.)
– 1st and 4th lines of Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition, 1948
“Our kids at public school are steeped and marinated in the sewage of Tailgunner Joe, the godfather of Bobby Kennedy’s first child. But they seem to be clueless about FDR’s marriage of convenience with Stalin.”
“Even now, leftists identify Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, as the greater threat to 20th-century American values.”
I recall it all most vividly. When the sirens sounded on Wednesdays and we all hid under our school desks trying to put our heads up our asses, all I could think about was how glad I was that Tailgunner Joe had been finally shut up and how that other Joe might not be such a bad guy.
I’m sure I’ve told you before how you wound me when you bring in Bobby. Ouch!
Just asked my 10yo niece, she knew who FDR was, drew a blank on Stalin and Tailgunner Joe.
I’m curious where these public schools the righties are always carrying on about are. They sound nothing like the schools I attended , or that my nieces and nephews attend.
Il @28
The Right is quick to change the subject to just about anything else when it comes to a thoughtful discussion of the meaning of the horseshit found between the covers of their Holy Bible.
In reality, Joseph Stalin, educated in a church school and seminary, wasn’t much of a threat to the “American Way of Life”, whatever that was. He was a Soviet politician and while demonstrating remarkable cruelty in his oversight of those unfortunate enough to have lived in the Soviet Union during his reign, he didn’t have any direct effect on those living in the United States.
Tail-gunner Joe on the other hand, presided over a reign of terror right here in the United States through his misuse and abuse of power as a Senator. In the end though, he was exposed for the incompetent, lying drunk that he was.
Good luck in your efforts to somehow rehabilitate his legacy.
@28,
what faith-based initiatives did Clinton or Carter propose? I can’t remember any.
@33
Reign of terror? Really? Was that from all of the unfortunates dragged off in middle of the night, never to be heard from again? No? From the millions of citizens unceremoniously thrown into labor camps, there to be worked to death? Don’t think so… Well then perhaps it was from the deliberate policy fostered by the government to foment terror amongst the population? Hmmmm… Probably not that either… Well, I’m at a loss. What “reign of terror” was this that McCarthy implemented exactly?
@33
I don’t personally care what’s in the bible, so again your generalizations about right-wingers are just as valuable as generalizations usually are.
However, if you think Stalin was not a threat to the United States, then you need to go ask for your money back, as whatever school you attended, ripped you off. I’d be happy to debate just how non-threatening the Soviets were any time you’d like.
Re 33
The Right is quick to change the subject to just about anything else when it comes to a thoughtful discussion of the meaning of the horseshit found between the covers of their Holy Bible.
Yes, you’re right. What better way to start a thoughtful discussion than to immediately dismiss the entire faith as horsehit. Our fault, I’m sure.
What a complete ass you are.
Re 36
I choked on that statement about Stalin posing no threat to the US as well.
Re 33
This historical revisionism would be funny if it weren’t so sadly revealing of who and what you are. China is still nominally communist. You might be happier there than here. Just don’t do anything to get executed (talk badly about the wrong people, piss off the wrong business rival and so on) as your family will be billed for the service.
On second thought, how about having a little respect for this country? How about having a little gratitude for the remarkable place politically and socially that it is, rather than always twisting history to make us look poorly? I know, this stands in contradiction to liberal thinking, but you might be a bit heretical and try it for a second or two.
OK, I’ll bite, tell me what the threat Stalin posed to “our way of life>’
@35
Yes, reign of terror.
Resistance to political orthodoxy, and belief in freedom of though, resulted in the ruination of lives. (remarkable that you righties are always braying on about freedom, until someone wants to the freedom to express an opinion different from yours)
Now, was personal destruction at the hands of the anti-Communist witchhunts the same as a gulag? Obviously not. But aren’t we, as Americans, supposed to live by a higher standard? Shouldn’t we hold our expectations of our leaders’ behavior higher than that displayed by Stalin? Why do you hate America?
@40 Indeed, you beat me to it.
I would like to ask lost, and I-Burn, to precisely define the threat to the USA that Stalin posed. Not posturing about fear propaganda, but real, quantifiable threats. What were they exactly, and how was Stalin going to carry this out?
@39
Critical inspection of oneself, or one’s country, is a manifestation of loving it, of trying to do better, of trying to perfect it.
Why is the right so afraid of this? Why do you need to be braying on over and over about us being “the best country int he world” or “the greatest” this or that? We’re people, indeed in a special place, but people like those anywhere. And from special gifts (one being simply alive here and now) come special responsibilities – like always striving to do better – and that means understanding what we have not done well in the past.
I don’t seem able to follow the rantings of this new [?] troll, illiberal science. Am I just dense, or is his point completely obscured by the overgeneralized, ahistorical, and unsupportable pap that serves as “reasoning” for wingnuttia?
“On second thought, how about having a little respect for this country?”
Like you do when you go run off at the mouth about how this nation has been long ruined and how you you keep thinking about moving to Italy to get away from it? You mean that kind of respect?
Heh. I believe any right winger in this country is at least secretly a HUGE fan of Josef Stalin.
Just like Saddam Hussein was a big fan even though he persecuted the Iraqi communist party.
Why?
Stalin probably killed more communists than anyone in history outside of Mao.
His show trials in the 30’s purged all the old Bolsheviks from the revolution.
