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So Religion's for Fools, eh? Fools and Liberals! [Separation of Church and State Thread]
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From the book reviews, I have a shitload of problems with his shit:
1. Assumes a vision there is little evidence most of the founders believed in it. He relies on the idea that they were mostly unified in their vision.
2. Doesn't really show causation. This is especially a problem when there are plenty of other possible problems such as the decline of decent paying working class jobs meaning they are going to be poorer even if they work as hard.
3. Without knowing causation, there is no real solution possible.
4. As a libertarian, the idea of any government involvement in the solution is anathema so the result is a wishy washy solution that relies on the rich as a deus ex machina that we have no reason to believe will happen.
5. Assumes pretty much everything is getting worse. For example, that the working class is less law abiding despite crime rates dropping.
6. This limits most of the value to a fairly useless description of shit we know happened and correlation we know about.
Because people don't vote or express themselves openly, and are frequently quashed/silenced/ignored when they do so, allowing "demographic leaders" to do whatever the fuck they want.
The Catholic Church is basically like the Democratic Party in this regard.
This always gets on my nerves. Those aren't values that make you succeed. They are being successful. Its like saying that if you want to have money you should have parents that have money.
Edit: Upon sober reflection I have decided to "to have money you should go on vacations" better states my point.
Yes, and both as a child and a father I've lived in areas on the forefront of this. I'm still pretty sure that people want ID in schools because they don't want the government doing what they perceive as teaching their children that their religion is false. I don't think most of them actually want to use schools to spread religion, though again, I'm sure that is true for many.
To be clear, I'm not in here arguing that being religious, prioritizing education, or brushing your teeth before bed make you socioeconomically successful; Murray basically does that in his book, and feels that those are values that ought to be glorified and promulgated, and that's his business.
What I do see as being a valuable contribution specifically to the discourse on large populations and religion is that, as it turns out, being better educated and making more money don't necessarily make you less religious, which was the impression that I had before hearing that piece on NPR on Tuesday. The "100 pages of data" was in reference to that, since eb was basically dismissing the entire book (including the aforementioned tidbit that I found relevant to this thread) based on an ad hominem against Richard Murray. If he has data that show that upper-middle-class white people -- and he says these trends ring true across all ethnic groups -- are just as or more religious than their lower-middle- and working-class counterparts, then I think that's an interesting finding.
EDIT: Actually, prioritizing education probably would make you more successful... but I feel it's still pretty clear what I meant by listing his list of White People Virtues.
One person's "teaching my children that my religion is false" is a another person's "teaching your children facts."
Besides the fact that the school having everyone pray is spreading religion, it helps ostracize anyone who doesn't go along with it. You can't pretend that those who don't pray, who would be in the minority, wouldn't be noticed when it would get pointed out every day when they don't participate. That is not a good thing.
They're right in that the administration needs to rebut every accusation of infringing upon religious expression with the fact that the government absolutely has the right to regulate labor law.
I just.
I don't....
yeah...
gonna walk away now and try to not explode over the nice clean internets.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
They think masturbation is a sin too.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
I also hope they get judges who can word their responses in subtle ways that equate to:
1. Remember the whole "give on to Caesar what is Caesar's" quote, yeah that also means if you take public money you have to follow the rules and if that's a problem don't be a greedy bitch by taking the money and then turning around to bitch about how you're rights are being violated.
2. Being the boss doesn't allow you to lord your beliefs over your employees and if you don't like that don't run a business bitch.
3. Also you fuckers have quite the nerve to cite morality when you were the bitches shuffling around child predators instead of outright removing them because you felt it was more important to maintain you public image while also lying through your fucking teeth.
Obviously, they would say in terms that would using profanity but I really want to see them get their asses handed to them and see the courts make this mostly into a non-issue before the general election. Obviously the right will cling to this as red meat but once the courts tell them they are fucking wrong, it loses much of it's clout amongst the non-fundamentalists that might be willing to go along with politicians that cling to such values as political talking points.
But science and facts never stopped the Catholic church from being total assholes.
That is a fantastic graphic.
Pretty clever, i guess, using the insurance companies as a buffer... there must be other complications though.
That's going to be a tough sell.
Planned Parent hood supports it.
...true.
So what are the potential downsides to this plan? I.e. what are the churches going to be bitching about?
Is it possible that it was a political move? Now the GOP looks like it was throwing a shitfit over nothing.
Possibly nothing. Or they might continue. It's hard to tell - they're morally obligated to complain about contrabortigaymarristemcells but they've never been obligated to do anything about it.
I assume, they were not ok with any increased cost in the plan, being attributed to the coverage.
And if contraceptives did actually lower costs or not increase them in insurance plans, why didn't all plans already offer that as a means of lowering their costs?
It doesn't. I guess it makes it look like the Catholic bishops overcame the big scary Obama White House and caused them to change things. But policy wise it's fine.
Also, it means birth control is now "controversial" which is only good news politically (in the sense that women will fuck your shit up if you go after birth control, but not so much with abortion). Not in the sense that it could possibly restrict access, but I don't see that happening in this country for parenthetical reason above.
Between the Komen uproar and this, it's been a fantastic week for Democrats. I lot of people on the left have been saying for years that the anti-abortion crowd also wants to target contraception, but no one believed them. Now, it's increasingly obvious to the general public that the conservatives do want to come for their birth control pills.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/boehners-office-not-satisfied-with-so-called-compromise I am fucking tired of people acting like this is a constitutional issue.
and it's about time, start hitting these fuckers where it hurts and show them that they do not represent America
If obama keeps hitting them on gay and women's rights he will win
Surprise of all surprises, turns out Americans take their equality stuff pretty god-damn seriously. Someone forward the GOP with that message, on November 7th.
I was reading an Economist article today (just cause I like getting a perspective of a world I will likely never be a part of) about the growing acceptance of out-of-the-closet homosexuals (and transsexuals) in the mega corporate world. Basically their take was companies who aren't making efforts to show their acceptance of such employees risk not only losing the talent pool of homosexuals, but also heterosexuals who are not down with working for someone that is refusing to get with the times. We're beginning to see the day when intolerance towards sexual preference/identity will be relegated to the crazy hick uncle fodder of conservatism.
Full Text: http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/10/opinion/glass-contraception/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
I think Frank Bruni recently wrote an op-ed in the NYT about that, though more about customers and corporate image than employees, referencing Starbucks, Amazon, and Microsoft supporting the recent gay marriage bill in Washington state.