Theocracy Watch

[Brian Rucker]

President Bush told the Washington Times yesterday he doesn't "see how you can be president without a relationship with the Lord."

"I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit," Bush said.

"That's what distinguishes us from the Taliban. The greatest freedom we have or one of the greatest freedoms is the right to worship the way you see fit.

"On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord."

Bush has often said that he is a religious man who supports freedom of religion, but yesterday may be the first time he has so clearly suggested in his use of words that he harbors the feeling that these two principles are to some degree in conflict.
You don't use the "other hand" construction for two concepts that complement each other. And his suggestion that someone is not qualified to be president unless they are religious is sure to spark some further discussion.

There's another enigmatic quote from the same interview:

"I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious person," Bush said. "I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is."

From today's Froomkin White House Briefing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/administration/whbriefing/

[Ryan A]

Every single U.S. President has professed their christian faith.

What's the big deal this time around?

[Jakub]

Really?

Thomas Jefferson has? Do tell.

[Enidigm]

Every single U.S. President has professed their christian faith.

What's the big deal this time around?

Context, context, context.

[John Reynolds]

Every single U.S. President has professed their christian faith.

What's the big deal this time around?

Has any past president ever explicitly stated that you're not qualified for the position unless you share that faith? Therein lies the rub.

Honestly, what's the moron implying here? That unless you're a Christian you don't deserve the highest office of the land? Oh, and that you're just not as patriotic as other Christians? Please, read your Bible and tell me exactly where, chapter and verse, the Constitution can be found.

[BooTx]

Has any past president ever explicitly stated that you're not qualified for the position unless you share that faith? Therein lies the rub.

Okay, so he didn't even state that to begin with. How exactly did he state it, "explicitly"? Hehe...

[Gunmetal]

Has any past president ever explicitly stated that you're not qualified for the position unless you share that faith? Therein lies the rub.

Okay, so he didn't even state that to begin with. How exactly did he state it, "explicitly"? Hehe...
Huh?
"On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord."

[Angie Gallant]

Has any past president ever explicitly stated that you're not qualified for the position unless you share that faith? Therein lies the rub.

His daddy said that atheists are neither patriots nor citizens.

Sherman: What will you do to win the votes of the Americans who are atheists?

Bush: I guess I'm pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in god is important to me.

Sherman: Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?

Bush: No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Sherman (somewhat taken aback): Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?

Bush: Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists.

His campaign later backed this up as President Bush's official stance.

[BooTx]

Has any past president ever explicitly stated that you're not qualified for the position unless you share that faith? Therein lies the rub.

Okay, so he didn't even state that to begin with. How exactly did he state it, "explicitly"? Hehe...
Huh?
"On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord."

How is that anything like saying that you can't be qualified if you aren't a Christian?

[Euri]

Has any past president ever explicitly stated that you're not qualified for the position unless you share that faith? Therein lies the rub.

Okay, so he didn't even state that to begin with. How exactly did he state it, "explicitly"? Hehe...
Huh?
"On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord."

How is that anything like saying that you can't be qualified if you aren't a Christian?

I don't see how you can be a doctor without a degree.

You suck at language.

[Nick Walter]

Has any past president ever explicitly stated that you're not qualified for the position unless you share that faith? Therein lies the rub.

Okay, so he didn't even state that to begin with. How exactly did he state it, "explicitly"? Hehe...
Huh?
"On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord."

How is that anything like saying that you can't be qualified if you aren't a Christian?

I don't see how you can be a doctor without a degree.

You suck at language.

What a cuttingly insightful reply. Way to raise the tone of the debate.

I'm sure we all know Bush was referring to christian faith when he spoke of "relationship with the Lord" but before this thread blossoms into a post-wasting semantics argument, he didn't actually say that.

His statement was ambiguous, so it all comes down to interpretation. Perhaps he meant that he doesn't understand how anyone without belief in a higher power could withstand the rigors of campaigning, perhaps he meant that the American people would never elect an Atheist, perhaps he was just repeating what the voices in his head told him to say. We'll never know. It's an interesting statement, but hardly a declaration of theocratic principles.

[Brian Koontz]

How is that anything like saying that you can't be qualified if you aren't a Christian?

I hear there's medication out there for your condition, you know... for the *split hairs*.

[Moore]

Has any past president ever explicitly stated that you're not qualified for the position unless you share that faith? Therein lies the rub.

His daddy said that atheists are neither patriots nor citizens.

Sherman: What will you do to win the votes of the Americans who are atheists?

Bush: I guess I'm pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in god is important to me.

Sherman: Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?

Bush: No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Sherman (somewhat taken aback): Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?

Bush: Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists.

His campaign later backed this up as President Bush's official stance.


Thats real nice. Should I wear an x'ed out cross patch on my clothing? I wouldnt want anyone to think I'm a citizen or that I like my country. Do I still have to pay taxes for the overly elaborate government buildings and the stupid ass government xmas trees?

I guess fucking that hag-cunt can make you a bitter old fuck.

[Midnight Son]

Bush: No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Fuck you very much.

[RichardC]

"I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious person," Bush said. "I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is."

"Ah've never said that. Now ah shall..."

[Bren]

It's an interesting statement, but hardly a declaration of theocratic principles.

The guy says he, from his own perspective, doesn't see how someone could be president without a relationship with God. And you don't see that as a statement of theocratic principles? Granted, if only his own, but that's the core issue here. Faced with the man's own words -- and later denial! -- you still can't see it. I guess it depends on what your definition of the word "is" is.

"I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is."

The mind reels.

[John Reynolds]

The mind reels.

That's because it's not firmly rooted in Scripture. On your knees, heathen! :twisted:


P.S. Sorry, couldn't resist.

[Nick Walter]

It's an interesting statement, but hardly a declaration of theocratic principles.

The guy says he, from his own perspective, doesn't see how someone could be president without a relationship with God. And you don't see that as a statement of theocratic principles? Faced with the man's own words -- and later denial! -- you still can't see it. I guess it depends on what your definition of the word "is" is.

:roll:


"I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit," Bush said.


Oh yeah, that's theocracy. Sounds like he's about to deploy the army to make sure people go to the right churches on Sunday.

[Angie Gallant]

To me, that sounds a lot like "I have black friends but..."

In otherwords, a qualifer to try to deflect anger when you know you're about to say something offensive.

[Bren]

It's an interesting statement, but hardly a declaration of theocratic principles.

The guy says he, from his own perspective, doesn't see how someone could be president without a relationship with God. And you don't see that as a statement of theocratic principles? Faced with the man's own words -- and later denial! -- you still can't see it. I guess it depends on what your definition of the word "is" is.

:roll:

Right. Point, um, taken?

"I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit," Bush said.


Oh yeah, that's theocracy. Sounds like he's about to deploy the army to make sure people go to the right churches on Sunday.

Theocracy refers to a government run by officials who believe in divine guidance, not necessarily one that enforces religious worship.

[Euri]

What a cuttingly insightful reply. Way to raise the tone of the debate.

Your argument, stripped down bare, is:

"We are unable to know what anyone means when they say something, ever."

I can't raise the tone of the debate when there are people that are so far out of it that they refuse to accept that meaning can be drawn from words.

[John Reynolds]

I can't raise the tone of the debate when there are people that are so far out of it that they refuse to accept that meaning can be drawn from words.

Well, in all fairness Dubya has been known to use words to mean the exact opposite of their traditional definitions.

[Bren]

I can't raise the tone of the debate when there are people that are so far out of it that they refuse to accept that meaning can be drawn from words.

You gotta admit though, GWB is very good at saying things that can be construed to mean just about anything, and nothing at the same time. He's an incredible politician. And by incredible I mean "that cannot be believed; not to be credited; too extraordinary and improbable to admit of belief."

This definition drawn from KJV Bible Dictionary at http://av1611.com/kjbp/kjv-dictionary/incredible.html.

I'm all about the credible sources.

[Nick Walter]

What a cuttingly insightful reply. Way to raise the tone of the debate.

Your argument, stripped down bare, is:

"We are unable to know what anyone means when they say something, ever."

I can't raise the tone of the debate when there are people that are so far out of it that they refuse to accept that meaning can be drawn from words.

Fascinating. And you criticize others about their reading comprehension skills?

[John Reynolds]

Fascinating. And you criticize others about their reading comprehension skills?

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean with "fascinating"? Because I have no idea what you intended to convey with that word.

[Ryan A]

Theocracy refers to a government run by officials who believe in divine guidance, not necessarily one that enforces religious worship.

That's only what theocracy means when halfwit partisans use the term as an attack on anyone they disagree with who happens to be religious.

Here's the wikipedia definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocracy):

the governmental rulers are identical with the leaders of the dominant religion...unlike other forms of government a theocracy is unique in that the administrative hierarchy of government is identical with the administrative hierarchy of a religion. This distinguishes a theocracy from forms of governments which have a state religion or from traditional monarchies in which the head of state claims that his or her authority comes from God.

[Nick Walter]

Fascinating. And you criticize others about their reading comprehension skills?

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean with "fascinating"? Because I have no idea what you intended to convey with that word.

Okay, you got me. I was being deliberately vague, Bush style. :D

[Bren]

Theocracy refers to a government run by officials who believe in divine guidance, not necessarily one that enforces religious worship.

That's only what theocracy means when halfwit partisans use the term as an attack on anyone they disagree with who happens to be religious.

Here's the wikipedia definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocracy):

the governmental rulers are identical with the leaders of the dominant religion...unlike other forms of government a theocracy is unique in that the administrative hierarchy of government is identical with the administrative hierarchy of a religion. This distinguishes a theocracy from forms of governments which have a state religion or from traditional monarchies in which the head of state claims that his or her authority comes from God.

Clarity of expression and reading comprehension being what they are here on QT3, I have to ask, are you disagreeing with me? Because that snippet seems to support my statement.

Britanica: (http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article?tocId=9380561&query=theocracy):


Government by divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided.

In many theocracies, government leaders are members of the clergy, and the state's legal system is based on religious law. Theocratic rule was typical of early civilizations. The Enlightenment marked the end of theocracy in most Western countries. Contemporary examples of theocracies include Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Vatican. See also church and state; divine kingship.

[mouselock]

What a cuttingly insightful reply. Way to raise the tone of the debate.

I'm sure we all know Bush was referring to christian faith when he spoke of "relationship with the Lord" but before this thread blossoms into a post-wasting semantics argument, he didn't actually say that.

His statement was ambiguous, so it all comes down to interpretation.

And what's the cutoff IQ level you must be restricted to in order to infer, and truly believe the inference, that Bush might very well have meant "with the Lord Buddah", "with the Lord Allah", "with the Lord Satan", or any other lord than "the Lord God Almighty"?

[Nick Walter]

What a cuttingly insightful reply. Way to raise the tone of the debate.

I'm sure we all know Bush was referring to christian faith when he spoke of "relationship with the Lord" but before this thread blossoms into a post-wasting semantics argument, he didn't actually say that.

His statement was ambiguous, so it all comes down to interpretation.

And what's the cutoff IQ level you must be restricted to in order to infer, and truly believe the inference, that Bush might very well have meant "with the Lord Buddah", "with the Lord Allah", "with the Lord Satan", or any other lord than "the Lord God Almighty"?

I'm not following. I think Bush is obviously a christian and the only logical inference from his statment is that he mean "The Lord God Almighty" in the christian sense.

EDIT: Ahh, I think I see where I represented my position unclearly. I was attempting to curb the inevitable "He could have meant any Lord" reply from some anal retentive type looking to argue exact semantics. So I acknolweged that Bush didn't actually say which Lord, but I still think the only logical inference is that he meant God in the christian sense.

Still, saying he personally is a big believer in God is hardly news. Tons of presidents have been. That doesn't mean theocracy is on the horizon, as he very clearly prefaced his remark with the understanding that in his professional capacity as president has the obligation to defend anyone's right to worship or not worship.

[mouselock]

What a cuttingly insightful reply. Way to raise the tone of the debate.

I'm sure we all know Bush was referring to christian faith when he spoke of "relationship with the Lord" but before this thread blossoms into a post-wasting semantics argument, he didn't actually say that.

His statement was ambiguous, so it all comes down to interpretation.

And what's the cutoff IQ level you must be restricted to in order to infer, and truly believe the inference, that Bush might very well have meant "with the Lord Buddah", "with the Lord Allah", "with the Lord Satan", or any other lord than "the Lord God Almighty"?

I'm not following. I think Bush is obviously a christian and the only logical inference from his statment is that he mean "The Lord God Almighty" in the christian sense.

Then the statement isn't particularly ambiguous, at least not for any definition of the word ambiguous that I've ever seen used.

[Ryan A]

Here's the wikipedia definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocracy):

the governmental rulers are identical with the leaders of the dominant religion...unlike other forms of government a theocracy is unique in that the administrative hierarchy of government is identical with the administrative hierarchy of a religion. This distinguishes a theocracy from forms of governments which have a state religion or from traditional monarchies in which the head of state claims that his or her authority comes from God.

Clarity of expression and reading comprehension being what they are here on QT3, I have to ask, are you disagreeing with me? Because that snippet seems to support my statement.


Are you this dense in real life? Or is this a troll? Here: I added bold to the parts that refute your absurd claim that "theocracy refers to a government run by officials who believe in divine guidance."

You have to at least admit the use of the word "theocracy" is hyperbole. Or am I not being clear enough for you? Want to claim I have poor reading comprehension?

Dumbass.

[Brian Rucker]

“Some [of the older leaders] are fading,” Oldfield said, “but that’s because George W. Bush is head of the Christian right.”
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6276308/

Pat Robertson's resignation this month as president of the Christian Coalition confirmed the ascendance of a new leader of the religious right in America: George W. Bush.

For the first time since religious conservatives became a modern political movement, the president of the United States has become the movement's de facto leader -- a status even Ronald Reagan, though admired by religious conservatives, never earned. Christian publications, radio and television shower Bush with praise, while preachers from the pulpit treat his leadership as an act of providence. A procession of religious leaders who have met with him testify to his faith, while Web sites encourage people to fast and pray for the president.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19253-2001Dec23?language=printer

The problem here is folks seem to be assuming theocratic leaders come from religions to take over governments. Sometimes, perhaps, they come from governments, or at least political movements, to take over religions.

[Ryan A]

The problem here is folks seem to be assuming theocratic leaders come from religions to take over governments. Sometimes, perhaps, they come from governments, or at least political parties, to take over religions.

At least this is a reasonable argument. I think it's based on a fundamentally flawed premise, though.

The fact that so many right-wing christians love having GWB in the oval office says more about the political preferences of right-wing christians than it does about any religious leadership of GWB.

Pat Robertson was never in any way in charge of American christians or christianity. One thing that secular liberals forget about right-wing christianity is that, while it's easy to mischaracterize as some kind of monolithic threat to civil liberties, evangelical christianity in America is anything but unified or homogeneous.

The only form of christianity with any kind of actual leadership at the national level would be Catholicism... and the Catholic hierarchy---especially in America--- could hardly be said to have much sway over Catholic Americans.

[Bren]

Here's the wikipedia definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocracy):

the governmental rulers are identical with the leaders of the dominant religion...unlike other forms of government a theocracy is unique in that the administrative hierarchy of government is identical with the administrative hierarchy of a religion. This distinguishes a theocracy from forms of governments which have a state religion or from traditional monarchies in which the head of state claims that his or her authority comes from God.

Clarity of expression and reading comprehension being what they are here on QT3, I have to ask, are you disagreeing with me? Because that snippet seems to support my statement.


Are you this dense in real life? Or is this a troll? Here: I added bold to the parts that refute your absurd claim that "theocracy refers to a government run by officials who believe in divine guidance."

You have to at least admit the use of the word "theocracy" is hyperbole. Or am I not being clear enough for you? Want to claim I have poor reading comprehension?

Dumbass.

Absurd claim??? That absurd claim is supported by the Britanica definition, which I quoted, which you ignored.

AND

Merriam Webster (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=theocracy):
1 : government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided
2 : a state governed by a theocracy

AND

Dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=theocracy):

A government ruled by or subject to religious authority.
A state so governed.
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
n 1: a political unit governed by a deity (or by officials thought to be divinely guided)
2: the belief in government by divine guidance
Source: Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary

I assume you know the meaning of the word "or"?

Admittedly, there is some disagreement over what is exactly meant by a theocracy, but I'll take Brittanica and M-W over fucking wikipedia any day. One thing is certain, what you describe is more accurately described as ecclesiocracy.

Furthermore, the main point I was refuting is that theocracy means religious worship is enforced by government, which is the meaning I thought you might be disputing, and hence, agreeing with me. God for-fucking-bid!

So fuck you, shithead!

[Tim Partlett]

Responding to Ryan's lame trolling, Bren, does you no favours, especially when you are, even in my opinion, wrong. Saying that you feel you need to have a relationship with the Lord to be a president is not the same as admitting that you are the leader of a theocracy. If that were the case, then half the countries of the world would be theocracies, including Britain (Blair is a devoted Christian). Bush didn't say he was going to act upon it, or that he believed laws should be enacted ensuring that all future presidents have a faith in the Lord; it's just his personal opinion. If Clinton had said that he didn't see how you could be a president without a degree in Economics, would that mean that he was bent on creating a government where only Economics students could ever gain power?

[Bren]

It's an interesting discussion and mental exercise, evaluating GWB's leadership in terms of a theocracy. I don't believe it is, by definition, but I do believe he leads by "theocratic principle". And I believe only someone seriously deluding themselves would deny there are some interesting similarities there. So, in this sense, right, wrong, I could care less.

What I take serious issue with is someone accusing me of making absurd claims and calling me a dumbass in the framework of a trivial semantic and pedantic debate about the definition of a word. In that, I am not wrong. Nor is Ryan, I'll concede, despite him being a shithead, who merely subscribes exclusively to a single, more narrow definition.

[Brian Koontz]

:roll:

The issue is not that Bush is a Christian, or that he's a little bit of a Christian, or whatever.

One of the elements of Neocon machination is the presentation of Bush AS a Christian, as Premiere Christian, as a man with the right of God and the power of the American military.

The truth, to them and to Bush, doesn't matter. What matters is what is presented to the public.

Its all orchestrated. Bush plays around, implies Christians should be presidents, its ALL GOOD from the Neocon perspective. Meanwhile, you guys moronically argue about whether or not Christians should profess their faith in office, or whether Bush really means it that Christians should be president, or whatever.

You're being played. The only intelligent response is to reject the message, and stuff in back in Bush's face (or elsewhere). Not to DISCUSS it.

Take your Neocon orchestrations and shove them up your ass, Bush.

[Moore]

jack chick for president! I can see it now!

[Brian Rucker]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050120/ids_photos_ts/r3363830595.jpg

[Linoleum]

Meanwhile, Senator Clinton joins the theocratic conspiracy (http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/01/20/sen_clinton_urges_use_of_faith_based_initiatives?m ode=PF)!

[extarbags]

Meanwhile, Senator Clinton joins the theocratic conspiracy (http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/01/20/sen_clinton_urges_use_of_faith_based_initiatives?m ode=PF)!

I want every conservative here to remember that the next time you're about to talk about how monstrously liberal she is.

[Jason McCullough]

Oh yes, you're right, Lino. Letting religious organizations also use government money to implement specific social programs like housing assistance is *exactly the same* as the President saying he doesn't see how you can perform the job without being a member of his personal religion.

[shift6]

Oh yes, you're right, Lino. Letting religious organizations also use government money to implement specific social programs like housing assistance is *exactly the same* as the President saying he doesn't see how you can perform the job without being a member of his personal religion.
Which is exactly the same as what Bush actually said. Since you're being so precise and all.

[Jason McCullough]

Find a difference, go ahead.

[shift6]

Top of my head, "...without a relationship with the Lord" hardly means the same thing to Evangelical Protestants like GWB as it does to old school Roman Catholics or religious Jews. I don't think they'd agree that they are all part of "his personal religion". Is that difference enough or is the huge umbrella "Judeo-Christian" enough to mean the same as "his personal religion"?

[Jason McCullough]

I meant "christianity" by his religion. "I have no idea how you be president without being christian."

[Linoleum]

I meant "christianity" by his religion. "I have no idea how you be president without being christian."

Fine. Given an opportunity to ask Bush what he meant by that do you think the answer would be:

A) He doesn't think anyone who isn't a Christian can be president
B) He doesn't understand how he could do his job without his faith to draw on.

I vote B.

[Bren]

I meant "christianity" by his religion. "I have no idea how you be president without being christian."

Fine. Given an opportunity to ask Bush what he meant by that do you think the answer would be:

A) He doesn't think anyone who isn't a Christian can be president
B) He doesn't understand how he could do his job without his faith to draw on.

I vote B.

Depends who asks, I would say.

CNN/NYT etc: B
Robertson/FOX etc: A

[shift6]

I don't htink it's exactly breaking news that you, Jason, and others who are attempting to paint a picture they already believe would pick A.

[Bren]

I don't htink it's exactly breaking news that you, Jason, and others who are attempting to paint a picture they already believe would pick A.

Did you even make an effort to understand the point? Until you do, don't even claim to know what I believe.

What I believe is that Bush would say A some times, and B other times.

Clear?

[John Many Jars]

Look, I hate to be pedantic here, but "theocracy" actually means government by Malcolm Jamal-Warner from "The Cosby Show."

[Bren]

Look, I hate to be pedantic here, but "theocracy" actually means government by Malcolm Jamal-Warner from "The Cosby Show."

A Theo/Fat Albert ticket would kill.

[shift6]

Did you even make an effort to understand the point? Until you do, don't even claim to know what I believe.

What I believe is that Bush would say A some times, and B other times.

Clear?
I am truly chided.

[Jason McCullough]

I don't htink it's exactly breaking news that you, Jason, and others who are attempting to paint a picture they already believe would pick A.

Is B really any less stupid? I mean, imagine an atheist President (stop laughing, it could happen!) who's like "Boy, I don't see how any religious person could be President!"

[quatoria]

I genuinely admire the ability of certain people to look a situation square in the eye, examine it in great detail, and then, with perfect confidence and poise, state, "No, the President did not just say what he said."

[Brian Rucker]

National Religious Broadcasters convention featuring bombed out Israeli buses and Dobson's Christian rebel son playing ping-pong.

http://www.mediatransparency.com/stories/nrbconvention.html

[Nick Walter]

National Religious Broadcasters convention featuring bombed out Israeli buses and Dobson's Christian rebel son playing ping-pong.

http://www.mediatransparency.com/stories/nrbconvention.html

mediatransparency.com is so far left it isn't funny. Not exactly a strong citation.

[Brian Rucker]

Without a doubt it's not pretending to be "fair and balanced" which gives it some points for honesty off the bat and I don't see any articles that come off as particularly loony or rant-worthy. The article itself is a fairly good read and largely fits into my understanding of what these guys are about. But, absolutely, take it with a grain of salt. It's not as if we're talking about pillars of journalistic integrity like Fox News.

[Nick Walter]

Without a doubt it's not pretending to be "fair and balanced" which gives it some points for honesty off the bat and I don't see any articles that come off as particularly loony or rant-worthy. The article itself is a fairly good read and largely fits into my understanding of what these guys are about. But, absolutely, take it with a grain of salt. It's not as if we're talking about pillars of journalistic integrity like Fox News.

Points for honesty? C'mon Brian, that site is so slanted I'm surprised the story doesn't fall off the edge off internet. Let's just examine the article title:


As Christian broadcasting's leading lights gathered at the National Religious Broadcasters' convention in Anaheim, California, only power-mongering and profiteering could keep their contradictions from bubbling to the surface


That pretty much sets the tone and It only goes down hill from there. It's a very negative piece that just follows up accusation with accusation with no attempt to understand or explain why the far right christians feel the way they do. It's pure partisan hate slinging, nothing more.

[Brian Rucker]

It nails the hypocrisy and wierd paranoia of the religious right. Here are these guys making piles of money and broadcasting all over the world with this put-upon attitude of victimization that's hilarious and terrifying at the same time. The whole bit with the Israeli tourism ministry booth babe who seems pretty shocked and rattled at who she's asked to deal with paints a pretty grim, and accurate, picture of the whole bizarre hybridization of policy between the neocons and the religious right with Israelis just kinda stuck in the middle. What unwholesome allies.

