If We Erase The Christian Basis Of Governance, Then What Do We Unleash?

[Derideo_Te]

"If We Erase The Christian Basis Of Governance, Then What Do We Unleash?"

Again, the idiocy of this, of course, is that there is no 'Christian basis of governance,' since the Declaration of Independence is a document neither of policy nor law, and devoid of any authority; consequently there's nothing to 'erase' and nothing will be 'unleashed,' whatever that's supposed to mean.

The Declaration of Independence is the Birth Certificate of the United States.

It does not seek to make policy nor law - rather, it declares, substantively, that a new Nation has been born, and gives some explicit references to the nature of that creation, and the moral and spiritual aegis under which it was fashioned and animated.

One must create a Nation and outline its nature before one can begin work on the more mundane and more demanding but less important mechanisms of policy and law.

Nope! If you are looking for a parallel then I suggest you try Divorce papers.

wrong again

you're the village idiot

lol look the village idiot is babbling nonsense again

Yet another vacuous response!

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

"So democratic government, equality, rights etc. are not of sufficient merit on their own?"

Claim: Democratic government, equality, rights etc. are of sufficient merit without the existence of God.

The claim is self-contradictory. The very idea of merit vs. unmerit (good vs. evil) requires absolute moral standard based on God perfect morality.

See: Transcendental proof of God's existence.

No proof supplied of your God ergo there is no proof of your alleged God's "perfect morality" either.

Mankind developed a moral code just as other animals have developed their own moral codes without the benefit of any deities.

Likewise mankind developed religion and 'god' as a means of social control, where neither are 'imbued' with some sort of 'special authority,' as there is no 'god' as perceived by theists, no extraterrestrial omnipotent entity that listens to prayers, intercedes on the behalf of mortals, or issues 'moral codes' that must be obeyed lest transgressors be subject to postmortem 'punishment.'


The creation of our Constitutional Republic was therefore a response to the arrogance and abuse that often manifest as a consequence of religion, to guard against the inherent imperfections and dangers of religion and its dogma because they were indeed developed by fallible humans, and to ensure our civil liberties are not jeopardized by the blind passions common to religious extremism.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

You know what, a lot of people got killed hitting the beaches at Normandy and Anzio because the Pope was such a ******* coward.

yes the Pope should have defeated the Nazi's himself!! See why we are positive that a liberal will be slow?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

And frankly, if the entire Catholic Clergy got wiped out, I'm just not seeing this as a bad thing.

the Church stood up to Rome creating Western Civilization and to Moscow freeing 2 billion from liberal communism.

See why we are positive that liberalism is based in pure ignorance?

 

[Rikurzhen]

All of your examples are of something that was designed by one person, even if it was built by many.

All of your examples are of something that was designed and built with a specific purpose in mind.

So, let me ask you this: Who designed Western culture? And what specific purpose was it intended to serve? To decorate? To shelter?

My spandrel example addresses your question. A spandrel is not designed, it appears.

To bring this into context, the Catholic Church issue edicts prohibiting marriage with people who were related to the 6th cousin level. This was a revolution created by conscious choice. The spandrel which arose is the changed relationship between an individual and society for now family/tribe/clan networks and one's place within those networks was essentially erased from society. No one designed THAT. Absent the Church's edict, it would not have arisen independently and we don't see this cultural feature in lands with strong clan networks.

You're focusing on designers but they're not essential - a culture arises from evolution and from keeping attributes which work. Christianity was essential to the cultures which grew in the West. Look around the world - there have been many cultural/religious experiments. Where else has an Enlightenment been born?

Thank you for the sentence I bolded. You're right. No one "designs" a culture and cultures (successful ones, anyway) keep attributes that work -- and keep working.

I do disagree with your assertion that spandrels just appear. They are a part of the design, even if not the focus of the design.

They're not part of the design. In architecture a beam transfers forces laterally, a post transfers forces vertically, an arch transfers forces down to a post. A spandrel is simply left over space on the exterior perimeter of an arch. Thought and effort have to be put into designing a post and an arch, the sprandel just appears.

 

[Kondor3]

[
I wish I could say that I'm convinced, but, I'm not.

A research paper by a couple of Italians, who all all on-fire about Pius XII not saying anything about German mass killings, after Rome had been liberated.

What those folks fail to take into account is that it was not just his (the Vatican's, or the Italian church's) skin that he was thinking about, but the skins of both his clerics (priests, nuns, etc.) and the faithful in those areas still controlled by the Nazis.

