Putting politics aside, as this is a topic that spans many disciplines. In this thread:
What are the “Birther’s” arguments when confronted with the principle of “jus sanguinis”?
md2000 posts:
Again I don’t care to debate the politics, but the mindset:
There were questions that were not immediately answered (in this case about Obama’s birth status), this formed doubts. I feel that these doubts are legitimate due to not being answered when they were raised.
After some times documents were presented to the public to clarify one position. But the question is if the documents were available why wait, this does raise suspicion and further questions.
A person says they are presented the proof to the public, when a member of the public wants to actually examine the documents that are made available they are called closed minded. Closed minded when they want to look at the evidence for themselves and make up their own mind, instead of just blindly accepting other people’s opinions.
To me it sounds quite the opposite, the people blindly accepting that the documents are real are the ones who are closed minded and the ones inquiring in a way to challenge their own opinion are the ones open minded.
You are a perfect example of the the quote you cited: "The correlation of logic, law, and reality are irrelevant when one’s mind is made up. "
Logic: If you have demanded proof of every candidate’s citizenship since you were old enough to vote, you are being logically consistent. If the first time you demand proof is, by an amazing coincidence, the first time a major party nominates a black man, you are not.
Law: Obama’s official birth certificate was released to the public before the 2008 election. It is the document required for any legal use of a birth certificate, e.g. applying for a passport. The insistence on a “long form” (the one he released a couple months ago) was simply cynical manipulation of ignorant people.
Reality: George Bush and Dick Cheney were not shy about using the national security apparatus for political ends. And once Obama was nominated, the Bush Administration was required to provide him with millions of dollars worth of Secret Service protection before the election. Can anyone believe that they would not have verified that Obama met the requirements for President before providing that protection? Or, if they wanted to be really evil, would not have revealed that he was ineligible one week before the election?
I think if you want to really discuss this topic, kanicbird, you’re going to have to broaden it beyond the birth certificate thing. Almost every single thing you wrote about the birth certificate and the controversy is totally wrong.
Doubts are not rendered legitimate by the way in which they are answered. They are legitimate based on the reasoning behind the doubt. In any event, these doubts were answered by providing a copy of legally binding state certified documentation of his birth status. That should have been the end of it, you raise a doubt about birth status, he provides documentation, the state confirms that the documentation is real, newspapers back up the documentation with birth announcements, we’re all good.
Some folks decided that legally binding state certified documentation wasn’t “good enough”, so we had this idiotic goat rodeo, suggesting that he has something to hide because he’s not jumping to attention and providing additional documentation to people who refuse to acknowledge the validity of a state certified document.
So, we now ask what is the validity of their doubt? We would need the government of Hawaii to be complicit in forging birth documentation. We would have Obama’s parents circling the globe for no apparent purpose other than to ensure Barack’s birth in Kenya, then immediately denying his Kenyan birth, to the point of getting his birth announcement listed in Hawaiian newspapers. Oh, and none of their friends from the time remember them going on a trip to Kenya while Ann was 8+ months pregnant, it was totally a secret, shhhhh!
Do you know what a real long form Hawaiian birth certificate from 1961 looks like? I don’t, and I don’t have any way of knowing if a document is real or forged, so I’m going to have to trust someone who actually does know these things, you know like the Director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, who certified that his documents were in order back in 2008.
I would note that every single religious person on Earth is accepting someone else’s word for what God wants and what you need to do to meet those wants.
Funny enough, I’m betting a lot of birthers want more evidence for Obama’s pedigree than they do for Jewish carpenters sometimes self-conceiving and later rising from the dead.
Taking it out of Obama’s hands as suggested by Marley23
Part of the foundation of the scientific method is repeatability, that any person should be able to preform the experiment in the constraints listed and get a repeatable answer. Most of the time we take for granted that a scientific conclusion is sound without doing the experiment ourselves to confirm it.
This may be true of religious but not true of spiritual people. Spiritual people do inquire for themselves with divine or at least spiritual help. They generally don’t take the word of someone else blindly but will take spiritual inspired interpretations of writings of old as they are lead to examine them and come to their own conclusion.