[Nick Walter]

It nails the hypocrisy and wierd paranoia of the religious right. Here are these guys making piles of money and broadcasting all over the world with this put-upon attitude of victimization that's hilarious and terrifying at the same time. The whole bit with the Israeli tourism ministry booth babe who seems pretty shocked and rattled at who she's asked to deal with paints a pretty grim, and accurate, picture of the whole bizarre hybridization of policy between the neocons and the religious right with Israelis just kinda stuck in the middle. What unwholesome allies.

I'm truly sad you think that way, because villainizing a different viewpoint precludes accomodation. You (and the article) are absolutely correct that the religious right is feeling victimized and persecuted. The more they feel cornered the more they are going to fight like a (excuse the expression) cornered rat.

The way to peaceful progress isn't to press them further into the corner and make this a life or death fight, but that's what this article seems to be trying to accomplish.

[John Reynolds]

Nothing like a false sense of victimization to enable justifying all sorts of poor, selfish behavior.

[Nick Walter]

Nothing like a false sense of victimization to enable justifying all sorts of poor, selfish behavior.

Nothin like close-minded refusal to understand the other side's view to enable justifying all sorts of poor, selfish behavior.

[Derek Meister]

I can only really speak anecdotally through experience with some of the more overly religious relatives, but as long as the law doesn't comply strictly with their beliefs, they will continue to feel "victimized" and "persecuted".

They see any attempt to remove religion from the coutroom, for example, as a direct assault on their religion and claim christians are persecuted because of "godless politicians".

In light of how often the legalization of same-sex marriages is framed as an direct assault on the morals of the religious right, I can't help but believe anything less than a total adoption of their theocratic utopia will make them feel like their beliefs are under constant attack.

[Midnight Son]

Just how civil are atheists, humanists, or non-believers supposed to be? We have a large group of religious people who demonize other religions, non-believers, sexual orientations, and so on. If they would just quietly observe their religion without trying to force everyone else to fall in line with them there would be no need for people to defend themselves against them.

Is this really so hard to understand? Quit pushing your beliefs on everyone else! :roll:

[Nick Walter]

I can only really speak anecdotally through experience with some of the more overly religious relatives, but as long as the law doesn't comply strictly with their beliefs, they will continue to feel "victimized" and "persecuted".

They see any attempt to remove religion from the coutroom, for example, as a direct assault on their religion and claim christians are persecuted because of "godless politicians".

In light of how often the legalization of same-sex marriages is framed as an direct assault on the morals of the religious right, I can't help but believe anything less than a total adoption of their theocratic utopia will make them feel like their beliefs are under constant attack.

And that's just why they feel victimized, because there's a bunch of left wing folks who have concluded that the christian right is hopeless foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics that can't be reasoned with. Sure, there are some of those (on both sides) but by treating all right wing christians like that is just pushing them farther right and alienating them. They get this victimized/persecuted feeling going and that's the sort of sentiment that leads them to flood the polls and blindly vote right wing.

The way I see it, the leftists who keep demonizing christians are handing the republicans an easily manipulated fanatic voter block. All the republicans need to do is work "values" or "Jesus" into speeches to pocket a sizeable bump in votes.

I'm only going off anecdotal evidence from what I see in my very christian-right family but that's how it seems to me.

[MikeSofaer]

I think Christianity has victimhood firmly at its idealogical center. Between that guy on the wooden thing and the whole system of saints and martyrs, moral value is given to people who suffer for the cause, so people involved in the cause see themselves as suffering for it because that's what makes a good Christian.

[Brian Rucker]

Nick, why be surprised at the unhappy reaction of people to those who regard them as little more than apostates to be converted at best or servants of the devil at worst?

Most folks just want to be left alone and to do what they want, within reason. Crazy notions like liberty and the pursuit of happiness are part and parcel of our culture. And here come these raving lunatics who think invisible people tell them to force their values on everyone else. Yeah, when I see these guys on C-Span 2 at some conference singing the praises of rapture and apocalypse as parts of some kind of political agenda, I'm less than accepting. That said, I don't want to burn down a church or tell them to shut up. I'm not telling them how to live their lives. But they come into my library, my music store, my game shop or my government and start trying to pull some thought control bullshit - I'll push back and I'll push back as hard as I can.

[Jason McCullough]

Interestingly, the last time I had The Religion Discussion (tm) with my parents the one thing that accidentally led us to a happy consensus was me saying "well, it's a free country."

[SolomonGrundy]

I juat can't help but think in 1000 years teachers are going to be saying" they had this president that was hearing voices and they re-elected him"

[Nick Walter]

Nick, why be surprised at the unhappy reaction of people to those who regard them as little more than apostates to be converted at best or servants of the devil at worst?

Most folks just want to be left alone and to do what they want, within reason. Crazy notions like liberty and the pursuit of happiness are part and parcel of our culture. And here come these raving lunatics who think invisible people tell them to force their values on everyone else. Yeah, when I see these guys on C-Span 2 at some conference singing the praises of rapture and apocalypse as parts of some kind of political agenda, I'm less than accepting. That said, I don't want to burn down a church or tell them to shut up. I'm not telling them how to live their lives. But they come into my library, my music store, my game shop or my government and start trying to pull some thought control bullshit - I'll push back and I'll push back as hard as I can.

You do realize that you sound exactly like a racist? If I didn't know you were talking about christians I could easily construe that paragraph to have come from an angry white southern gentleman decrying civil rights in the 60's. I'm not saying you are a racist Brian, but the fact that you are using their same rhetoric should set off some alarm bells.

[Brian Rucker]

It wasn't agnostics that used the bible to justify slavery or segregation. In fact, it was largely white Baptists wasn't it? The same Baptists who defected from the Democratic party when it endorsed civil rights and joined the Republicans. Quite a colorful Christian history these fundies have.

[Linoleum]

I juat can't help but think in 1000 years teachers are going to be saying" they had this president that was hearing voices and they re-elected him"

If you maintain that attitude about religious people in general, be prepared to be alienated from around 92-93% of the world population for the foreseeable future. For your average religious person, watching discussion on this board would be akin to your average homosexual man or woman watching discussion on a fundie board of ranting against the worst examples of gay pride parades. :roll:

[Nick Walter]

It wasn't agnostics that used the bible to justify slavery or segregation. In fact, it was largely white Baptists wasn't it? The same Baptists who defected from the Democratic party when it endorsed civil rights and joined the Republicans. Quite a colorful Christian history these fundies have.

I must say I'm frankly amazed. I pointed out that you were using inflammatory racist-style rhetoric and you responded with inflammatory racist-style rhetoric. I've come to the sad conclusion that you are just as vile a fundamentalist as the christians you demonize.

[Brian Rucker]

Funny thing is, you don't surprise me at all. Being inable to make a distinction between race, which is just a fact of nature, and religious fundamentalism, which is an elective decision - just seems par for the course. If someone seems nutty and holds positions which are not rationally defensible I don't feel particularly bad calling them on it. I wouldn't likely feel compelled to call a handicapped person a retard but someone who electively drools on his own shirt is another story.

[Jason McCullough]

Complaining about imposition of religious preferences as law is racist?

[shift6]

In fairness, Nick made very clear that he was talking about racist-style rhetoric and "sound[ing] like a racist", and he explicitly said "I'm not saying you are a racist Brian".

Anyways, Brian, saying that Baptists had slaves and extrapolating it to all Christian history is pretty bad. In fact, I'm pretty sure (I have no footnote for this) that slavery pre-dates both Baptists and the Christian church itself. The Catholic Church sponsored the Inquisition, why not use that to decry all Christian history?

[Brian Rucker]

Did I decry Christian history or did I question how Christian the Southern Baptists are based on their history? They're the lynchpin of the politically oriented religious right which wants to tell us how to run the country in a 'Christian' fashion so I'm considering who they've been and what they've actually done in the past.

[Lizard_King]

Religious acceptance is just as important as racial acceptance. To distinguish between them on the basis that one of them is elective is to be practically ignorant of the role religion (in some form or another) has played in human affairs.
That said, seeking to appease religious zealots is no-win proposition. In every argument where religion is a fixture, it has to be made plain that their battlefield is a cultural and moral one, not a political or legal one. There are plenty of valid arguments that are trivialized in the eyes of the antireligious simply because of the refusal of their proponents to accept it as an element in the debate rather than the beginning and the end of it. Embracing the American obsession with victimization is a dead end; just look how well it has worked for the left.
I've had to work with many an extremely conservative religious type, and they are just as easily differentiated into reasonable factions and irrational ones. Quite often, they only end up in bed together because of the inflexibility of their opponents...it's the politically-minded atheist's duty to their beliefs to engage them and discover where they stand, but that will only get you so far. Ultimately, it is up to them (just as it is with the modern American left) whether they will continue to be smeared by their own crowd of idiots in the name of political expedience.

[Andrew Mayer]

Religious acceptance is just as important as racial acceptance. To distinguish between them on the basis that one of them is elective is to be practically ignorant of the role religion (in some form or another) has played in human affairs.

That's nonsense. One's chimeric and the other isn't. Greeks remain, but the greek gods live on mainly episodes of Star Trek and Hercules.

Argue the points, but bringing willful ignorance to the argument doesn't help.

That said, seeking to appease religious zealots is no-win proposition. In every argument where religion is a fixture, it has to be made plain that their battlefield is a cultural and moral one, not a political or legal one.

I'm confused? To whom and for whom?

There are plenty of valid arguments that are trivialized in the eyes of the antireligious

"The Antireligious"? You're kidding right? Other then fringe lunatics do you really believe their is a large organized group who's goal it is to persecute the religious? Would that be the 10% of Americans that don't believe in angels and/or UFOs?


I've had to work with many an extremely conservative religious type, and they are just as easily differentiated into reasonable factions and irrational ones. Quite often, they only end up in bed together because of the inflexibility of their opponents...

At it's core belief is simply a filter by which people categorize and assign instantaneous qualitative values to their experiences. (Sex! Bad!) Trying to challenge that directly is a losing battle for anyone, if for no other reason that a believer has invested a great deal of their life and thought into creating a reality in which their mythology is "true", fending off both real and philosophical attacks to a system that tends to be full of cracks.

The thought of having spent a great deal of their life in denial is only valuable if they then throw in with equal fervor to the other side, so that their knowledge is still a useful tool. That's fairly rare.

I know very few individuals who have managed to tear down their own belief system for the safe of an improved life experience. FYI, when you make fun of Alan Moore for practicing Magick, you should be aware that doing exactly that one of the fundamental processes he's talking about.

it's the politically-minded atheist's duty to their beliefs to engage them and discover where they stand, but that will only get you so far.

Where will it get you?

[Nick Walter]

That's nonsense. One's chimeric and the other isn't. Greeks remain, but the greek gods live on mainly episodes of Star Trek and Hercules.


That's certainly your opinion, but you must realize you are in for nothing but strife if you try to use that as a basis for negotation or communications to those with differing opinions. I suspect you are just trolling.






"The Antireligious"? You're kidding right? Other then fringe lunatics do you really believe their is a large organized group who's goal it is to persecute the religious? Would that be the 10% of Americans that don't believe in angels and/or UFOs?


Large group, yes. Organized group, no. When the general sentiment of a large enough group is against another group, persecution can happen spontaneously with no need for central planning. I seriously doubt the south ever had a negro lynching central planning committee.


At it's core belief is simply a filter by which people categorize and assign instantaneous qualitative values to their experiences. (Sex! Bad!) Trying to challenge that directly is a losing battle for anyone, if for no other reason that a believer has invested a great deal of their life and thought into creating a reality in which their mythology is "true", fending off both real and philosophical attacks to a system that tends to be full of cracks.


I think you've oversimplified that. I also think it's irrelevant. Getting people to abandon their beliefs isn't the goal. It's important to realize that there is a HUGE middle ground between persecuting christians and getting them to abandon their beliefs. There is a lot of room for cooperation and accomodation.

[Andrew Mayer]

That's nonsense. One's chimeric and the other isn't. Greeks remain, but the greek gods live on mainly episodes of Star Trek and Hercules.


That's certainly your opinion, but you must realize you are in for nothing but strife if you try to use that as a basis for negotation or communications to those with differing opinions. I suspect you are just trolling.

So, you want to deny the obvious for the sake of expediency... and
I'm trolling.

I'm not saying make it the basis of your argument, I'm saying it's important to be aware of certain things.




Large group, yes. Organized group, no. When the general sentiment of a large enough group is against another group, persecution can happen spontaneously with no need for central planning. I seriously doubt the south ever had a negro lynching central planning committee.

You have heard of the KKK, right?


I think you've oversimplified that.

Think what you like. I'll pay attention to what gets me the results that improve my life.

I also think it's irrelevant. Getting people to abandon their beliefs isn't the goal. It's important to realize that there is a HUGE middle ground between persecuting christians and getting them to abandon their beliefs. There is a lot of room for cooperation and accomodation.

But that's the basis of the fear that people have when you discuss religion with them. Differnces of opinion get stuck because those who base their arguments on faith must defend them or lose faith.

I'd argue that much of the success of the Christian religion is due to the fact that the stakes are so high. It's all or nothing, heaven or hell.

[shift6]

Did I decry Christian history or did I question how Christian the Southern Baptists are based on their history? They're the lynchpin of the politically oriented religious right which wants to tell us how to run the country in a 'Christian' fashion so I'm considering who they've been and what they've actually done in the past.
Well I based my reply on this bit:
"It wasn't agnostics that used the bible to justify slavery or segregation. In fact, it was largely white Baptists wasn't it?" and "Quite a colorful Christian history these fundies have."

So my apologies if I extended that further than you intended it. Thanks for not just being an asshole and just saying that I am dishonest, though.

[Brian Rucker]

For more than 900 other Christians from across the US, the draw at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church last month was a national conference aimed at "reclaiming America for Christ." The monument stood as a potent symbol of their hopes for changing the course of the nation.

"We have God-sized problems in our country, and only God can solve them," Richard Land, a prominent leader of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), told the group.

An energetic pastor who built Coral Ridge into a 10,000-member megachurch with far-reaching radio and TV audiences, the Rev. Dr. Kennedy regularly calls the US a Christian nation that should be governed by Christians. He has created a Center for Christian Statesmanship in Washington that seeks to evangelize members of Congress and their staffs, and to counsel conservative Christian officeholders.

Some critics suggest these views reflect far-right Presbyterian thinking, some of which extends to the realm of theocracy, the belief that God - or His representatives - should govern the state.

Frederick Carlson, author of "Eternal Hostility: the Struggle between Theocracy and Democracy," says that if Kennedy is not a theocrat, "he is certainly a dominionist," one who supports taking over and dominating the political process.

Kennedy is not in the theocratic camp, says John Aman, Coral Ridge spokesman. He does believe that "Christians should not sequester themselves inside their stained-glass ghettoes, but seek to be 'salt and light' - apply biblical moral truth and the Gospel - to every area of society."

It's apparent that those who've traveled here from 40 states are eager to do just that. Many of them say they are most motivated by signs of moral decline in America, concern for their children's future, and what they see as an effort to keep God and religious speech out of public life.

"The country is getting further away from Christian values, and we're being stifled," says Debbie Mochle-Young, of Santa Monica, Calif. "Other nationalities are coming to live here and say, 'We want our beliefs,' but they don't let you have yours." Nathan Lepper, an Air Force retiree active in politics in Florida, says he has "a personal passion to help America turn back to its moral and ethical bases."

Some are already involved in their communities - in antiabortion actions, in trying to prevent removal of feeding tubes from Terri Schiavo, or in efforts to oppose same-sex marriage by defining marriage as only between a man and a woman.

Gabriel Carpenter, from Dryden, N.Y., works at a local crisis pregnancy center and is a coordinator for the now-required sexual abstinence program in New York public schools. He and his wife, Penelope, say they hope to "learn more about how to share America's Christian heritage with others."

Christianity and patriotism are interwoven throughout the gathering, from Christian and American flags marched into the sanctuary, to red, white, and blue banners festooning the church complex, to a rousing "patriotic concert." Several speakers emphasize the idea that America's founders were largely Christian and that their intent was to establish a biblically based nation. (No mention is made of other influences on the Founding Fathers, such as Englightenment thinkers or issues of freedom of conscience.)

David Barton, a leading advocate for emphasizing Christianity in US history, deftly selects quotes from letters and historical documents to link major historical figures such as George Washington to a Christian vision, and to suggest that the courts and scholars in the last century have deliberately undermined the original intent of the Founding Fathers.

Critics, including historians and the Baptist Joint Committee, challenge the accuracy of some of Mr. Barton's work, including what he calls "the myth of separation of church and state."

In "Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America," religious historian Randall Balmer of Columbia University writes that a "contrived mythology about America's Christian origins" has been a factor in the reentry of evangelicals into political life, helping sustain the conservative swing in American politics. Barton and others say they are recapturing truths hidden behind a secularist version of history, while critics say they are producing revisionist history that cherry-picks facts and ignores historical evidence.

But Barton is clearly a favorite speaker, with a theme buttressing the identity and purpose of those eager to reform the country. And there's plenty for them to do. Coral Ridge's Center for Reclaiming America is building a grass-roots alliance around five issues: the sanctity of life, religious liberty, pornography, the "homosexual agenda," and creation vs. evolution.

The Center aims to increase its 500,000-strong "e-mail army" to 1 million, and to encourage Christians to run for office. It has plans for 12 regional offices and activists in all 435 US House districts. And a new lobbying arm in Washington will target judicial nominations and the battle over marriage.

"If they don't vote our way, we'll change their view one way or another," executive director Gary Cass tells the group. As a California pastor, Dr. Cass spearheaded efforts to close abortion clinics and recruit Christians to seek positions on local school boards. "We're going to take back what we lost in the last half of the 20th century," he adds.

"Taking back" is a major theme - taking back the schools, the media, the courts.

It's time to "take back the portals of power," and particularly those of commerce, because "commerce controls all the gates - to government, the courts, and so on," says businessman Michael Pink in a workshop. Recounting his own business success based on in-depth Bible study, Mr. Pink says he's now urging wealthy Christian businessmen to start using their earnings to purchase such prizes as ABC and NBC.

Interspersed between worshipful singing, prominent activist leaders tout recent successes. Alan Sears of the Alliance Defense Fund, who has led the charge in the states against same-sex marriage, talks of victories in Ohio and California and the phalanx of 800 lawyers now trained for the fight across the US. Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association highlights growing impact on the entertainment industry, from spurring FCC regulatory actions against broadcast indecency to causing major companies to pull their ads from TV programs.
http://csmonitor.com/2005/0316/p16s01-lire.htm

[Brian Rucker]

The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay
Frank Rich

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/arts/27Rich.html?incamp=article_popular_3

The religio-hucksterism surrounding the Schiavo case makes DeMille's Hollywood crusades look like amateur night. This circus is the latest and most egregious in a series of cultural shocks that have followed Election Day 2004, when a fateful exit poll question on "moral values" ignited a take-no-prisoners political grab by moral zealots. During the commercial interruptions on "The Ten Commandments" last weekend, viewers could surf over to the cable news networks and find a Bible-thumping show as only Washington could conceive it. Congress was floating such scenarios as staging a meeting in Ms. Schiavo's hospital room or, alternatively, subpoenaing her, her husband and her doctors to a hearing in Washington. All in the name of faith.

[John Reynolds]

You know, I'm a Christian (Protestant) and a 20-year Republican and that's a great article Rich has written.

[Brian Rucker]

Many say that the Schiavo episode is splitting the Republican party; others say is it splitting Democrats, too; others say it is dividing America. But I think something more fundamental is happening:

The religious right is separating itself from the rest of America. The theocrats may have finally gone too far too often.

They have been aided and abetted --- but ultimately undermined -- by a media that bought their PR and presented the loud voices of a few as the voice of the nation marching to the right and up to the altar. But the overdose of overdoing it that we're seeing on TV these last few weeks may just be the catalyst that causes a backlash, that reminds us that we are a secular nation of churchgoers and that we value separation of church and state over either church or state: That is our mainstream.

In the case of Terri Schiavo, we have heard angry, even frightening rhetoric from the religious right: people in Florida and in Congress accusing judges of murdering Schiavo; the Schindlers and their advocates, many of them ministers, turning on even their allies (even on Jeb Bush if he doesn't do enough to satisfy them, if he doesn't do the impossible); online advocates saying that the laws and the courts should be damned; and conservatives throwing over their political philosphy opposing federalism and government interference in service of their religous philosophy.

It's not just Schiavo.
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2005_03_27.html#009347

[Dirt]

We live in a Theocracy where the King of the Gods is Pluto.

[Jakub]

I juat can't help but think in 1000 years teachers are going to be saying" they had this president that was hearing voices and they re-elected him"
Bush D'Arc!

[Brian Rucker]

NYT's Krugman

Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself.
One thing that's going on is a climate of fear for those who try to enforce laws that religious extremists oppose. Randall Terry, a spokesman for Terri Schiavo's parents, hasn't killed anyone, but one of his former close associates in the anti-abortion movement is serving time for murdering a doctor. George Greer, the judge in the Schiavo case, needs armed bodyguards.
The closest parallel I can think of to current American politics is Israel. There was a time, not that long ago, when moderate Israelis downplayed the rise of religious extremists. But no more: extremists have already killed one prime minister, and everyone realizes that Ariel Sharon is at risk.

America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/opinion/29krugman.html?hp

[Brian Rucker]

Shakespeare's Sister elaborates:

Any criticism of the increasingly voracious appetite of the religious right for power within and over the government is denounced as religious intolerance, irrespective of the source of the criticism; even other Christians, moderates and liberals alike, are held in contempt by their conservative counterparts, dismissed and vilified as “false” Christians—a denouncement the media is strangely willing to embrace as it fans the flames of this culture war, conjuring elaborate stories of Christmas-haters out of the thinnest of air, and inevitably juxtaposing the godly conservative Christians and the heartless, bah humbug secularists. If one only existed in the false reality of television news, one would never know there were plenty of Christians who respect the public sphere, and the non-Christians with whom they share it. So it becomes a Christian versus non-Christian (or, if you’re watching Fox, anti-Christian) argument, a specious and likely deliberate misconstruing of reality; two sides indeed exist, but they are comprised of those who have respect for the public sphere and everyone who travels in it, and those who have no respect for anything but satiating their ravenous hunger for control.


"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture," he said.
Though such a comment seems, well, fairly amusing, the truth is—it’s quite unnerving. They don’t need intellect; they’ve got faith. They don’t need education; they’ve got the Word of God. Intelligence and education can be challenged. Faith and the very word of God Himself, however, are untrumpable.

Or so we allow them to be, resisting categorical denunciations of such manifest lunacy, because that’s just what they believe is still an acceptable excuse for good Christians, no matter how unChristlike and indefensible their behavior. But is it really acceptable that these alleged supporters of the nebulously-named “culture of life” have murder on their minds because they aren’t getting what they demand? How far are they willing to go…if we aren’t willing to stop them?

These people deserve to be regarded with the same disdain we reserve for the other dregs and bottom-feeders who endlessly scrabble around in the muck, yowling sanctimoniously about how right they are and eating each other alive—the white supremacists, the neo-Nazis, Ralph Nader. They don’t deserve a place at the table of ideas at which the national debate is commenced. They don’t deserve to have one of their members substitute on news shows. They don’t deserve legitimacy in any way.
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2005/03/no-legitimacy-no-surrender.html

[Nick Walter]

Just out of curiosity, how many pages of discussion-free link-and-run are you shooting for here Brian?

[Brian Rucker]

Oh, I think 5:1 content-filled link to pointless inquiry is a good ratio. I'm playing it by ear though.

[Nick Walter]

Oh, I think 5:1 content-filled link to pointless inquiry is a good ratio. I'm playing it by ear though.

Content filled? Brian, you are posting shit comparing christians to nazis and you don't hear any little warning bells ringing? Hell, even if your prejudice against christians is too extreme for you to realize how much of a loon you sound like, at least an internet savvy fellow like yourself should realize you just invoked Godwin's law . . . in a discussion with yourself.

