Another Liberal Religion: Paganism

[AllieBaba]

Way too many factoids for people like Ravi and Splatter.

Excellent OP, researched and put together like nothing you ever see from the left. And so far, no intelligent discussion of it. Way to go, tards.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Did I read this correctly: "...(humans are a higher order than all other life)..."????

Yes, you read that correctly.

Are you actually suggesting that this is not so???

I don't believe humans are a higher order of life - we've just got more complex brains but we're very weak physically and not very tough either (we die pretty easily unlike many other species who can survive far worse trauma than we). And we don't reproduce as quickly as most other species.

I would kill anyone who even attempted to harm my pets.

If so, congrats on being an honest liberal!

Thanks. I'm proud to be liberal and honest.

"I don't believe humans are a higher order of life..."
Who would be better able to make said judgement about you, than you?
I bow to your expertise in this matter.


"...we die pretty easily ... we don't reproduce as quickly..."
Ah, I think I'm beginning to see where your coming from.
If I knew you better, I might inquire as to the traumatic events in your childhood...never mind.

"I would kill anyone ..."
Did you happen to catch one of my previous threads called "Violence at home on the political left"?
Sorry I hadn't met you when I wrote that one. Dang.

But, overall, I was wondering if I could trick, er, entice any liberals into admitting what you just volunteered.
"...I'm proud to be liberal ..."
Just goes to show: you can never underestimate liberals.

Now for the good news: You get the Cynthia McKinney Brilliant Liberal Award!

(psst! watch your back- the other libs might try to jump you out of the club)

 

[AllieBaba]

I would like to direct ColoMtnMan to the manifesto of the late, erstwhile, Mr. Lee:

"Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!

2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization and concentrate the message in finding SOLUTIONS to solving global military mechanized conflict. Again, solutions solutions instead of just repeating the same old wars with newer weapons. Also, keep out the fraudulent peace movements. They are liars and fakes and had no real intention of ending the wars. ALL OF THEM ARE FAKE! On one hand, they claim they want the wars to end, on the other, they are demanding the human population increase. World War II had 2 Billion humans and after that war, the people decided that tripling the population would assure peace. WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!

4. Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??"

WSVN-TV - Manifesto of James J. Lee

 

[goldcatt]

Every item is documented...

your point?

Or is your view predicated upon a background in...shall we say, animal husbandry?

Actually, I didn't even read your post.

Too many words. Sorry.

Too bigoted, shallow, unimaginative and stereotypical for my taste. But I did make it to the second sentence before having to use the scroll wheel. That's pretty rare for these long-winded venemous copy and paste jobs.

This is a country where people are supposed to love, protect and enjoy liberty, right? Gaining and keeping true liberty is hard work, it requires an open mind and a willingness to agree to disagree with others. Not just agree to disagree, but respect and support their rights and individual choices within the bounds of that liberty even if you argue passionately against the ideas they espouse. It requires tumbling in the marketplace of ideas, yes - but without smearing and dehumanizing those who are only exercising the very liberty you claim to love.

Even those (insert invective of choice here) people who don't want to eat animals. Even those (insert invective of choice here) liberals. Even those (insert invective of choice here) pagans. Not all of whom are the same people, by the way. Which the OP would know if she got her head out of the hack blogosphere (and other places) long enough to get to know any of them.

Oh the horror, she might even like them. She might even realize they aren't all that different from her. She might even realize she has more common ground than battleground with them. Whatever would she do? She would have nothing to post.

 

[Truthmatters]

The links in the piece are all partisan hackery sites

 

[PoliticalChic]

When the Right wants to really disparage something, some one or some idea, they run right to the pulpit and call that intellectual conundrum a "religion".

Why? Because 1) The Right thinks deep in their collective hearts that they own religion. They use religion as an intellectual aegis. There is no compromise with religion. One is more apt to compromise one's politics, but never their faith or dogma.

2) It's easy for the Right to get behind the eradication of the infidel. Christians vs. Muslims. Christians vs. Jews Christians vs. Christians. If the Right can successfully sell the concept that an idea they can't fathom or find too intrusive on commerce (because the cause of commerce rules every aspect of their being), they will slam that idea as a false prophesy or new religion.

