Religion and Politics

Hi, Bob,
I just finished Pinker’s book you referred to and thoroughly agree with your assessment of it. It’s a sane work about the social contributions of science and technology over the past few centuries.

Hi,
yes, I agree, but I accept one point from Petersen that it is one thing to ascertain these accomplishments, but it is another to control the rate of assimilation of ideas and not just push them as self-explanatory onto the public.

There is a need to accept both sides, the progressives who develop new ideas and the conservatives that protect values. There has to be an exchange between these two for the common good, just as politics and religion must speak to each other and approach a consense to the same goal.

Conservatives typically pride themselves on strength of will rather than strength of mind. You cannot argue with dogmatic people because faith is not predicated upon reason.

Then you’re a vanaprastha who must leave society. You cannot live within society and accept the benefits of that society without giving back in a symbiotic relationship or else you’re a leech or a pirate.

Sure, if you want to believe for instance that the earth is flat, more power to you, but keep your dogma out of the voting booth or else you’re affecting my life with your nonsense. If IQ tests were required to vote, there would be no such thing as a republican party.

Marriage itself is a religious concept and I can’t imagine why gays would want to marry.

Slavery is biblical. Servitude is the whole premise of the religion.

biblestudytools.com/topical … t-slavery/

It’s not Trump supporters, but conservatives.

That’s it really. If you are not talking about the same thing, there will be no understanding. To argue means “to present reasons for or against something“.

I’m not sure that Omar is willing to hand over household responsibilities to the next generation, take an advisory role, and gradually withdraw from the world, so he’s probably not a vanaprastha. As for a leech or pirate, I don’t think that fits either. He’s probably the opinion that the regulation and control that the state exerts is too much. The fault in his thinking is of course that they don’t have “their own damn money”, it is always ours.

That seems a bit harsh, but then again I’m a Brit living in Europe – what would I know. However, the more people who fight against the scientific method, the faster we’ll drift into the middle ages again. The amazing progress we have made is often forgotten, and the suffering that people went through in the past is underrated.

That isn’t quite true, because marriage is an interpersonal union that is recognized legally, socially (and religiously) granting the partners mutual conjugal rights and responsibilities.

The Bible is ambiguous in some places towards slavery, but Paul regards the freedom in Christ as larger than freedom from slave-owners and in the light of the second coming, it would be a useless conflict and contra-productive. Otherwise, slave-traders are named among the sinners.

Now there’s a statement! Trump supporter?

A vanaprastha means forest dweller and such were considered outlaws, but in the opposite sense from a criminal; he simply wishes to not be part of society. This sort of person paid no tax, but got no perks from society and lived by his own means in the forest.

To remain in society, but not not give back to society, is to be a pirate. That’s the opposite sense of the forest dweller because that sort of outlaw is a criminal, a thief.

Not harsh lol

Kennesaw, GA has a law mandating every head of household have a gun and ammo, yet only 1 murder in 10 years. What explains that? It’s because the people believe murder is wrong and it’s not open for discussion. They’re dogmatic, closed-minded, and there is no line of reasoning you could produce to change their minds. And they pride themselves for it. So even though they are armed to the teeth, there is no cognitive mechanism to allow murder (except in defense).

On the other hand, liberals believe the ends justify the means and such means includes murder because it can be rationalized and justified without dogmatic impediment.

Conservatives are dogmatic by nature which manifests into the delineation of the world into right and wrong, which is predicated on authority and held by faith.

The liberal creed is: no tolerance of intolerance, so they’re amoral by nature. Conservatives disagree and say we should be intolerant of certain things because: god says so.

Open-mindedness favors excellence on IQ tests while the arrogance required in dogmatism precludes learning. (ie If you already know, how can you learn?)

Ignorance is a virtue to conservatives since education is often seen as indoctrination antipodal to an innate “common sense” element bestowed seemingly exclusively on the grossly uneducated.

Noam Chomsky: Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history

Gays should fight to change the laws favoring marriage rather than fighting for the right to marry. Other than religious conviction, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to get married. It’s merely a contract disallowing someone from leaving, so it’s a contractual ball and chain. If you love someone, why would you leave? If you do not love someone, why have a contract forcing you to stay?

If someone wants to pledge their undying love with pomp and circumstance, then have a ceremony annually to do so, but without legally getting hitched.

