Politics and Religion

[Faisul]

It bears repeating;

People can be morally just, according to our current (yes, current, people thought differently before: read the Old Testament) ideas about what consitutes moral righteousness, without having their morality informed by religion.

Claiming that ideas such as 'don't kill people' and 'don't steal' and 'don't screw your neighbour's wife' ultimately stems from religious scripture - even worse, claiming that Christian scripture is behind people being nice, well, trying to be nice, in our current age - is untrue. It confuses what is crucial for stable society to exist, which is so prosaic that it shouldn't need to be explained, with religion.

Religious beliefs are often shaped by the needs and the concerns of ancient societies that were completely different from our own. See for example the absolute mind-boggling severity of God in the Old Testament. This is mirrored nicely in the actions of certain Assyrian kings, who would flog entire populations to death for the slightest signs of disobedience. Considering that the Old Testament's origins can be traced to pre-Torah Jewish scripture, and that this again can be traced back to the time of the great nations of Mesopotamia, gives us an idea of how God, the ultimate expression of ruling authority, might have gained his mean streak in the Old Testament. I argue this comes from the idea of God being King of Kings - if King Bob the Asshole, Assyrian Overlord, was a bad motherfucker, you'll be sure to make God seem much badder and meaner than him to make King Bob reevaluate his policies.

The problem with this is that we don't live in a society where we'll be flogged for sticking out our tongues at authority anymore, so the message in the Old Testament - Obey Me, or Fucking Die Forever (OMFDF) is hopelessly outdated. So are other ideas which have already been mentioned. Throwing stones at people until they fucking die for having long hair or disobeying parents, for example. We don't live like batshit caveman nomad shepherds any more (please excuse the wild hyperbole, I want you to keep reading), so these ideas seem reprehensible to us. They no longer inform our morality because we figure that killing people for arbitrary reasons is unjust in our society. That is because killing people for what seemed like arbitrary reasons to us weren't arbitrary for the people who lived a long time ago. Or something. And it's only until the New Testament was written that they figured out the whole 'okay, maybe being nice to one another and not behaving like rabid crazy bastards is a better idea' thing probably because the same developments in people's ideas of what was morally right to do happened took place much in the same way as they have recently.

For us, killing someone else for bullshit reasons seems monstrous. That would be right, because killing people generally makes a society unstable. So does doing things that piss other people off, like stealing or fucking your neighbour's wife. It generates Bad Vibes. Allow me to indulge myself in oversimplification for a moment. Bad Vibes makes people do things that generate more Bad Vibes. The more Bad Vibes you generate, the more your society will start to look like a WWF afterparty gone wrong. That's why we have laws and the courts to back them up, to stop Bad Vibes from making our societies completely unmanageable and chaotic. Most people understand that Bad Vibes are Bad. They don't need a magical book or OMFDF to tell them that Bad Vibes are Bad. They know this because avoiding Bad Vibes is hard-coded into our DNA. That, and the social constructs of certain moral principles.

We are inherently social creatures and the societies we have created is powerful evidence of this. In ideal situations, we take care of each other, maintain order, and crack down hard on bad apples who, for whatever reason, destabilize that order. This idea doesn't come from Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism, or Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism or Hinduism or whatever else. These religions serve primarily as a more or less easily operated delivery vehicles for the ideas our social nature has cultivated. Now that we are lucky enough to live in societies that largely take care of us, allow us to live beyond the age of thirty, attain education and live without having to gut each other with a spear to get food, we're beginning to move beyond the petty and insane 'morality' of the past expressed in many of these religions.

Also, if you think for a second that when some person tells you that 'Amurica is a nation under God, goddurnit!' that they are right, you are hopelessly confused. Like Dras mentioned, America was founded, at least when the good ol' Founding Fathers were around to do so, on secular principles. That's because these people had to deal with the insanity of religious political hegemony back in Europe. That I have to repeat this because I fear a lot of people don't understand this is pretty incredible, to me. They founded America the way they did to stop religion fucking up the country. Sure, they may have been pretty hardcore Christians by our standards, but they had enough sense to draw a line between when appealing to God in making your decisions is okay (where you want to eat or park your car for instance) and when it's not (politics). The whole 'ARE NATION IS CHRISTIAN' idea is such an incredibly dishonest portrayal of the dazzling multitude of beliefs and demographics present in the US that it brings me pause when I try to consider how it's lasted this long.