A conservative is never so tall as when she stoops to educate a liberal. Thank you for this opportunity.

1. "t’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.

2. Barack Obama’s liberal support during the campaign, which was decidedly different from the regular media bias that conservatives often complain about. “I haven’t seen a politician get this kind of walk-on-water coverage since Colin Powell a dozen years ago flirted with making a run for the White House,” said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on Meet the Press in February 2007, a day after Obama announced his candidacy. “I mean, it is amazing . . . a guy with all of two years’ experience in the United States Senate getting coverage that ranges from positive to glowing to even gushing.”

a. Samantha Fennell, formerly an associate publisher of Elle, wrote on the magazine’s website a month later: “When I attended my second “Obama Live” fund-raiser last week at New York City’s Grand Hyatt, . . . I was on my feet as Senator Obama entered the room. Fate had blessed me in this moment. . . . In a moment of divine intervention, he saw me,…”

b. Evan Thomas, a Newsweek editor, on the show Hardball with Chris Matthews last June: …”Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of God.”

3. If twentieth-century history teaches us anything, it’s that political religions spell trouble. Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism aren’t just called “political religions” by scholars today. Mussolini, for instance, called his ideology “not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people.”

a. And in Italy, writes the historian Michael Burleigh, “intellectual sycophants and propagandists characterised [Mussolini] as a prodigy of genius in terms that would not have embarrassed Stalin: messiah, saviour, man of destiny, latterday Caesar, Napoleon, and so forth.”

4. In The Political Religions (1938), Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun—a symbol of “the radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom”—from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.

5. “The totalitarian movements which have arisen since World War I are fundamentally religious movements,” wrote the political scientist Waldemar Gurian in 1952, in part because they “cannot conceive of realms of life outside and beyond their control…. the private lives and practices of individuals."

a. Marcel Prélot had commented that “the totalitarian state, naturally extending its field of action far beyond the recognized domain of the conventional state, claims to constitute both a political entity and an ethical and spiritual community, . . . the state itself being a church.”

(emphasis mine throughout)

BENJAMIN A. PLOTINSKY
The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm
The Left’s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience
The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm by Benjamin A. Plotinsky, City Journal Spring 2010

 

[Truthmatters]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


you cons are so damned silly.

The media helped Bush attack Iraq by allowing his lies to go unquesstioned

 

[PoliticalChic]

Every item is documented...

your point?

Or is your view predicated upon a background in...shall we say, animal husbandry?

Actually, I didn't even read your post.

Too many words. Sorry.

Too bigoted, shallow, unimaginative and stereotypical for my taste. But I did make it to the second sentence before having to use the scroll wheel. That's pretty rare for these long-winded venemous copy and paste jobs.

This is a country where people are supposed to love, protect and enjoy liberty, right? Gaining and keeping true liberty is hard work, it requires an open mind and a willingness to agree to disagree with others. Not just agree to disagree, but respect and support their rights and individual choices within the bounds of that liberty even if you argue passionately against the ideas they espouse. It requires tumbling in the marketplace of ideas, yes - but without smearing and dehumanizing those who are only exercising the very liberty you claim to love.

Even those (insert invective of choice here) people who don't want to eat animals. Even those (insert invective of choice here) liberals. Even those (insert invective of choice here) pagans. Not all of whom are the same people, by the way. Which the OP would know if she got her head out of the hack blogosphere (and other places) long enough to get to know any of them.

Oh the horror, she might even like them. She might even realize they aren't all that different from her. She might even realize she has more common ground than battleground with them. Whatever would she do? She would have nothing to post.

Ah, friend Goldy, had you not gone to a 'can't we all just get along' government school- please correct me if I am in error- you might, in those private, alone, moments, realize that there are folks and concepts with which you may not agree...

and even find dangerous, as I have outlined in the OP: folks who view people as no better than animals, folks who would kill those who disagree with them, etc. etc.

Now, that disagreement doesn't include me, at least not yet, as you claim not to have read the OP about which you are complaining....interesting analytical method: saves a great deal of time.

But if you happen to find the time and/or interest to read the OP, I suggest that you might agree with me, that the examples given are not themes that you would champion.

