Flags ...

[paperburn1]

Statements should be regarded as a whole, while tearing any text apart can be used to provide any counterpoint a far better discussion can be had by using the whole context and not just parts.
Outlooks and views are in constant flux in regards to peoples emotions and state of need.
As an example of changing viewpoint before WW 1 we were as a nation pro Germany with a significant portion of or population having Germanic descent. The job of the government was to change our feeling for Germany before we entered the war. Enter The Committee on Public Information, also known as the CPI or the Creel Committee, was an independent agency of the government of the United States created to influence U.S. public opinion regarding American participation in World War I. Over just 28 months, from April 14, 1917, to June 30, 1919, it used every medium available to create enthusiasm for the war effort and enlist public support against foreign attempts to undercut America's war aims. It primarily used propaganda techniques to accomplish these goals.
The same happened in WW 2 In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI). This mid-level agency joined a host of other wartime agencies, including the War and State Departments, in the dissemination of war information and propaganda.Officials at OWI used numerous tools to communicate to the American public. These included Hollywood movie studios, radio stations and printing presses. The end goal was the same, to turn a former allies into a enemy of the state

The same story is being played out today with each side trying to promote themselves and hide the real truth of the situation from the common man.

[Diogenes]

As if on cue, this shows up today.

The liberal West has been driving on the fumes of Christianity for about a century now and the car won’t go much further.

I'm curious why you consider liberal and libertarian to be the same thing?

On social issues, they mostly are. Libertarians want the sound monetary system created by Western Civilization, but they don't want the moral constraints which such a system required to be functional.



Also the word "Liberal" has become in a sort of state of quantum juxtaposition. Depending on context, and depending on the time period to which you are referring, it means the opposite of what it currently means. It effectively has two meanings, and it can get confusing telling which version of the word "Liberal" you are referring to.

In the context of the statement above, they are using the word "Liberal" in the classical sense, not in it's modern American sense.

[Diogenes]

Diogenes, you keep asking "Such as ...", but brushed off the answers because they were from the Old Testament. You are using the filter of which I spoke, eliminating the Judaeo from your Judaeo-Christian morality.

Which is fine. I'd hope you do not buy into the Genesis creation myth.

Judaism created the initial foundation, but it was all that later evolved "Christian" stuff that flipped Rome, and thereafter the rest of Europe. Christianity is actually a diabolically clever system of meme conquest. It's subtle and quietly pervasive.

You seem to confuse libertarian with liberal. You also seem to think libertarian means anarchist. Or maybe antichrist. Or both.

Libertarian overlaps with Liberal on social issues. They overlap with Conservative on Fiscal issues. They make the mistake of believing that societies can exist without moral standards, but this is an illusion created by the short life span they have to use as a reference for their ideas. If they would look at the world in terms of generations and centuries, they would have a better grasp of what happens when you add or subtract certain aspects of a society.


I'm annoyed at Libertarians because they can't seem to conceive of the world from any perspective but their own short life. They don't see the bigger picture of which they and their experiences are just a tiny little speck.

I don't usually push my particular take on Christian morality, but I think it is well summarized in Matthew 22:37-40, a discussion between Jesus and a another Jew.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

So that's Christianity in a nutshell. Its all about love. If it is not about love, it is a poor substitute for the real thing. And with you, sir, I'm just not feelin' the love.

This "appeal to love" is the insidious bit of how it spreads, and the implied equality in this and other statements is what makes it robust and lingering. From just that bit you can see that it forbids slavery, and creates an entire foundation of ethical behavior.


But European Christianity has always been a body of contradiction. For a religion that instructs people to love one's neighbor, it has been particularly violent and destructive for fellow neighbors. I think it is safe to say that people who have claimed the religion for a couple of thousand years, did not always believe or adhere to many of it's tenants.


The Europeans have always been bloody and violent. Christianity tamed them down a bit, but they all still have that same bloody and violent instinct that is barely kept in check by being taught to love one another. We Americans come from that same mindset, and it is not uncommon at all for many American Christians to be armed to the teeth and ready to do violence at the drop of a hat.

Yes, it's a contradiction, but a necessary one. Christianity as applied by it's tenants is non-functional. It could not defend itself. It needs that dichotomy of love and a willingness to do violence to achieve what it has achieved.

