We’ve crossed the line, rubbed it out completely. It’s getting out of hand, this Christian stuff.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
We’ve crossed the line, rubbed it out completely. It’s getting out of hand, this Christian stuff.
Piece of Mindful 
I’m scared of spiders, so when I’m in a new place and the lights are low, everywhere I go I see spiders everywhere even though they don’t really exist – it’s just lint and stuff. Not sure why I thought of that.
Call me when someone starts suggesting we make Christianity a national religion.
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What’s your number? I need to make that call.
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Well, if you’re really worried about it, you should consider praying about it. 😛
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Yes, I’ll do that right now. Done! Nothing changed.
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By the way, I answered you (finally) over at LITW.
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Are you referring to the bookcase, which might appear to be a cross to some who fear seeing one, or his Christian leaning message? Mr. Huckabee is openly courting the Christian voter. I think he’s allowed to do that. He’s not trying to hide who he is. He’ll probably put off some non-Christian voters, but that’s his choice. Isn’t it?
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Good grief! Take a deep breath. Is the man not allowed to publicly recognize the Christmas holiday? Talk about intolerance…
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At issue is whether or not there is a religious test for holding public office. Sure seems to be.
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Not that there hasn’t always been a de facto religious test, save a few period of tolerance, such as that window in the 1770-80’s when enlightenment thought and a bunch of agnostics (deists) gave us our constitution.
But don’t put me on the intolerant side here – I believe in separation of church and state. Absolutely.
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I don’t see why making appeals to Christian voters is such a big deal. Religion and government have always mixed so well in the past.
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Our country has always used religion since the earliest days of its foundings to define our presidency. Isn’t that a hoot?
Plus, didn’t the fact that Kennedy was Catholic have something to do with his presidency? This religious-political combo isn’t as recent as critics make it seem (imo).
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People were worried about Kennedy in that they thought he might put loyalty to the pope above that to country. He had to give a speech defining his views on religion much as Romney just did.
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“At issue is whether or not there is a religious test for holding public office. Sure seems to be.”
Seriously… I have liberal/Democratic friends and family with whom I get along well and am able to maintain intelligent conversation, but this is ridiculous. How, exactly, does this ad establish (or even promote) a religious test for public office?
Under your “logic” a non-religious test for public office is de-facto established. If what Huckabee says here is over the line, then even the most vaguely and inoffensively religious language has been barred from political and public discussion.
I’ll say it again: Good grief!
Merry Christmas (it’s the holiday where those wicked Christians celebrate the birth of their Lord)
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I don’t get it. What line? I think that there is no longer a line when I read the comments of potential voters. It seems there may be just mud in their heads and everyone knows, you can’t draw lines in mud. It just doesn’t work. Maybe it’s a result of propaganda that results in so few Americans being able to understand world and domestic affairs.
I think it’s a pathetic ad that would result in nil votes in any other country, including the communities that see religion in it’s proper place – i.e. inside politics. Quite frankly, knowing just a bit about the American political system as i do, this person is so obviously insincere and he deserves to fry in hell for using teh birth of Jesus to get a few votes. He’s got to be desperate, because i think he lost more than he gained with this one.
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Oh! so it is happening all over-politicians are dividing the mankind into religions, i believe its high time we as humans understand the importance of being religion-tolerant, and moving forward as a society and a species and not as christians, jews, muslims and so on….I am at jazz0aks.wordspace.com
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As I’ve said before, I take comfort in knowing that many (if not most) of our presidents were either agnostic or atheist. But in American you’ve got to either believe or pretend to believe to get elected. Our founders were idealistic – they established that there be no religious test for holding office – it was controversial, and it didn’t take.
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“…they established that there be no religious test… and it didn’t take.”
HOW DID IT NOT TAKE!?!?!? With all due respect, you are a fool. If the electorate decides they prefer religious candidates (or male candidates, or young candidates, or irreligious candidates, etc.), that is their prerogative. IT DOES NOT ESTABLISH A RELIGIOUS TEST! A religious test must definitionally be established by Congress or some other government body.