 

[Nosmo King]

When the Right wants to really disparage something, some one or some idea, they run right to the pulpit and call that intellectual conundrum a "religion".

Why? Because 1) The Right thinks deep in their collective hearts that they own religion. They use religion as an intellectual aegis. There is no compromise with religion. One is more apt to compromise one's politics, but never their faith or dogma.

2) It's easy for the Right to get behind the eradication of the infidel. Christians vs. Muslims. Christians vs. Jews Christians vs. Christians. If the Right can successfully sell the concept that an idea they can't fathom or find too intrusive on commerce (because the cause of commerce rules every aspect of their being), they will slam that idea as a false prophesy or new religion.

A conservative is never so tall as when she stoops to educate a liberal. Thank you for this opportunity.

1. "t’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.

2. Barack Obama’s liberal support during the campaign, which was decidedly different from the regular media bias that conservatives often complain about. “I haven’t seen a politician get this kind of walk-on-water coverage since Colin Powell a dozen years ago flirted with making a run for the White House,” said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on Meet the Press in February 2007, a day after Obama announced his candidacy. “I mean, it is amazing . . . a guy with all of two years’ experience in the United States Senate getting coverage that ranges from positive to glowing to even gushing.”

a. Samantha Fennell, formerly an associate publisher of Elle, wrote on the magazine’s website a month later: “When I attended my second “Obama Live” fund-raiser last week at New York City’s Grand Hyatt, . . . I was on my feet as Senator Obama entered the room. Fate had blessed me in this moment. . . . In a moment of divine intervention, he saw me,…”

b. Evan Thomas, a Newsweek editor, on the show Hardball with Chris Matthews last June: …”Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of God.”

3. If twentieth-century history teaches us anything, it’s that political religions spell trouble. Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism aren’t just called “political religions” by scholars today. Mussolini, for instance, called his ideology “not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people.”

a. And in Italy, writes the historian Michael Burleigh, “intellectual sycophants and propagandists characterised [Mussolini] as a prodigy of genius in terms that would not have embarrassed Stalin: messiah, saviour, man of destiny, latterday Caesar, Napoleon, and so forth.”

4. In The Political Religions (1938), Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun—a symbol of “the radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom”—from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.

5. “The totalitarian movements which have arisen since World War I are fundamentally religious movements,” wrote the political scientist Waldemar Gurian in 1952, in part because they “cannot conceive of realms of life outside and beyond their control…. the private lives and practices of individuals."

a. Marcel Prélot had commented that “the totalitarian state, naturally extending its field of action far beyond the recognized domain of the conventional state, claims to constitute both a political entity and an ethical and spiritual community, . . . the state itself being a church.”

(emphasis mine throughout)

BENJAMIN A. PLOTINSKY
The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm
The Left’s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience
The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm by Benjamin A. Plotinsky, City Journal Spring 2010

So, you decided to use a Conservative's rationalization about political enthusiasm to blunt my assertion that Conservatives use the term "religion" to refudiate (thanks, Sarah Palin) ideas they can neither fathom nor successfully refudiate themselves. And you call that an argument? I call it empirical evidence proving my argument.

 

[PoliticalChic]

The links in the piece are all partisan hackery sites

C',mon Ms.Truthie, join the fun: post with some rebuttal links or quotes.

Don't be lazy.

 

[PoliticalChic]

When the Right wants to really disparage something, some one or some idea, they run right to the pulpit and call that intellectual conundrum a "religion".

Why? Because 1) The Right thinks deep in their collective hearts that they own religion. They use religion as an intellectual aegis. There is no compromise with religion. One is more apt to compromise one's politics, but never their faith or dogma.

2) It's easy for the Right to get behind the eradication of the infidel. Christians vs. Muslims. Christians vs. Jews Christians vs. Christians. If the Right can successfully sell the concept that an idea they can't fathom or find too intrusive on commerce (because the cause of commerce rules every aspect of their being), they will slam that idea as a false prophesy or new religion.

A conservative is never so tall as when she stoops to educate a liberal. Thank you for this opportunity.

1. "t’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.