Open his mouth about such things and every cleric still in the thrall of the Nazis instantly had a target on his or her chest.

Case anything-but-closed, but, then again, we could probably go back and forth about this one for days, off and on, to no end or 'final' conclusion.

But is the WHOLE PROBLEM with the ******* Catholic Church. Looking out for the Church is ALWAYS the paramount concern.

When they caught priests diddling little boys, the first concern was protecting the church, not the children. They only started caring when those kids starting winning big settlements.

And when the Nazis were turning millions of people into Lampshades and Bars of Soap, the Catholic Church didn't say jack shit about it because, hey, the Nazis might retaliate and boy, we are really worried the damned Commies might outlaw religion.

Not that this was that big of a concern, most of the people fighting for the Axis were Catholics. Italy, Hungary, Romania, Austria, about half of Germany, - mostly Catholics serving in their armies. LIke they were really going to pull the triggers on their fellow Catholics because of something the Pope said?

Joe, I don't have the energy to sink a lot of time into this one at the moment; we're far apart on some aspects of this, and closer on others. Thanks for the time.

 

[Bfgrn]

"If We Erase The Christian Basis Of Governance, Then What Do We Unleash?"

Again, the idiocy of this, of course, is that there is no 'Christian basis of governance,' since the Declaration of Independence is a document neither of policy nor law, and devoid of any authority; consequently there's nothing to 'erase' and nothing will be 'unleashed,' whatever that's supposed to mean.

The Declaration of Independence is the Birth Certificate of the United States.

It does not seek to make policy nor law - rather, it declares, substantively, that a new Nation has been born, and gives some explicit references to the nature of that creation, and the moral and spiritual aegis under which it was fashioned and animated.

One must create a Nation and outline its nature before one can begin work on the more mundane and more demanding but less important mechanisms of policy and law.

Good point. The Declaration of Independence is in essence a 'mission statement'.

And Thomas Jefferson chose the word 'creator'. not God. The OP deliberately misses that important word.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Thomas Jefferson makes the case that all men are endowed with certain rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I wonder which one of those 3 Rikurzhen would deny ANY human being?

 

[Kondor3]

"If We Erase The Christian Basis Of Governance, Then What Do We Unleash?"

Again, the idiocy of this, of course, is that there is no 'Christian basis of governance,' since the Declaration of Independence is a document neither of policy nor law, and devoid of any authority; consequently there's nothing to 'erase' and nothing will be 'unleashed,' whatever that's supposed to mean.

The Declaration of Independence is the Birth Certificate of the United States.

It does not seek to make policy nor law - rather, it declares, substantively, that a new Nation has been born, and gives some explicit references to the nature of that creation, and the moral and spiritual aegis under which it was fashioned and animated.

One must create a Nation and outline its nature before one can begin work on the more mundane and more demanding but less important mechanisms of policy and law.

Nope! If you are looking for a parallel then I suggest you try Divorce papers.

Nah, DT, I'll stick with the Birth Certificate analogy for now.

 

[Antares]

"If We Erase The Christian Basis Of Governance, Then What Do We Unleash?"

Again, the idiocy of this, of course, is that there is no 'Christian basis of governance,' since the Declaration of Independence is a document neither of policy nor law, and devoid of any authority; consequently there's nothing to 'erase' and nothing will be 'unleashed,' whatever that's supposed to mean.

The Declaration of Independence is the Birth Certificate of the United States.

It does not seek to make policy nor law - rather, it declares, substantively, that a new Nation has been born, and gives some explicit references to the nature of that creation, and the moral and spiritual aegis under which it was fashioned and animated.

One must create a Nation and outline its nature before one can begin work on the more mundane and more demanding but less important mechanisms of policy and law.

Good point. The Declaration of Independence is in essence a 'mission statement'.

And Thomas Jefferson chose the word 'creator'. not God. The OP deliberately misses that important word.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Thomas Jefferson makes the case that all men are endowed with certain rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I wonder which one of those 3 Rikurzhen would deny ANY human being?

None, his point is merely that he is inclined to agree with Jefferson, that they were endowed by the Creator.

You guys are completely lost.

 

[Rikurzhen]

"If We Erase The Christian Basis Of Governance, Then What Do We Unleash?"

Again, the idiocy of this, of course, is that there is no 'Christian basis of governance,' since the Declaration of Independence is a document neither of policy nor law, and devoid of any authority; consequently there's nothing to 'erase' and nothing will be 'unleashed,' whatever that's supposed to mean.