Your problem is not with our system of government or the way it elects it office-holders, but with the people of this nation who disagree with your politics and views on religion.
Your animus toward serious people of faith has clouded your ability to thinking clearly on these issues.
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“As I’ve said before, I take comfort in knowing that many (if not most) of our presidents were either agnostic or atheist.”
Really? I’m not suggesting you’re wrong, but I’d love a citation on this one. It’s news to me.
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Oh, and I’d also like to know your source for the founding fathers being agnostics as well. Real history or revisionist history?
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Many of the most important founding father – Madison, Jefferson, Paine, Franklin, were called “non-sectarian deists” (Paine was an atheist), meaning that they thought there was some sort of supreme being, but not one that actively interfered in human affairs. That’s a fairly agnostic outlook. This idea that they were Christians relies on cherry-picked evidence that ignores their whole lives – Jefferson had no use for religion whatsoever, Adams was conflicted. You forget that they came out of the Enlightenment – that period time when European thinkers had reasoned their way out of religion, and indeed Enlightenment is the right word for the period.
I said I take comfort in knowing … I know that every president has to profess public piety – I just know that to be elected you have to be wily and smart – Bush aside, and these people who made it that far probably saw through religion too. Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, possibly Reagan, are the only agnostic/atheists I can think of right off hand, You missed the tenor of the remark.
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Eisenhower wrote of hoping that there was a God, for that would be the only manner in which men could make sense of the injustices seen in WWII. And then he had “under God” added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Pious believer? Not likely. Agnostic hopeful of a forgiving divine power? That’d be a “yes”. It’s funny, but the most faith based President we’ve had in the last century is likely Jimmy Carter. The irony overwhelms me with mirth.
Really? If one actually followed the tenets of Christian faith, that one would eschew political ambition. So when encountering a politician steeped in rightious noise about Jesus, it’s a good bet that animosity is the appropriate reaction.
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I thought only vampires would shriek and cower at the sign of the cross.
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Shouldn’t you be at a church now? Get to worshiping!
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“Not that there hasn’t always been a de facto religious test, save a few period of tolerance, such as that window in the 1770-80’s when enlightenment thought and a bunch of agnostics (deists) gave us our constitution.”
A damn good point. Some were enlightened Christians as well, Madison comes to mind. The most revolutionary idea of the new american government was the lack of an established church. It was Madison and Jefferson, and their supporters, who pushed that idea and also campaigned for it to spread to states which still denied rights to non christians.
Jefferson predicted that someday the populace would endorse a tyrant who would bring back establishment. The Texas Republican platform denies the existence of the disestablishment clause. Think we are there yet?
Will we yet suffer an impisonment for heresy or a denial of the trinity? We used to, before the disestablishment clause was adopted by the states.
I’m about half convinced our middle east policy is designed to hasten the apocalypse. If the leader of Iran sounds crazy when he talks about hommasekshuls and the last imam, what does former candidate for President Pat Robertson sound like?
And Mark, Paine was NOT, repeat NOT an atheist. He was as much a deist as Jefferson. John Adams was unitarian.
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Well. That was interesting. Paine was the closest thing his age produced to an atheist. He was accused of such unacceptable behavior. Madison flirted with Christianity for a while, but was not one of yours, sorry. Far from it.
Face it – the revolution was a product of the Enlightenment. Without that intellectual flowering, there would have been no USA. Religious types have always been oppressive, perhaps so insecure in their beliefs that they cannot stand to be around reminders that they just might be wrong about things. That’s the source of the oppression of non-believers. Not that I feel oppressed – we live in liberal times by comparison. No one is coming for me.
Non-believers, in history, had to form secret societies to protect themselves – Freemasons and the like. Historically, it is dangerous not to believe when surrounded by believers. Who was ever burned at the stake for believing?
Christian Right is going for state religion at the state level. As Jeff said up above, our expereince with religion being in charge has been so good, we might as well do it again.