2. Barack Obama’s liberal support during the campaign, which was decidedly different from the regular media bias that conservatives often complain about. “I haven’t seen a politician get this kind of walk-on-water coverage since Colin Powell a dozen years ago flirted with making a run for the White House,” said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on Meet the Press in February 2007, a day after Obama announced his candidacy. “I mean, it is amazing . . . a guy with all of two years’ experience in the United States Senate getting coverage that ranges from positive to glowing to even gushing.”

a. Samantha Fennell, formerly an associate publisher of Elle, wrote on the magazine’s website a month later: “When I attended my second “Obama Live” fund-raiser last week at New York City’s Grand Hyatt, . . . I was on my feet as Senator Obama entered the room. Fate had blessed me in this moment. . . . In a moment of divine intervention, he saw me,…”

b. Evan Thomas, a Newsweek editor, on the show Hardball with Chris Matthews last June: …”Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of God.”

3. If twentieth-century history teaches us anything, it’s that political religions spell trouble. Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism aren’t just called “political religions” by scholars today. Mussolini, for instance, called his ideology “not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people.”

a. And in Italy, writes the historian Michael Burleigh, “intellectual sycophants and propagandists characterised [Mussolini] as a prodigy of genius in terms that would not have embarrassed Stalin: messiah, saviour, man of destiny, latterday Caesar, Napoleon, and so forth.”

4. In The Political Religions (1938), Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun—a symbol of “the radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom”—from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.

5. “The totalitarian movements which have arisen since World War I are fundamentally religious movements,” wrote the political scientist Waldemar Gurian in 1952, in part because they “cannot conceive of realms of life outside and beyond their control…. the private lives and practices of individuals."

a. Marcel Prélot had commented that “the totalitarian state, naturally extending its field of action far beyond the recognized domain of the conventional state, claims to constitute both a political entity and an ethical and spiritual community, . . . the state itself being a church.”

(emphasis mine throughout)

BENJAMIN A. PLOTINSKY
The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm
The Left’s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience
The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm by Benjamin A. Plotinsky, City Journal Spring 2010

So, you decided to use a Conservative's rationalization about political enthusiasm to blunt my assertion that Conservatives use the term "religion" to refudiate (thanks, Sarah Palin) ideas they can neither fathom nor successfully refudiate themselves. And you call that an argument? I call it empirical evidence proving my argument.

So, it's beyond your comprehension that disagreement with your denials makes one a conservative, and therefore, one who you would not accept.

How's this:

. Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, argues [Ann] Coulter, it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. In 'Godless', she throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us:
its sacraments (abortion)
its holy writ (Roe v. Wade)
its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal)
its clergy (public school teachers)
its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free)
its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland)
and its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident)
(Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism)


Was that better for you?

 

[Nosmo King]

A conservative is never so tall as when she stoops to educate a liberal. Thank you for this opportunity.

1. "t’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.

2. Barack Obama’s liberal support during the campaign, which was decidedly different from the regular media bias that conservatives often complain about. “I haven’t seen a politician get this kind of walk-on-water coverage since Colin Powell a dozen years ago flirted with making a run for the White House,” said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on Meet the Press in February 2007, a day after Obama announced his candidacy. “I mean, it is amazing . . . a guy with all of two years’ experience in the United States Senate getting coverage that ranges from positive to glowing to even gushing.”

a. Samantha Fennell, formerly an associate publisher of Elle, wrote on the magazine’s website a month later: “When I attended my second “Obama Live” fund-raiser last week at New York City’s Grand Hyatt, . . . I was on my feet as Senator Obama entered the room. Fate had blessed me in this moment. . . . In a moment of divine intervention, he saw me,…”

b. Evan Thomas, a Newsweek editor, on the show Hardball with Chris Matthews last June: …”Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of God.”

3. If twentieth-century history teaches us anything, it’s that political religions spell trouble. Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism aren’t just called “political religions” by scholars today. Mussolini, for instance, called his ideology “not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people.”

a. And in Italy, writes the historian Michael Burleigh, “intellectual sycophants and propagandists characterised [Mussolini] as a prodigy of genius in terms that would not have embarrassed Stalin: messiah, saviour, man of destiny, latterday Caesar, Napoleon, and so forth.”