[unoservix]

I mean, I hate to be inflammatory, but look at how much President Obama has distanced us from our Christian base as a nation.

...nnnnnnnnot at all?

oh wait you mean Jesus actually hated stuff like making health care more available to people, which is totally why he only healed people who could pay exorbitant fees beforehand. for serious guys it's in the Bible. second Corinthians. look it up.

at any rate the fact that the US government has for its entire existence been dominated by Christians of some stripe (generally the Protestant one) does not mean this country was "founded on Christian principles." 'cuz, y'know, it wasn't. the most prolific of the Founders, in fact, practiced a form of "Christianity" that i rather suspect you would just as soon call agnosticism if not outright atheism.

[Faisul]

Now, the issues we're used to hear about the most when it concerns conflicts between the hardcore of the religious groups and greater society are;

1) Gay rights

2) Abortion

3) Evolution

Pretty much the only ones who raise up on their rear legs and start bleating bloody murder about the above are the ones that can be classified as 'pretty damn religious.' For those of you who subscribe to the trains of thought these people champion, I would like to attempt to clarify some things.

1) Gay rights

The idea that homosexuals (or any spectrum of the LGBT community and others who differ from the heterosexual area of the sexual orientations scale in some way) are inherently perverse or disgusting in some way is plainly untrue. Whatever you've heard, homosexuals are not more likely to be pedophiles, you can't catch 'homosexualitis,' as it is not a disease to be cured, and trying to cure it as if it was a mental illness is damaging and cruel. Being gay doesn't come with a flamboyant lifestyle subscription where marching up and down streets while wearing leather bondage gear and talking loudly about steamy buttsex with a lisp is obligatory. Homosexuals are people, just like you and me, there is nothing inherently different to them other than the fact that they prefer the same sex in relationships. There are certain people who live up to the stereotype, but who cares anyway? It's just people, folks.

The whole gay marriage issue is another topic where religion quite clearly has overstepped its bounds when it comes to policy. The fact that it is now legal in certain states is a victory for rational thought and a testament to the fact that we're moving beyond basing our politics on religious dogma, but quite a few conservative politicians love to play off the fear and prejudices of others and are reinforcing the bigotry that has kept homosexuals as second class citizens for centuries. Some of you may be convinced by their arguments, maybe even to a point where I could start talking about indoctrination, but things are happening that will hopefully make the sort of ideas about gays that I mentioned above obsolete in a few decades, so you'd all better start to get comfortable with the thought of having married gay couples around. Which should be a damned natural thing to be anyway, but there you go. Republicans!

2) Abortion

I am goddamn sick and tired of harping on about this on the Internet so I'll make it short. There is a difference between an embryo and a fetus. The difference can be quite mind-bogglingly huge, too. Typically when abortions are carried out, the embryo consists of less cells overall than the brain of a fly. Less cells, than the brain of a fly. This stage of embryo is called a zygote, and the idea that this teeny little speck of cells houses an immortal soul which quakes with such awesome power that removing it is an affront to all things good in the world is ridiculous. Now, abortions that take place at 21 weeks gestation are quite rare, but they do happen, and in this case the embryo is clearly a fetus with human characteristics. However, it is not yet fully formed at this stage and removing it can hardly be called murder.

There are perfectly good reasons to terminate a pregnancy and they've all been mentioned before. Again, restricting abortion beyond reasonable limits is a hostile attack against the autonomy of women and is a case where religious dogma has snuck its grabby tentacles into governmental policy. Rape victims especially do not need the degredation of being shamed into keeping a child they didn't want and that is probably going to have a rough time growing up. Same for teenage pregnancies, fetuses with serious developmental disorders, et cetera. Reducing pregnant women, through placing religiously motivated laws on abortion, to little more than human incubators who cannot choose for themselves whether or not they want their bodies and their lives to be dominated by a little creature that grows in their belly, is an atrocity.

3) Evolution

This has been laid to rest by far more intelligent people than I over the past few years so this I'm not going to go into major depths on this. There is undeniable evidence, overwhelming and awesome in its scope, for evolution. Generally, creationists don't raise a stink about what is called microevolution (small changes over time within a species, which has been seen to happen in a laboratory), but what they absolutely cannot fucking stand for some reason is macroevolution (entire species evolving into another over a span of hundreds of thousands to millions of years). And while Intelligent Design is dead and buried, watch out, because you can be damn sure that creationist types are trying to sneak something similar into school curricula all over again right at this moment. Also, do yourself a favour and get the idea out of your head that a monkey gave birth to a human and that's how evolution works. It doesn't. Or that a tomato can turn into a watermelon or any other of the equally ridiculous claims the exceedingly zealous have made about the workings of evolution in order to ridicule it.

