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Religion is destroying a lot of things.
It's not religion that is destroying things; it's the people who take from it what they choose and leave behind the rest. If you are a Christian and try to take everything in the Bible word for word, you run into a problem because there are just too many contradictions. On top of that, there are rules that make zero sense in today's world, and not even the fundies follow those rules. It cracks me up that these people will follow the Bible word for word and use scripture to back up their beliefs, but if you call them out on something they don't like they just ignore you.
I think it does have an effect. I think people can respect the idea of limited government. But when they try to legislate people's own bodies and what people do in the privacy of their own homes, that's not limited government. That's imposing your religion on a secular society. That's why people don't vote republican.
I think it does have an effect. I think people can respect the idea of limited government. But when they try to legislate people's own bodies and what people do in the privacy of their own homes, that's not limited government. That's imposing your religion on a secular society. That's why people don't vote republican.
Jesus was a socialist.
I think it does have an effect. I think people can respect the idea of limited government. But when they try to legislate people's own bodies and what people do in the privacy of their own homes, that's not limited government. That's imposing your religion on a secular society. That's why people don't vote republican.
Who has imposed their religion on me? Be specific please...........
I havent been forced to support my church through tax penalties.
I havent been forced to wear a jewish beanie........
Who?
Yes, the Zionists have really betrayed America. They're like Roberts on the Supreme Court. You expect the Jews on the court to be enemies of America. But, when Roberts voted for Obamacare, that was news.
I think it does have an effect. I think people can respect the idea of limited government. But when they try to legislate people's own bodies and what people do in the privacy of their own homes, that's not limited government. That's imposing your religion on a secular society. That's why people don't vote republican.
Who has imposed their religion on me? Be specific please...........
I havent been forced to support my church through tax penalties.
I havent been forced to wear a jewish beanie........
Who?
Blue laws...where they still apply.
No school and very little standard working hours on Sunday.
A veteran Republican says the religious right has taken over, and turned his party into anti-intellectual nuts
GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party - Salon.com
Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizesat least in the minds of its followersall three of the GOPs main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.
Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertsons strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.
The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.
The Constitution notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: Major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to share their feelings about their faith in a revelatory speech, or a televangelist like Rick Warren will dragoon the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, offering himself as the final arbiter. Half a century after John F. Kennedy put to rest the question of whether a candidate of a minority denomination could be president, the Republican Party has reignited the kinds of seventeenth-century religious controversies that advanced democracies are supposed to have outgrown. And some in the media seem to have internalized the GOPs premise that the religion of a candidate is a matter for public debate.
More in article
I think it does have an effect. I think people can respect the idea of limited government. But when they try to legislate people's own bodies and what people do in the privacy of their own homes, that's not limited government. That's imposing your religion on a secular society. That's why people don't vote republican.
Who has imposed their religion on me? Be specific please...........
I havent been forced to support my church through tax penalties.
I havent been forced to wear a jewish beanie........
Who?
Blue laws...where they still apply.
No school and very little standard working hours on Sunday.
On my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country. My desire to discover the causes of this phenomenon increased from day to day. In order to satisfy it I questioned the members of all the different sects; I sought especially the society of the clergy, who are the depositaries of the different creeds and are especially interested in their duration. As a member of the Roman Catholic Church, I was more particularly brought into contact with several of its priests, with whom I became intimately acquainted. To each of these men I expressed my astonishment and explained my doubts. I found that they differed upon matters of detail alone, and that they all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.
The unbelievers of Europe attack the Christians as their political opponents rather than as their religious adversaries; they hate the Christian religion as the opinion of a party much more than as an error of belief; and they reject the clergy less because they are the representatives of the Deity than because they are the allies of government.
In Europe, Christianity has been intimately united to the powers of the earth. Those powers are now in decay, and it is, as it were, buried under their ruins. The living body of religion has been bound down to the dead corpse of superannuated polity; cut but the bonds that restrain it, and it will rise once more. I do not know what could restore the Christian church of Europe to the energy of its earlier days; that power belongs to God alone; but it may be for human policy to leave to faith the full exercise of the strength which it still retains.
A veteran Republican says the religious right has taken over, and turned his party into anti-intellectual nuts
GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party - Salon.com
Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizesat least in the minds of its followersall three of the GOPs main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.
Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertsons strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.
The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.
The Constitution notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: Major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to share their feelings about their faith in a revelatory speech, or a televangelist like Rick Warren will dragoon the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, offering himself as the final arbiter. Half a century after John F. Kennedy put to rest the question of whether a candidate of a minority denomination could be president, the Republican Party has reignited the kinds of seventeenth-century religious controversies that advanced democracies are supposed to have outgrown. And some in the media seem to have internalized the GOPs premise that the religion of a candidate is a matter for public debate.
More in article
A veteran Republican says the religious right has taken over, and turned his party into anti-intellectual nuts
GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party - Salon.com
Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.
Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.
The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.
The Constitution notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: Major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to share their feelings about their faith in a revelatory speech, or a televangelist like Rick Warren will dragoon the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, offering himself as the final arbiter. Half a century after John F. Kennedy put to rest the question of whether a candidate of a minority denomination could be president, the Republican Party has reignited the kinds of seventeenth-century religious controversies that advanced democracies are supposed to have outgrown. And some in the media seem to have internalized the GOP’s premise that the religion of a candidate is a matter for public debate.
More in article
GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party
Like creationists, strong believers of Marxism reject all scholarly criticism of Marxism. In former Communist countries, Marx was given a personality cult and was viewed as immune to criticism. Critics of Marxism were labelled as "counter-revolutionary criminals" and were jailed or even executed which is analogous to execution of critics of state religion on charges of blasphemy in countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia etc. This tradition is held by Marxist parties all over the world. In god is not Great, Christopher Hitchens speaks of his loss of belief in Marxism as closely analogous to loss of religious belief.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Secular_religions#Marxism_as_a_religion
