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The First Amendment has two provisions concerning religion: the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. The Establishment clause prohibits the government from "establishing" a religion. The precise definition of "establishment" is unclear. Historically, it meant prohibiting state-sponsored churches, such as the Church of England.
Today, what constitutes an "establishment of religion" is often governed under the three-part test set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971). Under the "Lemon" test, government can assist religion only if (1) the primary purpose of the assistance is secular, (2) the assistance must neither promote nor inhibit religion, and (3) there is no excessive entanglement between church and state.
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/first-amendment-and-religion
Can a theist honestly separate their indoctrination from real time decision making? What if they hear voices and they think is their god saying to war against your neighbors like the Christian leader of Russia is doing?
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The only acceptions to the rule I reckon would be @just_sayin and @Bogan but it doesn't matter too much any way since neither of them even live on this planet.
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***Trigger Warning to leftists and atheists - the following contains truth. You will be offended. You have been warned.***
If religious people should not be involved in politics, then the founding fathers really had it wrong. 2/3rds of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence were... wait for it... clergy. Yep, they just weren't religious, they were the leaders of religious groups. The very first official act of the Continental Congress was a 4 hour prayer meeting. Pretty good for a bunch of so called 'deists'. LOL.
It would anger our atheists to learn just how much faith and politics were not just mixed, but considered inseparable. All 13 original colonies charters say they were founded for God, and most explicitly state for Christianity. Same goes for the Magna Carta.
The Library of Congress use to have a really good exhibit on the Faith of our Founding Fathers. Liberals have whittled it down considerably, but you will still learn a lot: see here:
https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9805/religion.html
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/ - then click the links off of this webpage for more detailed info
Also check out this site for a brief history of prayer in the US government:
https://www.nationaldayofprayer.org/about/history_of_prayer_in_america
Leftists and atheists will often mention the 'separation of church and state'. But do you know the history? Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter on a Friday to the Danbury Baptists who lived in state that had a different primary religious denomination. They were concerned that they would not have freedom of religion. Jefferson assures them by telling them that the government will stay out of their business. He did not mean that religion should stay out of government. In fact, after mailing the letter on Friday, he attended religious services in congress, on Sunday where the chaplain was paid with federal money. This was his regular custom. Yep, every Sunday, Congress had church in it paid for by the government. Gotta love that.
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I agree completely with that premise. I was thinking more from the theist perspective when I posted this yesterday, not from a legal one. The founders of our country were actually in a frame of revolutionary mind against an established national church and its resulting power. They realized how the doctrine of a religion destroys governmental attempts of equally disseminating due process to its citizenry. The theists of the time were also aware of their history, the 13 colonies being proclaimed for god was a duty to the church of England more than god. And they knew that in their time open discrimination against nonbelievers was systematically an acceptable practice. People had to lie about their world views to get a job. This in part was the concern I believe behind the motivation when jefferson sent a certain letter to the Danbury Baptists and introducing the establishment clause. Everything suggests they themselves wanted to reduce and limit religious authority within the government. The Danbury Baptists was concerned government might exhort its authority into religious beliefs as had happened in England. So to the theist at the time it was a win/win. That's why I'm wondering if the more informed theist today, would abstain willingly if they felt in the heat of the moment, with lives on the line; their indoctrination would interrupt the ability to logically reason out a rational decision?
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Are you're alluding to the possibility their indoctrination could help them stay rational during an extreme situation? Like their faith gets them through, type thing?
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Starting off with a sweeping proclamation lumping atheists and liberals together wreaks...
Doesn't surprise me since in those days atheists were not allowed jobs for the most part. Especially ones of a historic nature. But one thing consistently remains in their deliberations concerning the new government. Along with taxation, and freedom of speech concerns, were the need to reduce religions role within government. Obviously that wasn't the right time to abolish religious influence altogether. Not sure it would be a good idea now even. Religion did give us the beginning of expressing our desire to learn philosophically. Back to the mindset of the founders, they saw the writing on the wall. The society and culture they wanted to created was less discriminatory to atheists as it was becoming increasingly apparent it was an irrational position to move into the future with. Do you as a theist see any wisdom in their thinking? Should that wisdom prevail on? The link below describing bigotry against atheism world wide and what some backwards extremist countries have instituted would tell me 'yes' let's let that kind of thinking continue on...