4. In The Political Religions (1938), Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun—a symbol of “the radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom”—from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.

5. “The totalitarian movements which have arisen since World War I are fundamentally religious movements,” wrote the political scientist Waldemar Gurian in 1952, in part because they “cannot conceive of realms of life outside and beyond their control…. the private lives and practices of individuals."

a. Marcel Prélot had commented that “the totalitarian state, naturally extending its field of action far beyond the recognized domain of the conventional state, claims to constitute both a political entity and an ethical and spiritual community, . . . the state itself being a church.”

(emphasis mine throughout)

BENJAMIN A. PLOTINSKY
The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm
The Left’s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience
The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm by Benjamin A. Plotinsky, City Journal Spring 2010

So, you decided to use a Conservative's rationalization about political enthusiasm to blunt my assertion that Conservatives use the term "religion" to refudiate (thanks, Sarah Palin) ideas they can neither fathom nor successfully refudiate themselves. And you call that an argument? I call it empirical evidence proving my argument.

So, it's beyond your comprehension that disagreement with your denials makes one a conservative, and therefore, one who you would not accept.

How's this:

. Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, argues [Ann] Coulter, it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. In 'Godless', she throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us:
its sacraments (abortion)
its holy writ (Roe v. Wade)
its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal)
its clergy (public school teachers)
its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free)
its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland)
and its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident)
(Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism)


Was that better for you?

Now you're rockin' Ann Coulter?!?

My position is simple enough to understand. Conservatives are eager to paste a veneer of religion over Liberals because transforming political arguments to religious ones makes it more palatable for Conservatives to retort against Liberals as infidels rather than political foes. Religion is like a warm quilt for Conservatives to intellectually wrap themselves in because there is no compromise, no alternative, no questioning doctrine and dogma.

Liberals aren't adherents to some secular quasi-religion as Conservatives want to believe. Liberals have faith in the same God Conservatives do. Just not all the dogmatic baggage that Conservatives like to tout.

Scabby Annie and other "pundits" would have you dragged down into the same pit of ignorance that relieves the guilt of persecuting someone for political beliefs by transforming those political beliefs into religious heresy.

Try, try, and try to paint your political opposition as infidels and heretics. The only ones buying this twisted definition of faith are the Conservatives too blinded by their own self righteousness to see any truth at all.

Using religious analogies and reaching for lunatic comparisons might be a fun intellectual exercise for some, but it results in a further deterioration of rational argument. It's toxic and ridiculous.

 

[goldcatt]

Actually, I didn't even read your post.

Too many words. Sorry.

Too bigoted, shallow, unimaginative and stereotypical for my taste. But I did make it to the second sentence before having to use the scroll wheel. That's pretty rare for these long-winded venemous copy and paste jobs.

This is a country where people are supposed to love, protect and enjoy liberty, right? Gaining and keeping true liberty is hard work, it requires an open mind and a willingness to agree to disagree with others. Not just agree to disagree, but respect and support their rights and individual choices within the bounds of that liberty even if you argue passionately against the ideas they espouse. It requires tumbling in the marketplace of ideas, yes - but without smearing and dehumanizing those who are only exercising the very liberty you claim to love.

Even those (insert invective of choice here) people who don't want to eat animals. Even those (insert invective of choice here) liberals. Even those (insert invective of choice here) pagans. Not all of whom are the same people, by the way. Which the OP would know if she got her head out of the hack blogosphere (and other places) long enough to get to know any of them.

Oh the horror, she might even like them. She might even realize they aren't all that different from her. She might even realize she has more common ground than battleground with them. Whatever would she do? She would have nothing to post.

Ah, friend Goldy, had you not gone to a 'can't we all just get along' government school- please correct me if I am in error- you might, in those private, alone, moments, realize that there are folks and concepts with which you may not agree...

and even find dangerous, as I have outlined in the OP: folks who view people as no better than animals, folks who would kill those who disagree with them, etc. etc.

Now, that disagreement doesn't include me, at least not yet, as you claim not to have read the OP about which you are complaining....interesting analytical method: saves a great deal of time.