The evolution 'debate' is a classic case of religion versus science, and religious encroachment upon education. The people who raise a stink about it generally don't know much about science and have allowed themselves to be persuaded by religious dogma, and creationists are hell-bent on having a fairy tale version of actual biological history shoved into real education and presented as fact. This is dangerous. They actively misconstrue and misrepresent evolution to be some kind of laughable joke, or a sinister agenda by science to destroy religion, which is completely untrue and unfair. These kinds of misconceptions can be cleared up by educating yourselves on how evolution works and not just listening to the ramblings of the local evangelist mouthpiece. Fucking Wikipedia can do that for you, for Christ's sake. There's no excuse anymore.

[Robert Monroe]

Pffft, evolution isn't religion VS science.

It's "people who don't know shit about their religion" VS science.

OH NOES EVOLUTION DOES NOT OUTRIGHT CONTRADICT OR COMPLY WITH THE BIBLE IT MUST BE THE WORK OF EEEEVIL.

because it's not like a system where the adaptive and creative survive and the undeserving die out is an -intelligent- design or anything.

Oh wait.

Also btw guys the USA was not founded on Christian principles it was founded on pissed off British ones.

If you want to get absolutely technical about it there has yet to be a truly "Christian" nation to be founded on account of all nations being dickbutt assholes for all of history.

[unoservix]

the Bible contradicts the Bible so really, if you're going to go pounding your fist on the Bible demanding that we take the whole thing as a literal historical document, you've got bigger problems than evolution anyways

Edit: also, hilariously, considering the history of Christianity in both the West (via the Roman Catholic Church) and the East (via the Eastern Orthodox Church) one could quite easily say that meddling in temporal, worldly affairs and wielding vast power over temporal, worldly governments while deeply involving themselves in the temporal, worldly business of governance is a Christian principle, in which case the United States, founded as it was on a principle of separation between church and state, was founded on a distinctly anti-Christian principle

which is like super hardcore max hilarious

which leads to a bunch of Christians in the US telling themselves comforting lies like "putting 'In God We Trust' on our money makes us Christian" and "Thomas Jefferson wasn't really that important"

which is also hilarious because God tells you guys not to bear false witness

the hilarity just keeps growing

[Thu'um]

I am goddamn sick and tired of harping on about this on the Internet so I'll make it short. There is a difference between an embryo and a fetus. The difference can be quite mind-bogglingly huge, too. Typically when abortions are carried out, the embryo consists of less cells overall than the brain of a fly. Less cells, than the brain of a fly. This stage of embryo is called a zygote, and the idea that this teeny little speck of cells houses an immortal soul which quakes with such awesome power that removing it is an affront to all things good in the world is ridiculous. Now, abortions that take place at 21 weeks gestation are quite rare, but they do happen, and in this case the embryo is clearly a fetus with human characteristics. However, it is not yet fully formed at this stage and removing it can hardly be called murder.

There are perfectly good reasons to terminate a pregnancy and they've all been mentioned before. Again, restricting abortion beyond reasonable limits is a hostile attack against the autonomy of women and is a case where religious dogma has snuck its grabby tentacles into governmental policy. Rape victims especially do not need the degredation of being shamed into keeping a child they didn't want and that is probably going to have a rough time growing up. Same for teenage pregnancies, fetuses with serious developmental disorders, et cetera. Reducing pregnant women, through placing religiously motivated laws on abortion, to little more than human incubators who cannot choose for themselves whether or not they want their bodies and their lives to be dominated by a little creature that grows in their belly, is an atrocity.

i still do not agree i can't bring my self to find that moral. I understand your view point, but i don't share it. And its not like its opposed only by republican men, my mother is prolife. And to further that i have discused the matter of abortion with my non-christian friends who quite a few are prolife. Its not just a christian's oppionion. Its my oppinion on life and my deffention of life does begin with that one cell.

[Drasiana]

The overwhelming majority of anti-choice advocacy comes from a Christian base.