I bet right wingers ate that up!
Point is … what, exactly?
The point is … fumigation of smelly leftist orthodoxies and liberal pieties.
Such as … leftist liberal Leonard (it’s the) Pitts having a liberal sacred cow because soft white quasi-Republican Glenn Beck dared to speak and speak out on the SACRED 47TH ANNIVERSARY!!! of I have a dream.
Remind Mr. Pitts that civil rights were a project of northern Republicans during the Civil War.
Then tell him that Republicans, blacks, and black Republicans were lynched by Democrats after the Civil War.
Tell him that Republican Warren Harding’s anti-lynching bill was defeated by Congressional Democrats.
Remind Mr. Pitts that progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson resegregated the Executive Branch.
Tell him that liberal Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal paid rich white landowners to not grow food when one-third of America was going hungry and when black sharecroppers were forced off the land.
And that FDR refused to demand an anti-lynching bill.
And that the greatest violation of civil rights since 1865 was FDR’s forced removal of thousands of American citizens to concentration camps. Trail of tears, indeed.
Tell Mr. Pitts that Republican Eisenhower integrated our armed services. President Truman made the request, but Eisenhower made it happen.
Then Eisenhower integrated the District of Columbia and the Democrat stronghold of Little Rock, Arkansas.
Then Eisenhower pushed through the first civil rights bill in eighty years, and Senator Dirksen (as soft, white, and conservative as Glenn Beck) pushed through the 1964 civil rights bill for which Lyndon Johnson got the credit.
When Leonard Pitts is reminded of history, perhaps he’ll give the rest of us the credit we deserve.
RE 41
I don’t defend McArthy’s insane witch-hunts. I consider them a blot on our proud history, just as I consider the interning of Japanese citizens during WW2. But comparing them to Stalins murderous regime, or the real reign of terror is stupid. Sorry, but there simply isn’t another adequate word for it.
Finding yourself inconvenienced by limited social or career opportunities on the premise that you’re a ‘red’ isn’t at all comparable to finding yourself missing a head because you were born to a certain name. This seems blindingly obvious to me.
Should we have done better? Certainly. But the left constantly forgets the fear engendered by a possible nuclear armed opponent in the immediate wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. McArthy seized on this, and unfortunately the public couldn’t see past that fear. Which is still leagues different from Gulags or Cardinal Richelieu or midnight disappearances.
Re 42
Are you kidding!?
A nuclear Russia clouded my youth with the possibility of the literal end of the world. I remember fall-out shelters with posted signs directing one to them. I remember the background anxiety of not knowing when or if these might be needed. I don’t remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, well before my time, but this also indicates the threat an ideological and not entirely sane Russian government presented us.
How about the alliances we formed post WW2? In threatening Germany or Brittain or France Stalin threatened us by treaty obligations.
In creating client states within striking distance of the US, and in maintaining an enormous standing armed force Stalin forced us to respond in kind. This cost us untold national expense, but was entirely unavoidable given the consequences of Stalin feeling aggression was feasible.
Liberal, this line of argument is beneath your usual level. Seriously.
Re 43 and 45
I’m aware of our flaws. I’m aware that progressive ideology and policies are cancers striking at the very essence of what made this country great. This is critical thinking, and does not diminish my love of this nation one iota. But it’s also history. It isn’t revising history to create a narrative of an evil empire that is us. That’s the primary difference between left and right.
As for American esceptionalism, I believe in it. If I didn’t, if I felt another place did it better, I’d move there. If I felt, as the left does, that we do business wrong, politics wrong and culture wrong I’d move where I felt it was done right. But that’s just me.
47 – So classic of the HNMT to be so freaking obsessed with ancient history while recent events, (i.e. the unfathomable hypocrisy of right wingers and the politicians they vote for) are sucked into some kind of black memory hole.
Seems characteristic of early onset Alzheimers.
Yep, just like the Koch brothers are doing today.
Anything to keep from paying 3 or 4 more points income tax and maybe a bit higher on capital gains and dividends.
Pay off the Bush wars??? That’s the little people’s problem..
@47
I’m so tired of the right wingers claiming the legacy of Lincoln and the northern republicans. They are a species long extinct – the present conservative right drove them to extinction long ago. If you understood evolution you might understand how this came about – it was not intelligently designed. And yes, the post Civil War and early 20th century Democratic party, particularly from the south, was a bastion of racism.
Of course, that anachronism was corrected formally by the Nixon Southern Strategy that brought all the southern racists home to the Republican party (and sent Lincoln spinning in his grave).
So…as a Republican in 2010, please do not attempt to take credit for the Civil Rights Movement. You gave up any claim to that when your St. Ronnie announced his candidacy and love of “states’ rights” in Philadelphia Mississippi, desecrating the memories of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman.
@48…
You are one IN-sane motherfucker.
Get help.
Uhh.. Yeah he supported the legislation, twisted arms for it and eventually signed it.
That crusty old Texas Dem deserves little credit compared to the legendary R’s of old.
Rujax,
If you haven’t anything to say, let the grown-ups talk.
Re 51
Fair enough. So the left will stop holding this generation responsible for slavery, past treatment of the Indian tribes, and the internment of the Japanese or Mcarthyism come to that. Deal?
Re 51
“St. Ronnie announced his candidacy and love of “states’ rights” in Philadelphia Mississippi”
Ronald Reagan had the temerity to invoke the Constitution? How dare he!!!