But if you happen to find the time and/or interest to read the OP, I suggest that you might agree with me, that the examples given are not themes that you would champion.

I see you didn't read my post either. So we're even and all good.

 

[PoliticalChic]

So, you decided to use a Conservative's rationalization about political enthusiasm to blunt my assertion that Conservatives use the term "religion" to refudiate (thanks, Sarah Palin) ideas they can neither fathom nor successfully refudiate themselves. And you call that an argument? I call it empirical evidence proving my argument.

So, it's beyond your comprehension that disagreement with your denials makes one a conservative, and therefore, one who you would not accept.

How's this:

. Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, argues [Ann] Coulter, it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. In 'Godless', she throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us:
its sacraments (abortion)
its holy writ (Roe v. Wade)
its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal)
its clergy (public school teachers)
its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free)
its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland)
and its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident)
(Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism)


Was that better for you?

Now you're rockin' Ann Coulter?!?

My position is simple enough to understand. Conservatives are eager to paste a veneer of religion over Liberals because transforming political arguments to religious ones makes it more palatable for Conservatives to retort against Liberals as infidels rather than political foes. Religion is like a warm quilt for Conservatives to intellectually wrap themselves in because there is no compromise, no alternative, no questioning doctrine and dogma.

Liberals aren't adherents to some secular quasi-religion as Conservatives want to believe. Liberals have faith in the same God Conservatives do. Just not all the dogmatic baggage that Conservatives like to tout.

Scabby Annie and other "pundits" would have you dragged down into the same pit of ignorance that relieves the guilt of persecuting someone for political beliefs by transforming those political beliefs into religious heresy.

Try, try, and try to paint your political opposition as infidels and heretics. The only ones buying this twisted definition of faith are the Conservatives too blinded by their own self righteousness to see any truth at all.

Using religious analogies and reaching for lunatic comparisons might be a fun intellectual exercise for some, but it results in a further deterioration of rational argument. It's toxic and ridiculous.

Perhaps a further remedial might help...

Let's begin with the premise that you have the desire and ability to understand the following, and/or there are folks in the five-to-ten times more readers than posters who might be interested in this explanation.

1. The French Revolution represented the end of the oppression of the Church and the monarchy; the Revolution turned politics into a religion, replacing Christianity with a secular faith in the Jacobin agenda. “The Jacobean atheism was integrated with rationalism, …and with the dismissal of Judeo-Christian scriptures.” Differences between Left & Right in their Psycho-Philosophic background

2. For the origins of politics-as-religion, we must search through the Romantic nationalism of the 18th century, and the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who might even be called the ‘Father of Modern Fascism.’

a. The French Revolution was the first totalitarian revolution: a nationalist, populist uprising, led and manipulated by an intellectual vanguard determined to replace Christianity with a political religion.

b. It glorified ‘the people,’ and anointed the revolutionary vanguard as their priests. Now, this is important: not the individual, but 'the people.'

3. So, investing nationalism with the idea of the general will created a secular, if circular, religion: the people worshipped themselves! Thus the primacy of the collective, directly from Rousseau. I hope you recognize the collective as the Democrat-liberal-progressive-statists of today.

` a. Rousseau points out, in ‘The Social Contract,’ that a weakness of Christianity was that “men have never known whether they ought to obey the civil ruler or priest” (God or Caesar), so it would be better for all to have a society were religion and politics were one.

b. Revolutionary descendents of Rousseau knew that they had to exterminate every trace of Christianity from the public agenda. Mussolini wrote in 1919 “Two religions are today contending…for sway in the world- the black and the red.”
(not to be confused with 'Le Rouge et le Noir' that Stendhal wrote about)

c. In the Papal Encyclical “Non Abbiamo Bisogno,” the Vatican accused the fascists of organizing a state religion, “to monopolize completely the young, …for the exclusive advantage of a party and of a regime based on an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, a real pagan worship of the State.” Pius XI, Non abbiamo bisogno (29/06/1931)

4. The real Jacobin revolution resulted in an authoritarian 'Reason' replacing the Christian God. The French invested reason with the same dogmatic status as religion, creating a secular reflection of the Catholic Church. Reason, or nature, or the general will, became the civil religion. Thus authoritarianism was there from the time of the French Revolution. The general will became what you see as 'liberalism.' But it is an enforced 'general will,' dictated by the state, for the state: i.e., in opposition to the individual.