[Brian Rucker]

I dunno, the previous author claims to be a Christian herself who reviles these far right nutcases. And in addition to comparing them to neo-nazi's in terms of self-righteous indignation completely detached from any need to prove the value of their views she also compares them to Ralph Nader. So it's not Christians I'm after. It's loony toon fanatics and folks who're too shy to call 'em on it. Secularists aren't the ones shooting people and setting bombs off at clinics.

[VegasRobb]

You can invoke Godwin by quoting someone?

[Brian Rucker]

Danforth asks: What happened to my party?

Conservative bloggers aren't the only Republicans who think their party has gone too far in the race to "save" Terri Schiavo. John Danforth, the former Missouri senator who was, until January, George W. Bush's United Nations ambassador, says the GOP has been transformed into the "political arm of conservative Christians."

"The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active," Danforth writes in an op-ed essay in today's New York Times. "It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement."

It's not just the Republicans' intervention in the Schiavo case that's bothering Danforth. It's a series of initiatives, including the Republicans' support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and their opposition to stem cell research. "Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond," Danforth writes. "But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party."

Danforth is an Episcopal minister who presided at Ronald Reagan's funeral and knelt in prayer and listened to "Onward Christian Soldiers" with Clarence Thomas during the justice's contentious confirmation hearings, but he has never been a favorite of the religious right. As the Washington Post noted in a 2004 profile, Danforth "voted against abortion rights but shied away from a leadership role in the movement." As a senator, he opposed school prayer, opposed the death penalty, and was what his former chief of staff called "an extremely aggressive advocate of the separation of church and state."

Still, Bush considered Danforth as a vice presidential candidate and then turned to him to represent the United States in the United Nations after John Negroponte left for Iraq last year. For such a prominent Republican with such a long relationship with the Bush family to speak out on the GOP's mind-meld with the religious right -- in the New York Times, no less -- has got to sting.

Danforth writes: "During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.

"But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.

"The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots."
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html

Full editorial:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/opinion/30danforth.html?

[Dirt]

Isn't Shakespeare's Sister a pop band of the 90's?

[quatoria]

If the amount of link to commentary in Brian's mega-collation threads bothers you, why not add some commentary, get a discussion started?

[shift6]

It's loony toon fanatics and folks who're too shy to call 'em on it. Secularists aren't the ones shooting people and setting bombs off at clinics.
A tangential point, but didn't it turn out to be just like three hard core guys who were going around bombing clinics or something? When was the last one anyways? We haven't had some good Doctor murdering in awhile. Sanctity of life doesn't apply to you if you get an MD, ya know.

[John Reynolds]

A tangential point, but didn't it turn out to be just like three hard core guys who were going around bombing clinics or something? When was the last one anyways? We haven't had some good Doctor murdering in awhile. Sanctity of life doesn't apply to you if you get an MD, ya know.

Yes, because there's something very sacred about hooking a person up to a machine that keeps their body artificially going through the motions of life while lying comatose in a bed for year after year after year. Sign me up!

Let's hope they get a judge this time, because the rule of law doesn't apply once you're a conservative Republican appointed to a federal seat.

[antlers]

Content filled? Brian, you are posting shit comparing christians to nazis and you don't hear any little warning bells ringing? Hell, even if your prejudice against christians is too extreme for you to realize how much of a loon you sound like, at least an internet savvy fellow like yourself should realize you just invoked Godwin's law . . . in a discussion with yourself.

This is particularly hilarious in the context of the text Brian quoted.

[Brian Rucker]

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.520:

Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 (Introduced in Senate)

`Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.'.

To the extent that a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States or any judge of any Federal court engages in any activity that exceeds the jurisdiction of the court of that justice or judge, as the case may be, by reason of section 1260 or 1370 of title 28, United States Code, as added by this Act, engaging in that activity shall be deemed to constitute the commission of--

(1) an offense for which the judge may be removed upon impeachment and conviction; and

(2) a breach of the standard of good behavior required by article III, section 1 of the Constitution.

Mr. SHELBY (for himself, Mr. BROWNBACK, and Mr. BURR) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

[Brian Rucker]

Sen. John Cornyn said yesterday that recent examples of courthouse violence may be linked to public anger over judges who make politically charged decisions without being held accountable.

In a Senate floor speech in which he sharply criticized a recent Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, Cornyn (R-Tex.) -- a former Texas Supreme Court justice and member of the Judiciary Committee -- said Americans are growing increasingly frustrated by what he describes as activist jurists.

"It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions," he said. Sometimes, he said, "the Supreme Court has taken on this role as a policymaker rather than an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people."

Cornyn continued: "I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. . . . And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have."

Liberal activists criticized Cornyn's remarks, and compared them to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's comments last week following the death of a brain-damaged Florida woman, Terri Schiavo. DeLay (R-Tex.) rebuked federal and state judges who had ruled in the Schiavo case, saying, "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26236-2005Apr4.html?nav=most_emailed

[Moore]

So now they dont know what 'supreme' means, and they are issuing kinda-sorta thinly veiled appeals to loonies to shoot up some uppity judges?

I cant think of any politically motivated murder of a judge in the US.

[Brian Rucker]

You can't think of one because there hasn't been one. And the senator is backing off his comments now they've seen the light of day.

Meanwhile, this tuesday on Frontline is a look at Karl Rove. A snippet from the press release touches on a subject that has come up in this thread before and underlines why we need to take these folks seriously.

But Rove had spent years courting what he called the Republican conservative base. He immediately crunched the numbers to see if all the handholding and political deal making with that group would yield the turnout he expected. Before long Rove knew the exit polls were wrong.

In the end Bush's reelection was the result of many factors including the country's deep concern over national security. But no factor was more important than the sophisticated effort to turn out core supporters. It was an effort Karl Rove had been working on for years—identifying, learning about, and tailoring policies to meet the political desires of a key group of conservative Republicans

"The evangelicals didn't just come on board for him, they were campaigning. They were at the events, they were the poll volunteers, they were making the phone calls. You know, that's how you win elections." says Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank.

Over the past 35 years, Karl Rove has honed his skills at hardball politics, using wedge issues, surrogates, and attack ads, but these methods that the program traces in Texas, South Carolina, and in the contest with John Kerry are only a part of the story. Rove tactics have been in service of a long-standing belief in the need to reshape the American political landscape. And in George Bush he found the perfect candidate who has his own ambition to leave a large legacy.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/press/2310.html

[Tom McNamara]

Mario Cuomo said something very interesting on Real Time with Bill Maher recently, when comparing Lincoln's faith with Bush's. Paraphrased: When Lincoln prayed to God, he talked to God. When Bush prays to God, God talks to him.

Ref:

Bush says God chose him to lead his nation (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1075950,00.html)

'I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen... I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.'

And here's something quite interesting, from CBS news (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/15/60minutes/main612067.shtml):


60 Minutes won’t name those Woodward interviewed, but we've listened to the tapes and read the transcripts of his key interviews to verify that his accounts are based on recollections from people who took part in the meetings he describes, including a historic meeting on March 19, when Bush gives the order to go to war.

He’s with the National Security Council, in the situation room. Says Woodward: “They have all these TV monitors. Gen. Franks, the commander, is up on one of them. And all nine commanders, and the president asks each one of them, ‘Are you ready? Do you have what you need? Are you satisfied?’ And they all say, ‘Yes, sir.’ and ‘We're ready.’”

Then the president saluted and he rose suddenly from his chair. “People who were there said there were tears in his eyes, not coming down his cheeks but in his eyes,” says Woodward. “And just kind of marched out of the room.”

Having given the order, the president walked alone around the circle behind the White House. Months later, he told Woodward: “As I walked around the circle, I prayed that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty. Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I be as good a messenger of his will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for forgiveness."

Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There's a higher Father that I appeal to.’"

Beyond not asking his father about going to war, Woodward was startled to learn that the president did not ask key cabinet members either.

”The president, in making the decision to go to war, did not ask his secretary of defense for an overall recommendation, did not ask his secretary of state, Colin Powell, for his recommendation,” says Woodward.

[Brian Rucker]

April 11, 2005 | According to David Gibbs, the attorney for Terri Schiavo's parents, Terri sobbed in her mother's arms after the courts condemned her to death. "Terri Schiavo was as alive as any person sitting here," he said. "Anything you saw on the videos, multiply times two hundred. I mean completely animated, completely responsive, desperately trying to talk." Schiavo, said Gibbs, would struggle to repeat the word "love" after her mother, and managed to get out something like, "loooo."

Gibbs was speaking to a banquet of religious right activists and conservative operatives last Thursday, the first night of the Confronting the Judicial War on Faith conference in Washington, D.C. The hundred or so people in the audience had converged on the Washington Marriott from 25 states. Many cried as they listened.

"America needs a healing," Gibbs said, and the crowd murmured its assent. "We're sitting here desperately as a nation needing to adopt the heart of God…We're on the eve of a real major decision. Are we going to do it God's way, or are we going to head down the path of whatever these judges think is best? Terri was alive. The courts killed her. The courts killed her in a barbaric fashion. Others are already facing and will face a similar fate if we don't do something."

Conservatives convened at the two-day Confronting the Judicial War on Faith conference to figure out what that something should be. The event was remarkable in bringing together lawmakers and Capitol Hill staffers with unabashed theocrats. Rep. Todd Akin, R-Texas, shared the stage with prominent adherents of Christian Reconstructionism, a Calvinist doctrine that calls for the subordination of American civil law to biblical law.

Other strains of the religious right were represented as well -- Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s conservative niece, was there, as was the Catholic anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly. Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court Justice who lost his job after he refused to remove a two-ton granite Ten Commandments monument from his courthouse, received an adulatory welcome. There was Tom Jipping, a counselor to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch who used to work at Concerned Women for America, and Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council. All were united by a frantic sense of crisis symbolized by Schiavo, who has become a mythical figure, martyred and quasi-divine, in the stories that percolate through America's evangelical subculture.

Having won control of two branches of the federal government, the activists of the religious right have come to see the courts as the intolerable obstacle thwarting their dream of a reborn Christian nation. They believe in a revisionist history, taught in Christian schools and spread through Christian media, which claims biblical law as the source of the Constitution. Thus any ruling that contradicts their theology seems to them to be de facto unconstitutional, and its enforcement tyrannical.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/11/judicial_conference/index.html

[foogla]

I hate that "Sitepass" crap.

[playingwithknives]

"He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There's a higher Father that I appeal to."

Blimey. It doesnt exactly fill me with confidence that the man with his finger on the button of the worlds largest nuclear force takes his orders from a voice in his head.

[Brian Rucker]

Genuine, certified nutcase. James Dobson compares the "men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan" to the "black-robed men" on the Supreme Court.

You can hear the replay of the show here -- advance to timestamp 22:52.

First they came for Spongebob ...

(ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader KS for previewing this drivel on our behalf.)


-- Josh Marshall
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_10.php#005401

[Brian Rucker]

Blumenthal's take on Ratzinger:

President Bush treated his final visit with Pope John Paul II in Vatican City on June 4, 2004, as a campaign stop. After enduring a public rebuke from the pope about the Iraq war, Bush lobbied Vatican officials to help him win the election. "Not all the American bishops are with me," he complained, according to the National Catholic Reporter. He pleaded with the Vatican to pressure the bishops to step up their activism against abortion and gay marriage in the states during the campaign season.

About a week later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to the U.S. bishops, pronouncing that those Catholics who were pro-choice on abortion were committing a "grave sin" and must be denied Communion. He pointedly mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws" -- an obvious reference to John Kerry, the Democratic candidate and a Roman Catholic. If such a Catholic politician sought Communion, Ratzinger wrote, priests must be ordered to "refuse to distribute it." Any Catholic who voted for this "Catholic politician," he continued, "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion." During the closing weeks of the campaign, a pastoral letter was read from pulpits in Catholic churches repeating the ominous suggestion of excommunication. Voting for the Democrat was nothing less than consorting with the forces of Satan, collaboration with "evil."

In 2004 Bush increased his margin of Catholic support by 6 points from the 2000 election, rising from 46 to 52 percent. Without this shift, Kerry would have had a popular majority of a million votes. Three states -- Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico -- moved into Bush's column on the votes of the Catholic "faithful." Even with his atmospherics of terrorism and Sept. 11, Bush required the benediction of the Holy See as his saving grace. The key to his kingdom was turned by Cardinal Ratzinger.

With the College of Cardinals' election of Ratzinger to the papacy, his political alliances with conservative politicians can be expected to deepen and broaden. Under Benedict XVI, the church will assume a consistent reactionary activism it has not had for two centuries. And the new pope's crusade against modernity has already joined forces with the right-wing culture war in the United States, prefigured by his interference in the 2004 election.

For the first time, an American president is politically allied with the Vatican in its doctrinal mission (except, of course, on capital punishment). In the messages and papers of the presidents from George Washington until well into those of the 20th century, there was not a single mention of the pope, except in one minor footnote. Bush's lobbying trip last year to the Vatican reflects an utterly novel turn, and Ratzinger's direct political intervention in American electoral politics ratified it.

The right wing of the Catholic Church is as mobilized as any other part of the religious right. It is seizing control of Catholic universities, exerting influence at other universities, stigmatizing Catholic politicians who fail to adhere to its conservative credo, pressing legislation at the federal and state levels, seeking government funding and sponsorship of the church, and vetting political appointments inside the White House and the administration -- imposing in effect a religious test of office. The Bush White House encourages these developments under the cover of moral uplift as it forges a political machine uniting church and state -- as was done in premodern Europe.

The American Revolution, the Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were fought for explicitly to uproot the traces in American soil of ecclesiastical power in government, which the Founders to a man regarded with horror, revulsion and foreboding.

The Founders were the ultimate representatives of the Enlightenment. They were not anti-religious, though few if any of them were orthodox or pious. Washington never took Communion and refused to enter the church, while his wife did so. Benjamin Franklin believed that all organized religion was suspect. James Madison thought that established religion did as much harm to religion as it did to free government, twisting the word of God to fit political expediency, thereby throwing religion into the political cauldron. And Thomas Jefferson, allied with his great collaborator Madison, conducted decades of sustained and intense political warfare against the existing and would-be clerisy. His words, engraved on the Jefferson Memorial, are a direct reference to established religion: "I have sworn eternal warfare against all forms of superstition over the minds of men."

But now Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay threatens the federal judiciary, saying, "The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them." And Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will participate through a telecast in a rally on April 24 in which he will say that Democrats who refuse to rubber-stamp Bush's judicial nominees and uphold the filibuster are "against people of faith."

But what would Madison say?

This is what Madison wrote in 1785: "What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the Civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/04/21/tk/index1.html

[Brian Rucker]

Finally, looks like left and mainstream Christians are starting to get revved up. This twin pair of editorials on the Washington Post site look like the tip of the spear.

The history of a Christian church divided against itself is a long and bloody one. People calling themselves Christians have stood for war and peace, subjugation and brotherhood, communism and capitalism, privilege and equality, enslavement and liberty, imperialism and isolation.

That is one reason Thomas Jefferson insisted on religious liberty in the new republic. In his Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, he wrote that "millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity."

The present war within the Christian fold is perhaps more threatening to the republic than any of the previous intramural disputes. Right-wing religious zealots, working in partnership with the secularists who have advised President Bush, are a threat to the most fundamental of American principles. The founders of our nation welcomed and planned for spirited debate over public policies, including the role of the judiciary. But as sons of the Enlightenment, they looked to found a republic in which the outcome of those debates would turn on reason and evidence, not on disputed religious dogma. They planned wisely for principles that are now under wide assault.

All Americans, of whatever religious or non-religious persuasion, need to be on the alert to preserve those principles. The burden falls especially heavily on the mainstream Christians who are slowly awakening to the gravity of the challenge facing them. Too long tolerant of their brethren, too much given to forgiveness rather than to confrontation, they need to mount a spirited, nationwide response to what constitutes a dangerous distortion of Christian truths and a frightening threat to the republic they love.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10687-2005Apr22.html

The American flag was appropriated by the political right wing years ago. Now the Christian right is trying to hijack religion. This time it shouldn't be allowed to happen without a fight.

In 1969 I returned to the United States from Bonn with my family after working for three years on issues directly affecting the security of American interests. It was the height of the Vietnam War. What did I find when we reached home? The flag had been taken over by self-styled patriots, noncombatant domestic supporters of the war and vocal opponents of the civil rights movement. Nixonites and George Wallace supporters were sporting flags in their lapels and stickers on their cars. Old Glory had been appropriated as the exclusive property of those who believed in "law 'n' order," a hard-line foreign policy and the primacy of conservatism in American politics.

It didn't help that some Vietnam War protesters stupidly burned the American flag. But what really ensured the loss of the flag to those who fancied themselves as having a monopoly on patriotism was the failure of equally patriotic Americans on the left and the middle to have any stomach for a fight.

Emboldened by their appropriation of the flag, ideologues on the right have now set their sights on religion, and specifically Christianity, as the means to promote their political agenda. And as the promoters of tomorrow's "Justice Sunday" national telecast have demonstrated, there is no depth to which they won't sink in their campaign to seize the country.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10688-2005Apr22.html

[Brian Rucker]

As Republican strategists weigh the party's prospects for 2006 and 2008, they are increasingly worried about a political confrontation with Roy S. Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who became a hero to religious conservatives when he refused to follow a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state's judicial building.

Moore, a Republican who enjoys widespread support in his home state, is poised to run against a vulnerable Republican governor. If he wins, some party strategists speculate, he could defy a federal court order again by erecting a religious monument outside the Alabama state Capitol building. With the 2008 presidential race looming, President Bush would then face a no-win decision: either call out the National Guard to enforce a court order against a religious display on state grounds or allow a fellow born-again Christian to defy the courts.

The pitched political warfare over the direction of the nation's courts has energized many GOP voters, but it has also produced a restless Christian right movement that contends Bush has been too moderate on issues ranging from gay marriage to judicial nominations to the Terri Schiavo case. These conservatives want Moore to run for president as a platform for their cause.

''Moore's a lot like George Wallace," William H. Stewart, political science professor at the University of Alabama, said in a reference to the Democratic Alabama governor who stood in a schoolhouse door to block a federal desegregation order, forcing President Kennedy to federalize and send in Alabama National Guard units.

In his autobiography, ''So Help Me God: The Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny, and the Battle for Religious Freedom," Moore frequently casts himself as a lone man of principle battling dark forces.

When older cadets hazed him at West Point, he ''learned how to stand up to intimidation," he writes. As a company commander in Vietnam, he became a ''marked man," he says, because of his insistence on imposing strict discipline on drug-addled soldiers.

As a deputy district attorney in Etowah County in the late 1970s, he was referred for disciplinary action, he said, because he dared question spending priorities in the police budget; in the end he was not disciplined.

In 1982, he failed in his first race for circuit court judge because ''I was a threat to the system, and the system had closed ranks to defeat me."

He lost another race in 1986, this time for district attorney. ''The criminal defense bar united against me, and the opposition among political insiders was too strong to overcome," he recalled.

After a mutual friend pleaded Moore's case to Governor Guy Hunt, a Republican, Moore was appointed to fill a circuit court judge position left vacant by a death. ''God had given me something that I had not been able to obtain through my own efforts many years before," he writes in his book.

Fully aware that he would attract a lawsuit, Moore hung in his courtroom a redwood plaque of the Ten Commandments. A local ACLU attorney complained; Moore described this as ''the first time the civil rights group attempted to intimidate me."
In 2004, after the disciplinary panel had forced Moore to resign, supporters urged him to run for president, but he decided the timing was not right. Phillips compares Moore's national popularity to that of Pat Robertson, the TV evangelist whose 1988 bid for president divided the GOP, and said Moore is well-positioned to consider his own run.

''There's no question he would heighten the debate on the whole issue of religion and politics," Scarborough said. ''And nationally, there is a core following that would be faithful to him."

http://tinyurl.com/br2m6

[Brian Rucker]

As soon as the religious right political movement started making real inroads in the '80s, the movement's groups and leaders have envisioned circumstances in which they'd play the roll of kingmakers, particularly at the presidential level. If a candidate planned on getting the GOP nomination, the Christian conservatives thought, they'd have to jump through the far-right's hoops first.

Unfortunately, the religious right is moving one step closer to making this vision a reality.

Leaders of conservative Christian organizations plan to jointly interview Republican contenders for the 2008 presidential nomination, perhaps even endorsing one of them — steps that could expand their already considerable political influence.

"We'd like to try to stay together," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said at a breakfast with reporters Wednesday. The ad hoc group includes "free thinkers" and "strong personalities," he says, but they might unite behind a candidate who "unquestionably" best represented their views and priorities.

Gary Bauer, president of American Values, said in an interview that the sit-down sessions, likely to begin after the 2006 elections, would be "a very effective way to nail down where people are on cultural issues." He said candidates have become "very astute" at answering written questionnaires in ways that avoid making firm commitments.

And who'd participate in this little club? The FRC's Perkins, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, and the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association. (The AFA is the group with the boycott fixation.) Perkins told Roll Call that as many as 18 religious right organizations would be involved in the effort.

The entire set-up here is deeply disturbing. Every presidential aspirant will line up, kiss Dobson's ring, take turns trying to convince evangelical leaders that he's just as crazy as they are, and making all manner of promises about all the radical things we'll see if only the religious leaders will endorse their campaign. The democratic process isn't supposed to work this way.

To be sure, there are some countries in the world where politicians have to receive the backing of clerics and other religious leaders in order to succeed. Off the top of my head, they'd include Iran, Afghanistan under Taliban rule, Saudi Arabia….
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/4467.html

Includes links to articles in USAToday and Roll Call.

[Brian Rucker]

HOUSTON, July 31 - When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town, voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006 high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an effort to instill religious training in the public schools.

The council calls its course a nonsectarian historical and literary survey class within constitutional guidelines requiring the separation of church and state.

But a growing chorus of critics says the course, taught by local teachers trained by the council, conceals a religious agenda. The critics say it ignores evolution in favor of creationism and gives credence to dubious assertions that the Constitution is based on the Scriptures, and that "documented research through NASA" backs the biblical account of the sun standing still.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/education/01bible.html

[Crispus]

Yes, a voluntary Christianity class indicates that a theocracy is RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER!

[Nellie]

and that "documented research through NASA" backs the biblical account of the sun standing still

Ok 6000 year old earth by counting back through the "begat" pages I can just about deal with, but this is whole new level of fruityloops.

Is there a passage in Genesis somewhere about Saddam having nukes?

[Brian Rucker]

You can see the problem here already, I take it. This is more political indoctrination than a dispassionate study of theology. And I suspect it's only as voluntary as community/parental pressure lets it be. Pretty safe to assume that the fact this course even crawled out from under a rock tells you all you need to know about that. That's fine, that's freedom of speech, but once you put that kind of indoctrination under the mantle of public education you've crossed a line.

I imagine that is someone wanted to teach a public school course about the relationship of Deism, in the context of foolish, terrifying, European religious wars and the legacy of the Inquisition and Crusades, to the Founding Fathers you'd probably have someone screaming blue in the face. But, there it is, that has a far more realistic claim to our heritage than the idea there's some kind of Biblical code behind everything.

This kind of course is purest fantasy masquerading as "proven", via NASA of all things, facts. That has no role in an institution of learning.

[Nellie]

It would be interesting to see what the reaction would be if someone at that school suggested an Islamic course run on the same basis.

Want to have bible studies in the school? I don't actually have a problem with it. I did Religious education for my exams at 16, it was a compulsory course up until that point and I am still actually glad that we did it. We studied Christianity and the New Testament, Hinduism and Judaism and from what I can recall, despite being taken by the school chaplain was free from judgement and dogma and covered pretty objectively all of them in the same manner.

[Brian Rucker]

Bush: Intelligent Design Should Be Taught

The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 2, 2005; 7:05 AM

WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

The theory of intelligent design says life on earth is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must have had a hand in creation.

Christian conservatives _ a substantial part of Bush's voting base _ have been pushing for the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. Scientists have rejected the theory as an attempt to force religion into science education.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080200493.html

[MatthewF]

Sigh.

[Marcus]

Can we please just get rid of texas?

[Brian Rucker]

Mr. Marburger said it would be "over-interpreting" Mr. Bush's remarks to say that the president believed that intelligent design and evolution should be given equal treatment in schools.