The Declaration of Independence is the Birth Certificate of the United States.

It does not seek to make policy nor law - rather, it declares, substantively, that a new Nation has been born, and gives some explicit references to the nature of that creation, and the moral and spiritual aegis under which it was fashioned and animated.

One must create a Nation and outline its nature before one can begin work on the more mundane and more demanding but less important mechanisms of policy and law.

Good point. The Declaration of Independence is in essence a 'mission statement'.

And Thomas Jefferson chose the word 'creator'. not God. The OP deliberately misses that important word.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Thomas Jefferson makes the case that all men are endowed with certain rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I wonder which one of those 3 Rikurzhen would deny ANY human being?

When a people believe that they live in accord with Godly commands, then they don't want to anger their God by flouting his rules. When god creates everyone as equal, when God bestows upon each person a right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then people live their life as though this was true.

When Progressives got it in their head that they could create a better society they launched the Eugenics movement and forced sterilization onto people, thus directly depriving the victims of a right to pursue happiness, their liberty and their right to be equal.

Progressives thought they knew better than Godly wisdom. Who fought the Progressives? The Churchly people who saw Eugenics at an attack on God's rules and the Conservatives who saw Eugenics as an attack on the traditional role of government as laid down by the Founders.

 

[Rikurzhen]

All of your examples are of something that was designed by one person, even if it was built by many.

All of your examples are of something that was designed and built with a specific purpose in mind.

So, let me ask you this: Who designed Western culture? And what specific purpose was it intended to serve? To decorate? To shelter?

My spandrel example addresses your question. A spandrel is not designed, it appears.

To bring this into context, the Catholic Church issue edicts prohibiting marriage with people who were related to the 6th cousin level. This was a revolution created by conscious choice. The spandrel which arose is the changed relationship between an individual and society for now family/tribe/clan networks and one's place within those networks was essentially erased from society. No one designed THAT. Absent the Church's edict, it would not have arisen independently and we don't see this cultural feature in lands with strong clan networks.

You're focusing on designers but they're not essential - a culture arises from evolution and from keeping attributes which work. Christianity was essential to the cultures which grew in the West. Look around the world - there have been many cultural/religious experiments. Where else has an Enlightenment been born?

Thank you for the sentence I bolded. You're right. No one "designs" a culture and cultures (successful ones, anyway) keep attributes that work -- and keep working.

I do disagree with your assertion that spandrels just appear. They are a part of the design, even if not the focus of the design.

They're not part of the design. In architecture a beam transfers forces laterally, a post transfers forces vertically, an arch transfers forces down to a post. A spandrel is simply left over space on the exterior perimeter of an arch. Thought and effort have to be put into designing a post and an arch, the sprandel just appears.

Here's another way of looking at this. You undertake two efforts by design, you draw a square and then a circle, and the spandrels appear by magic.

 

[Bfgrn]

"If We Erase The Christian Basis Of Governance, Then What Do We Unleash?"

Again, the idiocy of this, of course, is that there is no 'Christian basis of governance,' since the Declaration of Independence is a document neither of policy nor law, and devoid of any authority; consequently there's nothing to 'erase' and nothing will be 'unleashed,' whatever that's supposed to mean.

The Declaration of Independence is the Birth Certificate of the United States.

It does not seek to make policy nor law - rather, it declares, substantively, that a new Nation has been born, and gives some explicit references to the nature of that creation, and the moral and spiritual aegis under which it was fashioned and animated.

One must create a Nation and outline its nature before one can begin work on the more mundane and more demanding but less important mechanisms of policy and law.

Good point. The Declaration of Independence is in essence a 'mission statement'.

And Thomas Jefferson chose the word 'creator'. not God. The OP deliberately misses that important word.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Thomas Jefferson makes the case that all men are endowed with certain rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I wonder which one of those 3 Rikurzhen would deny ANY human being?

When a people believe that they live in accord with Godly commands, then they don't want to anger their God by flouting his rules. When god creates everyone as equal, when God bestows upon each person a right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then people live their life as though this was true.

When Progressives got it in their head that they could create a better society they launched the Eugenics movement and forced sterilization onto people, thus directly depriving the victims of a right to pursue happiness, their liberty and their right to be equal.

Progressives thought they knew better than Godly wisdom. Who fought the Progressives? The Churchly people who saw Eugenics at an attack on God's rules and the Conservatives who saw Eugenics as an attack on the traditional role of government as laid down by the Founders.