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE8B9006/
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*** Trigger Warning - the following contains historical facts that leftists and atheists won't like ***
Jefferson is a great example of how wrong atheists and leftists are about what the founding father's believed about faith. To hear leftists, you'd be told that Jefferson was a deist and not very religious. Here's a few factoids for you though:While Jefferson did speak of dangers of the state imposing religion upon others, he did not believe that religion should not influence the state as his own actions demonstrate. And he is one of the 'heroes' of atheists among the founding fathers.
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Like other Founding Fathers, Jefferson was considered a Deist, subscribing to the liberal religious strand of Deism that values reason over revelation and rejects traditional Christian doctrines, including the Virgin Birth, original sin and the resurrection of Jesus. While he rejected orthodoxy, Jefferson was nevertheless a religious man. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/godinamerica/people/thomas-jefferson.html#:~:text=Like other Founding Fathers, Jefferson,and the resurrection of Jesus.
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To your question, if having a system of beliefs that can conflict with one's political objectivity is a reason for them to not participate in politics, then no one should be a politician (and that is actually something that I can subscribe to!). Me and you are not religious, but we certainly have other systems of beliefs that are not entirely rational and that significantly affect our political views. If you make me a soft dictator, I will make Javier Milei look like an extreme statist compared to what I do. I will start, for example, with complete abolishment of all taxation and replacement of it with a 1% flat income tax. Most people would say that, therefore, I should never be let anywhere near the Congress or the White House.
So who is allowed to do politics then? A small minority of people who conform with every societal tradition, are not religious, are not ideological... We might as well go full AI route in that case.
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Personally, I have very strong libertarian tendencies. That's not because I agree with everyone else, but because I want to have my rights respected also. I've mentioned this in another thread, that atheism has a deficient view of morality. It has no foundation for it, so morality is reduced to what the strongest person or group believe. That's just might makes right and not a very good moral foundation. Atheist leaders like Joseph Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky, Mussolini , Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong killed more than 150 million in the 20th century alone - most of them their own people. Throw Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood) in there and you have atheists having killed more people in the 20th century, than all other religions for the past 1,000 years.
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The content of your post is grossly misleading. For instance Mussolini followed the lead of the christian adolph hitler notoriously missing from your list. As well Margaret Sanger was an Episcopalian.
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Atheism is nothing more than lack of belief in the supernatural. It has nothing to do with "might makes right", or nihilism, or any other ill that you attribute to atheists. There are atheists who believe in pacifism, and there are atheists who believe in rivers of blood - just like there are theists who believe in pacifism, and there are theists who believe in rivers of blood.
The fact that within every single religion there have been countless divisions and rivers of blood have been spilled between people disagreeing on what the religion was about suggests that no one - despite what they claim - actually derives their morals from "the source". People derive their morals from certain observations they make about the world, and then they use religion, or non-religious ideology (such as fascism or communism), to rationalize their morals.
If religious morals were objective, then things like the Crusades, or the Hundred Years' War, or the endless conflicts between the Sunni and the Shia, would not exist. Which suggests that your moral foundation is as shaky as that of Trotsky or Mussolini, you just lack the tools and desire to force it on others.
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I get you want to distance yourself from atheists. Who wouldn't? My point is that the evil things such as starving your own people to death, have been committed by atheists because they have no moral foundation other than might makes right. The massive body count is exhibit A in that case that atheism is a poor moral system.
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What makes you think I'm distancing myself from atheism? I'm an apostate because the fallacies of the bible didn't reflect reality. Atheism is simply unbelief. It doesn't attempt to posit an alternative view. Yet here I am, every bit as moral as you.
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I wonder, what fraction of all atheists do you think support that bloodshed? If you ask even peaceful Muslims similar questions, the statistics of their answers are pretty damning. With Christians, similarly, you will routinely hear arguments for justification of the Crusades, or genocides that are described in the Bible.
But you will not find many atheists today who support Hitler's or Stalin's actions (the latter you will find in Russia and Belarus, but in those countries both atheists and Christians support them about equally, so it is not a good counter-example either). So I do not think that you want to maintain this line of reasoning.
You, in particular, consistently put words in my mouth, just as you did here. This part
is blatantly untrue, and I have told you many times that it is untrue - but you do not care about the truth, do you? I think that this is what it really takes to be a theist of this stubborn kind (I am not talking about all theists, just about those similar to you): intellectual cowardice, the fear of the inconvenient truth.