But Mr. Bush's conservative supporters said the president had indicated exactly that in his remarks.

"It's what I've been pushing, it's what a lot of us have been pushing," said Richard Land, the president of the ethics and religious liberties commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Dr. Land, who has close ties to the White House, said that evolution "is too often taught as fact," and that "if you're going to teach the Darwinian theory as evolution, teach it as theory. And then teach another theory that has the most support among scientists."

But critics saw Mr. Bush's comment that "both sides" should be taught as the most troubling aspect of his remarks.

"It sounds like you're being fair, but creationism is a sectarian religious viewpoint, and intelligent design is a sectarian religious viewpoint," said Susan Spath, a spokeswoman for the National Center for Science Education, a group that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools. "It's not fair to privilege one religious viewpoint by calling it the other side of evolution."

Ms. Spath added that intelligent design was viewed as more respectable and sophisticated than biblical creationism, but "if you look at their theological and scientific writings, you see that the movement is fundamentally anti-evolution."

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the president's comments irresponsible, and said that "when it comes to evolution, there is only one school of scientific thought, and that is evolution occurred and is still occurring." Mr. Lynn added that "when it comes to matters of religion and philosophy, they can be discussed objectively in public schools, but not in biology class."

The Discovery Institute in Seattle, a leader in developing intelligent design, applauded the president's words on Tuesday as a defense of scientists who have been ostracized for advancing the theory.

"We interpret this as the president using his bully pulpit to support freedom of inquiry and free speech about the issue of biological origins," said Stephen Meyer, the director of the institute's Center for Science and Culture. "It's extremely timely and welcome because so many scientists are experiencing recriminations for breaking with Darwinist orthodoxy."

At the White House, intelligent design was the subject of a weekly Bible study class several years ago when Charles W. Colson, the founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries, spoke to the group. Mr. Colson has also written a book, "The Good Life," in which a chapter on intelligent design features Michael Gerson, an evangelical Christian who is an assistant to the president for policy and strategic planning.

"It's part of the buzz of the city among Christians," Mr. Colson said in a telephone interview on Tuesday about intelligent design. "It wouldn't surprise me that it got to George Bush. He reads, he picks stuff up, he talks to people. And he's pretty serious about his own Christian beliefs."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/politics/03bush.html

[Brian Rucker]

The growing influence of evangelical Protestants is roiling the military chaplain corps, where their desire to preach their faith more openly is colliding with long-held military traditions of pluralism and diversity.

After accusations this summer that evangelical chaplains, faculty and coaches were pressuring cadets at the Air Force Academy, the Air Force yesterday issued new guidelines on respect for religious minorities. In the Navy, evangelical Protestant chaplains are fighting what they say is a legacy of discrimination in hiring and promotions, and they are bridling at suggestions they not pray publicly "in the name of Jesus."

Much of the conflict is in two areas that, until now, have been nearly invisible to civilians: how the military hires its ministers and how they word their public prayers. Evangelical chaplains -- who are rising in numbers and clout amid a decline in Catholic priests and mainline Protestant ministers -- are challenging the status quo on both questions, causing even some evangelical commanders to worry about the impact on morale.

"There is a polarization that is beginning to set up that I don't think is helpful. Us versus them," said Air Force Col. Richard K. Hum, an Evangelical Free Church minister who is the executive director of the Armed Forces Chaplains Board. "I don't know whether it's an overflow of what's happening in society. But this sort of thing is so detrimental to what we are trying to do in the chaplaincy."

The Rev. MeLinda S. Morton, a Lutheran minister who resigned in June as an Air Force chaplain after criticizing the religious atmosphere at the Air Force Academy, said there has been a palpable rise in evangelical fervor not just among chaplains but also among the officer corps in general since she joined the military in 1982, originally as a launch officer in a nuclear missile silo.

"When we were coneheads -- missile officers -- I would never, ever have engaged in conversations with subordinates aligning my power and position as an officer with my views on faith matters," she said. Today, "I've heard of people being made incredibly uncomfortable by certain wing commanders who engage in sectarian devotions at staff meetings."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082902036.html

[Brian Rucker]

Nov. 29, 2005 | Throughout the last five years, as the Christian right has assumed ever greater power and prominence in America, the organized Jewish community has been remarkably quiescent. Traditionally, Jewish leaders have been among the most vigilant guardians of American secularism, seeing the separation of church and state as key to Jewish equality. But faced with an evangelical president who seemed inviolable and an alliance of convenience with the religious right over Israel, Jewish leaders didn't raise much of an outcry when billions of taxpayer dollars were diverted toward religious charities through Bush's faith-based initiative. They didn't make a fuss when the administration filled the bureaucracy with veterans of groups like the Family Research Council and the Christian Coalition. As leaders of the religious right and their allies in the Republican Party trumpeted plans to "take America back," observers detected growing anxiety among ordinary American Jews, but there was little response from organized Jewry.

This month, that started to change. Two major Jewish figures -- Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism -- have taken on the religious right and, by extension, the Republican Party. By doing so, they have enraged some evangelicals and opened a fissure in the larger Jewish community. Some leaders are worried about provoking a conservative backlash and ushering in a new era of anti-Semitism. Others rejoice that someone has finally articulated what so many ordinary American Jews have been thinking. Either way, the culture wars have suddenly taken on an overtly sectarian cast.

On Nov. 3, Abraham Foxman gave a speech to an ADL meeting, calling attacks on church-state separation the "key domestic challenge to the American Jewish community and to our democratic values." "[T]oday we face a better financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized, and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before," he said. "Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us!" Among the major players in this campaign, Foxman listed Focus on the Family, the Alliance Defense Fund, the American Family Association and the Family Research Council.

Foxman lamented the divisions in the Jewish community over the issue, noting that there is much less unity than there was 15 years ago. Nor could Jews count on their old allies in the civil rights struggles -- African-Americans and Latinos -- for help. Those bonds have withered; those groups no longer tend to see church-state separation as a vital condition for minority rights. With the America that Jews have prospered in threatening to disappear, Foxman called for a meeting of Jewish leadership to plan a coordinated strategy.

One person who plans to be there is Rabbi Eric Yoffie, whose group is the largest Jewish organization in the country, representing more than 900 congregations. Two weeks after Foxman's broadside, Yoffie blasted the religious right in a sermon delivered to around 5,000 people at the Union's biannual convention in Houston. Yoffie says he hadn't coordinated with Foxman, but the two share some of the same concerns -- though Yoffie approaches the issue from a religious rather than a political perspective.

"We are particularly offended by the suggestion that the opposite of the religious right is the voice of atheism," he told his audience. "We are appalled when 'people of faith' is used in such a way that it excludes us, as well as most Jews, Catholics and Muslims. What could be more bigoted than to claim that you have a monopoly on God and that anyone who disagrees with you is not a person of faith?"

Much of Yoffie's sermon argued that for many Jews, liberalism is the result of religious values, not their antithesis. Being a liberal believer, he said, "means believing that religion involves concern for the poor and the needy, and giving a fair shake to all. When people talk about God and yet ignore justice, it just feels downright wrong to us. When they cloak themselves in religion and forget mercy, it strikes us as blasphemy. "

And then he launched into the most controversial part of his sermon -- an impassioned denunciation of right-wing homophobia that invoked the historical parallel of Nazism. "We understand those who believe that the Bible opposes gay marriage, even though we read that text in a very different way," he said. "But we cannot understand why any two people who make a lifelong commitment to each other should be denied legal guarantees that protect them and their children and benefit the broader society. We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things that he did was ban gay organizations. And today, we cannot feel anything but rage when we hear about gay men and women, some on the front lines, being hounded out of our armed services. Yes, we can disagree about gay marriage. But there is no excuse for hateful rhetoric that fuels the hellfires of anti-gay bigotry."

Yoffie's sermon was more than 8,000 words long, and ranged over all kinds of subjects. By all accounts, though, the crowd responded most enthusiastically to his salvos against the religious right. This was something that American Jews have been desperate to hear from their leadership, but much of that leadership has been unable or unwilling to say it. As the Jewish newspaper the Forward wrote in an editorial, "There are many reasons to applaud this month's back-to-back speeches by Abe Foxman and Eric Yoffie on the dangers of the religious right, but here's the most important: They have given voice to something their constituents have been thinking and feeling for a long time."

Why the silence until now? Part of it has to do with Israel. Christian Zionism, inspired by end-times beliefs that make the return of Jews to Israel a precondition for the second coming, has made American evangelicals the world's staunchest backers of Israeli hawks. (Their Jewish allies usually choose to ignore the fact that the Christian Zionist's apocalyptic scenario ends with unsaved Jews being slaughtered and condemned to hell.) But while evangelicals support Israel for their own eschatological reasons, there have been threats, implicit and explicit, that such support might weaken if Jews oppose their domestic agenda too aggressively. Indeed, in response to Foxman's speech, Tom Minnery, vice president of government and public policy at Focus on the Family, told the Forward, "If you keep bullying your friends, pretty soon you won't have any.'" (Neither he nor anyone else from Focus on the Family returned a call for comment from Salon.)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/11/29/foxman/

[Gav]

I think the Salon article is a complete misreading of the American Jewish Community's relationship to the religious right.

There've been numerous studies (I'm too lazy to look them up now) showing that, in general, the liberal/Reform side of the religion is not particularly active in Jewish causes--they're not particularly interested in Israeli politics, the philanthropies they participate in are more likely secular (say, "People for the American Way") than Jewish, and so on.

So, Jewish energy that goes into fighting the religious right that in past decades might have come from explicitly Jewish groups is more likely now to come from generic left-wing groups. So it's not exactly correct to say that there hasn't been a Jewish backlash against conservatism; it's just hidden in non-Jewish-specific causes (in which Jews are members way out of proportion to their actual population)

On the other side, the more Orthodox/conservative side of the religion doesn't really see a conflict between the religious right and themselves--in fact, they'd see them as a closer ally than liberals, not because of the state of Israel, but because of the social issues--they would say there's a natural alliance against the social decay promoted by the secular left. The right's support of Israel is just an added bonus.

(I'm ignoring liberal orthodoxy for the sake of convenience--it's a very small community, even within the already small Jewish community).

Gav

PS Since I'm thinking of it... The reform movement in general is not exactly a big supporter of Israeli hawks in the first place. IT's not as if they've had a sudden rude awakening to how wrong they've been over the past decades. Reform, to the extent they think about Israel at all, tends to be very leftist.

[Brian Rucker]

I'll admit I'm no expert on these issues but it does seem based on some pretty broad (if abrupt) readings that the ADL is a mainstream, moderate, Jewish organization and that until this address they were, in fact, embracing the alliance with the Religious Right. While I found many articles that deal tangentally with this in an, admittedly, brief spasm of google-fu, this one letter to The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles seems to take it head on and is written by someone who'd seem to be an expert or at least has much more of a claim to it than myself.

A few years ago, a few moderate American Jewish leaders tried to allay Jewish fears that the Christian right was a threat.

American Jews had it wrong, they said — former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, the Rev. Pat Robertson and their ilk really were quite nice, even open-minded fellows and strongly pro-Israel to boot. They were our friends.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) publicly praised Reed’s pro-Israel stance and invited Christian conservatives to ADL banquets. Christians, in turn, organized nationwide prayer vigils and lobbying campaigns to support Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s vision of a greater Israel.

Basking in the glow of this newfound friendship, Reed proclaimed that the Jewish-Christian alliance for Israel was as important as the black-Jewish coalition for civil rights in the 1960s.

Then, a Hollywood film star produced, directed and bankrolled a cinematic portrayal of Jesus’ final hours that depicted Jews as Jesus’ killers, promoting an age-old anti-Semitic theme. Fearing that the film would stoke new anti-Semitism, ADL National Director Abraham Foxman pleaded that Gibson alter the film, the pope disavow it and the Christian evangelicals that had become Foxman’s allies sermonize against it — to no avail.

Foxman should have seen it coming.

For all their talk of loving Jews and Israel, conservative Christians’ No. 1 priority always has been to expand their influence and numbers at home and abroad.

Several years ago, I interviewed dozens of Christian activists for a book I was writing about a campaign against gay rights that bitterly divided many Oregon communities, where I was living at the time.

Today, some of those activists have gone on to mobilize support for Israel, working to insure that the Holy Land stays in Jewish hands so that "saved Christians" like themselves can enjoy their final rapture out of harm’s way.

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, these Christians have felt further justified for their alliance with Israel by the conviction that Judeo-Christian culture must protect itself against the followers of Mohammed, in preparation for the coming "clash of civilizations."

My travels in evangelical America tell me that despite the claims of Jewish conservatives, and even moderate leaders like Foxman, conservative Christians are not our "natural allies." In fact, most American Jews find themselves deeply at odds with the Christian right over a host of issues.
Arlene Stein is a professor of sociology at Rutgers University and the author of “The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights.”
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=11980

[Gav]

I'm no sociologist, but my father-in-law is a historian, and he tries to follow these trends in a global way. So most of my info is second-hand for him.

First off, I think the ADL's support for Sharon already puts them outside of mainstream American Jewish thought, which tends to run liberal. It's just not immediately apparent how outside they are, b/c (at the risk of repeating my above post) most liberal American Jews aren't affiliated with any Jewish lobbying groups at all, which tends to skew groups like the ADL to the right.

I still think the Israel support thing is something of a red herring. Hasidic groups who have no interest in the state of Israel (and, in fact, consider the state a mistake at best, or a desecration at worst) tend to support the religious right, because they see themselves on the same side of the culture wars against pornography, abortion, etc.

On the other side, there are a small number of secular Jews who believe in the idea of a Greater Israel. I don't know any numbers on these guys, and I've only met a few, but they tend to be distrustful of the religious right.

To the extent that there's any real shift going on, I'd bet that it's more that Jews are moving back into Jewish activist groups, and out of secular ones, skewing them back to the left, rather than Jews as a whole moving toward the left. But I'd honestly be surprised if even that were happening to a huge extent.

I could ask my father-in-law for his opinion next time I talk to him He's probably got more to say than I want to listen to. :)

Gav

[Brian Rucker]

Well, we do know that even in 2004 the Jewish vote was 2 to 1 Democratic or thereabouts according to the polls so the idea that the general tendency is liberal sounds about right. And based on my reading of what's in this thread alone it seems that comes about from a combination of religious belief ("we are liberals because of our faith" as Foxman put it) and secular pragmatism - contemporary conservatives are allied with a Religious Right that's out to "recreate" a theocratic society. Good for them, not so much for anyone else.

Though I'd agree, the Religious Right finds kindred spirits in other religious fringes who also feel alienated by the cultural mainstream. But guess where they'll be if reason fails and it's up to religious charismatics to sort out policy. The old fashioned way.

But I've never really had the feeling that the ADL was really conservative by nature. They've always been liberally inclined as they were deeply involved in the civil rights movement and tend to see other disenfranchised groups as potential allies against bigotry. This embrace of the Ralph Reed-Falwell axis by them does seem surprising to me in the first place. And it would appear the membership wasn't of one mind about it. Your father-in-law's point of view would be valuable, or anyone else's. Sofaer, I'm looking at you man. :)

There are a couple right leaning groups of course, the smaller one mentioned in the article which is heavily vested in getting religious conservative Christian cash into Likud coffers and right-wing Jewish groups but the biggie is AIPAC, the pro-Israeli lobbying group (whose head was recently indicted as part of the Pentagon spy investigation).

[MikeSofaer]

Who, me? On the topic of the Jewish Community's relationship to the American Right, and the Republican party in particular?

I'll be making this up as I go along even more than usual. Also, this will turn into a post about my dad, because I think he is an illustrative example of a Right-leaning Jew.

My mom's family are Jewish Democrats, if any family is. They like to do things like call Cheney "evil" at family events. My grandmother was a union infiltrator in the New York sewing factories. It's clear that a large chunk of the New York Jewish community thinks exceedingly poorly of Bush, and don't think he's at all a good ally for Jews or Israel. (They do tend to support the State of Israel).

My dad is a Republican, and I've asked him about how he feels about the right. He replies by talking about the Left, usually. He feels that the Democrats are weak, that Bush's move toward pre-emptive force in foreign policy is long overdue, that terrorism is a very serious threat that Clinton ignored. He's been talking about the need for pre-emption and agressive anti-terror policies since the 80s, so he was very happy to see Bush move that way. In the 2004 election he was pushing Jews to vote for Bush because of his pro-Israel stance. He told me once that if the Christians believe that Israel should be Jewish until the End of Time, we are OK with that, even if we have differing opinions on how long that is likely to take.

For my dad, the foreign policy aspects of the Bush presidency outweigh the domestic annoyances. If you ask him about the domestic troubles he largely says they are not serious worries. It would be terrible to drill ANWR, but it won't happen. It would be horrendous if Roe v. Wade got reversed, but it would be political suicide, it's not a real possibility. A draft would be a catastrophe, but who are you kidding? This is a guy who started a legal fund in the 60s to oppose the Vietnam War in the courts, he's not socially conservative at all.

He also used to complain about the Democrats' profligate spending when defending his Republican loyalties. Not so much anymore.

So what's the big picture? Israel is central. Support for Sharon over the next couple years will enable him to hack out a permanent arrangement along the general lines that he wants, particularly if Palestinian violence continues. The next two years are absolutely key for Israel to succeed at this, and he puts that high on his priority list.

Secondarily, the ability to look at an ideology and call it an enemy is important. He feels that the Democrats are unwilling to wholeheartedly oppose militant Islam, and that it must be opposed. He thinks the Right wants to win and the Left wants to make friends.

So, that's my best attempt at describing what one intelligent and policy-savvy Jew sees in the Republican Party. I don't buy all his arguments, in particular I'm leery of the way we choose our friends based on whether they sell us oil, even when they support the enemy ideology, but I think it's a coherent and reasonable viewpoint overall.

I hope that helps, and that it addresses the question you were asking.

[Brian Rucker]

That's exactly what I was hoping to get. Not that I'm going to argue with it, my opinions are pretty well spelled out here and elsewhere, but it goes a long way to understanding where that mindset is coming from. Which is something that frankly didn't make alot of sense to me.

It does seem to me that the facts are bearing out that a military, unlateralist, approach to the region is quite counterproductive. Seems like Iraq's little more than a training ground and recruiting poster for extremist Islam. Where it is right to be skeptical about the possibilities of a modern pluralistic democracy coexisting with extremist Islam, the logical conclusion might not be that we can bomb extremist Islamicism out of existence but we can make it look very unattractive by comparison. The big problem, though, is internal to Islam (and probably abetted by our cynical manipulation of Muslim regimes in order to maintain regional stability at all costs). There doesn't seem to be a strong, moderate, modernist Islamic movement. At least nothing coherent and effective that hasn't sold out, at some point, to Western or Eastern bloc interests.

I don't know how that can turn itself around.

Edit: By the way, it's really not just my opinion that Iraq's created more terrorist problems than it's solved.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7460-2005Jan13.html

[MikeSofaer]

Well, he doesn't see Iraq in as bleak a light as you do, and when he talks about the failures he's mostly furious at Defense for ignoring all the work State did in preparation for just such an occupation.

Anyway, if you want to debate the issue with him, you probably can. I just set him up a policy opinion blog last weekend, and he'd probably be happy to write an article on it addressing the issue, and address any comments.

[Brian Rucker]

I'd be happy to read anything he has to say. Whether I get involved in a discussion or not, I don't know. If he's been this consistant since the 1980's it's unlikely anything I say is going to change his mind especially if the worst thing he can say about this administration is that they ignored State's planning for the reconstruction or he can rationalize a political alliance with the Religious Right as something tolerable as long as it helps a foreign county.

Still there's something to learn here so I'd go have a look.

[Brian Rucker]

During the debate on John R. Bolton's nomination as US ambassador to the UN, I was a little dismayed about the lack of attention devoted to his long and troubling history of collaboration with Christian right interest groups to, for instance, restrict condom distribution in developing nations. Now that Bolton has been installed in the UN by Bush, his so-called "reform" agenda will undoubtedly include a host of reactionary Christian right social policies.

A disturbing reflection of Bolton's plans was provided by James Dobson in today's Focus on the Family broadcast, in which he and FoF President Jim Daly described a private, hour-long meeting they and a group of FoF staffers recently held with Bolton in New York.

Here are key portions of Dobson and Daly's discussion of their meeting with Bolton:

JIM DALY: He's [Bolton's] a good man. I mean, everything we saw of him in that almost hour we met with him...he's just a solid pro-life gentleman and uh, certainly more meek than what the Democrats portrayed. He's a nice guy.

(....)

JAMES DOBSON: But we had an opportunity to talk to him about the possibilty of Focus on the Family working with the United Nations. That really did excite me.

DALY: Absolutely. I think what came across in the meeting is that he [Bolton] is pro-life and pro-family and he gave us an invitation to work with him in setting some policy there at the UN that would support the values we believe in.

DOBSON: Now we're finding out why the Democrats didn't want him...

DALY: It had nothing to do...

DOBSON: He's [Bolton's] pro-life, pro-family, pro-morality and sees things the way we do regarding condom distribution and abstinence and other things.
For a little perspective, consider what Bolton's predecessor at the UN, former Republican Senator John Danforth, wrote about Dobson and his ilk:

When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another....

As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/dobson-meets-with-bolton-_b_11561.html

[Brian Rucker]

For completeness I'm also linking to the War on Science thread here:

http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12824&start=90

[Acoustic Rob]

And remember, Danforth isn't just a highly respected ex-senator; he's also an ordained Episcopal priest.

[Brian Rucker]

When hundreds of religious activists try to get arrested today to protest cutting programs for the poor, prominent conservatives such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will not be among them.

That is a great relief to Republican leaders, who have dismissed the burgeoning protests as the work of liberals. But it raises the question: Why in recent years have conservative Christians asserted their influence on efforts to relieve Third World debt, AIDS in Africa, strife in Sudan and international sex trafficking -- but remained on the sidelines while liberal Christians protest domestic spending cuts?

Conservative Christian groups such as Focus on the Family say it is a matter of priorities, and their priorities are abortion, same-sex marriage and seating judges who will back their position against those practices.

"It's not a question of the poor not being important or that meeting their needs is not important," said Paul Hetrick, a spokesman for Focus on the Family, Dobson's influential, Colorado-based Christian organization. "But whether or not a baby is killed in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, that is less important than help for the poor? We would respectfully disagree with that."

Jim Wallis, editor of the liberal Christian journal Sojourners and an organizer of today's protest, was not buying it. Such conservative religious leaders "have agreed to support cutting food stamps for poor people if Republicans support them on judicial nominees," he said. "They are trading the lives of poor people for their agenda. They're being, and this is the worst insult, unbiblical."

At issue is a House-passed budget-cutting measure that would save $50 billion over five years by trimming food stamp rolls, imposing new fees on Medicaid recipients, squeezing student lenders, cutting child-support enforcement funds and paring agriculture programs. House negotiators are trying to reach accord with senators who passed a more modest $35 billion bill that largely spares programs for the poor.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/13/AR2005121301764.html

[Moore]

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051207/LIFESTYLE04/512070347/1003/METRO

This an interesting one. Dump your witchcraft(catholicism) or do prison time!

[Chris Nahr]

Wow, that's unbelievable. Guess this "freedom of religion" thing doesn't actually mean all that much to some people.

Instead, Hanas said officials at the program, run by a local Pentecostal church, told him his religion, Catholicism, was witchcraft and he had to convert to the Pentecostal faith or he would go to prison.

He said his Catholic prayer book and rosary were confiscated and he was barred from seeing his priest, a deacon, and his mother. Hanas, 23, said in the suit he was told that in order to complete the program and avoid prison, he would have to be "saved" in the Pentecostal church.

After seven weeks of forced Bible study and Pentecostal services, Hanas returned to court where he told Judge Robert Ransom of his experience and asked to be placed in a secular facility.

Instead, Ransom, the recently retired chief judge of the Genesee Circuit Court, removed him from the Drug Court diversion program. Ransom sentenced Hanas to six months in jail and boot camp, three months of house arrest on a tether and four years of probation.