And honestly, AJC, I'd tell you that if you don't like abortions, don't get one, but not even that would work because you don't have a uterus and I don't dare suggest you force any future girlfriends to not go through with an abortion just because *you* don't like it, which is what this boils down to. Before a certain point in gestation, that tiny thing IS a part of the woman's body, so she has every right to do whatever she wants with it. It is not a baby at that point, it is a growth that might be a baby eventually.

Every time you jerk off, and every time a woman menstruates, there goes as much "life" as the tiny zygote that an abortion would be rid of.

Anyways, there IS an abortion topic for this, which despite you making a big stink about not wanting to talk about it on the first page, you continue to bring up in other topics. Weird.

[unoservix]

Every time you jerk off ... there goes as much "life" as the tiny zygote that an abortion would be rid of.

the average instance of spooging contains between 100 and 400 million sperm cells.

Hitler's Holocaust killed roughly 12 million people.

every time you jerk off, you are as evil as between 8.3 and 33.3 Hitlers.

that's almost forty Hitlers. almost as many four tens.

and that's terrible.

[Harlow]

Legal doesn't equal mandatory. You're not going to get chased around with a vacuum just because abortions are legal, as you're not going to drop off your studies and get addicted to pot just because it's legal, as you're not going to get dragged from your house to a gas chamber just because death penalty's legal (as long as you haven't murdered someone), as you're not going to get raped by huge gay motorcyclist man just because gay marriage is legal.

Just means it's a viable option for everyone permitted.

[Harlow]

Well, apparently Santorum's retiring from the race.

[OneUnder]

Well, apparently Santorum's retiring.

Retiring completely? I knew [THANK GOSH!] that he dropped out of the presidential race, but I wasn't aware he was retiring. In any case, his dropping out calls for celebration!

[Harlow]

Sorry, retiring from the pres race. Not really retiring retiring

[Faisul]

While that's pretty excellent news, from my understanding of how the race was going Santorum was never really going to win, so it's more like a strategic withdrawal to give the Democrats one less platform from which to say "See? SEE? Do you now see how far into the shitter the country has gone now that a misogynist homophobe bible-thumper is a presidential candidate?"

The absolute worst thing I think Santorum ever said was 'The reason for the financial crisis was the lack of a moral backbone in America' which implies that gays was behind it. That was fun, and the worst part was most Republican voters don't know any better and probably agreed wholesale. Just another feather in the cap for the Republican Shitheel Fun Club.

It's giving Gingrich a better chance at making it to the White House for sure. At least Gingrich doesn't make me want to smash something every time he says something.

[Harlow]

It's giving Gingrich a better chance at making it to the White House for sure. At least Gingrich doesn't make me want to smash something every time he says something.

No. I don't trust a man who Clinton'd. Twice. While his wives were sick. At least Clinton was clean before he reached the White House.

Either Paul or Romney (surely the choice) sound like the saner choices. Sure, they both have their cons, but at least there aren't as apparent.

[Faisul]

Either Paul or Romney (surely the choice) sound like the saner choices. Sure, they both have their cons, but at least there aren't as apparent.

Oh god are you insinuating that sanity has anything to do with what the Republican party chooses to do

oh dear

um

[jesseboyd7]

I noticed a big difference between Paul and Romney. I think these videos speak for themselves. With the time of both videos combined requires a snack for this one.

Romney:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQwrB1vu74c

Paul:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPWu97oPik

[unoservix]

hahahaha Ron Paul

Gingrich does not have any chance to the nomination, let alone the presidency. The GOP's rules for nominating candidates at the convention require that each candidate wins a plurality of delegates from at least five states in the primary. Gingrich has won two states and his campaign is so hard-up that his $500 check for filing fees to get onto the ballot in Utah bounced. Nobody is coming over to his side; the GOP establishment is coalescing around Romney, because it wants this whole circus over with so the Republicans can turn their attention to the general election. Santorum was Romney's main challenger and most formidable opponent, and now he's out of the race, so unless they catch Romney in bed with a black boy or something, he is virtually guaranteed the nomination. Thus, Gingrich is a nonentity, much like Ron Paul, although Gingrich has a little better claim to entityhood seeing as how he did actually win a couple of states and had a couple turns at the top of the Not-Romney Ferris Wheel.

So after Romney's likely loss in the general election, we will probably have another cycle of meaningless extremist self-destruction before the GOP either claws its way back to sanity or just up and disintegrates.