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Originally posted by RionaEire:
Magon's I don't know the answers to those questions. But I can ask him and maybe I'll figure out some theories someday. On a side note, if we weighed just as much as we do now, how big would wings need to be to carry us? Just curious.

If I'd chosen a faerie tale to make up it wouldn't have been this life and all it has in it. It would involve all sorts of interesting pretend things, and possibly air ship pirates. :)

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Even still, I wouldn't consider that fundamentalist. I mean, someone yelling at me that I'm of the devil, and going to hell, that's not exactly forcing me to do anything. It doesn't affect me because I don't believe what they do.

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Hitler: Quicko's quotes are indeed there and Hitler did say them. One can ask why: Did he say them because that's how _he believed, or did he say them to get others to come alongside him and get them interested in his cause. I don't know. There's this show on the history channel (which I've not watched) called Hitler and the Occult, which insinuates he was doing some things that I would consider unsavory that Christians tend to steer clear of. But then again he was a horribly evil awful person so none of what he did was something that a real Christian would consider savory or even remotely okay, so the point is moot.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
I'm not so insecure about science that I feel I have to defend it or else it could blow away in the stiff breeze from a blowhard's mouth.

The past is done. Modern days are different from when religion held sway, I can be openly atheist, and even Christians will generally leave me alone for it, and the country is not so homogenous.

Denying people the option of believing what they want is in violation of that whole pursuit of happiness thing that we talk about so much over here. And focusing too much on the past just leads to desire for (intellectual and real physical) revenge on both sides. Whatever powers they have, they are on the decline, I think. I don't fear a return to the dark ages from religion.

But prudence is not giving them a reason to hold a grudge, if they ever do get power again. That means letting go of our own grudges.

As for them saying I'm going to hell, so they're offensive, so what. Over here you're allowed to be offensive in speech. It still doesn't matter to me because I don't believe in hell.

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If you believe it despite the scientific evidence, then you are anti intellectual.

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What about when they rewrite legislation specifically aimed at eliminating low-cost healthcare alternatives for lower-income women?

What about when they picket any pharmacy which agrees to sell "Plan B" or the morning after pill, and do so until such a business caves in and removes a legal product from their shelves?

Or when they do everything in their power to hold up approval of such things in the first place?

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There you go. You said it yourself; he's not talking about you or anyone else except those who use their belief in Christianity to condemn others and to try to force others to believe and act like them.

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Frem: This is why I'm not scared of them. What're they going to do, ban microwaves? Sometimes when something gets let out of the bag, it can't be stuffed back in. Science is like that, religion IS powerless to get rid of it.

Let's just see them try. Their rocks against our space ships.

I'm not saying it out of a fear of retaliation thing, I'm saying it out of a "let's stop perpetuating this pointless feud of intolerance" thing. It already shifts back and forth, neither side is strong enough to end the other. So keeping this up only bites all of us in the ass. The only way TO end it is to let it go.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

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If you believe it despite the scientific evidence, then you are anti intellectual.

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No, belief isn't anti-intellectual. Anti-intellectualism in America is when someone grumbles about "intellectual elites" and college grads and all their high-fangled fancy words. Maybe some of these types do this, but you're conflating two different issues.

Compare to anti-intellectualism under Pol-Pot, who believed the entire society should be brought back to agriculture based by any means possible and killed anyone with an education, INCLUDING people who wore glasses because they might have been LITERATE.

The things you guys are worried about are seriously minor.

People believed for almost TWO millenia in this, and people who didn't really believe were forced to act like they did, and YET, knowledge continued.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

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What about when they rewrite legislation specifically aimed at eliminating low-cost healthcare alternatives for lower-income women?

What about when they picket any pharmacy which agrees to sell "Plan B" or the morning after pill, and do so until such a business caves in and removes a legal product from their shelves?

Or when they do everything in their power to hold up approval of such things in the first place?

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You missed what I'd consider the more pertinent points about sex ed and stem cell research. Considering that most of the arguments against both are based on erroneous conclusions, I'd say religious objections against availability to the greater public are SOL.