[shift6]

"It's not a question of the poor not being important or that meeting their needs is not important," said Paul Hetrick, a spokesman for Focus on the Family, Dobson's influential, Colorado-based Christian organization. "But whether or not a baby is killed in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, that is less important than help for the poor? We would respectfully disagree with that."
Number of times Jesus mentioned the poor in the New Testament: 25
Number of times Jesus mentioned babies, fetuses, etc: 0

Why don't you respectfully read your Bible, good sir.

[Unicorn McGriddle]

Dude, Jesus covered the fetus thing back in the Old Testament during the X-Men crossover. And not only that, but the whole Infinity Gauntlet thing is totally an allegory for the Christ's rejection of contraception. Deadpool was great in that arc. You really owe it to yourself to pick up the Old Testament TPBs sometime.

[Brian Rucker]

Thread necromancy:

So how scared should we be?

Kevin Phillips' grim new book, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century," puts the country's degeneration into historical perspective, and that perspective is not conducive to optimism. The title is a bit misleading, because only the middle section of the book, which is divided into thirds, deals with the religious right. The first part, "Oil and American Supremacy," is about America's prospects as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, and the last third, "Borrowed Prosperity," is about America's unsustainable debt. Phillips' argument is that imperial overstretch, dependence on obsolete energy technologies, intolerant and irrational religious fervor, and crushing debt have led to the fall of previous great powers, and will likely lead to the fall of this one. It reads, in some ways, like a follow-up to "The March of Folly."

"Conservative true believers will scoff: the United States is sue generis, they say, a unique and chosen nation," writes Phillips. "What did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He was apparently not added a further debilitating note to the later stages of each national decline."

There's a sad irony to the fact that Phillips has come to write this book. His 1969 book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," both predicted and celebrated Republican hegemony. As chief elections and voting patterns analyst for the 1968 Nixon campaign, he is often credited for the Southern strategy that led to the realignment of the Republican Party toward Sun Belt social conservatives. Today's governing Republican coalition is partly his Frankenstein.

Phillips has been disassociating himself from the contemporary GOP for some time now -- his last book, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," attacked the presidential clan as a corrupt threat to American democracy. His concern with the growing power of religious fundamentalism was evident then. As he wrote in the introduction, "Part of what restored the Bushes to the White House in 2000 through a southern-dominated electoral coalition was the emergence of George W. Bush during the 1990s as a born-again favorite of conservative Christian evangelical and fundamentalist voters. His 2001-2004 policies and rhetoric confirmed that bond. The idea that the head of the Religious Right and the President of the United States can be the same person is a precedent-shattering circumstance that had barely crept into national political discussion."

Since then, there's been much more attention paid to the role of evangelical Christians in the Republican Party. In "American Theocracy," though, Phillips brings something important to the discussion -- a global historical perspective on the relationship between growing religious zeal and the end of national greatness. "[T]he precedents of past leading world economic powers show that blind faith and religious excesses -- the rapture seems to be both -- have often contributed to national decline, sometimes even being in its forefront."
For someone who is profoundly uneasy about America's future right now, there's something perversely comforting about reading this from a figure like Phillips. It suggests that one's enveloping sense of foreboding is based on something more than the psychological stress of living under the Bush kakistocracy. A feeling that the world is falling apart is usually associated with neurosis; now, it's possible that it's a sign of sanity.

But if Phillips is correct, the coming years are going to be ugly for all of us, not just blithe exurbanites with SUVs and floating-rate mortgages. With oil growing scarce and America unable or unwilling to even begin weaning itself away, we could see a future of resource wars that would inflame jihadi terrorism and bankrupt the country, shredding what's left of the social safety net. As Phillips notes, a collapsed economy would leave many debt-ridden Americans as what Democratic leaders have called "modern-day indentured servants," paying back constantly compounding debt with no hope of escape via bankruptcy. The prospect of social breakdown looms. The desperation of New Orleans could end up being a preview.

Desperate economic times are not good for democracy. The Great Depression, which ushered in the New Deal, was an anomaly in this regard. In an Atlantic Monthly article published last summer, the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman wrote, "American history includes several episodes in which stagnating or declining incomes over an extended period have undermined the nation's tolerance and threatened citizens' freedoms." During the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s, when tens of thousands of families lost their land due to a combination of rising interest rates and falling crop prices, the Posse Comitatus, a far-right paramilitary network, made exceptional recruiting inroads. One poll had more than a quarter of Farm Belt respondents blaming "International Jewish bankers" for their region's woes.

The right's ideological infrastructure has only grown stronger since then. Kunstler may not have been exaggerating when he told Salon, "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar."

Eventually, like Spain, England and the Netherlands, the United States, shorn of imperial fantasy, may evolve into something better than what it is today. But terrible times seem likely to come first -- years of fuel shortages, foreign aggression, millenarian madness and political demagoguery. A Democratic president could stop exacerbating the country's problems and could reconcile with the rest of the world, but it's unclear how much he or she could really turn things around. America's economic and energy foundations are too badly eroded to be restored anytime soon. Besides, redistricting and the overrepresentation of rural states in the Senate mean that the GOP will remain powerful even if a decisive majority of Americans vote against it. Zealous conservatives in Congress and the media will almost certainly mount an assault on any future Democratic president just as they did on Bill Clinton. Governmental deadlock, as opposed to flagrant recklessness and misrule, is probably the best that can be hoped for, at least for the next few years.

In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, it was clear to everyone that the United States had suffered a hideous blow, but few had any idea just how bad it was. It didn't occur to most people to wonder whether the country's very core had been seriously damaged; if anything, America had never seemed so united and resolute. Almost five years later, with Bush still in the White House, a whole cavalcade of catastrophes bearing down on us and a lack of political will to address any of them, the scope of Osama bin Laden's triumph is coming sickeningly into focus. He didn't start the country on its march of folly, but he spurred America toward bombastic nationalism, military quagmire and escalating debt, all of which have made its access to the oil controlled by the seething countries of the Middle East ever more precarious. Now the United States is careening down a well-worn road faster than anyone could have imagined.
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/03/16/phillips/

[Rob Beschizza]

You know what's funny? In the 80s, people in Britain were seriously worried that the U.K. would get snarled up in a shitty war and end up being controlled by religious fascists. We remember V for Vendetta, but that's just what's lasted the distance in a literary sense. At the time, popular culture was infused with this fear. There was even a kids TV show called "The Knights of God" about a heroic Welsh peasant fighting to overthrow the theocrats running England into the ground.

Odd that it's ramping up here rather than there, eh?

[Peter Frazier]

Heh, kakistocracy, my new word for the day.

[Rob Beschizza]

Heh, kakistocracy, my new word for the day.

Shouldn't that be cacostocracy? What is this, ancient Greece in here?

[Brian Rucker]

More on Phillips from the NYT Book Review:

Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19brink.html?pagewanted=2&incamp=article_popular

[Brian Rucker]

Anyone have a link to video of this?

For a president whose public appearances have often been choreographed, the questions proved penetrating and critical.

The first was whether Bush agreed with "prophetic Christians" who see the war in Iraq as an early sign of the apocalypse. The president stammered, laughed nervously and said: "First I'd heard of that."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-na-bush21mar21,1,1835330.story

[Brian Rucker]

The first question came from a woman in the audience and her question was: "Thank you for coming to Cleveland, Mr. President and the Cleveland Club. My question is that author and former Nixon administration official, Kevin (it sounded like 'Captain', thanks to reader Max for the correction) Phillips ,in his latest book, American Theocracy, discusses what has been called radical Chritianity and it's growing involvement into government and politics. He makes the point that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise in terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you believe this? That the war in Iraq and the rise in terrosim are signs of the apocalypse. And, if not, why not?"

President Bush: Um..uh...er...(laughter from audience and Bush)...um..uh... I....the answer is...I haven't really thought of it that way (heh, heh) (crowd laughs). Here's how I think of it. Um...first, I've heard of that by the way. I..uh.. the...uh..I, I guess...um...I'm more of a practical fellow. I vowed after September 11th that I would do everything I could to protect the American people. And...uh...my attitude, of course, was affected by the attacks.

I knew we were at a war. I knew that the enemy obviously had to be sophisticated and lethal to fly hijcacked airplanes...uh...into facilities of people, innocent people doing nothing, just sitting there going to work. I also knew this about this war on terror that...uh..that uh....the farther we got away from September 11th the more likely that people would, you iknow, seek comfort and not think about this global war on terror as a global war on terror. And, that's good, by the way...
http://www.newshounds.us/2006/03/20/happy_stories_about_iraq_are_at_the_forefront_on_f ox_again.php

The rambling goes on for another page and, naturally, never addresses the question head on.

Now me? I don't know whether he actually believes that religious right End Times crap or not. But it's plentifully clear a huge chunk of his most rabid supporters live and breath the stuff. So there's no way he can afford to offhandedly dismiss it. Instead it's, "First I've heard of that or I haven't really thought of it that way or I'm more of a practical fellow." This from the same fire and brimstone, Good vs. Evil, sermonizing sonofabitch that absolutely knew what he was doing when he was rallying his base for the war in Iraq.

Here was his chance to just lay it all to rest and move on. But he can't. Whether he wants to or not.

Edit: Naturally, Crooks and Liars has the clip. Doesn't look quite as bad as it might have. You get the feeling his natural inclination is to really laugh it off but, on second thought - realizing just how that might play in the heartland, he comes at it from a different angle. Man knows who butters his bread.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/03/20.html#a7592

[instant0]

Why is it so hard to make it optional for students to themselves chose what they want to study?

In Norway when I went to school, we had a 'forced' study session each week in Christianity... Your parents had to go through a lot of work to get you out of this and most schools did'nt have anything else to put you to for that hour, so you'd either be stuck in the christian course anyway (not like many kids protested anyway... ) or you'd be in the library for an hour or doing some menial task not related to your other study courses.

Guess learning about Islam would'nt be bad though.. considering what Europe will face in the next 50 years.

[Brian Rucker]

Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough are Baptists, D. James Kennedy is a fundamentalist Presbyterian, and John Eidsmoe is a Lutheran. All of them, however, have been shaped by dominion theology, which asserts that, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, godly men have the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.

Dominion theology comes out of Christian Reconstructionism, a fundamentalist creed that was propagated by the late Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Born in New York City in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had recently fled the genocide in Turkey, Rushdoony was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and spent over eight years as a Presbyterian missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. He was a prolific writer, churning out dense tomes advocating the abolition of public schools and social services and the replacement of civil law with biblical law. White-bearded and wizardly, Rushdoony had the look of an Old Testament patriarch and the harsh vision to match -- he called for the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers, and unchaste women, among other sinners. Democracy, he wrote, is a heresy and "the great love of the failures and cowards of life."

Reconstructionism is a postmillennial theology, meaning its followers believe Jesus won't return until after Christians establish a thousand year reign on earth. While other Christians wait for the messiah, Reconstructionists want to build the kingdom themselves. Most American evangelicals, on the other hand, are premillennialists. They believe (with some variations) that at the time of Christ's return, Christians will be gathered up to heaven, missing the tribulations endured by unbelievers. In the past, this belief led to a certain apathy -- why worry if the world is about to end and you'll be safe from the carnage?

Since the 1970s, though, in tandem with the rise of the religious right, premillennialism has been politicized. A crucial figure in this process was the seminal evangelical writer Francis Schaeffer, an American who founded L'Abri, a Christian community in the Swiss Alps where religious intellectuals gathered to talk and study. As early as the 1960s, Schaeffer was reading Rushdoony and holding seminars on his work. Schaeffer went on to write a series of highly influential books elucidating the idea of the Christian worldview. A Christian Manifesto, published in 1981, described modern history as a contest between the Christian worldview and the materialist one, saying, "These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results -- including sociological and government results, and specifically including law."

Schaeffer was not a theocrat, but he drew on Reconstructionist ideas of America as an originally Christian nation. In "A Christian Manifesto," he warned against wrapping Christianity in the American flag, but added, "None of this, however, changes the fact that the United States was founded upon a Christian consensus, nor that we today should bring Judeo-Christian principles into play in regard to government." Schaeffer was one of the first evangelical leaders to get deeply involved in the fight against abortion, and he advocated civil disobedience and the possible use of force to stop it. "It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's Law it abrogates its authority," he wrote.

Tim LaHaye, who is most famous for putting a Tom Clancy gloss on premillennialist theology in the Left Behind thrillers that he co-writes with Jerry Jenkins, was heavily influenced by Schaeffer, to whom he dedicated his book "The Battle for the Mind." That book married Schaeffer's theories to a conspiratorial view of history and politics, arguing, "Most people today do not realize what humanism really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country -- and, one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the UN, education, TV, and most of the other influential things of life.

"We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders," LaHaye wrote.

As premillennialists grew to embrace the goal of dominion, they made alliances with Reconstructionists. In 1984, Jay Grimstead, a disciple of Francis Schaeffer, brought important pre- and post-millennialists together to form the Coalition on Revival (COR) in order to lay a blueprint for taking over American life. Tim LaHaye was an original member of COR's steering committee, along with Rushdoony, North, creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy, and the Reverend Donald Wildmon of the influential American Family Association.

Between 1984 and 1986, COR developed seventeen "worldview" documents, which elucidate the "Christian" position on most aspects of life. Just as political Islam is often called Islamism to differentiate the fascist political doctrine from the faith, the ideology laid out in these papers could be called Christianism. The documents outline a complete political program, with a "biblically correct" position on issues like taxes (God favors a flat rate), public schools (generally frowned upon), and the media and the arts ("We deny that any pornography and other blasphemy are permissible as art or 'free speech'").

In a 1988 letter to supporters, Grimstead announced the completion of a high school curriculum "using the COR Worldview Documents as textbooks." Since then, there's been a proliferation of schools, books, and seminars devoted to inculcating the correct Christian worldview in students and activists. Charles Colson accepts one hundred people annually into his yearlong "worldview training" courses, which include meetings in Washington, D.C., online seminars, "mentoring," and several hours of homework each week. "The program will be heavily weighted towards how to think," Colson's Web site says. It's intended for those who work in churches, media, law, government, and education, and who can thus teach others to think the same way.

Those who don't have a year to spare can attend one of more than a dozen Worldview Weekend conferences held every year in churches nationwide. Popular speakers include the revisionist Christian nationalist historian David Barton, David Limbaugh (Rush's born-again brother), and evangelical former sitcom star Kirk Cameron. In 2003, Tom DeLay was a featured speaker at a Worldview Weekend at Rick Scarborough's former church in Pearland, Texas. He told the crowd, "Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity."

Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they're simply responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. They say they're the victims in the culture wars. But Christian nationalist ideologues don't want equality, they want dominance. In his book "The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action," George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote:

"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less...
Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ."
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2006/05/12/goldberg/index2.html

[Nick Walter]

You on summer break Rucker? You are updating all your classic threads :)

[Brian Rucker]

Oh, man - I'm so far behind it's not funny. :) But I can't catch up. Frigging Republican incompetence, corruption and zaniness just outstrips my best efforts.

[MikeSofaer]

I heard about this on NPR yesterday, I think it was on Fresh Air. The lady seemed a bit worried.

[shift6]

It's funny, I too just began looking at the basics of Dominion Theology. That's some fucking scary stuff. These guys are legitimate, actual Inquisition types.

[John Many Jars]

I wonder whether radical Islamists would like us more or less if we became a Dominion? More at first, then less? Less at first, then more?

[Brian Rucker]

And it would be hi-larious if they were just some fringe nuts. But you've got real politicians, hell, if you consider DeLay and his like real politicians, catering to them. This country is going in some scarey directions.

[bago]

Delay is finished. However if you want your chill read Michelle Goldberg. Andrew Sullivan is doing a bit on this too.

[Saber Cherry]

I'd love to play a game of Dominions against those people, and walk all over them with an Arch Devil prophet carrying the Ark.

[Brian Rucker]

I loved it when moderate Republicans and conservative leaning independants would accuse Democrats of raising up the religious right as a "boogeyman." Now, the boogeyman is raising itself up. Read on:

WASHINGTON, May 13 — Some of President Bush's most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion.
In the last several weeks, Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and one of the most influential Christian conservatives, has publicly accused Republican leaders of betraying the social conservatives who helped elect them in 2004. He has also warned in private meetings with about a dozen of the top Republicans in Washington that he may turn critic this fall unless the party delivers on conservative goals.

And at a meeting in Northern Virginia this weekend of the Council for National Policy, an alliance of the most prominent Christian conservatives, several participants said sentiment toward the White House and Republicans in Congress had deteriorated sharply since the 2004 elections.

When the group met in the summer of 2004, it resembled a pep rally for Mr. Bush and his allies on Capitol Hill, and one session focused on how to use state initiatives seeking to ban same-sex marriage to help turn out the vote. This year, some participants are complaining that as soon as Mr. Bush was re-elected he stopped expressing his support for a constitutional amendment banning such unions.

Christian conservative leaders have often threatened in the months before an election to withhold their support for Republicans in an effort to press for their legislative goals. In the 1990's, Dr. Dobson in particular became known for his jeremiads against the Republican party, most notably in the months before the 1998 midterm elections.

But the complaints this year are especially significant because they underscore how the broad decline in public approval for Mr. Bush and Congressional Republicans is beginning to cut into their core supporters. The threatened defections come just two years after many Christian conservatives — most notably Dr. Dobson — abandoned much of their previous reservations and poured energy into electing Republicans in 2004.

Dr. Dobson gave his first presidential endorsement to Mr. Bush and held get-out-the-vote rallies that attracted thousands of admirers in states with pivotal Senate races while Focus on the Family and many of its allies helped register voters in conservative churches.
Midterm Congressional elections tend to be won by whichever side can motivate more true believers to vote. Dr. Dobson and other conservatives are renewing their complaints about the Republicans at a time when several recent polls have shown sharp declines in approval among Republicans and conservatives. And compared with other constituencies, evangelical Protestants have historically been suspicious of the worldly business of politics and thus more prone to stay home unless they feel clear moral issues are at stake.

"When a president is in a reasonably strong position, these kind of leaders don't have a lot of leverage," said Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan political analyst. "But when the president is weak, they tend to have a lot of leverage."

Dr. Dobson, whose daily radio broadcast has millions of listeners, has already signaled his willingness to criticize Republican leaders. In a recent interview with Fox News on the eve of a visit to the White House, he accused Republicans of "just ignoring those that put them in office."

Dr. Dobson cited the House's actions on two measures that passed over the objections of social conservatives: a hate-crime bill that extended protections to gay people, and increased support for embryonic stem cell research.

"There's just very, very little to show for what has happened," Dr. Dobson said, "and I think there's going to be some trouble down the road if they don't get on the ball."

According to people who were at the meetings or were briefed on them, Dr. Dobson has made the same point more politely in a series of private conversations over the last two weeks in meetings with several top Republicans, including Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser; Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader; Representative J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the House speaker; and Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the majority leader.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/washington/15dobson.html

[Brian Rucker]

And in what I'm sure is completely unrelated news:

From Froomkin at washingtonpost.com

And here's another data point: Joel C. Rosenberg, who writes Christian apocalyptic fiction, told me in an interview this week that he was invited to a White House Bible study group last year to talk about current events and biblical prophecy.

Rosenberg said that on February 10, 2005, he came to speak to a "couple dozen" White House aides in the Old Executive Office Building -- and has stayed in touch with several of them since.

Rosenberg wouldn't say exactly what was discussed. "The meeting itself was off the record, as you could imagine," he said. He declined to name the staffer he said invited him or describe the attendees in any way other than to say that the president was not among them. "I can't imagine they'd want to talk about it," he said.

"I can't tell you that the people that I spoke with agree with me, or believe that prophecy can really help you understand what will happen next in the Middle East, but I'm not surprised that they're intrigued."

The White House press office wasn't able to confirm the visit for me, but there have been previous reports about White House Bible study groups inviting Christian authors to come speak.

Rosenberg -- like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the authors of the phenomenally popular "Left Behind" series -- writes fiction inspired by biblical prophecy about the apocalypse. The consistent theme is that certain current events presage the end times, the Rapture, and the return of Jesus Christ. Rosenberg's particular pitch to journalists is that his books come true.

Here he is in a recent interview with Christian talk-show host Pat Robertson , talking about what he thinks is going to happen next: "Now I have to say, Pat, I believe that Ezekiel 38 and 39 -- the prophecies that we're talking about -- I think this is about the end of radical Islam as we know it. God says He's going to supernaturally judge Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, these other countries. We're talking about fire from heaven, a massive earthquake. It's going to be devastating and tragic. But I believe that afterwards there's going to be a great spiritual awakening. We're seeing more Muslims coming to Christ right now than at any other time in history. But I think that's just the beginning. We've got dark days ahead of us. But I believe there's a light at the end of that tunnel."

Rosenberg says he got a call last year from a White House staffer. "He said 'A lot of people over here are reading your novels, and they're intrigued that these things keep on happening. . . . Your novels keep foreshadowing actual coming events. . . . And so we're curious, how are you doing it? What's the secret? Why don't you come over and walk us through the story behind these novels?' So I did."

Judy Keen first wrote back in October 2002, in USA Today, that "some White House staffers have been meeting weekly at hour-long prayer and Bible study sessions."

Elisabeth Bumiller wrote in the New York Times last year that "intelligent design was the subject of a weekly Bible study class several years ago when Charles W. Colson, the founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries, spoke to the group."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/08/04/BL2006080400780_2.html

[Mike O'Malley]

1. "Rosenberg" writes Christian apocalyptic fiction?
2. For the love of God, please tell me this isn't the same Joel Rosenberg who wrote the Guardians of the Flame fantasy stuff. I loved that when I was younger.

edit: Damn, Amazon thinks it is. I'm crying inside.

[Flowers]

Yeah, that's the same way I felt when the lead singer of Superdrag got Jesus.

[Brian Rucker]

BBC article on Christian Right's growing influence on foreign policy:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5193092.stm

More than 3,400 evangelical Christians have arrived in Washington to lobby lawmakers as part of the first annual summit of Christians United for Israel.

Delegates have come from all 50 states and have 280 meetings on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Pastor John Hagee said.
John Hagee is the pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and a long-time fervent supporter of Israel.

John Hagee says 40 million Americans back his views

In common with many American evangelicals, he believes that God gave the land to the Jewish people and that Christians have a Biblical duty to support it and the Jews.

His latest book, Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, interprets the Bible to predict that Russian and Arab armies will invade Israel and be destroyed by God.

This will set up a confrontation over Israel between China and the West, led by the anti-Christ, who will be the head of the European Union, Pastor Hagee writes.

That final battle between East and West - at Armageddon, an actual place in Israel - will precipitate the second coming of Christ, he concludes.
What has changed is the movement's level of political involvement, said Nancy Roman, the director of the Council on Foreign Relations' Washington programme.

"Part of what is happening is that the evangelical community in the US is becoming more engaged in the political process," she said.

"Whereas the church used to counsel people not to engage in politics, many churches are now counselling the opposite.

"It's important and it will have a huge influence on foreign policy over time," she added.
Michelle Goldberg is deeply concerned about that influence.

She is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, which argues that a significant strain of conservative Christianity is working to undermine fundamental American rights and freedoms.

She said the movement was just as dangerous in foreign policy.

"Christian Zionism is responsible for American support for some of the most irredentist Israeli positions," she said, such as support for settlement-building.

She said evangelical Christians had substantial influence on US Middle East policy - more so than some better-known names such as Aipac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

[Brian Rucker]

The moderates strike back!

KANSAS CITY, Kan., July 29 — God and Charles Darwin are not on the primary ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, but once again a contentious schools election has religion and science at odds in a state that has restaged a three-quarter-century battle over the teaching of evolution.

Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of Education adopted rules for teaching science containing one of the broadest challenges in the nation to Darwin’s theory of evolution, moderate Republicans and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack. They want to retake power and switch the standards back to what they call conventional science.

The Kansas election is being watched closely by both sides in the national debate over the teaching of evolution. In the past several years, pitched battles have been waged between the scientific establishment and proponents of what is called intelligent design, which holds that nature alone cannot explain life’s origin and complexity.

Last February, the Ohio Board of Education reversed its 2002 mandate requiring 10th-grade biology classes to critically analyze evolution. The action followed a federal judge’s ruling that teaching intelligent design in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A defeat for the conservative majority in Kansas on Tuesday could be further evidence of the fading fortunes of the intelligent design movement, while a victory would preserve an important stronghold in Kansas.