Sorry, but the Constitution is a document which favors states over the federal government. Except for the limited and enumerated rights and duties granted federal authorities all other rights devolved to the states and the citizens of them.
I know, facts can be a bear when you’re a liberal.
@48
The assignment included avoiding fear
propaganda. Bomber gap, anyone? Missile gap?
Manufactured fear is not a bona fide threat.
“In creating client states within striking distance of the US, and in maintaining an enormous standing armed force Stalin forced us to respond in kind.”
What client states did Stalin create that were within striking distance of the US?
You guys display the ability to connect dots when it serves your purpose, not so much when it doesn’t.
Point is to hi-jack your smelly liberal Bible-bashing-bigotry threads. Not that any real Americans would want to wear your threads … except Steve’s. Bet Steve has cool kicks, too, unlike yours.
So tired of you liberal scientists and your pet Rabbits shitting on St. Ronnie and Philadelphia, Mississippi. Didn’t you get the memo? Mississippi in 1980 wasn’t the Mississippi of 1964, which was run by Democrats. Not after Mr. Hoover got through with it, or didn’t you see the movie?
“Conservative” J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI infiltrated the Democrat’s Klan after the Klan killed Chaney and Cornell’s own Goodman and Schwerner.
Infiltrated. Used the effective techniques of domestic spying that the left found intolerable when they were used by Hoover against rad leftist mad bombers such as Obama’s pal Bill Ayers.
But back to blind liberal faith: Took a few minutes out to check the current New Yorker. Article about the “fervent Christian” appointed by Obama to the NIH.
Of course other liberal scientists assert that the fervent Christian appointed by Obama is demented.
liberally
Back in a bit – off to kick the soccer ball around…
Bomber gap? Missile gap? Manufactured or exploited by … all together now … liberal Democrats.
Particularly the liberal Democrat who rode a fake missile gap into the White House in 1961, January, a month or two before his new defense secretary repudiated the trumped up missile gap.
To be fair and balanced, Ike’s U2 overflights proved both a missile gap and a bomber gap, both in our favor. Candidate Kennedy had the facts, but preferred to push the lies.
Typical.
You’re not a “grown up” you’re an imbecile. An imbecile with a severely warped view of the world, history and the bigger picture as it relates to power, purpose, economics, influence and justice.
…and it’s McCarthy…NOT McArthy you child.
You should let the “grown-ups” talk…you’re in over your head here.
@64…
…more vodka Max?
I was a teenage McCarthyite. Got semi-clean for Gene, who got his mind right and voted for Reagan.
Stanton Evans’ book about Joe McCarthy, Blacklisted by History, is useful. Joe was often right (correct) but he was often drunk. He tried belatedly to follow through on inconvenient truths from the 1940s: FDR’s and HST’s administrations were loaded with reds. Bentley and Chambers identified them. Hoover and Nixon knew who they were. HST, after Amerasia in 1945, apparently tried (Richard Gid Powers notes that the evidence is strong) to cover-up and stonewall. Harry was doing a modified limited hangout before Nixon made it cool.
Yes, some people were inconvenienced by Joe McCarthy. Some good people were needlessly inconvenienced. Nobody was inconvenienced to death by McCarthy as they were by Joe Stalin who had entirely too many useful American leftist idiots working for him.
=============
YLB: The 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed despite unreconstructed Dems such as Al Gore Sr … just ask rhp. Republican Dirksen got it through just as Senate Leader LBJ pushed through Ike’s 1957 civil rights bill (but only after LBJ stripped out enforcement mechanisms.)
About 1964, Malcolm X said you couldn’t trust liberals in general or LBJ in particular. With a conservative like Goldwater, said Malcolm, you knew where you stood.
Re 64
Congratulations Rujax! I didn’t realize you knew polysylabbic words existed. Now if you can learn what they mean you’ll be on your way, little buddy.
66 – Repeating yourself again..
How about something more recent like the latest breed of Quayle in AZ and his updated “family values” complete with rent-a-kid for the media shutterbugs?
Heh not to mention Quayle the younger’s curious ‘toob’ habits.
“I was a teenage McCarthyite.” I thank you for the remarkable restraint shown here. It must have been very difficult for you to have mentioned Clean Gene and not to have taken a swipe at my man Bobby.
“I didn’t realize you knew polysylabbic words existed.”
I’d touch on this but, for my part, I’ve never got off on shooting fish in a barrel.
Steve @ 71
When they make it that easy, it really does take all the fun out of smacking them down, doesn’t it?
re 71 and 72
Wow, if one mis-spelling gives you folks that much enjoyment…
All I can say is I’m jealous at how easily you’re entertained.
While noting, of course, that not one substantive objection to anything I’ve written has yet been registered. Of course, that’s pretty much par for the course here. Since no logical refuation is possible, some form of diversion from this fact is required. It never actually works at diverting attention from your woeful lack of response to anything, but it entertains you, so something’s gained.
Well, off to take the dogs for a run. Have a pleasant evening.
“Wow, if one mis-spelling gives you folks that much enjoyment…”
Nah, it was hardly worth a chuckle.
“While noting, of course, that not one substantive objection to anything I’ve written has yet been registered.”
heh- That one was kinda funny.
lost @ 73
It’s just that there is a beautiful irony at play in your criticizing Rujax for his use of the language while you misspell the critical term. C’mon, don’t you find that amusing?