I do not have such fear, and I have faced brutal truth many times in my life. I was just rejected from a firm today I have worked for months from morning to evening to get into. "Nope, not good enough for us". My reaction? It was not, "Oh, well, their loss", or, "Blind bastards". It was, "Okay, I can see 7 things that I could improve upon. Time to get to work".
What about you? When you are afraid to even face the fact that some random stranger on the Internet may have a position that threatens your self-assurance, then what do you do when life shows you harsher truth? I have always said this, and I will say it again: living a life of lies in one particular domain is not sustainable - it is going to seep into the rest of it. This is something Ayn Rand understood very well: you lie to yourself a bit - you lie to yourself a lot. We can witness it here very well. There is absolutely nothing you have to gain from consistently misrepresenting my simple position (which, I think, everyone except for you got months ago) - yet you do it out of habit. Small lies have become a part of your intellectual routine, and you have started decaying as a thinker.
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I would not claim to understand people's motivations, and I try to not be confrontational. That said, I think that I explain my position somewhat well and people generally understand it, so I cannot connect systematic misunderstanding of it to anything other than desire to not understand it.
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Well good because so long as you under stand that I am not knocking religion. Its just that even loonies have a right to have a say because they contribute to society. How on earth would we get the high quality coat hangers and number plates and baskets if it wasn't for them?
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Your faith in atheism is not based on facts, evidence and science, it exists in spite of them. I mention the miracle of Calanda where there are 24 eye witness accounts supported with medical records. Spain held a tribunal to verify the account and all evidence points to it being real, but you bitterly cling to your faith claim that it was not real - even though there are medical records and eye witness accounts that say otherwise. You didn't base your faith in atheism on evidence, its just your faith belief, that actual stands in opposition to what the evidence says. You seemed to be willing to believe the evil twin theory that only exists in soap operas and wrestling storylines rather than accept the medical records and eye witness testimony. Are there any records of a twin? Nope.
You quite literally have put your faith in nothing. You are much more faith driven in your conviction of nothing creating the universe than any other person on the site. Your faith in nothing, exceeds @RickeyHoltsclaw's faith in God. At least his faith is based in historical evidence, such as the life and death of Jesus. Yours is...well...literally based on nothing.
I don't need any of the miracles that I have discussed with you to be true. Falsifying an individual miracle does not disprove God. But your faith won't allow the admission of a single miracle. You must deny all facts, medical records, news reports, medically reviewed studies, recorded evidence, and eye witness testimonies of miracles. You mock people for their faith, but it is at least rooted in facts. Your faith in nothing, isn't based on facts. It's based on nothing but your hopes and wishes.
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You mock people for their faith, but it is at least rooted in facts.
@MayCaesar doesn't mock people for their faith, he mocks the arguments claiming their object of faith is rooted in fact. Your fairy clown book is what you have faith in, not facts or reality. If it were facts or reality, it wouldn't be faith. Faith takes an unproven assertion and blindly accepts it even when reality aligns against said faith. That's what makes you a theist. Atheism is just unbelief in your faith. That doesn't require faith at all. Atheism makes no assertions requiring faith. When confronted with a question where the answer is unknown, an atheist will say so where a theist asserts 'god did it'. Understand?
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As much as you may hate Christianity, the historical evidence for Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are there. I've gone into this before also. Even Jesus' enemies admitted he could perform miracles and predict the future. In fact, no one in antiquity denied Jesus' existence and ability to perform miracles. The only ones who have done so are modern atheists, who are faith driven, because to admit otherwise would destroy their religious belief system.
You believe that nothing created you, and that to when you die, you will go and spend eternity with your creator - nothing. This is an illogical faith belief for nothing can only create nothing, for it can do nothing else.
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When you ignore facts to cling to your faith in nothing, you are not basing that faith on facts and evidence
Yawn, unbelief doesn't require faith in 'nothing', just means no faith in your book. When your faith requires you to lie and speak in circles such as 'lack of faith is faith' then you need help, professional help. And should, if you were honest, abstain from politics till okayed by a doctor. A guy with two legs is evidence the guy didn't have an amputation based on facts and reality. You choose to assert the intentionally buried cult story put out for public consumption by a notoriously deceptive denomination 400 years ago is real, just because when all is said and done, the guy had two legs, but I don't believe it. You need the assertion of a supernatural event occurring to believe it, I simply don't believe the assertion. No one says 'look, he has two legs! One must of been amputated and grew back!'