Can you name any 'conservatives' who spoke out against eugenics? Maybe the robber barons?

Maybe NOT...

America’s national eugenics program received funding from many of the country’s largest corporate concerns, including from the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, J. H. Kellogg, Proctor and Gamble, Hanes and the Harriman railroad fortune.

Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation in 1909. By 1929 he had placed $300 million worth of the family's controlling interest in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now called ``Exxon'') to the account of the Foundation.

The Foundation's money created the medical specialty known as Psychiatric Genetics. For the new experimental field, the Foundation reorganized medical teaching in Germany, creating and thenceforth continuously directing the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry'' and the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity.'' The Rockefellers' chief executive of these institutions was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, assisted by his proteges Otmar Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann.

In 1932, the British-led ``Eugenics'' movement designated the Rockefellers' Dr. Rudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics Federation. The movement called for the killing or sterilization of people whose heredity made them a public burden.


Churchly people?

Ironically, as the Eugenics Movement came to the United States, the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.

Methodist churches around the country promoted the American Eugenics Society “Fitter Family Contests” wherein the fittest families were invariably fair skinned and well off. Methodist bishops endorsed one of the first books circulated to the US churches promoting eugenics. Unlike the battles over evolution and creationism, both conservative and progressive church leaders endorsed eugenics. The liberal Rev. Harry F. Ward, professor of Christian ethics and a founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said that Christianity and eugenics were compatible because both pursued the “challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.”

Conservative Rev. Clarence True Wilson, the General Secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, and the man chosen to debate Clarence Darrow after William Jennings Bryan’s death, believed that only the white Aryan race was the descendant of the lost tribes of Israel.

 

[Antares]

"If We Erase The Christian Basis Of Governance, Then What Do We Unleash?"

Again, the idiocy of this, of course, is that there is no 'Christian basis of governance,' since the Declaration of Independence is a document neither of policy nor law, and devoid of any authority; consequently there's nothing to 'erase' and nothing will be 'unleashed,' whatever that's supposed to mean.

The Declaration of Independence is the Birth Certificate of the United States.

It does not seek to make policy nor law - rather, it declares, substantively, that a new Nation has been born, and gives some explicit references to the nature of that creation, and the moral and spiritual aegis under which it was fashioned and animated.

One must create a Nation and outline its nature before one can begin work on the more mundane and more demanding but less important mechanisms of policy and law.

Good point. The Declaration of Independence is in essence a 'mission statement'.

And Thomas Jefferson chose the word 'creator'. not God. The OP deliberately misses that important word.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Thomas Jefferson makes the case that all men are endowed with certain rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I wonder which one of those 3 Rikurzhen would deny ANY human being?

When a people believe that they live in accord with Godly commands, then they don't want to anger their God by flouting his rules. When god creates everyone as equal, when God bestows upon each person a right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then people live their life as though this was true.

When Progressives got it in their head that they could create a better society they launched the Eugenics movement and forced sterilization onto people, thus directly depriving the victims of a right to pursue happiness, their liberty and their right to be equal.

Progressives thought they knew better than Godly wisdom. Who fought the Progressives? The Churchly people who saw Eugenics at an attack on God's rules and the Conservatives who saw Eugenics as an attack on the traditional role of government as laid down by the Founders.

Can you name any 'conservatives' who spoke out against eugenics? Maybe the robber barons?

Maybe NOT...

America’s national eugenics program received funding from many of the country’s largest corporate concerns, including from the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, J. H. Kellogg, Proctor and Gamble, Hanes and the Harriman railroad fortune.

Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation in 1909. By 1929 he had placed $300 million worth of the family's controlling interest in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now called ``Exxon'') to the account of the Foundation.

The Foundation's money created the medical specialty known as Psychiatric Genetics. For the new experimental field, the Foundation reorganized medical teaching in Germany, creating and thenceforth continuously directing the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry'' and the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity.'' The Rockefellers' chief executive of these institutions was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, assisted by his proteges Otmar Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann.

In 1932, the British-led ``Eugenics'' movement designated the Rockefellers' Dr. Rudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics Federation. The movement called for the killing or sterilization of people whose heredity made them a public burden.

Churchly people?

Ironically, as the Eugenics Movement came to the United States, the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.