“Since no logical refuation is possible, some form of diversion from this fact is required.”
If you believe in such certainty, you are far more hardened in your ideological convictions than I otherwise perceive you to be. Moreover, suggesting that logic applies to politics as currently practiced suggests considerable naivete on your part.
Re 75
I have to admit that much of the heat of my response was due to the unintentionally ironic and embarrassing error in spelling. Touche.
Well, leaving you folks to it, the far better half wants to go out to dinner.
I don’t know why Revelations is even in the Bible. It was written 90 years after Jesus dies by some hermit monk in a cave in Turkey. What do his ramblings have to do with Christianity?
Heck, it’s like I decided to write another chapter to Tolkien’s “Return of the King.” It may be interesting, but it would have no real standing in the literary world.
@73
37: no assertion, merely hurt feelings
38: ditto
39: Something about China being communist, and why don’t you (liberals) go there. Then something about gratitude for this country, andimplicitly how that means liberals should stop complaining
48: (Multipart!)Minimization of McCarthyism, because being “inconvenienced” isn’t the same as losing your head in the French Revolution.
Then some scary memories of duck-and-cover and how Stalin was going to kill you mom, or something.
Then, America is great and progressive ideology is a cancer upon us.
54: Jejune
55: Some false equivalence
56: OK, here’s something – you deliberately avoid the FACT the “states’ rights” is dogwhistle for southern institutional racism, and that St. Ronnie’s declaration of this, in the town where civil rights workers were MURDERED, was a naked pander to the former southern Democrats who had rightly joined the Republican party, further consolidating Nixon’s southern strategy.
Not unlike Beck’s not knowing the significance of Aug 28 at the Lincoln Memorial.
67: Schoolyard taunt.
73: Typical whine.
Did I miss something, or in 9 posts did you have only one thing to say of any substance, and it of course demonstrated either willful avoidance or criminal stupidity?
Steve, zotz and Peninsula folk (who I would hope would include an honorary membership to the Rabbit tomorrow),
I’m leaving work (yeah, yeah, I know us liberals don’t work, and surely those of us who are “self-employed” wouldn’t be working today). Due to dead laptop battery and failure of Amazon to deliver on time, will not have access to the Tubes tomorrow. So, if there is any change in our troll-bashing plans of the morrow, please call my cell.
Achoo!!!!!!!
Bless Me for I have sneezed.
I am that I am.
LS @ 78
Responding in kind,
37 through 39- Honest statement that calling one of the worlds largest religions horsehit is unlikely to start thoughtful discussions. Unrelated comment that anyone born prior to when Reagan finally put paid to the Soviet threat ought to recognize the very real threat the Soviets posed to the US. Final statement that liberals spend so much time complaining about every facet of American life that perhaps a)they’d be happier living elswhere and b) they should show some respect for the remarkable country they inhabit.
48- Multipart response to multiple postings. Some responses to idiotic equivocation of the French Revolution with the Red Scare of McCarthy, and some to the moronic notion that the Soviets never posed a real threat to the United States.
54- Jejune? Nice variation from peurile, at any rate. Though your comment was a bit devoid of interest of significance…
55- Apparent position taken by you; If I bring up the past it’s relevant. If you do it’s false equivalence. Are you female, by any chance, LS?
56 OK, here’s something. Any comment made by any Republican anywhere at any time is racist. Doesn’t matter if they say, Have a nice day, or How’s the weather. It’s racist. No policy position or casual comment is devoid of the imputation of racism. At least that’s how the hyper sensitive left sees it.
67 But a fun one, for me anyway.
73 Caught in an error, and overcompensating. Apparent whining, which really was an attempt to distract from an embarrassing and stupid mistake.
Off to bed. Have a nice evening. Oh damn, is that racist?
Re 81
Sorry, the response to 55 should have had the positions taken by you and I reversed. It’s late and I never was a wonderful typist.
@66,
Some were inconvenienced by that drunken lout tailgunner joe and like (small) minded lackeys like Nixon? IN-FUCKING-convenienced? My, is that how you describe guilt by association, unfounded accusations, hounding people out of their chosen profession, ruining their careers, subjecting them to public humiliation, reducing them to pariahs?
And your defense of these crimes is to invoke the ‘lesser evil’ doctrine and at the same time whine that your opponents are “moral relativists”?/
Have you no fucking shame? None whatsoever?
Lost in narcissism above: I’m aware that progressive ideology and policies are cancers striking at the very essence of what made this country great.
This reminds me of the common meme in wingnuttia about ‘precious bodily fluids’.
Don’t lose them. Sleep tight. Keep the .38 cocked a loaded under the pillow.
If you wingers’ justification for which ‘system’ is “better” is based solely on which has the higher body count….well, that’s pretty stupid. But if you wish, I’m game. Capitalism comes out on the short end of that stick by a mile.
Comparisons to the French Revolution or Stalins pattern for Russia weren’t mine. Since someone else chose to try to make McCarthy’s repugnant activities out as equivalent to those two things, some common sense seemed in order.