a. And the overarching achievement of the revolutionaries was in instructing the masses that veneration was due, in phases, God, then ‘the people,’ then the nation, the state, and finally and, simply, ‘progress.’ The slight of hand is clear as Napoleon swapped phases as he crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor.

b. Henri de Saint-Simon, the articulator of socialism, argued for the supremacy of the sciences over religion, and predicted that, like religious, secular propaganda would employ artists and poets. His collaborator, Auguste Comte, also saw the need for a secular religion, a scientific materialism, which contends that the only reality is what can be detected and measured by human senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. His authoritarian thinking shapes today’s liberal’s doctrinaire insistence that science has the explanation for all things.

And, so- in summary, liberalism is the elitists' imposition of 'reason,' meaning their view, as to that government will be best for all people.
This related to the OP in the following way: reviling Christianity, and all organized religion, has resulted in a return to paganism, a worship of what the elites call reason and science, imposing their view of truth.

I suggest further reading in 'Post Modernism.'

 

[Wicked Jester]

First of all, your religious intolerance is showing. If it doesn't agree with your beliefs, its wrong? Or just wrong for you?

Secondly, what does paganism have to do with liberals or with your posting?

Just because you want to justify our need to kill and eat animals, and to make yourself feel better (humans are a higher order than all other life), doesn't mean the rest of us HAVE to feel or live like you do.

I hope you don't abuse animals because they're not people.

Did I read this correctly: "...(humans are a higher order than all other life)..."????

Are you actually suggesting that this is not so???

If so, congrats on being an honest liberal!

Tell that Great White Shark swimming towards you that you are a higher order than he is.

Before or after the HUMAN made, highly engineered speargun puts one right between his eyes?

 

[strollingbones]

you have a very limited view of paganism

 

[Mr Natural]

Paganism makes about as much sense as any other religion.

 

[rdean]

There is nothing in the world today more silly than religion. All religion. They are all EQUALLY believable.

 

[goldcatt]

you have a very limited view of paganism

She's cherry picking factoids from garbage blogs to support a fallacy as her thesis. Of course her view is limited. Paganism is not the point. Libruls are eeeevul is the point.

I wouldn't get too concerned she'll be taken seriously.

 

[Richard-H]

First of all, your religious intolerance is showing. If it doesn't agree with your beliefs, its wrong? Or just wrong for you?

Secondly, what does paganism have to do with liberals or with your posting?

Just because you want to justify our need to kill and eat animals, and to make yourself feel better (humans are a higher order than all other life), doesn't mean the rest of us HAVE to feel or live like you do.

I hope you don't abuse animals because they're not people.

Did I read this correctly: "...(humans are a higher order than all other life)..."????

Are you actually suggesting that this is not so???

If so, congrats on being an honest liberal!

I hate to break it to ya, but the AVERAGE IQ of Americans is 98. There have been Chimps with IQs measured as high as 95.

That means that roughly 50% of Americans are not as smart as the smartest known chimp.

Now, while there is no doubt that many humans can have IQs considerably higher than the smartest known chimp - assuming that all or any one human is smarter than a chimp is blatantly false.

Now, if we look at little closer:

The top 5 states for highest IQ are all 'Liberal' states:

1. VERMONT (The most liberal state in the Union)
2. MASSACHUSETTS
3. CONNECTICUT (Hey, that's my state!)
4. NEW JERSEY
5. MAINE

I've also heard it stated that the 10 states with the highest average level of education all voted for Kerry in 2004, while the 10 states with the lowest average level of education all went with Bush.

Now, this begs the obvious question:

Why do we 'Liberals' spend our time arguing on USMB with a bunch of monkeys?

Answer:

Because these monkeys vote!

Perhaps we need to change our political strategy, and instead of using logic, reason and fact to convince these monkeys, instead perhaps we should just offer them a banana if they vote they way we tell them too.

Hey, it couldn't hurt! 'Cause logic, reason and truth sure don't seem to have any affect on them!