Your argumentation actually points to why I posted this thread to begin with. Knowing your proclivity to make such irrational leaps of faith, would you consider staying out of politics as a sign of your integrity?
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Let's go through some facts. While it is true the Bishop did investigate the miracle at Calanda, the tribunal where the testimonies were recorded was not done by the Catholic church, but by the King of Spain, and overseen by his official record keeper. I have mentioned this to you before and you must have forgotten.
Now, you assert, without any evidence that the man did not have his leg amputated. But what does the evidence say:
1. Licentiate Juan de Estanga, Professor of Surgery testified admits to cutting off the leg, to the time of the amputation, and to the man's recover during the winter at the hospital.
Here's a snip of the tribunal records (taken from a Google translation of the original):
2. Licentiate Pascual del Cacho, Presbyter Vee-of the Holy Hospital of Our Lady of Grace of the Present City said he witnessed the man at the hospital with an amputated leg, and to seeing the amputated leg:
3. Juan Lorenzo Garcia, Mancebo Platicante de Cyrjjano said he saw the leg amputated and that he buried the leg:
4. Diego Millaruelo, Master in Surgery said he saw the patient before and after the amputation, and saw the amputated leg
The reason I can provide those details is because Spain's King's own record keeper verified the testimony and preserved it. And your evidence? Where can I find it? *** sound of crickets **** That's what I thought.
You see, that's because my faith is supported by the evidence and facts, and yours has no facts to support it, and you can't provide evidence for it. If you look at our discussion of prayer - I cited well over 100 sources. And what did atheists provide? Well Dee - falsely accused an old white cardiologist of secretly changing into a Black Bishop on the weekends and of stealing money - none of which he had any evidence of. In fact calling the white guy a Black man was really funny. Not as funny as when Dee produced a Yelp review where he claimed the Yale Cardiologist which headed up his hospital and had pioneered many procedures was a 'quack' because the guy wouldn't honor a coupon for a heart procedure. LOL - you can't make this stuff up. Atheists are so funny!!!
There were lots of accusations and lots of theories, but when it came to evidence - the atheists were lacking objective evidence. Deny, deny, deny - that was all we got from the atheist side.
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So which is it? Did I say that miracles are impossible, or are miracles things for me to pretend didn't happen? Is my position that "even when science says it happened, trust me, it didn't happen", or is it that "since only nature exists, only natural explanations are real"? For the record, I have said none of these four things - but it is not just that, it is also that these four things contain two pairs of mutually exclusive statements, and you have attributed them all to me.
From now on I employ a new policy for conversations with you: you have to accurately summarize my position before I am going to reply to your criticisms of it. I am tired of correcting you over and over, and I am not going to defend positions that I disagree with.
I will reiterate also what I said before: the more you continue this charade, the more respect I lose for you. At this point I am starting to doubt your ability to make a single accurate statement about something that challenges your positions.
It is clear to me that you do not understand even 1% of my position. What you read in my (fairly straightforward) statements has very little in common with the content of those statements. In my understanding, people do it in two cases: when they are illiterate, or when they are habitual liars (especially to themselves). I am inclined to think that it is the latter in your case, and I have voiced this suspicion multiple times before.
Again, this has nothing to do with your religiosity (I know plenty of religious people that consistently make strong logical arguments and understand and reply to mine). Although I should say that heavily religious people are more prone to this, in my observation.
You do not only do it to me either. You do it to other people, for example here:
At no point did @Factfinder suggest that he "hates Christianity". Are you really comfortable showing so little respect to other people?
Lastly, you just said that you like engaging with me and @Factfinder on this topic... But I have yet to see you engaging with us. To engage with someone means to understand their views and reply to them, and you have demonstrated no such understanding.
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Another fun fact is, I wanted to read that book that summer out of curiosity. But that was exactly when I encountered Rickey here, the guy who later got banned, then came back. Wanting to stay as far away from this kind of thinking as possible, I decided to read a better fantasy instead: Salvatore writes some great books.
My point is, while there are a lot of problems with Christianity, I think that within the Christian population variability is very high, and the people range from those with whom you can have very satisfying intellectual conversations, to those who will not even try to understand what you are trying to say.
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