Yes, most were inconvenienced. They lost a great deal, but not their freedom nor their lives. And I repeat, the left takes this whole unpleasant episode in American history completely out of historical context. We knew the Russians were actively seeking nuclear weapons and a few short years before had seen the effects of such weapons. We had just fought one insane leader in Germany at tremendous cost of lives and treasure and looked like having to fight another in Russia.
So yes, the House Unamerican Activities Comittee was a horrible thing. But no, it wasn’t in any way equal to the kinds of things Stalin did.
Re 84
Bodily fluids? Cocked 38? What the hell? Ease up on the whiskey.
Re 85
I see you’ve been re-reading your much thumbed copy of Das Kapital. The fatal flaw of capitalism and all that. And yet, which system is still functioning? To which system is China slowly but surely working? The proof is in the puddy, Proud Ass.
Now I really am off to bed. Damm. Those racist comments are going to get me in trouble!
Anyone else notice there wasn’t a single line penned in defense of the Holy Scriptures or the Christian faith? Instead, they toss out a totally unrelated comparison of the political impact of Joseph Stalin vs Joe McCarthy as if to somehow trivialize the sins of the latter by contrast.
I think we can all agree the Bible is a target rich environment in a search for the absurd.
And I really don’t think anyone gives a rip whether someone else wants to worship one on the many Gods touted in the Bible, or the Great Pumpkin, or the orbiting teapot.
It’s when we’re then told by that someone else we must structure our society, or culture, or individual behavior, or tax code, or foreign policy because the Great Pumpkin said so, or someone thought that’s what one of the Gods of the Holy Bible told us to do that the rest of us object.
Blue:
Sorry if I hurt your feelings by referring to your Holy Scriptures as horseshit. I was trying to get you to defend them with something other than righteous indignation.
Perhaps next week we can have a discussion about those scriptures and their meaning instead of your obvious misunderstanding of recent history.
You didn’t hurt my feelings. It would be entirely irrational to be offended by the opinions of a person I’ve never met, nor are likely to meet, with whose worldview I may have a tiny fraction in common.
I was simply pointing out the fruitlessness of engaging in ‘thoughtful’ discussion with someone who dismisses his interlocutors point of view as horseshit as a starting point.
You seem an intelligent person, so far as a few posts on a blog can indicate. But what you or Liberal Scientist get out of this little exercise in mental masturbation escapes me. I won’t change your mind, you won’t change mine. This isn’t a discussion, it’s people talking past each other.
BTW, if you have school age kids don’t send them to whatever school you went to. They either taught you a lot of nonsense, or failed to teach you real history. One way or the other, they really failed you.
@87 LSIB
Only a self serving conservative would uses China’s success as an example f power of liberal de3mo0cracy.
China today is a fascist state. Fascism does NOT mean the racism and sheer evil of Hitler, it means the combination of nationalism and state capitalism .. the philosophy that drove Mussolini, Franco, Peron, and Allende.
In a fascists state, any freedom of speech is limited to serving the State. Private. capitalists become merged into state bureaucrats. The great bulk of China’s corporate giants are STATE owned. You really ought t realize that Hi8tloer was widely supported by American capitalists, including Henry Ford.
Religion does exist in China, but only those religions that conform to State rules. EG even the bishops of the Roman church are appointed by the party ..as are the Buddhist priests in Tibet!
You want something scary? Imagine Dung Zhao Ping, as the teacher of the world. Imagine a triumph of his system, celebrated as “capitalism’ by rich people made richer.
Uncle Witz
“Anyone else notice there wasn’t a single line penned in defense of the Holy Scriptures or the Christian faith?”
I noticed.
I am that I am.
RE 91
All of that I grant you. I wouldn’t care to live in China for a number of reasons. Food (what kind of country calls itself civilized without cheese for goodness sake, a constant bone of contention with my lovely Chinese wife) santitation, air and water quality and overpopulation are good starts. But the biggest reason is the government and lack of basic civil liberties.
But what liberals don’t understand is human motivations. It’s the fundamental flaw of your systems. If I have property to protect I’ll demand the civil liberties which alone can do so. If I have a business I’ll demand rational laws governing how I and my competitors behave. Greed isn’t a pretty motive, but it sure is predictable, unlike altruism or love of ones neighbors or social responsibility.
Conversely if you take away protections of private property, as we are doing here in the US since FDR, you slowly erode the other rights. Those with no personal stake in the game don’t play it with any real interest.
In short China is slowly moving to what we were and we are moving slowly to what the USSR was. From my point of view this isn’t a good trend.
Blue:
I’m still not hearing any defense of either your faith, or your holy scripture. You seem to stuck at the schoolyard taunt level and unwilling to engage in a discussion of the thread topic.
I realize Revelation is a challenging book to make any kind of sense out of, so perhaps you’d like to pick another book, chapter and verse and explain why it says what it does and what it means to you and your faith. I promise I’ll keep and open mind and my own taunts to a minimum.
As for my schooling, I will let my posts speak for that.
As for my children, I’ve encouraged them to be critical of all the knowledge they acquire and deeply suspicious of any sort of dogma. My advice seems to have served them well.
LSIB
@93.
“But what liberals don’t understand is human motivations. It’s the fundamental flaw of your systems. If I have property to protect I’ll demand the civil liberties which alone can do so. ”
Ohh??