Methodist churches around the country promoted the American Eugenics Society “Fitter Family Contests” wherein the fittest families were invariably fair skinned and well off. Methodist bishops endorsed one of the first books circulated to the US churches promoting eugenics. Unlike the battles over evolution and creationism, both conservative and progressive church leaders endorsed eugenics. The liberal Rev. Harry F. Ward, professor of Christian ethics and a founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said that Christianity and eugenics were compatible because both pursued the “challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.”

Conservative Rev. Clarence True Wilson, the General Secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, and the man chosen to debate Clarence Darrow after William Jennings Bryan’s death, believed that only the white Aryan race was the descendant of the lost tribes of Israel.

So you find yourself defending Eugenics....

 

[Bfgrn]

"If We Erase The Christian Basis Of Governance, Then What Do We Unleash?"

Again, the idiocy of this, of course, is that there is no 'Christian basis of governance,' since the Declaration of Independence is a document neither of policy nor law, and devoid of any authority; consequently there's nothing to 'erase' and nothing will be 'unleashed,' whatever that's supposed to mean.

The Declaration of Independence is the Birth Certificate of the United States.

It does not seek to make policy nor law - rather, it declares, substantively, that a new Nation has been born, and gives some explicit references to the nature of that creation, and the moral and spiritual aegis under which it was fashioned and animated.

One must create a Nation and outline its nature before one can begin work on the more mundane and more demanding but less important mechanisms of policy and law.

Good point. The Declaration of Independence is in essence a 'mission statement'.

And Thomas Jefferson chose the word 'creator'. not God. The OP deliberately misses that important word.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Thomas Jefferson makes the case that all men are endowed with certain rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I wonder which one of those 3 Rikurzhen would deny ANY human being?

When a people believe that they live in accord with Godly commands, then they don't want to anger their God by flouting his rules. When god creates everyone as equal, when God bestows upon each person a right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then people live their life as though this was true.

When Progressives got it in their head that they could create a better society they launched the Eugenics movement and forced sterilization onto people, thus directly depriving the victims of a right to pursue happiness, their liberty and their right to be equal.

Progressives thought they knew better than Godly wisdom. Who fought the Progressives? The Churchly people who saw Eugenics at an attack on God's rules and the Conservatives who saw Eugenics as an attack on the traditional role of government as laid down by the Founders.

Can you name any 'conservatives' who spoke out against eugenics? Maybe the robber barons?

Maybe NOT...

America’s national eugenics program received funding from many of the country’s largest corporate concerns, including from the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, J. H. Kellogg, Proctor and Gamble, Hanes and the Harriman railroad fortune.

Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation in 1909. By 1929 he had placed $300 million worth of the family's controlling interest in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now called ``Exxon'') to the account of the Foundation.

The Foundation's money created the medical specialty known as Psychiatric Genetics. For the new experimental field, the Foundation reorganized medical teaching in Germany, creating and thenceforth continuously directing the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry'' and the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity.'' The Rockefellers' chief executive of these institutions was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, assisted by his proteges Otmar Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann.

In 1932, the British-led ``Eugenics'' movement designated the Rockefellers' Dr. Rudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics Federation. The movement called for the killing or sterilization of people whose heredity made them a public burden.

Churchly people?

Ironically, as the Eugenics Movement came to the United States, the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.

Methodist churches around the country promoted the American Eugenics Society “Fitter Family Contests” wherein the fittest families were invariably fair skinned and well off. Methodist bishops endorsed one of the first books circulated to the US churches promoting eugenics. Unlike the battles over evolution and creationism, both conservative and progressive church leaders endorsed eugenics. The liberal Rev. Harry F. Ward, professor of Christian ethics and a founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said that Christianity and eugenics were compatible because both pursued the “challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.”

Conservative Rev. Clarence True Wilson, the General Secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, and the man chosen to debate Clarence Darrow after William Jennings Bryan’s death, believed that only the white Aryan race was the descendant of the lost tribes of Israel.

So you find yourself defending Eugenics....

And exactly where do I 'defend' eugenics?

 

[Rikurzhen]

Can you name any 'conservatives' who spoke out against eugenics?