In other words, there is theory, and then there is practice. In practice, Christianity needs weapons and violence. It needs very non-Christian components to remain viable.

[Diogenes]

Was Jefferson a Troublemaker? Oh, yes, and with a capital T. And what the heck is wrong with that? It was pretty much a hallmark of those radicals and revolutionaries who got us started.

You got a problem with that?

I'm not sure. The question in my mind is whether we could have gotten to where we needed to go without the trouble that Thomas Jefferson inadvertently caused.

I'm kinda thinking we could have, but i'm not certain about this.


If we could not have done it without Jefferson's trouble making, then I guess it's was so much for the better, but one wonders.

[Diogenes]

...
I'm curious why you consider liberal and libertarian to be the same thing?

The term "liberal" in a political context has been greatly abused. A century ago it denoted favor of liberty and limited government. Since then it has been hijacked by leftists who favor quite the opposite. The only liberty favored by the leftists who hijacked "liberal" may be better describes as license, or libertine, dismissal of social norms that allow a nation to survive and prosper.

Exactly. It nowadays has two very different meanings, and one can only glean which meaning to which someone is referring by prying it out from the context.

[Diogenes]

Even nowadays, if you are in the wrong parts of the world, the brutality of man is still manifesting itself in all sorts of cruel ways.

You have NO idea who you said this to. This is typical of your arguments. Presuming so much. It's so not even close to my POV that like so many other times reading your posts I reread them a second time to make sure I read them right.

I've read what you have written here several times, and I am just not grasping whatever point you are attempting to convey.

Yes the world is dirty and even williatw in the other thread, re: curing aging, sounds way too simple and optimistic to me.

Me too.

That doesn't mean there is nothing between his extreme and yours, or that the answer must be as simple as either of those extremes.

Both being correct simultaneously is also an option. Humanity is a massively parallel operation.

The world didn't get to this peaceful lull or to its current state of science & tech, etc, by brownian motion.

I can point you to sources that argue Christianity is what created both the peaceful lull, and the science and tech. I suspect we are about to find out in the next decade or so whether this theory is correct.

So that's Christianity in a nutshell. Its all about love. If it is not about love, it is a poor substitute for the real thing. And with you, sir, I'm just not feelin' the love.

If I'm allowed to admit my own private POV about a religion I'm neither believer nor disbeliever of, that is exactly it. GIT and other people who are so far gone they forget that, all sound that way. No love.

I think much of our current problems stem from equating love with indulgence. As Franklin said of the poor:

“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”

Dostoevsky had this stuff figured out 150 years ago.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

All roads lead to Rome.
IE
If there is love, there will be God; even if unwittingly.

The concept of "God" serves the same purpose for Humanity that an artificial guide star serves for astronomy. It doesn't have to be real to have real consequences.

[Diogenes]

Statements should be regarded as a whole, while tearing any text apart can be used to provide any counterpoint a far better discussion can be had by using the whole context and not just parts.
Outlooks and views are in constant flux in regards to peoples emotions and state of need.
As an example of changing viewpoint before WW 1 we were as a nation pro Germany with a significant portion of or population having Germanic descent. The job of the government was to change our feeling for Germany before we entered the war. Enter The Committee on Public Information, also known as the CPI or the Creel Committee, was an independent agency of the government of the United States created to influence U.S. public opinion regarding American participation in World War I. Over just 28 months, from April 14, 1917, to June 30, 1919, it used every medium available to create enthusiasm for the war effort and enlist public support against foreign attempts to undercut America's war aims. It primarily used propaganda techniques to accomplish these goals.
The same happened in WW 2 In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI). This mid-level agency joined a host of other wartime agencies, including the War and State Departments, in the dissemination of war information and propaganda.Officials at OWI used numerous tools to communicate to the American public. These included Hollywood movie studios, radio stations and printing presses. The end goal was the same, to turn a former allies into a enemy of the state

The same story is being played out today with each side trying to promote themselves and hide the real truth of the situation from the common man.

I have come to believe that older versions of these same tactics were employed in the Civil War. I have been discussing the issue for several years on other websites, and I have learned a great deal about the conflict of which I have been unaware for most of my life. That conflict was not nearly so cut and dried as I had always been led to believe.