But history show your fallacy. When the state and wealth come together, as they do in China, then “if (you) have a business you will demand (whatever laws are in you interest). Greed isn’t a pretty motive, but it sure is predictable. ”
The you go on to say that “Conversely if you take away protections of private property, as we are doing here in the US since FDR, you slowly erode the other rights.”
WHAT!!!!!
a. American’s personal wealth has grwon enormously since FDR.
b. The greatest erosion of rights, e.g. the right of free speech and right to an education, have come because of power of the wealthiest amongst us. Try opening your own hamburger stand, getting a first class education, of competing to be heard with Fox, ABC, Viacomm. “Those with no personal stake in the game don’t play it with any real interest.” True enough.
“In short China is slowly moving to what we were”
Again you are blond. China is terrified of moving toward what we were. We “were” a very egalitarian society where opportunity for all was guaranteed. China sees itslf as gm GROWN BIG … WITHUT THE UNIONS. a
“we are moving slowly to what the USSR was.”
Are you ill or merely poorly spoken? What about the USA looks remotely like the USSR?
Oh yeh, like them, we see oursleves with a need to gfovern other countries? Like them we insist on the scientific truth of our religion and want to spread it world wide.
Yep.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Ouch!
Guess Blue has lost his stomach for this discussion.
Witz
Unlike most of troll colleagues or the Becks, LSIB does seem to be sincere and intelligent.
Maybe he is addicted to Fax?
Re 94-96
I know these have two different authors, but for convenience-
No, not running away. But the mortgage needs paid, household chores done, kids and dogs and a wife need attention, so immediate responses aren’t always convenient.
Nor am I running away from the Bible or faith as topics. I just hadn’t seen them as such in this particular thread. Sure way back at the beginning LS and Uncle made some light comments on the subjective nature of Biblical interpretation. Then it veered off into politics. Since both faith and politics interest me, I had no objection.
Revelations, while part of the Bible, isn’t a particular area of study for me. In attempting to allow my faith in what I know as God, the Bible and the 2 millenia of obiter dicta on either to guide my life, attention to the next life hasn’t been a large concern of mine. I imagine, possibly erroneously, that if I take care of this life, the next will take care of itself.
Yes, there are areas of the Bible which confuse or trouble me. There are areas of virtually any thing I’ve studies or made part of my life which confuse or trouble me. This is called life.
Pascal and Kierkegaard came at the same problem of faith from opposite directions. Pascal posed this argument- We can’t know certainly if God exists or if we go on from this life to another. We can know that if God exists failing to acknowledge God will have bad results. However if God doesn’t exist and we believe that he does, the worst that happens is we are wrong. Along the way we perhaps live a better life than we might otherwise have done. Belief is a net gain whether God exists or not. Atheism has a 50% chance of very negative consequences. All this is a bit cold and logical for my tastes, and I’m sure philosophy majors would disagree with my short form Pascal, but this is one approach.
Kierkegaard came at the same problem from the mystic side, with a twist. His best form of this is in Fear and Trembling, but it recurs in pretty much everything he wrote. His problem was that he could intellectually believe as Pascal argued. But he couldn’t make the leap into wholehearted faith. This is more or less how I view my faith. Everything in me tells me that the wondrous thing that is life and the physical surroundings of it could not have come about by accident. But some of what my chosen faith proclaims present problems for me.
Does this make me question that faith? Not at all. If the nature of God is infinite any attempt to conceptualize that God is doomed to failure. This doesn’t mean I can’t try, and in the attempt come closer than had I not tried at all, though.
As I’m sure everyone not lost 2 paragraphs ago is entirely bored, I’ll end at that.
Re 97
Addictd to Fox you mean? Just checking in case I’m missing a reference.
Not really. In the past 3 years I may have seen 30 minutes of Fox broadcasting, almost all in the form of internet posted clips. I don’t own a television, and won’t buy one. Frankly I don’t know how I’d have time for one.
Maybe I just sincerely believe something you don’t about faith or politics. Maybe the things I’ve read inform my interpretation of these things differently than you.
Blue:
Perhaps I’m reading way too much between the lines here, particularly since I had a difficult time following your fourth paragraph. But it sounds like your “God” is found somewhere else besides the Holy Bible, and it may be something entirely different than either the angry papa of the Old Testament, or the enigma of an all knowing, all loving and all powerful creator of the universe who can’t seem create one that doesn’t involve an enormous amount of human suffering.
Personally, I dismissed Pascal’s wager as something he published to establish his Christian bona fides at time when not doing so could not only lead to professional ruin, but persecution, torture and death. He clearly had a mystical experience, but he hardly describes it as something compatible with any biblical writing.
Not sure what to make of Kierkegaard other than again to say his God was probably not the one referred to each Sunday morning in the pulpits of his time.
You say you look in wonder at the “thing that is life” and your physical surroundings, and know it could not have come about by accident. I would agree. I would say it came about by physical principles that we have slowly and surely come to understand over the last several hundred years. Principles that we continue to study and ponder.
If those principles are what you want to call God, then we are very much in agreement.
But make no mistake:
Those principles are found no where in the Holy Bible, and
Organized religion has done virtually everything in its power to resist their discovery.
Hence, my concern with both.
Thank you for taking the time to compose a thoughtful response to my earlier posts.
Blue @99:
NO TV!
Maybe you are a kindred spirit after all.
Blue
Lets start with your comment about Pascal.