Look here:

And yet the Progressives themselves repeatedly denied that this was the case. As Theodore Roosevelt acknowledged in a private letter near the end of his life:

I do not for one moment believe that the Americanism of today should be a mere submission to the American ideals of the period of the Declaration of Independence. . . . Such action would be not only to stand still, but to go back. American democracy, of course, must mean an opportunity for everyone to contribute his own ideas to the working out of the future. But I will go further than you have done. I have actively fought in favor of grafting on our social life, no less than our industrial life, many of the German ideals.[10]
​

The Progressives, at least, understood that their approach to reform was animated by a new conception of government or, more precisely, “the State.” Importantly, this idea, the “German idea of the State,” departs from the American Founders’ understanding of government in a couple of key respects, both of which help explain the Progressives’ enthusiasm for eugenics.[11]

For the Progressives, to begin, the power of government is NOT limited in principle to securing the natural or “inalienable” rights of man, as the Declaration of Independence has it. “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” as the German-trained progressive political scientist and future New Dealer Charles Merriam concludes in a 1903 survey of progressive thinking,

but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle . . . each specific question must be decided on its own merits, and each action of the state justified, if at all, by the relative advantages of the proposed line of conduct.
​

“in general,” as the German-trained progressive economist Richard T. Ely likewise affirms, “there is no limit to the right of the State, the sovereign power, save its ability to do good.”[12] The first step toward bold, experimental reform was to untie the hands of government.

For the Progressives, the government’s obligation in this regard was perfectly compatible with treating different races (whom they believed were at varying stages of development), differently in law and policy.[13] It also trumped not only the ability of individuals to exercise their now “so-called innate or ‘natural rights'” –e.g. the right to live, enjoy one’s physical liberty, acquire and use property, marry, speak, worship God according to the dictates of one’s conscience, etc.–but also an individual’s fundamental right to attain his own highest development where the prospect for development was believed to be relatively small, or his restraint was believed to be advantageous to the development of a greater number.[14]

Perhaps nowhere is the Progressives’ willingness to run roughshod over individual liberty, for the sake of improving America generally, as stark as in their support for eugenics.
​

These debates are still playing out today. Progressives see no limit to the expansion of government. Progressives favor unmooring the Constitution from what the Founding Fathers intended. Conservatives are in favor of Originalist readings of the Constitution. Eugenics was to the Progressives of the era as Climate Change is to the Progressives of this era - it was "sciency" and they lapped it up.

This was an expansion of government power which was alien to conservatives.

The man who I quoted in the OP and later in the thread, wrote "Eugenics and Other Evils" in 1922. A Christian-based opposition to what Progressives were undertaking. Here is the full-text of that work.

Ironically, as the Eugenics Movement came to the United States, the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.

The Mainline denominations which have disproportionately provided the footsoldiers of modern-day Liberalism. It's not a surprise that in an era in which everyone belonged to some Christian church that there was variation seen on the metric of how closely a group subscribed to Scripture. Then when religiosity declined the members of these Churches abandoned their Christianity and migrated over to their new religion, Liberalism. The present-day remnants of these Churches are the ones who have Gay Bishops and such.

From the book "The Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics:

The people who fought against eugenics in the past are drawn from the same set as the people who fight against abortion today, for eugenics and abortion are thematically linked.

 

[Antares]

The Declaration of Independence is the Birth Certificate of the United States.

It does not seek to make policy nor law - rather, it declares, substantively, that a new Nation has been born, and gives some explicit references to the nature of that creation, and the moral and spiritual aegis under which it was fashioned and animated.

One must create a Nation and outline its nature before one can begin work on the more mundane and more demanding but less important mechanisms of policy and law.

Good point. The Declaration of Independence is in essence a 'mission statement'.

And Thomas Jefferson chose the word 'creator'. not God. The OP deliberately misses that important word.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Thomas Jefferson makes the case that all men are endowed with certain rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I wonder which one of those 3 Rikurzhen would deny ANY human being?

When a people believe that they live in accord with Godly commands, then they don't want to anger their God by flouting his rules. When god creates everyone as equal, when God bestows upon each person a right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then people live their life as though this was true.

When Progressives got it in their head that they could create a better society they launched the Eugenics movement and forced sterilization onto people, thus directly depriving the victims of a right to pursue happiness, their liberty and their right to be equal.

Progressives thought they knew better than Godly wisdom. Who fought the Progressives? The Churchly people who saw Eugenics at an attack on God's rules and the Conservatives who saw Eugenics as an attack on the traditional role of government as laid down by the Founders.

Can you name any 'conservatives' who spoke out against eugenics? Maybe the robber barons?

Maybe NOT...

America’s national eugenics program received funding from many of the country’s largest corporate concerns, including from the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, J. H. Kellogg, Proctor and Gamble, Hanes and the Harriman railroad fortune.

Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation in 1909. By 1929 he had placed $300 million worth of the family's controlling interest in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now called ``Exxon'') to the account of the Foundation.