The curriculum standards adopted by the education board do not specifically mention intelligent design, but advocates of the belief lobbied for the changes, and students are urged to seek “more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

Though there is no reliable polling data available, Joseph Aistrup, head of political science at Kansas State University, said sharp ideological splits among Republicans and an unusual community of interest among moderate Republicans and some Democrats were helping challengers in the primary.

Kansas Democrats, moreover, have a strong standard-bearer in the incumbent governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who has distanced herself from the debate.

“And if a conservative candidate makes it through the primary, there’s a Democratic challenger waiting” in the general election, Professor Aistrup said.

Several moderate Republican candidates have vowed, if they lose Tuesday, to support the Democratic primary winners in November.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/us/01evolution.html

[Flowers]

I love it when a coalition unravels. I always did think money and zeal were odd bedfellows. Money belongs with pragmatism.

[Ergo]

1. "Rosenberg" writes Christian apocalyptic fiction?
2. For the love of God, please tell me this isn't the same Joel Rosenberg who wrote the Guardians of the Flame fantasy stuff. I loved that when I was younger.

edit: Damn, Amazon thinks it is. I'm crying inside.
Rest easy. They're two different people.

[John Many Jars]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092901055.html

[Matthew Gallant]

It's really more of an attack on the ACLU, who will do the work pro bono regardless. They probably can handle the hit to the pocketbook. It's a pretty scummy bill though. In how many other civil issues is a successful plaintiff not allowed to recover attorney fees?

[Ben Sones]

I can't imagine how that bill could withstand even the most tentative Constitutional scrutiny, since the bill itself is, as far as I can tell, a violation of the Establishment clause. That law wouldn't be long for this world; it will be challenged and struck down* the first time it's used.


*Assuming that the senate even passes it, which it probably won't.

[RickH]

In how many other civil issues is a successful plaintiff not allowed to recover attorney fees?

Almost all, in the US. Both sides being responsible for their attorneys fees is often called the "American Rule." If you meant "civil rights," that's different, but there are statutory conditions to be met. But realize, this is an exeption to the rule, and can be changed at the whim of the legislature. Honestly, there is no constitutional aspect here.

[Brian Rucker]

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.

The office’s primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book.

Entitled “Tempting Faith,” the book is not scheduled for release until Oct. 16, but MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” has obtained a copy.

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.
He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.

According to Kuo, “Ken loved the idea and gave us our marching orders.”

Among those marching orders, Kuo says, was Mehlman’s mandate to conceal the true nature of the events.

Kuo quotes Mehlman as saying, “… (I)t can’t come from the campaigns. That would make it look too political. It needs to come from the congressional offices. We’ll take care of that by having our guys call the office [of faith-based initiatives] to request the visit.”

Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans, Kuo reports. The outreach was so extensive and so powerful in motivating not just conservative evangelicals, but also traditionally Democratic minorities, that Kuo attributes Bush’s 2004 Ohio victory “at least partially … to the conferences we had launched two years before.”

With the exception of one reporter from the Washington Post, Kuo says the media were oblivious to the political nature and impact of his office’s events, in part because so much of the debate centered on issues of separation of church and state.

In fact, the Bush administration often promoted the faith-based agenda by claiming that existing government regulations were too restrictive on religious organizations seeking to serve the public.

Substantiating that claim proved difficult, Kuo says. “Finding these examples became a huge priority.… If President Bush was making the world a better place for faith-based groups, we had to show it was really a bad place to begin with. But, in fact, it wasn’t that bad at all.”
More pointedly, Kuo quotes an unnamed member of the review panel charged with rating grant applications.

“But,” she said with a giggle, ‘When I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero … a lot of us did.’”

“Tempting Faith” contains several other controversial claims about Kuo’s office, the Bush White House and even the 1994 Republican revolution in Congress.

Many of those revelations and others will be the topic of discussion on Thursday night’s edition of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15228489/

[Brian Rucker]

More Kuo in an interview at Salon.

Obviously, the main topic of discussion about your book has been the administration's attitude toward the evangelical community, your contention that many members of the Bush team felt disdain for fundamentalists. Can you tell me about what you saw while you were in the administration?

I think the administration's attitude toward evangelicals was the administration's attitude toward any other constituent group. They viewed them as necessary, but it wasn't like they shared any particular affinity for them. I think that's something Christians need to understand. There's been this image perpetuated of President Bush as "pastor in chief," and I think Christians have fallen into that. What they need to understand is that President Bush is a politician, a very good politician. He's the head of the GOP, he's the head of government, but he's not a pastor. I think that this pastoral sense of him that has been perpetuated is preventing Christians from being more critical, objectively critical -- in Jesus' words, "wise as a serpent." And I also think that it contributes to this sense of political seduction by Christians. When you get to the point where when I mention Jesus people think they know my politics, that I'm pro-life and anti-gay and pro-Iraq war, as opposed to identifying Jesus as someone who will bring life and has good news, I think that's troubling.
You're not happy with the way Tony Perkins talks about you, but one of the most discussed things about you and your book has been your claim that the Bush team ridiculed Christian conservative leaders. You told CBS, for example, that "people in the White House political affairs office referred to Pat Robertson as 'insane'" and "Jerry Falwell as 'ridiculous.'" Is there any validity to the administration's criticisms of the evangelical leaders they were dealing with?

(Laughs.) Wow. Um, that's a good question.

You know, I go back to something that Chuck Colson wrote after he left the White House. Colson tells the story about his own experience working for Nixon, and he says in the early 1970s, working under Nixon, he was in charge of, basically, seducing these Christian leaders. He closes the story saying, "On the whole, of all the groups I dealt with, I found the religious leaders the most naive about politics. Maybe that is because so many came from sheltered backgrounds, or perhaps it is a mistaken perception of the demands of Christian charity ... Or, most worrisome of all, they may simply like to be around power.”

I think that's the best answer to your question.

So you think they like the power too much, is that what you mean?

I think White House power is kind of like Tolkien's ring of power. When you put it on, it feels good and dazzles. After a while it becomes imminently and remarkably distorting. I think everyone is subject to the negative influence of that power, and that's true of anybody. It's true of me, it's true of anyone that's worked there, it's true of anybody in politics after a while.
One of the lines of attack that I've seen used against you is that you're naive, that you didn't understand the realities of working in the White House. What do you think of that accusation?

I'm an optimist. I hope. I believe in the possibility of change. I think if you don't have those things, you should get your butt out of anything you're involved in. But I also -- I've worked for the CIA, I've worked in politics for more than a few years, I've had to deal with my own health issues, my own mortality. You can't go through those things, you can't work those places, and be some starry-eyed, naive naif. Do I believe in promises? Yeah, absolutely. But this idea that I'm some starry-eyed naif is just silly.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/10/17/kuo/index.html

[Brian Rucker]

WICHITA -- Paul Morrison, a career prosecutor who specializes in putting killers behind bars, has the bulletproof résumé and the rugged looks of a law-and-order Republican, which is what he was until last year. That was when he announced he would run for attorney general -- as a Democrat.

He is now running neck-and-neck with Republican Phill Kline, an iconic social conservative who made headlines by seeking the names of abortion-clinic patients and vowing to defend science-teaching standards that challenge Darwinian evolution. What's more, Morrison is raising money faster than Kline and pulling more cash from Republicans than Democrats.

Nor is Morrison alone. In a state that voted nearly 2 to 1 for President Bush in 2004, nine former Republicans will be on the November ballot as Democrats. Among them is Mark Parkinson, a former chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, who changed parties to run for lieutenant governor with the popular Democratic governor, Kathleen Sebelius.

"I'd reached a breaking point," Parkinson said, preparing for a rally in Wichita alongside Sebelius. "I want to work on relevant issues and not on a lot of things that don't matter."

The Kansas developments coincide with efforts by Democrats across the country to capture moderate Republican and independent voters dismayed with partisan bickering from both parties, particularly from the Republican right. The spirit of the attempted Democratic comeback in Kansas, set by Sebelius, is a search for the workable political center.

Though yet untested in the election booth, the Democratic developments in Kansas reflect polls in many parts of the country. As elsewhere, Democrats and moderate Republicans say they are frustrated with policies and practices they trace to Republican leadership, including the Iraq war, ballooning government spending, ethics violations and the influence of social conservatives.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/18/AR2006101801679.html

[Brian Rucker]

Garry Wills A Country Ruled by Faith (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19590)

Bush promised his evangelical followers faith-based social services, which he called "compassionate conservatism." He went beyond that to give them a faith-based war, faith-based law enforcement, faith-based education, faith-based medicine, and faith-based science. He could deliver on his promises because he stocked the agencies handling all these problems, in large degree, with born-again Christians of his own variety. The evangelicals had complained for years that they were not able to affect policy because liberals left over from previous administrations were in all the health and education and social service bureaus, at the operational level. They had specific people they objected to, and they had specific people with whom to replace them, and Karl Rove helped them do just that.

[Brian Rucker]

Jan. 8, 2007 | Longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges, the former New York Times bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans, knows a lot about the savagery that people are capable of, especially when they're besotted with dreams of religious or national redemption. In his acclaimed 2002 book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," he wrote: "I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of Southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments." Hedges was part of New York Times team of reporters that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting about global terrorism.

Given such intimacy with horror, one might expect him to be aloof from the seemingly less urgent cultural disputes that dominate domestic American politics. Yet in the rise of America's religious right, Hedges senses something akin to the brutal movements he's spent his life chronicling. The title of his new book speaks for itself: "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." Scores of volumes about the religious right have recently been published (one of them, "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," by me), but Hedges' book is perhaps the most furious and foreboding, all the more so because he knows what fascism looks like.
In the beginning of the book, you write briefly about covering wars in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans. How did that shape the way you understand these social forces in America? What similarities do you see?

When I covered the war in the Balkans, there was always the canard that this was a war about ancient ethnic hatreds that was taken from Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts." That was not a war about ancient ethnic hatreds. It was a war that was fueled primarily by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. Milosevic and Tudman, and to a lesser extent Izetbegović, would not have been possible in a stable Yugoslavia.

When I first covered Hamas in 1988, it was a very marginal organization with very little power or reach. I watched Hamas grow. Although I came later to the Balkans, I had a good understanding of how Milosevic built his Serbian nationalist movement. These radical movements share a lot of ideological traits with the Christian right, including that cult of masculinity, that cult of power, rampant nationalism fused with religious chauvinism. I find a lot of parallels.

People have a very hard time believing the status quo of their existence, or the world around them, can ever change. There's a kind of psychological inability to accept how fragile open societies are. When I was in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, at the start of the war, I would meet with incredibly well-educated, multilingual Kosovar Albanian friends in the cafes. I would tell them that in the countryside there were armed groups of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who I'd met, and they would insist that the Kosovo Liberation Army didn't exist, that it was just a creation of the Serb police to justify repression.

You saw the same thing in the cafe society in Sarajevo on the eve of the war in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic or even Milosevic were buffoonish figures to most Yugoslavs, and were therefore, especially among the educated elite, never taken seriously. There was a kind of blindness caused by their intellectual snobbery, their inability to understand what was happening. I think we have the same experience here. Those of us in New York, Boston, San Francisco or some of these urban pockets don't understand how radically changed our country is, don't understand the appeal of these buffoonish figures to tens of millions of Americans.
But don't you feel like the tipping point is still quite a way off? Speaking personally, when I've read about totalitarian movements, I've always imagined that I'd know enough to pack up and go. That would seem to be a very premature thing to do here.

Well, most people didn't pack up and go. The people who packed up and left were the exception, and most people thought they were crazy. My friends in Pristina had no idea what was going on in Kosovo until they were literally herded down to the train station and pushed into boxcars and shipped like cattle to Macedonia. And that's not because they weren't intelligent or perceptive. It was because, like all of us, they couldn't comprehend how fragile the world was around them, and how radically and quickly it could change. I think that's a human phenomenon.

Hitler was in power in 1933, but it took him until the late '30s to begin to consolidate his program. He never spoke about the Jews because he realized that raw anti-Semitism didn't play out with the German public. All he did was talk about family values and restoring the moral core of Germany. The Russian revolution took a decade to consolidate. It takes time to acculturate a society to a radical agenda, but that acculturation has clearly begun here, and I don't see people standing up and trying to stop them. The Democratic policy of trying to reach out to a movement that attacks whole segments of the society as worthy only of conversion or eradication is frightening.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/01/08/fascism/index.html

[Brian Rucker]

"It would be a mistake to draw the conclusion that because there is not one obvious or a few obvious leaders of this movement, that the movement is waning," said Mark DeMoss, president of an Atlanta-based public relations firm that works primarily for evangelical organizations.

But John C. Green, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said four factors combine to make this a time of flux on the religious right.

There is no single leader who stands astride the movement as Falwell once did. Nor has a 2008 presidential contender emerged to galvanize the ranks. A generation gap is emerging between younger and older evangelicals on subjects such as homosexuality. And a sometimes bitter debate is pitting evangelicals who want to keep their political activity tightly focused on a few issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, against those who want to embrace a broader agenda, including climate change and global poverty.

All these shifts present opportunities for younger leaders. But they also pose the possibility that the movement will become more fragmented.

"The evangelical movement as a political force is in a serious state of transition," Page said. "With the passing of Jerry Falwell, evangelicals are struggling to try to find the kind of cohesion he represented. That was going on even before he died."

When Falwell dissolved the Moral Majority in 1989, the leadership torch was picked up by Robertson at the Christian Coalition. After that group ran into financial and management problems in the late 1990s, leadership passed to Dobson's radio ministry, Focus on the Family.

"Falwell's death highlights the inevitable change in the leadership of conservative Christians," Green said. "The big question is whether there will be one prominent leader for this movement, as there was most of the time in the past, or whether there will be many leaders, making the movement more diffuse and perhaps less influential."

DeMoss said he thinks "there will never be such a single, dominant leader of the movement again."

Page agrees. "We're in an anti-hero age. People shoot at anybody who comes to a certain level of prominence," he said. "We're in a time of real doubt and disturbing lack of loyalty to causes. We see people having a hard time pulling together."

The absence of a national evangelical political leader was masked in recent years by the presence of President Bush, who served as a rallying point. But the Rev. Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptists' Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said the only candidates in 2008 with wide appeal to evangelicals are ones, such as former governor Mike Huckabee (R-Ark.) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kans.), who do not appear able to win.

Land noted that the leading Republican in the polls, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been married three times and supports abortion rights. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has opposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is a Mormon who adamantly supported legalized abortion in previous runs for office, though he has changed his position.

Faced with this field, some evangelicals have suggested that a Democratic victory might be a good thing. "If 2008 is a bad year for the Republican Party, there will be nothing like a liberal president to help that movement find its footing again," said Gary Bauer, president of the conservative group American Values.

Polls suggest that evangelicals under 30 are just as staunchly opposed to abortion, and almost as concerned about "moral standards" in general, as their elders. But a February Pew survey found that younger evangelicals are more likely than their parents to worry about environmental issues; 59 percent of those under 30 said the United States was "losing ground" on pollution, compared with 37 percent of those over 30.

Acceptance of homosexuality is also greater among young evangelicals. One in three under 30 favors same-sex marriage, compared with one in 10 of their elders.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/21/AR2007052101581.html?nav=most_emailed

[DeepT]

Page agrees. "We're in an anti-hero age. People shoot at anybody who comes to a certain level of prominence," he said. "We're in a time of real doubt and disturbing lack of loyalty to causes.

Yeah, right. How about the fact that there are no heros of prominence? Although if by hero, he means monster, then yes, people were taking shots at heros like Falwell.

[Moore]

A disturbing lack of loyalty? Thats a bit creepy.

[Brian Rucker]

This [Iowa] has been rock-solid Bush country. Conservatives and evangelicals were largely at peace in the knowledge that their president shared their Christian values. But this year, they aren't at all sure anymore where to put their trust for 2008 -- or whether they should even bother trying.
Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor with the affable manner, would seem to be the natural choice here, and a Washington Post-ABC poll conducted over five nights in Iowa ending Sunday shows Huckabee's support in the state tripling since July -- bringing him within striking distance of Mitt Romney's well-heeled operation. Sixty-eight percent of Huckabee's support comes from self-identified evangelical Protestants.
They pledge to vote in the general election even if they skip the caucuses and are resigned to the fact that they may have to vote for -- in their words -- "the lesser of two evils."

"I say we have to go vote because if we don't vote, then all the women will vote and we'll have a woman in the White House and then we got problems," bellows Larry Timmons, who is in the construction business, from the back of the room. This gets a huge laugh. But he's serious.

"God," he notes, "did not plan for a woman to run everything."

Political experts have been perplexed that the evangelical community hasn't rallied sooner and in greater force for Huckabee. "My sense is that the rank and file on the religious right are waiting for cues from identifiable leaders like James Dobson or Tony Perkins," says Cary Covington, associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa.

But beyond the horse race, beyond the fact that Iowa is a late-deciding state, the mood among many evangelicals here reflects what is happening nationally, as Christian conservatives grapple with apathy and evaluate whether they should count on the government to legislate morality.
Personally, Moes says he, too, has moved to Huckabee's corner. John McCain, he says, strikes him as "very negative, very angry," and Romney's Mormon religion "bothers more people than they care to admit."

And thrice-married Rudy Giuliani, whose children don't seem to be supporting his candidacy, is a non-starter for Moes and many others, he reports, because "he can't get his own house in order."

"The Bible says that if a man can't lead his own family, how can he manage the house of God?" he says. "And I think it's the same with the country. If he can't get his kids to love and respect him, how can he command the respect of a nation?"

Moes says he simply doesn't get why religious leaders aren't doing more for Huckabee. "The saddest thing for me right now is that no one in the evangelical community is leading -- they are all following," says Moes. "Huckabee is head and shoulders above the rest of the field. . . . If someone like James Dobson came out for Huckabee, it would make all the difference in the world. . . . He's one of us."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/20/AR2007112002302.html

[Brian Rucker]

Kennedy and Romney - Politics and Religion in America

From the Washington Post

When he arrived in Houston on the evening of Sept. 12, Kennedy found a "sullen, almost hostile audience," White wrote, but by the end, the event concluded "in respect and friendship." Kennedy explicitly affirmed his belief in separation of church and state, saying that he would not take orders from the Vatican and if his faith ever collided with his duty as president he would resign first.

"I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source," Kennedy said. He warned that voting against him because he was Catholic would unleash broader religious discrimination. "Today I may be the victim but tomorrow it may be you until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril."
Just as Kennedy confronted worries about his Catholicism, Romney hopes to overcome suspicions of his Mormonism. The echo half a century later offers a convenient way for Romney not only to address concerns about his faith but to link himself to the popular 35th president.

The environment, though, was different in 1960, making comparisons imprecise at best. For one thing, Romney has other, perhaps bigger political problems. Kennedy was arguing for keeping religion out of public leadership, while Romney plans to discuss the commonalities and importance of different faiths in public life. Kennedy's challenge was assuring the nation that he believed in strict separation of church and state. Romney wants to convince a narrower, more religious audience in the Republican primary electorate of almost the opposite, that he will promote more religious values in the public square. "I am not going to be giving a JFK speech," Romney demurred this week. "I am going to be talking about the role of religion, faith in America and in a free society."
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2007/12/06/post_227.html?hpid=topnews

Salon's Joan Walsh on Romney's speech
I'm with Walter Shapiro on this one: The big headline on Mitt Romney's momentous speech Thursday morning has to be "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom ... Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone." I happen to be a believer, and I found those words appalling.

Everyone knew Romney couldn't give a "John F. Kennedy speech" because Kennedy made a passionate, historic argument that the separation of church and state should be "absolute." No one quite knew that Romney's speech would represent an "obliteration of the separation of church and state," in the words of the Washington Post's Sally Quinn on MSNBC afterward (a remarkably critical statement from Quinn, given that she's a driving force behind the paper's "On Faith" project). As she noted, Romney's speech laid out a vision of America with no place for atheists, doubters or nonbelievers, and it chilled me.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/election_2008/2007/12/06/romney_speech/

Why does this all matter so much?

Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is surging nationally in the Republican presidential race as he runs better than 3-to-1 ahead of his nearest competitor among religious conservatives.

A Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll shows that Huckabee, with 17 percent support, trails only longtime front-runner Rudy Giuliani, with 23 percent. Huckabee has been running strong in the first voting state of Iowa, though well behind the leading candidates in national surveys. In this latest poll, he forges ahead of Fred Thompson, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ac1P6fNdykeo&refer=home

[Hawkeye Fierce]

Slacktivist responds (http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2007/12/mitt-vs-atheist.html) to Romney's speech:

"Freedom requires religion," Romney said. Had he said, "Freedom requires religious freedom," then I would agree, absolutely. Try to imagine if you can a society in which people were denied this most intimate of freedoms, the freedom of conscience, yet remained in all other respects free. Such a thing is impossible. This is part of the genius of the First Amendment:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Take away any one of those freedoms and you take away the others as well. Each of those freedoms requires the others.

But Romney did not say that freedom requires religious freedom. He said, "Freedom requires religion." And that's a contradictory statement -- a very different, and very frightening, thing.

If freedom requires religion, then the a-religious and irreligious, the non-religious and un-religious are the enemies of freedom. Romney believes, in other words, that atheism is incompatible with freedom. Whatever it is he means by "religious liberty," he does not believe it can safely be applied to atheists.

Keep in mind that this is Mitt "double Guantanamo" Romney talking -- he's made it clear what he wants to do to those he regards as the enemies of freedom.

[Rollory]

There is a school of thought that argues that the necessity of human freedom arises as a consequence of certain religious ideas, and only as a consequence of those religious ideas; that without them, one cannot form a properly internally consistent philosophy that results in the necessity of human freedom. I am by no means an expert on this but IIRC one of the religious underpinnings is "God gave humans free will to freely choose between good and evil; therefore humans shouldn't try to take away what God expressly granted", and that people who don't start from that premise have no overriding reason other than convenience to allow freedom for other people.

It's not an argument I agree with, but it's not unworthy of discussion.

[extarbags]

That sounds like an extension of the old "you can't have morality without religion" line, which is pretty much a crock. It's the kind of thing that seems like it works really well for people who are religious, because from their perspective, morality and belief in freedom, etc, probably do seem to stem from their religious convictions. It falls apart though, when you realize that in actuality, people who aren't religious are just as capable of those values.

In any case, I sincerely doubt that there was any philosophical thought along these lines driving Romney's speech. I'm pretty sure it was basic pandering.

[Tankero]

There is a school of thought that argues that the necessity of human freedom arises as a consequence of certain religious ideas, and only as a consequence of those religious ideas; that without them, one cannot form a properly internally consistent philosophy that results in the necessity of human freedom. I am by no means an expert on this but IIRC one of the religious underpinnings is "God gave humans free will to freely choose between good and evil; therefore humans shouldn't try to take away what God expressly granted", and that people who don't start from that premise have no overriding reason other than convenience to allow freedom for other people.

It's not an argument I agree with, but it's not unworthy of discussion.

The problem with this is the sense of "Manifest Destiny" that is gaining strength in modern religion; we're not dealing with St. Thomas Aquinas as far as theologians go these days, even if Chrisitanity does assert that humans have a God-given free will.

I bring up St. Thomas Aquinas, that delightfully portly fellow, because he declares that there is no such thing as a New New Testament waiting to be written. By saying this he meant to put a stop to the apocalyptic fanatisism and the over-symbolic vision of the world held then. Such figures as "God's Instrument on this Earth" and "The Enemies of Faith" are what St. Thomas meant to dissolve, because they were self-destructive delusions that could justify anything and everything. The Crusades stand as an example of those delusions, since sanctified violence is oxymoronic in a Christian context. St. Thomas Aquinas' final purpose was to truly uphold, at least imho, the sanctity of the free will that God gave every one of us because he declared "God has no purpose for us".

However, if modern christianity indeed held that precept to be true, they'd lose all moralizing authority, all political clout and relevance, because their position is to be the Right (as in correct) in a world of Wrongs. There are rhetoric devices that allow modern religions to embrace both sides of the issue, free will and moralizing authority, but they generally don't withstand even superficial scrutiny.