But, as ever, I would support their ability to refuse the services they would disagree with, such as their walking out of sex-ed. You can't force people to participate.

Really, though, sex ed is probably the best long term solution TO people needing abortions, so I'd like to think they might eventually realize that they're shooting themselves in the foot.

So as for their other anti-abortion legislation, no, I don't really support it. Not only do I consider it different degrees from something merely discussed in a classroom, but at the same time I think the stuff that they want to put in the classroom, in some areas, is just going to be discussed anyway. I oppose the one because I think it affects non-Christian populations, I don't bother with the other because I don't think it does.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:

We are currently rules by an intellectual elite.

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Originally posted by TheHappyTrader:
Niki, I have lost patience with this thread, but not because of you. I appreciate you being respectful and I just want to attempt to clarify my position to you.

I realize this article was not meant to apply to me or even my denomination (or more accurately lack there of). However it still intentionally stereotypes Fundamentalist, and and that bothers me. Not all Fundies are out to take over the government and force their views on others.

I do believe violent extremism is dangerous and and that a bloody 'score card' serves no purpose. Also, extremism need not be religious in nature, and is often far from religious in true motivation.

Using the term 'extremist' is at least more appropriate than fundamentalist. I believe that 'extremism' is merely a symptom of a real human problem(s) and am wary of that label as well. I thought Frem had some very good points concerning this, not sure if I've said that yet or not.

Lastly, I think the general notion of 'these groups just can't be reasoned with' is destructive and only adds to the problem.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:

You can believe in God and science at the same time. I'm skeptical of both ;) But I take the point.

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Magons, about the anti-intellectual thing, I tend to disagree. I think faiths and science often go different ways, and it's not about intellect. I find other things more indicative of an anti-intellectual basis among extremists. No particular belief, to me, reflects anti-intellectualism--anti-SCIENCE, perhaps, maybe even ignorance in not having looked into the facts, but not anti-intellect. Some of the things I find representative of anti-intellectualism are the use of "elitist", the "he's someone you'd want to have a beer with" and so many of the other put-downs you hear from the right.

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No, belief isn't anti-intellectual. Anti-intellectualism in America is when someone grumbles about "intellectual elites" and college grads and all their high-fangled fancy words. Maybe some of these types do this, but you're conflating two different issues.

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Compare to anti-intellectualism under Pol-Pot, who believed the entire society should be brought back to agriculture based by any means possible and killed anyone with an education, INCLUDING people who wore glasses because they might have been LITERATE.

The things you guys are worried about are seriously minor.

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People believed for almost TWO millenia in this, and people who didn't really believe were forced to act like they did, and YET, knowledge continued.

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Originally posted by Kwicko


This is a good point, especially the last one. You CAN reason with these people, at least sometimes. Or you can at least reason with the people that are in danger of listening to them. And in doing so, you can change the course of history.

A reasoned counter-proposal to Hitler in 1922 might have helped stave off WWII. A reasoned response to Pol Pot might have averted the killing fields. A reasoned response to the Taliban before they started blowing up statues might have avoided 9/11. At any point, we had chances to deal with these people or their followers, but they were deemed too unimportant, not enough of a threat.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Magons, note that I pointed out that if you can't reason with THEM, you can reason with the folks who might LISTEN TO THEM, and cut off their support before they ever really have any power to enact their agenda.

One of the prime tools in that fight is ridicule, because once people are laughing at you, it's really hard to convince them that you're a mighty and fear-inducing great leader.

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Originally posted by Storymark:

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:

We are currently rules by an intellectual elite.

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Heh, bit o' irony.

"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."

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Originally posted by TheHappyTrader:
I do believe violent extremism is dangerous and and that a bloody 'score card' serves no purpose. Also, extremism need not be religious in nature, and is often far from religious in true motivation.

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
For most of em, it has jack shit to do with religion anyway, they're just looking for an EXCUSE to hurt people, a "cause" with which to massage their conscience about the harm they want to do, and any "cause" will do.