“These [Christian] principles seem to me to have made men feeble, and caused them to become an easy prey to evil-minded men, who can control them more securely, seeing that the great body of men, for the sake of gaining paradise, are more disposed to endure injuries than to avenge them.”
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
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http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/deist1999/paine.htm
As good a spot as any, Remsberg, to start your education with Paine.
If you want more, a book or two from the Kentucky website is the best to investigate Paine, containing the the Age of Reason and other collected works. I’ll let you find it. They have a fine poster with the original Pledge of Allegiance.
The evidence is very, very strong that Freemasons are deists, at the very least.
I’ve read the Age of Reason, have you? I’ve read the philosophy behind the Declaration, the scots and english philosophers that inspired Jefferson, have you?
You’re so prickly that you can’t spot agreement in disagreement. “Madison flirted with Christianity but he was not one of yours, sorry”? Madison by his own words WAS a Christian. He despised established religion, to be sure, but he was far more a Christian than Jefferson, Adams, Franklin or Paine.
Do you know your enemy? I think not. Nor your allies, it appears. The enemy is ignorance, something the left loves to promote, with it’s worship of the noble primitive. That is hardly the enlightenment. More like the Dark Ages. The post enlightenment luddism of the left rejects reason and private property as surely as the Christian right rejects reason and the individual’s rights of ownership and control over the labor of his or her body.
You want to convince anyone that you’ve bought into the enlightenment? Embrace Locke’s emphasis on property rights and individual freedom and reject socialism and communism once and for all.It matters not whether the government is described as “the state” or “the King” when it confiscates another’s property or forces them to work for the benefit of others. Without that acceptance of private property right, the right to control the labor of one’s physical self, your “enlightenment” ideals continue to look to me like an excuse to attack others for their religious beliefs.
And many people were put to death for believing. The established church of rome killed more christians than the pagan romans ever did.
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What a turnoff you are! That aside, it took me a minute to realize that you were claiming deism as a form of religion favoring your argument. Now you make more sense. But you’re quite wrong – deism is as far as men of that age could go in denial of religious truth – remember – they rejected the miracles of the bible, but stood by some of the more moral teaching contained therein. But they were not of your ilk.
There is this active enterprise on the Christian Right to steal the founders from us, to claim them as their own, when it was religion owning the state and the Enlightenment that turned them against the oppressiveness of religious rule. So you have done with Madison, mining the texts looking for a bent twig on a tree, and when finding it claiming that the whole tree is a bent twig. Madison flirted with Christianity in his formative years. In pre-Darwinian times, there were few other ways to explain the world other than to make god attributions, which deists did. Madison can safely be counted among them – they strayed from formal religion, and viewed whatever god existed as distant and indifferent.
I have a relative who is a Catholic priest. He said one time that if you mined his Sunday sermons, you could find proof that he was an atheist.
You guys frankly scare me. I think part of it is that you are so insecure in your beliefs that you need constant affirmation for support. You become antagonistic of anyone who casts seeds of doubt. Deep down in some level under nine layers of the onion, you probably know there was no virgin birth or resurrection, but you’ve staked yourself to it and will go after those who admit their doubts with vengeance. When you and your ilk are mixed with the power of government, there is great danger for all of us. History teaches us this. You hearken back to a time when Romans supposedly persecuted the small and insignificant Christian sect as validation that you are persecuted. You are the persecutors, and have been throughout hisotry. Anyone can plainly see this.
Regarding Locke and property and all of that, I’ve rejected it all but the barest elements in favor of our natural setting in which we support one another in familial society. We are not islands, we don’t operate independently of one another – we support each other and each contribute to the common good. Your idea that we do best for each other by acting in our own selfish interest is nothing more than rationalization for antisocial behavior. We need fewer of you and your Hummers and pay-no-tax extremism, and more of those who recognize our common lot and contribute their share. Enough of right wingers!
Regarding what I have read and what you have read, stuff it. I’ll refrain from listing mine if you do the same. Each to our own.
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