It used to be that a woman couldn’t survive on her own, certainly not thrive, outside of prostitution and so it was required that a man vow to always care for her and a whole moral-obligation formed around the notion as a means of enforcement. Women do fine on their own nowadays, so marriage is antiquated.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zNdGyuFI08[/youtube]

Servitude is the whole idea. “Choose this day whom ye shall serve.” Joshua 24:14-15

Me? Lord no lol. I’m for Bernie, but would vote Trump over Biden. <— That statement will raise some eyebrows LOL

Essentially, a vote for Hoover in 1929 was a vote for social programs in 1933 because we needed a Hoover to exacerbate the recession into the Great Depression in order to get FDR. Had that not happened, we still may not have social programs, certainly not to the degree that we have them now. A vote for a centrist is a vote for mediocrity: suffering is bad, but not bad enough to fight for the change we really need. We need Trump to bring people to their knees in pain in order to usher in the next phase of social guarantees.

I would call your position libertarian not conservative.

Right

If the Bible is the inerrant Word of God as Christian Fundamentalists believe then slavery must be acceptable because of verses like
1 Timothy 6:1 “Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed.” and Titus 2:9 “Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back.”

The Bible literally condones slavery. If one doesn’t believe that it is inerrant one may cherry-pick at will …no problem.

Yes, I share your concern. Obviously, the Evangelical Trump supporters you are talking with don’t share your libertarian values. They are authoritarians who favor government by a strict father figure. And the Trump-Putin “bro-mance” is no accident. Trump s serving Putin’s interest when he verbally attacks NATO and the European Union. Trump is unfriendly toward the US’s allies and friendly toward strongman dictator types. He is re-aligning the US with fascist states against our liberal-democratic allies.

I agree, but not because of the verses.

The verses just mean: if you are a slave, be a good one. They’re not advocating for slavery, but apparently condoning it.

Neither Omar, the Evangelical Christian he was arguing with nor I stated that the Bible did more than condone slavery. But when the author of Colossians says in chapter 4 verse 1 Masters treat your slaves justly and fairly for you know that you also have a master in heaven, evokes a worldview in which slavery is not an aberration but rather an ontological fact. It follows that if someone were to oppose slavery they would be opposing the divine order of things. There’s no need to advocate for something that can’t be changed because it’s built into the structure of Being.

Slavery is not just and fair. To be admonished to treat slaves justly and fairly, completely sidesteps the point!

Well said! =D>

Slavery was necessary for a time though, right? Humans are animals and animals have been slaves until the machine replaced them.

Condoning something that has already happened and has led to prosperity of the nation is different from condoning ongoing acts of brutality.
That was why we chose Trump over Clointonk.*

(*bot avoidance)

Though this is about not establishing a state religion and also making sure anyone can practice their religion even if it is not the main one.

It is not saying that one’s religious or moral ideas will not affect legislation.

And of course everyone lets their belief system, including religious ideas if they have them, affect what they think should be legislated.

If Trump tried to enact that everyone will be Christian or Muslims cannot practice their religion - and he may very well do the latter - THEN he is merging church and state.

Marriages are run by the state, to various degrees in a myriad of ways. Anyone can go in the woods and have their shaman marry them, even with your horse. But if you want to get a marriage licence you are getting married by the state. And the states have regulations about age and at least implicitly species and the courts have to take seriously when marriage partners want to get divorced, etc.

It’s a state thing.

Me I think gays should get to get married. But I have no problem with people who disagree on whatever their grounds trying to influence legislation.

That’s what a democracy is. And they get to do that based on whatever drives them, including religion.

There seems to be some fundamental confusion about the separation of church and state which is not, by the way, a law, but kind of summing up of ideas in the constitution.

We all have the right to let our religious and belief system principles affect what we struggle to legislate and stop from being legislated.

Religious people do not have less right to struggle to make things the way they want because what they what they want comes from religious ideas.

We can have all the negative feelings we have because we think their ideas are backward, mean spirited, intrusive or whatever, if we have those reactions, but they are not cheating or breaking the constitution. Even the president. Though I am sure he has broken the constitution in other ways, just like Obama and Bush and…so on, who all pull all sorts of beyond the scope shit.

No, we could have managed without slaves. But it sure made life better in some ways for some people. It did allow for concentratoins of wealth in ways that would have been hard, at least without being more creative, without slaves.

If human bodies could do the work, then those bodies could have done the work without being slaves. What would have happened then is that they would have been in some sense employees or part of the community in community works. We might not have had pyramids, sure, but not because we didn’t have the labor, but rather because why the fuck would we want to build those fucking things for the bodies of rich assholes.

That is the point that needs to be made.

I would agree to a certain degree. If it is accepted that the USA is made up of varying cultures and religions, and people have the right to practice their own religion and cultural practices, then this should also be visible in legislation.

If legislation is for the common good, then it should be no problem making sure that this freedom is maintained. It could only be against the common good if one set of principles of one group overruled the principles of another by restrictive legislation. The exception is of course if the principles being questioned were contrary to the common good.