All an atheist need do is bet that any God that does exist is a good god and that we, humans, can tell good from evil. If an afterlife were true, then the atheist who leads a moral life has enhanced her chances by not having made an unnecessary bet that God was, e.g. Jesus rather than Matriya or the unnamed God of the Jews.
Bottom line, it is foolhardy to bet that your view of God is the right one.
Moving on …
I do not see your logic on Revelations. If you feel free to edit some of the Roman Bible, then why not edit other parts as well?
Why believe that God arranged for his son to eb crucified?
There is a reason, but that reason is that you see a higher purpose, NOT in your bible and accept this story as way of asdhering to that good.
Of course, the follow on is that evangelism is always wrong.
One more …
on Fox,
if you do not get comments like these form Fox, where do they come from?
USA = USSR .. Beck?
as in O’Reilly’s war against Christmas?
Yep, that Barack Obama is prety stupid as compared to ???
More Beck.
Hannityland.
SJ,
@102
You’re right to a point. Pascals Wager doesn’t specify any deity. On the other hand, while the Pensees are very enjoyable writing, that doesn’t make it infallible.
@103
I don’t edit anything, or reject anything necessarily. What I do is accept that some things don’t seem relevant at the moment. I have books in my library I haven’t read. They are books considered important bought sometimes years ago. For some reason I don’t enjoy them up til now. I have other books that languished on shelves and underwent attempts to read them that failed. At some point the right experiences or other prior reading clicked though, and the full beauty or relevance of the writing came into focus. I see the Bible in that light.
@104
Fox is popular for a reason. Some of that is the same reason as that which makes people stare at car accidents. But some of it is that Fox represents a viewpoint that some agree with. Not having watched it, I don’t know the scope of what is said or represented. But to say that a conservative media outlet and a conservative leaning individual might come to the same conclusions about things isn’t particularly startling.
As for Beck and Hannity, I’ve heard a bit here and there on the radio from them. I can’t say I’m fond of either. Again, I can agree with the viewpoint and find the proponent irritating. I think Beck and Hannity (and their equivalents on the left) entertainers, not to be taken seriously.
“The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.”
She’s on the dole for 180 weeks? And Lost thinks 99 weeks of unemployment is bad. I can’t recall what came next. Did this welfare queen ever get a job?
Coming in late to all this – don’t know if anyone is listening.
I would like to echo the sentiment above – I find lostinaseaofblue to be far more thoughtful and earnest than either Puddy or Cynical or any of the assorted other transient trolls. The Puddy/Cyn continuum is truly disturbed, I think, and not only wrong, but they seem malevolent as well.
I appreciate lost’s appearances here – though I wonder why he shows up for this – I don’t know about anyone else, but I really have no interest in hanging out at RedState or wherever and jousting the wingnuts. Why are you drawn here, lost? Are you looking for something we’ve found? I’m earnestly asking this.
All that said, I find lost’s belief system interesting in its expressed wonderment at the universe, his apparent breadth of reading, and his oft expressed love and concern for his family – I appreciate and share all these things. What I find consternating, among others, is the insistence that wonderment and joy at appreciating and understanding the universe is somehow hollow without an acknowledgment of a creator or supreme being or a god. That just does not follow.
Echoing SJ above, I think thoughts like this are manifestly wrong as well:
Indeed – this is very simpleminded and actually isn’t playing the odds well, if that is how the postulated afterlife is going to work. I took away from my religious upbringing (Roman Catholic) that god was all loving and all knowing, infinite, all that. How could a compassionate incarnation of love condemn anyone to suffering for any reason, much less not believing, particularly if you’ve led a moral life, as SJ above argues?
We’re not going to argue our way to faith or rejection thereof. What are we doing here? I find the Biblical quotes interesting in their absurdity – and as a jumping off point for political discussions, including the often corrosive effect of religiosity on society. As noted by someone above, the false comparison between McCarthy and Stalin was ridiculous and a detour – which I would assert was the point – to get the argument off into the weeds. What I think is constructive here is the dissection of the influences on our society, our visions for how society should and could be, and how we strategize and implement how we change our society for the better.
Another observation above regarded the paucity of a joyful vision of the future to religion/christianity. I know some would contest this, but I believe it’s quite true,
LSIB
I think you are avoiding rather than answering questions.
105. lostinaseaofblue spews:
You raised Pascal, or his ghost, to support the idea that it is safer to believe in your God than not to. Your answer avoids the question of the risk you take if you have guessed wrong.
Sounds very .. well, situational. How is that any different from anyone else who takes a whimsical approach to morality? Sure, at some time you may find Revelations useful to you, but that is hardly a justification for accepting the Roman screed over all others.
This would be fine if you were saying reasonable things. Taking a point of view that the US is turning into Stalin’s USSR is not reasonable. Nor is it conservative, if by that you mean a philosophy. Taking a point of view that the US is turning into Stalin’s USSR is, however, part of the cant offered up by Beck. The same can be said of global warming denialism. There is nothing conservative about denying the views of science.
I never asked your taste in media types. However, I did point out the obvious ocnguence of your views to theirs.
Hunhhh? Who are “their equivalents?” Is there a media figure “on the left” who regularly lies and creates bizar conspiracy explanations?
This is part and parcel of a view that treats moderate, factual media as left. I assume you consider the NY Times, Nature Magazine, and the Economist as “left?” If not Fox. where do you get your “facts?”