The Foundation's money created the medical specialty known as Psychiatric Genetics. For the new experimental field, the Foundation reorganized medical teaching in Germany, creating and thenceforth continuously directing the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry'' and the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity.'' The Rockefellers' chief executive of these institutions was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, assisted by his proteges Otmar Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann.

In 1932, the British-led ``Eugenics'' movement designated the Rockefellers' Dr. Rudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics Federation. The movement called for the killing or sterilization of people whose heredity made them a public burden.

Churchly people?

Ironically, as the Eugenics Movement came to the United States, the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.

Methodist churches around the country promoted the American Eugenics Society “Fitter Family Contests” wherein the fittest families were invariably fair skinned and well off. Methodist bishops endorsed one of the first books circulated to the US churches promoting eugenics. Unlike the battles over evolution and creationism, both conservative and progressive church leaders endorsed eugenics. The liberal Rev. Harry F. Ward, professor of Christian ethics and a founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said that Christianity and eugenics were compatible because both pursued the “challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.”

Conservative Rev. Clarence True Wilson, the General Secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, and the man chosen to debate Clarence Darrow after William Jennings Bryan’s death, believed that only the white Aryan race was the descendant of the lost tribes of Israel.

So you find yourself defending Eugenics....

And exactly where do I 'defend' eugenics?

Why try to rationalize it by saying "yeah but"?
Just say yeah we fucked up.

 

[NYcarbineer]

God's will and providence necessitate the formation of Western culture and everything else.

OK.

Then let God protect and defend our culture.

I shall do nothing to interfere with the will of God on this matter. I shall do nothing at all.

God's will is absolute. Everything God wants to do is done already.

The created creature reality is the now. Therefore, we have free will. More precisely, we have an appearance of free will.


You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?Romans 9:19-24 (ESV)

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 6:33

The Bible is a storybook written by Men.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Good point. The Declaration of Independence is in essence a 'mission statement'.

And Thomas Jefferson chose the word 'creator'. not God. The OP deliberately misses that important word.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Thomas Jefferson makes the case that all men are endowed with certain rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I wonder which one of those 3 Rikurzhen would deny ANY human being?

When a people believe that they live in accord with Godly commands, then they don't want to anger their God by flouting his rules. When god creates everyone as equal, when God bestows upon each person a right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then people live their life as though this was true.

When Progressives got it in their head that they could create a better society they launched the Eugenics movement and forced sterilization onto people, thus directly depriving the victims of a right to pursue happiness, their liberty and their right to be equal.

Progressives thought they knew better than Godly wisdom. Who fought the Progressives? The Churchly people who saw Eugenics at an attack on God's rules and the Conservatives who saw Eugenics as an attack on the traditional role of government as laid down by the Founders.

Can you name any 'conservatives' who spoke out against eugenics? Maybe the robber barons?

Maybe NOT...

America’s national eugenics program received funding from many of the country’s largest corporate concerns, including from the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, J. H. Kellogg, Proctor and Gamble, Hanes and the Harriman railroad fortune.

Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation in 1909. By 1929 he had placed $300 million worth of the family's controlling interest in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now called ``Exxon'') to the account of the Foundation.

The Foundation's money created the medical specialty known as Psychiatric Genetics. For the new experimental field, the Foundation reorganized medical teaching in Germany, creating and thenceforth continuously directing the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry'' and the ``Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity.'' The Rockefellers' chief executive of these institutions was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, assisted by his proteges Otmar Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann.

In 1932, the British-led ``Eugenics'' movement designated the Rockefellers' Dr. Rudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics Federation. The movement called for the killing or sterilization of people whose heredity made them a public burden.

Churchly people?

Ironically, as the Eugenics Movement came to the United States, the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.

Methodist churches around the country promoted the American Eugenics Society “Fitter Family Contests” wherein the fittest families were invariably fair skinned and well off. Methodist bishops endorsed one of the first books circulated to the US churches promoting eugenics. Unlike the battles over evolution and creationism, both conservative and progressive church leaders endorsed eugenics. The liberal Rev. Harry F. Ward, professor of Christian ethics and a founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said that Christianity and eugenics were compatible because both pursued the “challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.”

Conservative Rev. Clarence True Wilson, the General Secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, and the man chosen to debate Clarence Darrow after William Jennings Bryan’s death, believed that only the white Aryan race was the descendant of the lost tribes of Israel.

So you find yourself defending Eugenics....