[hanelyp]

The Europeans have always been bloody and violent. Christianity tamed them down a bit, ...

Humanity has always been bloody and violent.

We Americans come from that same mindset, and it is not uncommon at all for many American Christians to be armed to the teeth and ready to do violence at the drop of a hat.

Jesus said "so far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone." We live in a fallen world. Sometimes it isn't up to us whether we live at peace. Sometimes "love your neighbor" means taking up literal arms against evil. Given how weakness is provocative to the uncivilized, being prepared to fend off aggressors and protect the innocent helps keep the peace.

[KitemanSA]

If there is no God, everything is permitted.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

If you believe in God, everything is permitted... to the priest.
Me.

[hanelyp]

You invite problems if the priest is an unquestioned authority or isn't answerable to the flock. You can get a world of difference between priest as guide to find God vs. priest as intermediary.

Not all religions are equal.

[Tom Ligon]

Curiously enough, Muslims say they do not believe in an intermediary between the sinner and God. On judgement day, you face God and he will not accept any excuses about your mullah telling you something. You have the whole truth to judge from yourself. And while they give Jesus an honored status (read "The Imrans"), the Quran clearly says he is not the Son of God, and the reason often cited is intercessors are not part of the faith.

Yet it is quite clear from recent history that intercessors are working overtime and telling people to do things which they're warned against.

Not only does it depend on the religion, but also the way humans subvert it. In that sense, the only difference between Islam and Christianity is a few hundred years.

Getting back to the original subject of flags, once upon a time, the Pope had an army, and wanted his son to inherit the Papacy. Viva la Vida ... I know there are a lot of theories about Cold Play's lyrics, but if you listen to them in the context of the Papacy, it all falls into place.

Part of a religion growing up is for people to understand that they must not trust a cleric who is spouting something clearly against any sense of right.

[Diogenes]

If there is no God, everything is permitted.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

If you believe in God, everything is permitted... to the priest.
Me.

You present your argument as if religion is one-sidedly bad.

This bad aspect of religion is more than offset by the good effects produced by it.

Just as abuses in government do not support the rejection of governance, so too do abuses in religion not reasonably support the rejection of religion.

[Tom Ligon]

You present your argument as if religion is one-sidedly bad.

This bad aspect of religion is more than offset by the good effects produced by it.

Just as abuses in government do not support the rejection of governance, so too do abuses in religion not reasonably support the rejection of religion.

Herein lies the great beauty of the First Amendment. With no state religion, and with the various religions operating in competition and with only their persuasive ability, we each get to judge for ourselves if their arguments for moral authority hold water.

There was some mention of Virginia starting out with the Anglican sect as the state religion back in colonial times. Yes, it did ... as a colony of England, under authority of the King, we had the King's religion. Keep in mind, that religion still smelled of fresh paint at the time, having been invented by Henry VIII just a couple of generations earlier, producing a civil war from which the smoke was just settling. And it would flare up in England again in the mid-17th century as the sect who had settled Massachusetts temporarily gained power in England. There's a long story to this, but I come from a line of Virginians dating back to 1640, and was raised in the Episcopal Chruch, US Anglican but only distantly affiliated with the Church of England. It does consider itself to be Catholic down in the fine print, just not Roman Catholic. But even in my own lifetime, I've watched it liberalize, now with women as priests, an openly gay bishop, and willing to conduct gay marriages.

During which time I've also watched the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIL, and other examples of religions that assume absolute authority, with the the state answering to religious authority, do the exact opposite, with chilling results.

I would propose that the bad aspect of religion is not invariably offset by the good effects produced by it. I'd also point out that excessive flexibility in accepting some modern social trends may undermine age-old social values. I will note that there are socially conservative Episcopalians who are not exactly comfortable with recent trends in their churches.

For me, maybe it is not so bad that we can evolve our beliefs. Given the choice between allowing gays to marry and throwing them from rooftops, picking sides is pretty easy. Even the present Pope is showing flexibility ... I kinda like the guy.

[KitemanSA]

Ahhh yesss, the Pepsi-Cola Church.

Anagrammatically, the Episcopal...

[Tom Ligon]

Ahhh yesss, the Pepsi-Cola Church.

Anagrammatically, the Episcopal...

I always heard that members were known as E-whiskeypalians.