  1. But, again, a democracy allows for people to struggle to have legislation that restricts what some people class as simply a private issue and others see as a moral issue. 2) I don’t think the distinction is so clear…Drugs, showing off your breasts as a woman, the way you can punish your child, freedom of speech in court or with police -try using curse words in these contexts and see if your sense of cultural freedom is respected - or even, given todays form of capitalism, how one is allowed to behave in a work context or even in one’s private life as far as employers are concerned. Yes, one has the ‘freedom’ to look for work elsewhere.

What seems obviously not a cultural issue to one group may not to another.

And as, I would guess, a liberal, your concerns are the effects of restriction. To a conservative they are afraid of the effects of no restrictions, when it comes to some things. I see both. I don’t want corporations getting at children and I would restrict that - an issue that cuts across those lines. I wouldn’t want privitization of schools and then advertising in the schools and via, say, school i-pads and so on. I would restrict corporate freedom and radically. Hell, I would go much further and eliminate a lot of what passes for OK in tv and other marketing. We have the culture of capitalism and I know the corporations love their freedom, but fuck em. Oops. I mean, I am a willing to restrict it.

Here we are dealing with an issue where we are asking for the state to now sanction a same sex marriage. I think it would be better to get the state out of the marriage business, but given the situation, I am for gay marriages.

But I think it is a category error to raise the issue of separate of church and state in relation to people opposed to gay marriage. In fact, it is hypocrisy, given the actual intent of the exclusion and right to practice parts of the constitution.

Because what we are actually saying is ‘your position on this issue is coming from religion’ so you are per se wrong for wanting to affect legislation. My position is not based on a religion so I can struggle to have my values legislated.

jThat’s nto the postion you presented above. But note, you presented a position based on your sense of what American values are and should be. But that’s your take. I have a similar take, but I also think that it is very hard to track the effects of what seems personal or free and not hurting. I disagree with the religious conservatives on this one, however.

I agree, but this is the task of legislation. Nobody said it would be easy, but that is the challenge of the job and quite obviously why, despite the views of the 45th, politics is always a question of compromise. It isn’t just a case of morality or ethics, because that can be varied according to where I come from. It must also be clear to everybody entering the country with intentions to stay, that this is how it is, but it must also be clear to politicians that this is their task.

Unfortunately, vested interests seem to be played out more than is healthy. Democracy isn’t a weapon to undermine the difficult task of representative legislation, although some view it that way, but a way of getting a representation of varying views to the table. The fact that different parties represent different sides of the argument is one thing, but to totally underrepresent a minority is a failure if it has a far reaching effect on society – which obviously has happened many times.

Well, you can label me anyway you want but it won’t stick. It seems you have the same attitude as I do. Whenever you have the task of legislating a country as diverse as America is, the task is daunting. The freedom that was envisioned in the constitution clearly couldn’t imagine our times and what people would come up against. It has duly been misused to grant freedoms that have had dramatically adverse effects with all of the consequences.

I think the biggest problem is a lack of diversity amongst the political parties, which also has its dangers, obviously. But a two party system virtually represents a vote of “Yes” or “No” or “I don’t care”. And as long as the vested interests dominate the candidates agenda, nothing short of a revolution could change that. However, it seems to me that the 45th is doing his best to break it, but the perspectives that could follow are not particularly hopeful.

What I was trying to say is that marriage isn’t per se a religious issue. It can be, obviously, but it is more of a legal issue. It can be “any of the diverse forms of interpersonal union established in various parts of the world to form a familial bond that is recognized legally, religiously, or socially, granting the participating partners mutual conjugal rights and responsibilities“.

Perhaps I was unclear.

I don’t know about that. If we take any moment in a country’s history, it’s legislation is not a compromise or set of compromises but distinct demarcations. We can’t tell Rosa Park’s and her lawyers that segregation is a compromise between slavery and complete equality and this is politics. She will view it as purely wrong and not as a compromise, though at an earlier time she might have viewed it as an improvment.

And then before a compromise is reached there’s no reason not to go for what you think is right.

To compromise? I am not sure if that is their task, but compromise is certainly going to be a frequent reality of their work.

Sure. But I am not sure what I wrote that goes against this.

I’m not defending Trump, him being a complicated set of phenomena and issues, if there every was one. I was reacting to what seemed to me a blanket condemnation of people trying to bring about legislation that would be based on their religious principles. (and note: I am not saying you had this blanket condemnation. But my post that was reaction to other posts in the thread was reacting to this, so the issue carries forward since you are responding to my response. Gets tricky with the various in contexts. You do not seem to be saying this, but I am defending my response to other posts in that context.)