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Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
-Anton Chigurh

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Yeah, like this is anything we need to ever worry about. How very dare anyone complain about the Radical Christian Right....

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:

You can believe in God and science at the same time. I'm skeptical of both ;) But I take the point.

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Originally posted by m52nickerson:

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:

You can believe in God and science at the same time. I'm skeptical of both ;) But I take the point.

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A man that is skeptical of faith, does not have it.

A man that is skeptical of science, is called a scientist.

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Originally posted by Niki2:

Regarding the increase in hate groups recently, I found this, which I think is apropos:

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Fundamentalist Christian churches are growing in membership and influence despite holding views that are incompatible with any reasonable understanding of our world and how it works. Their intellectual schizophrenia allows them to hold beliefs that are incompatible with the world view that depends on the conclusions and implications of science that we (and they!) rely on daily to function in the modern world. They deny the fundamental premises and conclusions of geology, biology, physics, anthropology, archaeology and astronomy. They deny a world view that most of us take for granted.

The growth of these Fundamentalist groups is counter-intuitive, but may be an unfortunate consequence of a serious decline in general literacy and in the quality, breadth and scope of liberal arts education in the United States. What is particularly disturbing about this anti-intellectual trend is that members of these fundamentalist groups hold views with implications that are dangerous and destructive for our civilization, for our nation, for world peace, and for human rights and freedoms. [ed. note: We will expand on this particular issue in a subsequent article.]

What is the appeal of these fundamentalist religious groups? They are strikingly similar once you get beneath the surface and their shared characteristics may help explain their wide and growing appeal.

Their “closed" belief system provides simple answers to complex political and social problems, but more importantly fundamentalist provides simplistic answers to ultimate questions of meaning and existence. Simplicity helps their adherents resolve the ultimate “problem” of being human, what Existentialists call angst (or ultimate anxiety). Angst means the consciousness of death-- the awareness of being human, of mortality, of non-being. It is comforting to have answers to life’s deepest questions and Fundamentalism provides relief from angst by postulating that there is some form of continued existence in an afterlife after death.

Fundamentalist Christians believe that there is a world beyond our world of experience [“heaven”] in which the injustices and evils of this world will finally be overcome and their God (and ultimate good and ultimate justice) will triumph over the unavoidable evil and injustice of our experience. They view our world as a cosmic struggle with stark contrasts between the antagonists: black and white, good and evil, God and Satan, good guys and bad guys, allies and enemies, us and them—a world in which the religious believer is on the side of right and has a duty to “fight evil” as they define it from their particular vantage point. Fundamentalists have a deep emotional commitment to the ultimate truth and virtue of their particular religious beliefs, which remain unaffected and unreachable by relevant fact, rational argument, daily experience or common sense.

Many of these religious groups combine their fundamentalist religious ideas with a wide range of far right political, economic and social agendas. In the past five years or so these right wing religious-political alliances have used political power aggressively and with considerable success in their attempt to impose their political, social and economic philosophy, their standards of public conduct, and their moral values on the rest of society.

This potent combination of having the answers, knowing what is good and evil, standing on the side of right in a cosmic struggle against the forces of darkness, believing in a world beyond this one, being totally committed to their cause, and using political power to realize their objectives makes them troublesome to deal with in our pluralistic society -- and sometimes it makes them dangerous.

Religious fundamentalists -- whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian -- seem to have few scruples and no moral difficulty using political and police power to force citizens who do not agree with them to live by their social, political or religious rules. Some of the more extreme among them have no difficulty using and justifying the use of force (including deadly force and torture) against those who oppose them or their objectives or whoever they determine to be their enemies.

There is little to distinguish the bomb thrower at a family planning clinic in Atlanta, from the Israeli settler tossing a bomb into the home of a Palestinian family, or the Sunni bomber blowing up a Shiite mosque in Iraq..

Regrettably the frequency of the link between religious fundamentalism and terrorism is not all that surprising if we look at the history of religions, particularly in the Western world.