And exactly where do I 'defend' eugenics?

Why try to rationalize it by saying "yeah but"?
Just say yeah we fucked up.

But they don't believe that they fucked up. Look at their defense of expanding the role of government away from the conceptualization laid down by the FF. Everything here is part and parcel of a whole. Look at the mindset at play today - the government can force you to buy a product, health insurance. There are no limits on what government can do. Abortion ties in as well. Creating babies via sperm/egg donation and violating their human rights to be raised by their own parents. There are no limiting principles on what progressives believe they can do.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Can you name any 'conservatives' who spoke out against eugenics?

Look here:

And yet the Progressives themselves repeatedly denied that this was the case. As Theodore Roosevelt acknowledged in a private letter near the end of his life:

I do not for one moment believe that the Americanism of today should be a mere submission to the American ideals of the period of the Declaration of Independence. . . . Such action would be not only to stand still, but to go back. American democracy, of course, must mean an opportunity for everyone to contribute his own ideas to the working out of the future. But I will go further than you have done. I have actively fought in favor of grafting on our social life, no less than our industrial life, many of the German ideals.[10]
​

The Progressives, at least, understood that their approach to reform was animated by a new conception of government or, more precisely, “the State.” Importantly, this idea, the “German idea of the State,” departs from the American Founders’ understanding of government in a couple of key respects, both of which help explain the Progressives’ enthusiasm for eugenics.[11]

For the Progressives, to begin, the power of government is NOT limited in principle to securing the natural or “inalienable” rights of man, as the Declaration of Independence has it. “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” as the German-trained progressive political scientist and future New Dealer Charles Merriam concludes in a 1903 survey of progressive thinking,

but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle . . . each specific question must be decided on its own merits, and each action of the state justified, if at all, by the relative advantages of the proposed line of conduct.
​

“in general,” as the German-trained progressive economist Richard T. Ely likewise affirms, “there is no limit to the right of the State, the sovereign power, save its ability to do good.”[12] The first step toward bold, experimental reform was to untie the hands of government.

For the Progressives, the government’s obligation in this regard was perfectly compatible with treating different races (whom they believed were at varying stages of development), differently in law and policy.[13] It also trumped not only the ability of individuals to exercise their now “so-called innate or ‘natural rights'” –e.g. the right to live, enjoy one’s physical liberty, acquire and use property, marry, speak, worship God according to the dictates of one’s conscience, etc.–but also an individual’s fundamental right to attain his own highest development where the prospect for development was believed to be relatively small, or his restraint was believed to be advantageous to the development of a greater number.[14]

Perhaps nowhere is the Progressives’ willingness to run roughshod over individual liberty, for the sake of improving America generally, as stark as in their support for eugenics.​

These debates are still playing out today. Progressives see no limit to the expansion of government. Progressives favor unmooring the Constitution from what the Founding Fathers intended. Conservatives are in favor of Originalist readings of the Constitution. Eugenics was to the Progressives of the era as Climate Change is to the Progressives of this era - it was "sciency" and they lapped it up.

This was an expansion of government power which was alien to conservatives.

The man who I quoted in the OP and later in the thread, wrote "Eugenics and Other Evils" in 1922. A Christian-based opposition to what Progressives were undertaking. Here is the full-text of that work.

Ironically, as the Eugenics Movement came to the United States, the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.

The Mainline denominations which have disproportionately provided the footsoldiers of modern-day Liberalism. It's not a surprise that in an era in which everyone belonged to some Christian church that there was variation seen on the metric of how closely a group subscribed to Scripture. Then when religiosity declined the members of these Churches abandoned their Christianity and migrated over to their new religion, Liberalism. The present-day remnants of these Churches are the ones who have Gay Bishops and such.

From the book "The Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics:

The people who fought against eugenics in the past are drawn from the same set as the people who fight against abortion today, for eugenics and abortion are thematically linked.

Eugenics in the early 20th century was closely intertwined with the anti-immigration movement.

 

[Rikurzhen]

God's will and providence necessitate the formation of Western culture and everything else.

OK.

Then let God protect and defend our culture.

I shall do nothing to interfere with the will of God on this matter. I shall do nothing at all.

God's will is absolute. Everything God wants to do is done already.

The created creature reality is the now. Therefore, we have free will. More precisely, we have an appearance of free will.


You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?Romans 9:19-24 (ESV)

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 6:33

The Bible is a storybook written by Men.

It doesn't matter whether God exists or not, whether those are his words or not.