The religious precepts that're thought to promote freedom are that of the martyr (the non-explosive kind), that of the lost sheep and the visionary. It's a very narrow framework in which to imagine the concept, and given the confrontational religious environment we're in, in our historic era, pretty much negated. Basically, we're in the same sort of place, religiously, that we were in thirteen centuries ago; everything is a symbol, a player in a great text that's being penned by God's finger onto history itself. In such an environment free will is apocryphal, while the true purpose of our lives is to perform our role.

[Nick Walter]

There is a school of thought that argues that the necessity of human freedom arises as a consequence of certain religious ideas, and only as a consequence of those religious ideas; that without them, one cannot form a properly internally consistent philosophy that results in the necessity of human freedom. I am by no means an expert on this but IIRC one of the religious underpinnings is "God gave humans free will to freely choose between good and evil; therefore humans shouldn't try to take away what God expressly granted", and that people who don't start from that premise have no overriding reason other than convenience to allow freedom for other people.

It's not an argument I agree with, but it's not unworthy of discussion.

Bah, theist drivel! I'm a little suspiscious of anyone who claims that there is no way to justify or trust a moral code that doesn't involve positing an invisible patriarch in the sky commanding it from on high. Seems to me that indicates they lack faith in their own ability to behave well and need to rely on the crutch of an external authority to act properly.

But it is a sadly prevalent argument, so I suppose I can't handwave it off easily.

[shift6]

Bah, theist drivel! I'm a little suspiscious of anyone who claims that there is no way to justify or trust a moral code that doesn't involve positing an invisible patriarch in the sky commanding it from on high. Seems to me that indicates they lack faith in their own ability to behave well and need to rely on the crutch of an external authority to act properly.

But it is a sadly prevalent argument, so I suppose I can't handwave it off easily.
That was pretty poorly worded, as well. It is fairly defensible to claim that a moral code requires a reaonably fixed, if not absolute, standard against which it should be measured. On the other hand, having such a moral code doesn't mean one is a retarded simpleton who would otherwise flail about amorally without it as a "crutch" to lean on. Having faith in one's ability to behave well is related to what one believes "behaving well" is, but it isn't the cause of it.

[bago]

It's OK. You can always have Bill-O Tell you who Satan really is.

Clue. He's Greek and orange.

[StGabe]

It is fairly defensible to claim that a moral code requires a reaonably fixed, if not absolute, standard against which it should be measured.

In fact it's not very defensible. The very notion of a fixed, absolute standard itself is rather indefensible. Who told God that his laws were ok and why should we take their word for it? If I have faith in a God named Bob who defines different absolute values, then which of us is right.

Inevitably it comes down to how you define "moral code". I think when it comes down to it you'll find that the those who wish to only allow morality as defined on some cosmic stone tablets are defining morality in a way that by definition isn't really possible.

Having faith in one's ability to behave well is related to what one believes "behaving well" is, but it isn't the cause of it.

It absolutely can be. Having "faith in one's ability to behave well" apart from any absolute, canonical definition of morality shifts responsibility to the individual for determining what is moral and how to be moral. Having such responsibility lie on the individual can cause the individual to better approach moral dillemmas and act accordingly. Putting faith in external morals divorces someone from this responsibility and allows them to more easily handwave convenient but ultimately poorly-reasoned moral decisions.

I.e. by empowering an individual to be the arbitor of morality you actually create an individual who is far better equipped to act morally.

[Theodore Rex DX]

On one view of faith - that it's essentially sustained belief without knowledge or understanding - how could faith in yourself, or any real or imaginary outside system or agent, be any kind of foundation for morality by any honest definition? It's even more bankrupt than extreme relativism. Anyway, faith isn't the foundation of anything - it's what people resort to when their arguments and faculties fail. That's the unfailing pattern. Faith dictates that motivation to believe (there is always a motivation, though most people seem to externalise it) is just another kind of reason to believe, when they're necessarily distinct things. Outside of the context of 'spiritual' matters or personal health, most people will tell you that this is despicable behaviour. I mean, faith of this kind is a foundation in the sense that a lot of people rely on it ... otherwise not so much.

The other view of faith that I can make out is that it's simply an abiding respect and trust.
Issues arise when people inevitably confuse the two versions - of course you use the second if you buy into the first - but these aren't remotely compatible. You can't trust or distrust in something you don't even know is real.

Re: Morality: The only decent definition of I've seen or come up with is 'an attempt to do what is best'. Something like that. Getting more specific by bringing in 'rules' or 'systems' to help define or aim at what actually is 'best' as part of the basic definition seems kind of extraneous. I think it's pretty elegant, and just seems to 'fit' the more you test it.

[shift6]

In fact it's not very defensible. The very notion of a fixed, absolute standard itself is rather indefensible.
I said "reasonably fixed, if not absolute, standard". I also didn't select a specific moral code as in your God Named Bob intarweb expression of moral relativism. I'd argue that there are widely accepted moral codes, such as something like the golden rule, which have a reasonably fixed standard: that other people are as legitimate as oneself, and one has no right to intrude upon them.

Tell me how that's not very defensible.

It absolutely can be. Having "faith in one's ability to behave well" apart from any absolute, canonical definition of morality shifts responsibility to the individual for determining what is moral and how to be moral. Having such responsibility lie on the individual can cause the individual to better approach moral dillemmas and act accordingly. Putting faith in external morals divorces someone from this responsibility and allows them to more easily handwave convenient but ultimately poorly-reasoned moral decisions.

I.e. by empowering an individual to be the arbitor of morality you actually create an individual who is far better equipped to act morally.
I disagree, perhaps based on my reading of the original phrase. "Faith in one's ability" to perform an action well, doesn't cause one to perform the action. In addition, it doesn't guarantee that one performs the action well, even though one believes one can. The presence or absense of an external standard of "well" has nothing to do with the rest.

Re: Morality: The only decent definition of I've seen or come up with is 'an attempt to do what is best'. Something like that. Getting more specific by bringing in 'rules' or 'systems' to help define or aim at what actually is 'best' as part of the basic definition seems kind of extraneous. I think it's pretty elegant, and just seems to 'fit' the more you test it.
Best for whom? Is a man who donates all of his income to a "feed starving children for $1 a day" charity while his own family starves doing his best? Is an evil genius who does his best to rule the universe moral? Is an athlete who does his best in his events moral simply because he's doing his best? When Al Capone and Eliot Ness were facing off, both doing their best against the best of the other, were both moral?

I believe your definition is severely lacking.

[Unicorn McGriddle]

But it is a sadly prevalent argument, so I suppose I can't handwave it off easily.

Nah, it's still theist drivel.

[Chris Nahr]

Is an athlete who does his best in his events moral simply because he's doing his best?

That's what Plato would say!

[Theodore Rex DX]

Best for whom? Is a man who donates all of his income to a "feed starving children for $1 a day" charity while his own family starves doing his best? Is an evil genius who does his best to rule the universe moral? Is an athlete who does his best in his events moral simply because he's doing his best? When Al Capone and Eliot Ness were facing off, both doing their best against the best of the other, were both moral?

I believe your definition is severely lacking.

As a definition it's great, and I challenge you to come up with a better one. It's not meant to be a school of thought, or a creed, or anything - and every creed and school of thought has the same or similar problems you attempted to point out in my definition, so there's that. Having said that ... it's pretty easy to dismiss your criticisms, because you made a terrible mistake. On the other hand, it's a pretty illuminating one, so good for you. Check it: When you make a point of over-contextualising and reframing the deliberately broad question 'what is best?' and change it to 'what is best for x?', you instantly run into serious trouble. So don't do that! A man who allows his family to starve in order to feed starving children might certainly be doing his very best, as well as what is best for the starving kids. In fact, it's entirely possible that his sacrifice might have a better overall result than just keeping his family fed. But what is best for him, or what is best for the starving children, or what is best for his family, do not concern me. You ask the question 'is that best?' rhetorically, and in doing so, you get the answer both you (and I) wanted. Which is 'No'. I don't think any of the examples you gave amounts to 'what is best'. So - and here's the real trick - keep asking! That's what makes the definition so great!

[Andrew Mayer]

As a definition it's great, and I challenge you to come up with a better one.

I like yours, but I'd amend it, I think:

An attempt to do what is best, and examining the results of your actions.

[shift6]

As a definition it's great, and I challenge you to come up with a better one. It's not meant to be a school of thought, or a creed, or anything - and every creed and school of thought has the same or similar problems you attempted to point out in my definition, so there's that. Having said that ... it's pretty easy to dismiss your criticisms, because you made a terrible mistake. On the other hand, it's a pretty illuminating one, so good for you. Check it: When you make a point of over-contextualising and reframing the deliberately broad question 'what is best?' and change it to 'what is best for x?', you instantly run into serious trouble. So don't do that! A man who allows his family to starve in order to feed starving children might certainly be doing his very best, as well as what is best for the starving kids. In fact, it's entirely possible that his sacrifice might have a better overall result than just keeping his family fed. But what is best for him, or what is best for the starving children, or what is best for his family, do not concern me. You ask the question 'is that best?' rhetorically, and in doing so, you get the answer both you (and I) wanted. Which is 'No'. I don't think any of the examples you gave amounts to 'what is best'. So - and here's the real trick - keep asking! That's what makes the definition so great!
The only thing I got out of all that is that a great definition is the one that makes you keep asking what it really means, but that by so asking one is making a terrible mistake. Damn it's good to have you back.

[Theodore Rex DX]

It's not the job of the definition of morality to tell you what *really is best*. The terrible mistake you made was changing the question in an attempt to dismiss it. What is that, a straw-question? Whatever. What's your definition, anyway?

[Rimbo]

Theodore Rex DX came back?

When did that happen?

[bago]

Yeah. What is the deal with that invisible deity that wants you to believe in absence of evidence.

[Rimbo]

If we're looking for a definition of faith, I call it a belief in something in the absence of conclusive evidence. Emphasis on "conclusive," because belief in something in the absence of any evidence is just delusion.

One can question the validity of the evidence by which shift6 and I believe in God, but to say that we lack evidence entirely, or believe despite evidence to the contrary, is either arrogance, naïveté or something similar.

[Theodore Rex DX]

I like yours, but I'd amend it, I think:

An attempt to do what is best, and examining the results of your actions.

I thought about this a bit and I decided it wasn't a good amendment ... because it's actually a good general policy to have. That is, it seems like what people should do if they are earnestly shooting for 'what is best'. Thing is, there are a few moral systems that make a special point of not examining the results of their actions (ie. some or all religions, Kantian ethics on one view, etc.), but you wouldn't want to arbitrarily exclude them from being called 'morality'. Which doesn't mean you can't add a qualifier to them, like 'not very good' morality or 'functionally retarded' morality or something less rude. I don't think it's a good idea to smuggle in nice ideals to basic definitions, or it just gets messy.

[madkevin]

One can question the validity of the evidence by which shift6 and I believe in God, but to say that we lack evidence entirely, or believe despite evidence to the contrary, is either arrogance, naïveté or something similar.

OK, I'll bite: What kinda-sorta-but-not-really evidence of God do you have?

[Crispus]

OK, I'll bite: What kinda-sorta-but-not-really evidence of God do you have?

Lowering your opinion of his intelligence already?

[Brian Rucker]

In general this is a thread aimed at keeping an eye on what the more radical and politicized Religious Right elements are up to and not so much debating whether there is a god or not. You don't have to have any particular opinion on that to appreciate why the Founders were skeptical of more formal arrangements between Church and State for the sake of both Church and State.

[madkevin]

Lowering your opinion of his intelligence already?

Like that's possible.

[Nick Walter]

Lowering your opinion of his intelligence already?

I don't think it was necessarily that. I happen to disagree with Rimbo on this one but I think he's still demonstrated he's a pretty sharp cookie multiple times. I think it was more the general skepticism any atheist immediately feels when someone talks of "evidence" of God. Such evidence always falls into four categories in my experience.

1. The incredibly subjective. This is the old "I can feel the love of God in my heart." Of course a lot of people feel or experience a lot of different things for which they have no explanation. Some of them receive medication to treat this.

2. The fluctuations of chance. A good example of this would be the person who narrowly survives a car accident or has been in some other ways favored by some other wild caprice of probability. Of course if God is responsible for manipulating probability that does raise the ugly question of why the die sometimes falls the other way and freak chances cause misfortunes to good people.

3. The currently unsolvable questions. "Who created the universe?" or "Why are we here?" are classics of this type. I can't get too motivated by these because people have been using religion to wallpaper over the cracks in our understanding of the natural universe for all of recorded history.

4. The idea that any belief so widespread must have something to it. Of course people get caught up in all sorts of ideas and fads and beliefs, oftentimes quite irrationally, so I find this one unpersuasive.

[madkevin]

Nick's right (along with being considerably more polite) - I can't imagine what would constitute "evidence" of God's existence, and by evidence I mean an objective, observable thing.

Also, Nick: Crispus was referring to my previous P&R statement that whenever I find out that somebody believes in God, my opinion of their intelligence goes down a notch. He likes to bring that up a lot.

Rather than shitting up Brian's thread, though, this should probably be a separate discussion.

[Nick Walter]

Also, Nick: Crispus was referring to my previous P&R statement that whenever I find out that somebody believes in God, my opinion of their intelligence goes down a notch. He likes to bring that up a lot.


Ah, I'd missed that angle.


Rather than shitting up Brian's thread, though, this should probably be a separate discussion.

I don't think it's possible to shit up this thread. Look at the history, Rucker is going to post what he's going to post and the responses or lack thereof aren't going to hinder him in the least. Heck, this thread is about to turn three years old. Yep, this thread is old enough that it's probably potty trained.

[Rimbo]

Well, I'll throw the question back at you: What would you consider evidence of the existence of a god or gods? This unfortunately might require some sort of definition of what a god is.

[StGabe]

I said "reasonably fixed, if not absolute, standard". I also didn't select a specific moral code as in your God Named Bob intarweb expression of moral relativism. I'd argue that there are widely accepted moral codes, such as something like the golden rule, which have a reasonably fixed standard: that other people are as legitimate as oneself, and one has no right to intrude upon them.

The Golden Rule is only fixed to any individual interpretation of it. Starting with the Golden Rule you quickly diverge into a deluge of rationalization and interpretation.

To answer your second question, let's consider two people:

#1 Believes in the Golden Rule and believes that moral authority comes from the fixed rule itself and not the individual.

#2 Believes that the Golden Rule happens to be a useful rule because of the effects of following it but believes that ultimately it is an individuals responsibility to pick what rules are moral and which are not.

#2 has a far more developed ability to reason about moral choice and as such is far better equipped to make decisions with respect to any individual choice about morality. On a case-by-case you never know and this #2 may not do anything better than a #1. In general, a room full of #2's is going to be far less prone to rationalizing their moral beliefs and far more likely to act responsiblity in any situation that has a moral choice which isn't black and white.

"Faith in one's ability" to perform an action well, doesn't cause one to perform the action.

It doesn't but it empowers the individual making the choice, makes the responsibility to act morally far more clear and presents moral choice in a far more realistic and rational matter than "I do X because lots of other people do X and I'm told it's a good way to go". The latter is the is ultimately the basis of morality which comes from anything other than a feeling of individual responsibility. No other explanation really makes sense if you want to externalize responsibility for morality.

[StGabe]

BTW, some relevant reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development

Basically what I am talking about doesn't need to be talked about philosophically and can be described psychologically as a move from conventional to post-conventional morality.

[madkevin]

Well, I'll throw the question back at you...

Let's not. I'd rather you just answer the question.

[Nick Walter]

Well, I'll throw the question back at you: What would you consider evidence of the existence of a god or gods? This unfortunately might require some sort of definition of what a god is.

Bzzt, throwback out of bounds. I'm not the one making any claim to the supernatural in the absence of evidence, you are. So you (or your fiendish and possibly omniscient football picking program) get to define the claim ;-)

[IndridCold]

#1 Believes in the Golden Rule and believes that moral authority comes from the fixed rule itself and not the individual.

#2 Believes that the Golden Rule happens to be a useful rule because of the effects of following it but believes that ultimately it is an individuals responsibility to pick what rules are moral and which are not.

#2 has a far more developed ability to reason about moral choice and as such is far better equipped to make decisions with respect to any individual choice about morality. On a case-by-case you never know and this #2 may not do anything better than a #1. In general, a room full of #2's is going to be far less prone to rationalizing their moral beliefs and far more likely to act responsiblity in any situation that has a moral choice which isn't black and white.



Seriously, where do you find the evidence to support the claim that #2 has a 'far more developed ability to reason about moral choice'?

#2 has proven time and again to be the road to subjective justifcation of pretty much anything. And I'm not specifically referring to justification for breaking the law or anything like that. What about the guy who justifies drinking himself to death because of wrongs committed against him as a child? Surely he could justifiy his actions, but is it moral or immoral?
Or even more seriously: the holocaust? Rwandan genocide? Perfectly acceptable to the ones committing the act but replusive to us. So who is ultimately in the "right" in these cases? And does it even matter?

The notion of individual morality is problematic because it infers that moral choice is directly tied to culture, and therefore changes over time. How can this be? Evil is no longer evil simply because I say so?

[Rimbo]

Let's not. I'd rather you just answer the question.

Forget for one moment what we're talking about, and I'll tell you why I ask. If I throw a diamond into a clear liquid substance, and the diamond dissolves, it's evidence of something. It could be evidence that the diamond was in fact made of sugar. It could be evidence that I'm a wizard. Without context, evidence is meaningless.

That is why, in Science, we come up with a hypothesis first, and then we run the test, and then try to determine if the test is repeatable.

More to the point, if I tell you it's evidence that diamonds actually can dissolve in the right substance, if you aren't willing to play along in the first place you can just tell me, "No, your diamond was made of sugar," or "No, you faked it somehow," and we haven't really gone forward any.

Now the issue with the existence of some entity that presumably has a will of its own is that you could run a test once, and then the second time you run it, the entity decides not to play along and picks up its ball and goes home. In fact, I don't think I'd get much argument if I said this was a requirement for an intelligent entity.

Despite this, there are ways, or else I wouldn't claim to have evidence.

So in order for anything I say to have any meaning, we have to agree upon a hypothesis to test. But if, as you say, you cannot even imagine such a test, then what use is any evidence to you? I could have found a point on a mountain in the Himalayas where, if you go there, you get to speak with God face-to-face, and you could easily tell me it was just an elaborate hoax set up by bored Newari without any effort on your part; more importantly, your beliefs and perceived intellectual superiority would remain intact.

So if you're not willing to accept any evidence brought to you anyway, why should I bother?

[Nick Walter]

The notion of individual morality is problematic because it infers that moral choice is directly tied to culture, and therefore changes over time. How can this be? Evil is no longer evil simply because I say so?

Why is this such a scary concept? Good and Evil are human creations and thus the definitions shift around the edges just as humans shift.

[Rimbo]

Bzzt, throwback out of bounds. I'm not the one making any claim to the supernatural in the absence of evidence, you are. So you (or your fiendish and possibly omniscient football picking program) get to define the claim ;-)

Before I can provide evidence of a claim, we both have to agree on what constitutes evidence.

[Hawkeye Fierce]

Christ, Rimbo, he's not asking you to propose a scientifically valid test, he's just asking what subjective evidence was enough for you to decide that God exists.

He's asking you to testify, and you're playing rhetorical games instead.

Maybe he's just trying to trap you, but I'm genuinely curious.

[Nick Walter]

Forget for one moment what we're talking about, and I'll tell you why I ask. If I throw a diamond into a clear liquid substance, and the diamond dissolves, it's evidence of something. It could be evidence that the diamond was in fact made of sugar. It could be evidence that I'm a wizard. Without context, evidence is meaningless.

That is why, in Science, we come up with a hypothesis first, and then we run the test, and then try to determine if the test is repeatable.

More to the point, if I tell you it's evidence that diamonds actually can dissolve in the right substance, if you aren't willing to play along in the first place you can just tell me, "No, your diamond was made of sugar," or "No, you faked it somehow," and we haven't really gone forward any.

Now the issue with the existence of some entity that presumably has a will of its own is that you could run a test once, and then the second time you run it, the entity decides not to play along and picks up its ball and goes home. In fact, I don't think I'd get much argument if I said this was a requirement for an intelligent entity.

Despite this, there are ways, or else I wouldn't claim to have evidence.

So in order for anything I say to have any meaning, we have to agree upon a hypothesis to test. But if, as you say, you cannot even imagine such a test, then what use is any evidence to you? I could have found a point on a mountain in the Himalayas where, if you go there, you get to speak with God face-to-face, and you could easily tell me it was just an elaborate hoax set up by bored Newari without any effort on your part; more importantly, your beliefs and perceived intellectual superiority would remain intact.

So if you're not willing to accept any evidence brought to you anyway, why should I bother?

That's all true enough, but it sounds to me like you've already started the game of trying to explain away why there can be no repeatable test of an intelligent deity, because the intelligence can simply not play along with the tests.

It's quite possible to formulate a theory that God is so almighty that he is by definition above all proof because he will use his great and subtle powers to foil all tests or attempts to prove conclusively his existence. This type of theory is logically ironclad since it has an inherent explanation for it's every failure in every other area. Such a theory is also completely useless for the purposes of discussion as it precludes there ever being evidence for God that I would accept.

So if that's what you believe, I respect that, but we don't have anything to talk about really.

[Nick Walter]

Before I can provide evidence of a claim, we both have to agree on what constitutes evidence.

Yes, but you have to define your claim first. To go back to the scientific method you just referenced in a recent post, the formation of the hypothesis must precede the formation of the tests to disprove that hypothesis.

If you want a shortcut, we can start at the standard christian formulation of God, but we've got to start somewhere.

[StGabe]

#2 has proven time and again to be the road to subjective justifcation of pretty much anything.

Both #1 and #2 are vulnerable to that. In #1 is simply more vulnerable as the individual does not admit any personal responsibility to the question of whether a given justification has any rational basis from one's premise.

For a start on evidence see my link to psychological research about the stages of moral development.

The notion of individual morality is problematic because it infers that moral choice is directly tied to culture, and therefore changes over time. How can this be? Evil is no longer evil simply because I say so?

No more problematic than saying that something is Evil simply because you say so (or say that your God says so).

Ironically, when you get down to it, conventional morality (i.e. that espoused by my #1 above) is more fundamentally tied to culture because it is rooted in cultural beliefs about what morality should be. Be that the culture of a certain religion, society or government. A person who takes individual responsibility for morality will come to the cultural significance of moral thought secondarily as they see the value the in rooting their own values in social contracts so as to be able to expect common values among their peers. I.e. #1 has morals that rooted in their culture because that's the only way they know how to think about morals. #2 has morals that are rooted in their culture because they choose to.

Of course the irony of this conversation is that, given that this is all related to psychological development, it's rather impossible to talk about the value of #2's way of thinking or to talk about the psychological underpinnings of morality without coming across as a smug git. Uh, sorry about that. I realize that is a natural consequence of talking about this stuff but then again it doesn't make me wrong, just harder to listen to.

[IndridCold]

Why is this such a scary concept? Good and Evil are human creations and thus the definitions shift around the edges just as humans shift.

Is the answer not self-evident? Our society (beginning with the dawn of the Modern Age) is the 1st in history to posit such an explanation. The same society is also responsible for the greatest atrocities in human history committed not in the name of religion, but rather to fulfil someone's twisted vision of righteousness (I'm thinking of course of Hilter and Stalin).

Today we can witness first hand the breakdown of the family unit and the proliferation of recreational violence, both deemed as completely morally acceptable. Of course its not all doom and gloom, but I believe we're experiencing a downward moral spiral that can be attributed to the belief that human emotion defines morality.

[Talisker]

In general this is a thread aimed at keeping an eye on what the more radical and politicized Religious Right elements are up to and not so much debating whether there is a god or not. You don't have to have any particular opinion on that to appreciate why the Founders were skeptical of more formal arrangements between Church and State for the sake of both Church and State.
Looks like it's time to start a new thread, B.

[Nick Walter]

Is the answer not self-evident? Our society (beginning with the dawn of the Modern Age) is the 1st in history to posit such an explanation. The same society is also responsible for the greatest atrocities in human history committed not in the name of religion, but rather to fulfil someone's twisted vision of righteousness (I'm thinking of course of Hilter and Stalin).