I want to be clear about the way I use the word terrorism because it is easy to get carried away with the imagery and so dilute the full impact of the picture that word should bring to mind. I mean terrorism in its most precise meaning – the use of deadly force against others in an attempt to achieve political goals, frequently under cover of a religious or other ideological rationale or justification.

In the early days of our own country our forefathers endured the religious excesses of the self- righteous Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who were quick to punish with enthusiasm (and apparently with an easy conscience) anyone who transgressed their strict behavioral rules defining upright and moral conduct. They had no qualms about burning witches — and their definition of witches seems to have been broad enough that almost any woman who got out of line could find herself burned at the stake by the good Christians of the time, who argued that such barbaric punishment was justified because it ridded their community of great potential evil. These good Christian men (and they were all men!) were confident they were doing god’s work and so they acted with untroubled consciences.

People do terrible things in the name of religion. The arrogance and self-righteousness that presumes to know the mind and will of god is not only self-delusion, it is the cause of much evil in our world.

Watching a recent PBS series on the history of the Papacy I was struck by how essentially evil many of the early popes were – how cavalierly they ruled, how combative they were with whatever secular political force opposed their authority, how immoral many of them were in their personal lives, how often they abused their vows and ignored their duties, how easily they used and abused the power of the Church as they extended their domination both politically and religiously, how greedily they grabbed lands for themselves to build empires both political and financial, how cruelly they treated anyone who opposed their rule, how viciously they dealt with those whose religious beliefs differed from their own, how easily they let debates about the nature of Christ turn into battles over religious turf, political territory and power, how arrogant they were when they presumed to be infallible in matters of faith and morality, how viciously they attempted to force their truth on others, how little they seemed to value humility and virtue.

The Inquisition was an unfortunate time in the history of the Christian Church, when the Popes and their obedient soldiers the Jesuits implemented a plan to purify the Church from unorthodox teachings, particularly teachings about the source of authority for political power and religious teaching (which the Church said lay in the Pope). The object of the Inquisition was to identify wrong belief and conduct using torture as an instrument of the church to save the souls of those unfortunate individuals who had errant beliefs by torturing them until they recanted their error and accepted the true teaching of the Church.

As late as the 1930s we are reminded how easily the dangerous alliance of religion and politics led the Catholic Church into a moral compromise with fascism, as Pope Pius XII negotiated a deal with Mussolini to ensure that the Church kept its land holdings in Rome, now Vatican City, in exchange for an agreement that the Church would stay out of politics in the rest of Italy. We are surprised to hear the Church’s excuse that its compromise was a necessary bargain with the devil in order that a greater good might result. In that same period of time we also saw how easily the Nazis co-opted the Protestant churches of Germany into acquiescence with Nazi practices in exchange for their survival as a state church.

It is amazing that early Christianity survived these unlikely church leaders to become the dominant religion of the Western world. Despite its ill-informed and badly-behaving leaders, Christianity has become the most significant influence in the development of the basic humanitarian, moral and social values of the Western world of today. We look, so far in disappointment, for those who define themselves as Christian leaders today to do better than their predecessors in speaking truth to power.

The lesson here is that for someone with religious authority and political power to believe that he knows the will of God and that he/she is the instrument of God to confront evil and to build god’s kingdom on earth is the product of arrogance and self-delusion. In Christian theology, that self-delusion is precisely what is meant by the concept of sin.

History continues to repeat itself. The arrogance and self-delusion of the powerful that they alone know what is good for others applies to President Bush, who has said on several occasions that he believes that he was chosen at this time and place to be the instrument of God to lead America and to bring democracy and Western values to the Middle East. The self-delusion of the powerful when combined with a sense of theocratic mission and a lack of Christian humility and self-criticism is particularly dangerous in a political leader in a democracy.

If there is anything that the history of Christianity teaches us, it is that power tends to corrupt those who have it. That unhappy combination of political power and religious authority has been responsible for a great deal of mischief in our world and it continues to wreak havoc on us today.

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http://christianhumanist.net/Christian.aspx

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You were ahead of your times buddy. I'd like to see you posting here again; like now!

T