I agree about the 2 party system and don’t really see it as even two parties anymore. I think we have an oligarchy. (And oddly, I think the oligarchy was not really pleased with Trump, which doesn’t make me like him, but I find it tragically ironic, not ha ha ironic. He is not fundamentally a free trade guy. He more Ross Perotish, with added instabilities, though we never got to see Perot live out whatever his full range of instabilities might have been. But heck, they got him on line with their continued desire to destabilize Syria and menacing Putin, we’ll see if they get him to back off from messing with GATT and the new GATTs and future GATTs. It’s like the idiot brother got to be king and all the nobles and the rest of the family are trying to keep him from messing with their interests. With Bernie Sanders, they’d probably just have had him put down.)

The problem is that demarcations, which are a very important part of life, also tend to marginalize and fail to seek ways in which to include minorities. Demarcate a metaphorical square with a metaphorical circle, for example, and you have four areas that can cause you problems if you fail to find some method of inclusion. “Square” societies (which are in fact reality) have often seen themselves as “circles” (some ideal that doesn’t represent reality), and pushed groups outside of the margin.

The example you gave of Rosa Parks is an example of this. Rosa Parks and those like her were part of the “square” society (reality) but there were a lot of people who were convinced that they were “circles” (imagined). Overcoming segregation was an act of inclusion, which had to overcome the perception of the imagined homogeneous (white) society with the reality of a diverse, heterogeneous society which included people of colour. The same can be said of any group that people don’t want to be a part of society.

Of course, you have to change behaviour, but the best way is to promote a consensus within society for laws that you intend to legislate if it doesn’t already represent the views of a majority. Of course, you are sometimes going to have to say, “this is how it is going to be, no discussions.” However, if you don’t want to just exchange the group that was excluded with another group, you have to find ways to include them. You have to make sure that the constituents are going to follow if you want them to support your policy, and coercion is not the best way.

If it is part of their work, then it is their job. To me, it is obvious that the compromise will follow a plan to change things more completely for the common good, and the compromise may be one step. However, I am aware that the vested interests of politicians often don’t work that way. Which is why I wrote:

I didn’t intend to put you in that box, but mentioned Trump as the way it is (or they are trying to make it) at the present, but religious principles have to be translated into real political policies, which must represent the best for all (however it may be seen) and not just a one-to-one quote, for example, out of the Bible.

Trump is Instability! He has hidden and more obvious agendas that are very damaging for millions of people, which is quite normal for a narcissist, and should never have been put in this position. In some ways he acts like a Greek god, petty and vengeful, full of his own importance, with no vision of serving the public. He probably wishes he had the powers of the gods.

I don’t disagree. But there is an implicit disembodied ‘you’ in the above. The best way [for you] is to promote a consensus…

If we look at Rosa Parks and the movement around her, they opted to be rather rigid and did not look for a compromise, whatever that would have been. They tried to eliminate segregation, period. They might accept compromises along the way as realists. Of course on the side they are making moral arguments to achieve perhaps not consensus, but enough support.

My point being that there is nothing wrong, per se, with aiming for what one wants and not the compromise. One direct practical reason for this is that the other side will use your aiming directly for compromise against you in the negotiation. And while one may later accept compromises, these will be seen as temporary and this is not per se bad.

I mentioned the disembodied you as an issue because then it is as if we are talking about everyone. But we are individual yous and those particular yous need, often, to go in with a not compromised goal.

It seems to me their job is more complicated. To represent their constituants. To remove or minimize pernicious aspect of legislation, even if this means NOT compromising. If one of the common occurrances is compromise this does not make it THE JOB. Just as disagreeing with their opponents and even allies will be a part of their work, it is not THE JOB. And sometimes their role entails, includes a duty, to NOT compromise.

Are you willing to compromise on the inclusion of minorities? Like we include some of them or only in some ways? would you go to the table with the intent to find a middle ground or with the goal or including them, period? I understand that for practical reasons you might accept a temporary less than ideal inclusion, but your goal and what seems to what you would consider your responsibility would in the long run be inclusion, period.

You have a morality of inclusion and you struggle to make the world match that.
Others have different ones.
We can’t make our own personal shoulds metashoulds.

Your morality is X.
Mine is Y.

But mine is actually right because it does Z, which supercedes your morals.

It’s the same when the right says liberals have no values. That conservatives are the only ones with values. Mine are values, yours are not. So my values are the ones we must go with.

Same in the sense that it is trying to create a meta-position to deny the validity of the other person’s morals being truly morals.

Oh, you got your belief from a line in the Bible, that is not best for all, in my estimation, so it is invalid.

One can certainly argue that there are problems with determining morals through scripture and so on.

But this thread, it seemed to me, seemed to be implying that ‘their’ values should not be part of the process because they come from religion. That this is Sharia - but Sharia would be going against the principles of the constitution around exclusion and freedom to practice. While individuals, be they politicians or citizens just, having their morals based on religion does not go against the constitution.

And much of the law is about exclusion. This person is allowed to do this because of X. All others are not.