Sorry, I think your point is so far from self evident that you may need to clarify it some more before I'll even understand what you are getting at.

What are you including in "our society" that you mention. This idea isn't an American invention nor a particularly recent one though it has gained popularity worldwide recently as religion has waned a bit. Are you just using the term to apply to traditional western societies?

Also, the only reason that modern atrocities achieve the scale they do is technological advance. We have more people nowadays and more ability to do things to them for ill or good. Believe me, the will to perform such evil deeds has always been with us. You can find leaders just as ruthless as a Hitler or a Stalin in the history books.


Today we can witness first hand the breakdown of the family unit and the proliferation of recreational violence, both deemed as completely morally acceptable. Of course its not all doom and gloom, but I believe we're experiencing a downward moral spiral that can be attributed to the belief that human emotion defines morality.

Recreational violence is completely morally acceptable? Are you talking about criminal violence or sports or kids fighting in alleys? I'm not following.

As for the breakdown of the traditional family unit, that's quite true but I maintain hope that a better way to order our lives and provide for our children will evolve. The traditional family unit is rooted in some very sexist gender role stereotypes and is a bit obsolete in the modern world anyway.

I guess I don't see any evidence at all of a moral downward spiral.

[IndridCold]

Both #1 and #2 are vulnerable to that. In #1 is simply more vulnerable as the individual does not admit any personal responsibility to the question of whether a given justification has any rational basis from one's premise.

For a start on evidence see my link to psychological research about the stages of moral development.


I did read the link you mentioned. While I'm certainly no ethics expert, I don't see how Kohlbergs thery can be considered an argument-ender. Case and point:


Kohlberg's theory is not value-neutral. It begins with a stake in certain perspectives in meta-ethics.

[madkevin]

I am indeed genuinely curious as to what happened to you personally, Rimbo, to make you believe in God. It is also true that I personally cannot imagine what such a thing might be to make me believe.

But much more to the point, what you started to call "evidence" increasingly sounds like faith. I can't know that, of course, because you don't seem to want to say what it is.

[StGabe]

Is the answer not self-evident? Our society (beginning with the dawn of the Modern Age) is the 1st in history to posit such an explanation. The same society is also responsible for the greatest atrocities in human history committed not in the name of religion, but rather to fulfil someone's twisted vision of righteousness (I'm thinking of course of Hilter and Stalin).

Also the centurary which increased US life expectancy by 50%, saw the poverty rate of the US literally reduced by 66%, introduced woman's suffrage and civil rights.

There's no way to get hard and fast numbers but I think it's pretty obvious that far less people have been engaged in war and violence, as a percentage of the global population, in this century than in any prior.

But hey, why actually take responsibility for figuring out whether your claim is actually correct? Why do that when you have a handy morality handed to you that says that "family values" are being challenged and that must be Evil.

[Soapyfrog]

Also increased properity, longevity, health and welfare have gone hand in hand with a diminishing interest in religion. Of the free societies, it is the secular ones that are the best off.

[Mister Widget]

Is the answer not self-evident?
The answer is not self-evident.

Our society (beginning with the dawn of the Modern Age) is the 1st in history to posit such an explanation.

This is simply not true. The ancient Greeks developed a plethora of different philosophical systems that examined questions of morality without relying on instructions from invisible sky deities.

As for the rest of your post, as others have pointed out, you are both exaggerating the problems of, and not giving enough credit to, modern secular societies.

[Unicorn McGriddle]

Indrid Cold doesn't really live up to the expectations I have of alien time travellers from the future.

[shift6]

It's not the job of the definition of morality to tell you what *really is best*. The terrible mistake you made was changing the question in an attempt to dismiss it. What is that, a straw-question? Whatever. What's your definition, anyway?
I wasn't trying to just dismiss it out of hand, I was illustrating why I think it isn't a good definition. It's not a strawman to pose questions back to the person asking for clarification or how potential "what ifs" affect the defintion.

I define morality as a set of standards by which a person's thoughts and actions can be judged.

Yeah. What is the deal with that invisible deity that wants you to believe in absence of evidence.
Religion isn't science (wacky-assed fundamentalists and their dinosaurs-on-the-ark statues notwithstanding). It cannot and should not be held to the same standard; the other side of which is that it cannot and should not be expected to pursue similar avenues of inquiry.

OK, I'll bite: What kinda-sorta-but-not-really evidence of God do you have?
This question from the guy who said that if 70 million people all saw something he doesn't think could happen, he would consider them under mass delusion. Genuine question here, madkevin: how do you believe anything at all? If you won't believe a hypothetical 70 million people who witness some event, how are you going to put stock in some niche specialty in science (for example) where only 50 people in the world are even qualified to judge? How do you believe anything you read in history books? Hell how do you know the earth is round?

I'm not Rimbo, but I'll answer your question. Here are three objective and observable (or rational) pieces of evidence for me:
1) I believe that the existence of the universe leads any rational thinker to a First Cause. Naturalists sometimes handwave this away as something that can never really be explored by science (which is true) which gives a convenient reason to not bother thinking about it. Of course they'll chide a creationist who confuses evolution with abiogenesis, but then they'll hammer away at creation while claiming they aren't talking about abiogenesis... Sorry. Tangent.

2) I also believe that the magnificence of the universe is evidence of its supernatural generation. Naturalists might claim the anthropic principle to say that the universe produced us, so it must be suitable for us else we wouldn't be here to see it; I say that it produced us because Someone had us in mind to be produced.

3) I further believe that purposelessness is sad, pathetic, and a defense mechanism brought on by our need for "something". If a person asks why is he here, but refuses to believe in an external reason/cause, he comes to the conclusion that there is no purpose, no reason, no cause, no nothing. I don't believe consciousness is an "emergent property" of putting enough cells together, and so with consciousness comes this question. I explained this a long time ago in another post so I won't go into it further here.

So I guess to sum up: I see first cause, the marvels of science, and purpose of consciousness as proof of creation. Please note that nothing I have said presupposes the Judeo-Christian God, either. I beileve these three reasons above are what have led people to all kinds of extrascientific inquiries, many of which are areas, I'm sure you would agree, that science cannot ever pursue.

The Golden Rule is only fixed to any individual interpretation of it. Starting with the Golden Rule you quickly diverge into a deluge of rationalization and interpretation.
I disagree so completely with your post that I literally don't know where to begin. But I think my disagreement comes because you adjusted what I said to fit your examples. You said that an absolute morality (although, and I repeat, I said "reasonably fixed") is indefensible and I provide a simple rule which I believe is defensible. Yes, both of your hypotheticals treated it differently; but that has nothing to do with the defensibility of a reasonably fixed moral standard: the golden rule. Yes there are hundreds of way to take it and run (humanism vs Buddhism vs &c) but the standard itself is reasonably fixed and a defensible position on which to base a moral code.

It doesn't but it empowers the individual making the choice, makes the responsibility to act morally far more clear and presents moral choice in a far more realistic and rational matter than "I do X because lots of other people do X and I'm told it's a good way to go". The latter is the is ultimately the basis of morality which comes from anything other than a feeling of individual responsibility. No other explanation really makes sense if you want to externalize responsibility for morality.
I totally disagree. You sound like you are contending that one can never act in a truly morally free fashion (or freely determine a moral code, or whatever) based on what others have said. You present it as if the code and decision itself must be newly generated by any rational actor. In the fine lines or various contrived life situations, sure there are scenarios where a person has to decide which decision is moral (and there are no external rules to dictate this). I don't have to "believe" I will make the right choice to actually make it. I could even make a choice that I "know" is wrong, because I am an immoral person.

I don't know many sane people who would do some immoral thing and then just say "welp, the rules I live by say it's OK, so it's OK!" In fact, they are generally put into various categories of insanity, criminality, etc. by mainstream society for this reason. Having no fixed moral code behind them made no difference.

Why is this such a scary concept? Good and Evil are human creations and thus the definitions shift around the edges just as humans shift.
Can this be shown? Or is it something you just... wait for it... believe? ;)

Indrid Cold doesn't really live up to the expectations I have of alien time travellers from the future.
You're just waiting for a true-to-life SMAC. I know it. ADMIT IT!

[Hawkeye Fierce]

Please note that nothing I have said presupposes the Judeo-Christian God, either.

Thanks for that, shift6. My next question was going to address this. What led you to believe in God as having a specific character (i.e. Judeo-Christian) rather than just a general concept of a higher power or powers?

[Nick Walter]

Can this be shown? Or is it something you just... wait for it... believe? ;)


I have never encountered the concept outside of humanity, barring works of fiction, so yeah that's what I BELIEVE!

[Soapyfrog]

1) I believe that the existence of the universe leads any rational thinker to a First Cause. Naturalists sometimes handwave this away as something that can never really be explored by science (which is true) which gives a convenient reason to not bother thinking about it. (...)

2) I also believe that the magnificence of the universe is evidence of its supernatural generation. Naturalists might claim the anthropic principle to say that the universe produced us, so it must be suitable for us else we wouldn't be here to see it; I say that it produced us because Someone had us in mind to be produced.
There is no evidence for your belief in a Supernatural Deity, either way. You are simply saying we were engineered by someone or something without having any evidence what ever to back up your claim.

3) I further believe that purposelessness is sad, pathetic, and a defense mechanism brought on by our need for "something". If a person asks why is he here, but refuses to believe in an external reason/cause, he comes to the conclusion that there is no purpose, no reason, no cause, no nothing. I don't believe consciousness is an "emergent property" of putting enough cells together, and so with consciousness comes this question. I explained this a long time ago in another post so I won't go into it further here.
This is mildly unintelligble. Purposelessness is a defence mechanism? Isn't it the other way around? Also you believe in god becuase you can't contemplate the possibility that life is without "higher purpose" (since obviously our lives do have purpose for ourselves individually, at minimum).

The rest of your argument boils down to saying "there must be a God, becuase I can't understand how there couldn't be", which is no argument at all.

[IndridCold]

Indrid Cold doesn't really live up to the expectations I have of alien time travellers from the future.

Sorry, I'll try to make future posts more mysterious sounding...

[Nick Walter]

I'm not Rimbo, but I'll answer your question. Here are three objective and observable (or rational) pieces of evidence for me:
1) I believe that the existence of the universe leads any rational thinker to a First Cause. Naturalists sometimes handwave this away as something that can never really be explored by science (which is true) which gives a convenient reason to not bother thinking about it. Of course they'll chide a creationist who confuses evolution with abiogenesis, but then they'll hammer away at creation while claiming they aren't talking about abiogenesis... Sorry. Tangent.


Heh, I know that tangent well. But I do think that this argument is uber weak because it's simply the symptom of a weakness of mind. A weakness that says "I cannot accept that some things are insoluble right now and may never be solved in my life." So instead an answer is invented and the weak mind may rest content that the insoluble has been defeated.



2) I also believe that the magnificence of the universe is evidence of its supernatural generation. Naturalists might claim the anthropic principle to say that the universe produced us, so it must be suitable for us else we wouldn't be here to see it; I say that it produced us because Someone had us in mind to be produced.


Um, okay. That doesn't seem like any sort of argument to me. Sure, the universe is an awesome place but you've already pointed out the proper counter argument. Perhaps you don't believe in excess prosperity? You can't believe things can be good for us without a supernatural explanation?


3) I further believe that purposelessness is sad, pathetic, and a defense mechanism brought on by our need for "something". If a person asks why is he here, but refuses to believe in an external reason/cause, he comes to the conclusion that there is no purpose, no reason, no cause, no nothing. I don't believe consciousness is an "emergent property" of putting enough cells together, and so with consciousness comes this question. I explained this a long time ago in another post so I won't go into it further here.


Again, this strikes me as a weakness of mind, or perhaps more accurately of will. A person does not need an external source to find a purpose, nor does a person who cannot find their own purpose without turning to an external source gain a lot of respect from me.

[Rimbo]

Nick/kevin:

If I want to provide evidence that someone (say, a person) exists, the only way I know to do that is to bring you to meet him. I can show you documents, but those can be falsified. I can show you other people who have met that someone, but you've already pointed out the error in that logic. A photo could be a photo of someone else. And even if I bring you to meet him, the person you meet could be an actor playing the role, or a model, or something like that.

But if you're unwilling to go to the guy's house to meet him in the first place, if you're going to suspect a ruse right from the get-go, it's not really useful. And that's just with a particular human being, when you know that other human beings exist and generally what comprises a human being!

But after a while, say in the case of my brother, it's not really a leap of faith for me to say "I have an older brother," because I've spent so much time with him and built up a relationship with him. For me, I've built a relationship with God. (Not as good of a relationship as it could've been, but there you have it.) The questions of faith for me have gone beyond the level of, "Does He exist?" similar to how I don't really question that I have a brother. These are different in quantity only, not really in quality.

So the evidence is quite simply that I sought out God and met Him, felt His presence; it was not what I expected, but left little room for doubt. And my experience is not too different from many others'.

Now you're certainly welcome to rule my evidence out as another of many thousands of people who are deluding themselves, and I must accept your explanation as an equally valid possibility. However, that I've been able to continue to experience God's presence after that moment, and having heard the testimony of others as well, I feel that the weight of the evidence is in favor of the existence of some kind of God who is personally involved in our lives.

And you're right that this then provokes some tough philosophical questions. I was fortunate that the church I grew up in challenged us to face these questions head-on, and instilled that as a way of living. So if you'd like to ask me for my answers to these questions, I'd be happy to give them.

(One question I think you brought up earlier, "why do bad things happen to good people," is easily enough answered: Because the goal of morality is to do the right thing for its own sake, because one loves God, and not because of some promised reward, not in this life and not in the next. There are a number of stories in both the Bible (e.g. Job, the Prodigal Son) that make this point, that you don't really get more treasures in Heaven by doing good for longer than others.)

[madkevin]

Religion isn't science (wacky-assed fundamentalists and their dinosaurs-on-the-ark statues notwithstanding). It cannot and should not be held to the same standard; the other side of which is that it cannot and should not be expected to pursue similar avenues of inquiry.

I totally, 100% agree with this. That's why I was so interested to hear what Rimbo's "evidence" was.

This question from the guy who said that if 70 million people all saw something he doesn't think could happen, he would consider them under mass delusion. Genuine question here, madkevin: how do you believe anything at all? If you won't believe a hypothetical 70 million people who witness some event, how are you going to put stock in some niche specialty in science (for example) where only 50 people in the world are even qualified to judge? How do you believe anything you read in history books? Hell how do you know the earth is round?

If 70 million or whatever people saw something that had a plausible explanation that didn't require the supernatural in order to explain, then you're darn tootin' I would consider that a mass delusion. People have believed far weirder things with less provocation all throughout human history.

Luckily for you that particular example really is hypothetical, eh?

Rimbo: What you're describing is not, in any way, what I would consider "evidence" of anything besides possibly an overactive imagination. What you're describing is belief. Even in your own example, proof could be easily obtained simply by going to your house and meeting your brother, who would have a physical presence that would not require a supernatural explanation.

[Soapyfrog]

Well that was a let down...

[StGabe]

accidentally posted early: read below

[Enidigm]

The problem with your more Machiavellian interpretation, St. Gabe, is that it would be wise to execute bad leaders before they appear. In fact, propreity would demand it. Think of how much better the world would be if you executed Hitler and Stalin before they came into power. Think of all the lives you've saved. The only problem is that you wouldn't know that they would become a Hitler or Stalin until after the fact, and were not, instead just another Joseph Anymann.

[StGabe]

I disagree so completely with your post that I literally don't know where to begin. But I think my disagreement comes because you adjusted what I said to fit your examples. You said that an absolute morality (although, and I repeat, I said "reasonably fixed") is indefensible and I provide a simple rule which I believe is defensible. Yes, both of your hypotheticals treated it differently; but that has nothing to do with the defensibility of a reasonably fixed moral standard: the golden rule. Yes there are hundreds of way to take it and run (humanism vs Buddhism vs &c) but the standard itself is reasonably fixed and a defensible position on which to base a moral code.
Get a bunch of people in a room. Get rid of the ones that say they don't agree that the Golden Rule is a good basic tenet of morality. Ok, with me so far?

Now ask them how the Golden Rule applies to Peace in the Middle East.

And then you will see what I mean by being deluged with interpretations of the Golden Rule.

Now, do this again, only this time separate the room into people who believe in the Golden Rule because they have been told to believe in it and those who believe in it not because they thought about it and it makes sense to them as a good general guideline. Which side of the room do you think is going to have a better shot at saying something about the Middle East?


I totally disagree. You sound like you are contending that one can never act in a truly morally free fashion (or freely determine a moral code, or whatever) based on what others have said.
You can. However the fact that you were told that the morals were good morals by other people really doesn't have anything to do with whether they were or not. 100 years ago, most people would have agreed that whites were morally superior to blacks. That didn't make it right to believe that. Nor does it make it wrong to believe in the Golden Rule just because it comes from Christianity.

The point isn't that you can never pick up morals from someone else. The point is that unless you assume responsibility for which morals you pick and which you throw out, you have very little basis for knowing either:

1) That your morals really are good and effect the world you want to see.
2) Why the morals you have were chosen over other morals.

Said differently, a person who merely picks up their morals by osmosis lacks:

1) Any vetting process on which morals they have.
2) Any practice in thinking about morality as a whole.

I don't know many sane people who would do some immoral thing and then just say "welp, the rules I live by say it's OK, so it's OK!" In fact, they are generally put into various categories of insanity, criminality, etc. by mainstream society for this reason. Having no fixed moral code behind them made no difference.
I do immoral things on a daily basis, if you use the fixed laws of religious fundamentalistis. I can say "fuck" whenever I want, for example, because "by the rules I live by it's ok".

Usually, moral decisions are about small things like "do I tell the cashier that he undercharged me by $10" and many people will, invariant of the morals they espouse, rationalize their decisions or NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT THEM. That's one of the biggest problems about talking about morality. It's always assumed that people are making conscious decisions with how they act when most simply are not. The more developed a person's morals and the more actual thought they've put into why they chose those moral, the more likely they are to have reasons for sticking by them.

Speaking psychologically:

Pre-conventional moralists act by their principles so as to avoid getting caught and will tend to lapse when they think they won't be.

Conventional moralists will act by their principles when it will be affirmed for it by their peers. If that won't happen then they really have little reason not to lapse as well.

It's only Post-conventional moralists, those who accept the burden of responsibility for choosing their morals, who will act morally because, literally, they think that it is right thing for them to do so.

[Theodore Rex DX]

[I wasn't trying to just dismiss it out of hand, I was illustrating why I think it isn't a good definition. It's not a strawman to pose questions back to the person asking for clarification or how potential "what ifs" affect the defintion.

First off, I want to apologise: I think you're right that you weren't strawman-ing me. So I'm sorry. The thing is, though, that you inadvertently showed how useful my definition is. You gave some posers where there the person thought what they were doing was 'best' ... but it patently wasn't. Even if somebody has a truly warped opinion of what 'best' is - like wiping out all animal life and planting trees - you would still call it a kind of moral system. Right? Not a very good one, but a moral system all the same. I think you maybe just misunderstood and thought I was saying that anybody trying their best or doing what they thought was best was 'moral'? Something like that? Really what I'm saying is very similar to your definition, but it doesn't leave us begging:

I define morality as a set of standards by which a person's thoughts and actions can be judged.

You mean like an SAT? I think you're making a few hidden assumptions here. It's almost like you're inserting invisible words in here, like: "I define morality as a set of moral standards by which a person's thoughts and actions can be judged moral or immoral." Needs tweaking?

[magnet]

This question from the guy who said that if 70 million people all saw something he doesn't think could happen, he would consider them under mass delusion.
You may believe that madkevin said that, but in fact that was me (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=1140093&postcount=121).

But I like madkevin's response, anyway. Human perception is fallible, as you've just demonstrated. Millions of people saw the Statue of Liberty disappear in 1983, all at the same time. Yet it's still there.

[StGabe]

The problem with your more Machiavellian interpretation, St. Gabe, is that it would be wise to execute bad leaders before they appear. In fact, propreity would demand it. Think of how much better the world would be if you executed Hitler and Stalin before they came into power. Think of all the lives you've saved. The only problem is that you wouldn't know that they would become a Hitler or Stalin until after the fact, and were not, instead just another Joseph Anymann.

Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premises.

If it is true that:

The only problem is that you wouldn't know that they would become a Hitler or Stalin until after the fact, and were not, instead just another Joseph Anymann.

Then it is incorrect that:

it would be wise to execute bad leaders before they appear

Even so, I haven't said I'm a Utilitarian (although I am) which is really what you meant by Machiavellan and it isn't really necessary from what I've said thus far. All I've said is that those who accept direct responsibility for determining which morals are the best and do not rely on fixed notions of morality are best equipped to actually think why they believe what they do and how to effectively live with that belief. Those who accept any set of beliefs, be they the Golden Rule or National Socialism, because they were handed these beliefs by their peers don't even know why they believe what they believe. As such they are very ill-equipped to figure out if their beliefs really will make a world they want to live in or not or to figure out if they are in fact following the moral code they espouse.

Without free-thinking people vetting each and every moral that we have grown accustomed to we have no method of refining our morals and improving them over time.

[Rimbo]

Rimbo: What you're describing is not, in any way, what I would consider "evidence" of anything besides possibly an overactive imagination. What you're describing is belief. Even in your own example, proof could be easily obtained simply by going to your house and meeting your brother, who would have a physical presence that would not require a supernatural explanation.

Yes, it's definitely a valid possibility that I just have an overactive imagination, delusional, or what have you. And even in the case of my brother, how would you have proof that he was my brother simply by meeting him? He could just be an actor, part of a ruse to deceive you. It could just be some guy, and not actually my brother, you know?

There's a certain element of uncertainty in every empirically-established fact. Which is why you need corroboration. What's happening here is that you're rejecting corroborating evidence out of hand, and unwilling to obtain the evidence for yourself.

And that belief, that everyone who ever claims to have met God is experiencing delusions, is a very subjective judgment call.

[Rimbo]

Hmm, also, I'd say that the existence of God doesn't require belief in the supernatural. There have certainly been attempts to describe God in terms that don't involve the supernatural (e.g., Edwin Abbott's Flatland, stories that attribute certain events to e.g. space aliens, etc.).

Part of this is exacerbated by the fact that e.g. the Bible is deliberately vague about what God is ("I am what I am," His response to Moses), being more concerned about who God is. And it's certainly true that the concept of what God is changed over the centuries, with the early Bible portraying Him as just one of many gods, then later being the one true god, then later being the only god, yet even as late as the New Testament there are references to e.g. Asherah (Jesus' walk on the water).

So if you'd like, you can certainly imagine God as a being that exists within our universe who certainly does have a physical presence somewhere, and you won't really get an argument from me. Although I'm not saying you should expect a voice in your head, either. ("Kent, this is Jesus, Kent...stop playing with yourself!")

[madkevin]

Yes, it's definitely a valid possibility that I just have an overactive imagination, delusional, or what have you. And even in the case of my brother, how would you have proof that he was my brother simply by meeting him? He could just be an actor, part of a ruse to deceive you. It could just be some guy, and not actually my brother, you know?

But in each one of those examples, there's still a way to prove whether or not the person in question is your brother, even if it has to get all the way down to DNA testing or whatever.

Your brother's existence is possible to prove. It is impossible to prove God's. That's the difference.


There's a certain element of uncertainty in every empirically-established fact. Which is why you need corroboration. What's happening here is that you're rejecting corroborating evidence out of hand, and unwilling to obtain the evidence for yourself.

And that belief, that everyone who ever claims to have met God is experiencing delusions, is a very subjective judgment call.

No, what's happening here is that you are choosing to define "evidence" in a way that I manifestly do not agree with. What you're basically telling me is that your gut tells you God exists, and that should be good enough for me. It isn't.

[JM]

But after a while, say in the case of my brother, it's not really a leap of faith for me to say "I have an older brother," because I've spent so much time with him and built up a relationship with him. For me, I've built a relationship with God.

You've built a relationship with God? Is this like the 'relationship' I built with a girl in college I had an obsession with but never actually spoke to?

Creepy.