@107 LS
Buddhism teaches that there are many tools one can use to achieve enlightenment/knowledge. This too; set may include fictions … such as creating a God and believing inn him as an exercise in developing a spiritual point of view.
As far as LSIB goes, I see nothing wrong with his using the Roman Bible that way. I justhope he keep the good word to himself.
The problem comes when Christians and Muslim, unlike Jews or Buddhists, insist their practice and beliefs are the exclusive pathway to salvation and that anyone who does nto accept this is going to be punished.
In a sense they are claiming that their religions are science. Anyone who does not recite the Shahada or accept the Apostle’s creed is doomed just as anyone who is not vaccinated or who smokes carcinogens, will get polio or cancer.
Problem is, we have done the experiments with religious truth. Religious fanaticism, especially evangelical fanaticism, leads to death and suffering.
Glad that LSOB is finally getting some good buzz from you Krugmaniacs and anti-Christian bigots. Of course there was once a day (29 October 2008, e.g.) in which the fan club was shrieking a different tune:
Looks like Puddy is back from his long weekend.
@110
I think you miss the point.
So much of LSB’s opinions, I think, are misinformed and echoing a certain malignant libertarianism. What tempers this for me is what appears to be a certain honesty and to a degree good intentions. I could be very wrong about this – I could be being fooled by earnest form hiding corrosive substance.
My criticisms of the content, however, stand. He’s usually got his head up his ass, I think.
SJ,
I get that for you all forms of God or none are equally valid. I confess I don’t understand it, but I can see it’s your belief, which you have every right to hold.
From that very gray lens you somehow interpret everything I write in very stark black and white, which I find interesting. But not objectionable. That too is your right.
But you miss the point. For me at present some aspects of the Bible or Christianity don’t resonate or even make much sense. This is far from saying that I discard them, reject them, or edit them. It’s far from the pick and choose theology of, for instance, Unitarianism or Christian Science. It says only that I probationally accept them until they do make sense. Or that I choose not to make of them stumbling blocks to my faith until I have the correct knowledge or experience to understand them.
For most Christians evangelism is equivalent to warning a man whose car is stuck on the tracks of an oncoming train. It isn’t so much an enthusiasm as an obligation under their faith. Sorry, but there it is. I can and do wince at some of the forms evangelism has taken. This disagreement doesn’t mean I don’t see why they do it. If this offends I can’t help you. Nor can anyone promise you a life free of offense caused by others beliefs.
Re 107
“I appreciate lost’s appearances here – though I wonder why he shows up for this –”
It’s an eccentricity of my personality. (That’s an irregular adjective, eccentric. When describing my oddities, they are eccentric. When describing those of someone else, they are just plain nuts. Ah well.)
I don’t enjoy echo chambers. I know what I think and mostly why. It’s interesting to me how others with whom I don’t agree think and why.
At any rate, if you’re hoping for a conversion to Atheist Progressivism, I’m going to have to dissappoint you. Sorry.
-Sent from my laptop, with my head firmly up my ass, I’m told.-
Damn straight.
@115
how many church windows did you break this weekend ruxaxoff? Did you set a new personal record?
Ooooooo…looky who’s back from shooting up mosques….
…gee why were there no reports of burning churches. Must be because…
…there WEREN’T any.
But you and facts don’t really get along do as we know!
@117
I didnt say burning…I said breaking windows – you know, your typical idea of fun on a saturday night.
LSIB
“For most Christians evangelism is equivalent to warning a man whose car is stuck on the tracks of an oncoming train. …If this offends I can’t help you. Nor can anyone promise you a life free of offense caused by others beliefs.”
Read your words.
By this standard we have no right to expect anyone to show respect for anyone else. Calling folks Nigger is OK by this standard? how about making fun of someone’s retarded child?
The very idea that Christianity REQUIRES intrusion into others beliefs is a violation of the respect we should feel for each other.
BTW, my POV is hardly a Manichean as you suggest. I certainly can respect anyone who believes in any deity as long as that belief does not imply hurting others. Any belief that you better call God jesus or I will need to protect you from the harm you are doing, is offensive.
Back at the Bible, why THIS book? Do you sincerely believe that it has more to offer than the Quran, the Torah, the biography of Gandhi??? Why do you believe that?
I wrote my my words, and apparently understand them better than your comments indicate you do.
Nowhere in the Constitution, the Bible, or in general common sense will anyone grant you a right to be free from offense. It would be impossible (attempts at nonsensical PC framing of terms and holidays being a prime example.)
It is not disrespectful to present ones religious point of view to others, ipso facto. It may take disrespectful forms. So if one person gives me the finger on the road for an imagined offense, all drivers are disrespectful, by your analysis? It simply doesn’t follow.
The sincere attempt to do what the actor regards as helping save anothers eternal soul is the same as calling someone nigger? The desire to help others is the same as mocking a retarded child? This isn’t just misunderstanding, this is intentional framing to distort my comments. The motives of a KKK member or the schoolyard bully are hardly the same as those of the Christian greatest commandment, to spread the word of Christ. Don’t want to hear it? I don’t want to hear the very real threat of Islamic terrrorism minimized by those too dense to see it. I don’t want to hear the cynical historical revisionism surrounding changing the beneficial effects of Christianity to malignant ones. But that’s the price of living in a free society.