People who are reasonably thoughtful do not assume conclusions are sound until they are peer reviewed, and chewed over by the scientific community. That is, we rely on people who actually know how to repeat the experiment, and know how to examine scientific conclusions to look at the claim and make a judgment. Similar to what I said about a birth certificate, do you know how to analyze environmental data to determine the impact of greenhouse gases on climate? Would you be able to tell if that data was tampered with, or the conclusion incorrect? If you don’t, and I assume you’re like the 99.99% of people who don’t, then you have to rely on someone to do it for you and trust that they are honestly reviewing the conclusion.
People who are not thoughtful believe an idea because it sounds right to them, they use their own personal judgment on a topic they know very little about, and often go hilariously wrong. For example, homeopathy. Even if you go step by step explaining how there are 0 atoms from the original mixture in their final product, they’ll still believe that the product can cure a malady.
Nobody can be absolutely sure about anything. Yet we can have enough faith in the reliability of our own observations and those of others to stumble through life somehow. Big lies will prevail, and do damage. But big truths are more abundant, they just don’t create much controversy with anyone but the big liars.
Actually I have been schooled and have a accredited degree to do exactly that, though I really didn’t chose to pursue that line. What I did discover is in that particular issue: 1 is way too large for any single person to accomplish themselves or verify themselves, and very very sadly 2 the issue is way too political and economic to trust conclusions to any degree of certainty.
Going into homeopathy, the belief basically stems from all healing is from love (and Love is God & God heals), not from the ‘active ingredient’. This healing by Love has been the basis of early medicine for man and still practiced today in mom’s chicken soup. My own personal experience and much to my amazement was with a sore throat. I prayed and was guided to pick up a homeopathic remedy in a supermarket - I didn’t even know that supermarkets had them. I read the ingredients, mostly salt water with perhaps 0% chance of a active ingredient molecule in it. I felt that my prayers answer may be wrong so I put it back but was lead back to it. So I ended up buying it, taking it and 30 minutes later the sour throat was gone totally.
The problem with medical practice of double blind studies is that love, which is the real healer, is not accounted for and like Jesus said the blind leading the blind both will fall into the pit.
And that’s one reason people take the word of others. We don’t have the time or expertise to verify a great many things, and it’s easy to be misled by your senses or by failures in logic like “I prayed, tried homeopathy and my sore throat went away, therefore prayer and homeopathy work.”
You’re assuming the doubts were based on rational evidence - that once the doubters saw a certain document, the doubts would end.
If that was the case - if the doubts would have ceased once Document A was produced - then producing Document A as quickly as possible would have been the best course.
But the reality is the doubt here is self-sustaining. It feeds on belief not evidence. So no amount of evidence will end it because people will keep believing. Showing people Document A just made them invent a new objection to Document A. Rational evidence will never convince people who reject rational evidence.
So what purpose did the delayed presentation of the birth certificate prove? It demonstrated that the birthers were not looking for rational evidence. The birthers have been saying for two years that all they want to see is the birth certificate and they’ll concede the argument. So it played out for all that time and their position was set.
And then the Obama administration released the birth certificate. It gave the birthers what they had said was all they wanted. And the birthers did not give up - they simply raised a new set of objections. So the point was to show that the birthers had been lying.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that if your malady were a burst appendix, rather than a sore throat, you would opt for a hospital full of doctors trained in double blind studies, rather than love therapy.
I agree there are too many things out there for us to know all, but my point was discrediting people for asking for evidence so they can find out for themselves.
If you read my entire post I think you would see that the claim is that God, who is Love, does the healing, in this case for me through homeopathy therefore love works and sometimes He (or She if you prefer) sometimes will use homeopathy.
**brock **I have seen too many things to make such a statement. Yes if I was in such pain I would be heading that way, but that isn’t always the case with things of God/Love. Such things can be halted and pain stopped and the person guided to where they should be, with that person just knowing where they need to go.
Have you even heard that scripture quote applied to how I did (to double blind studies)? I’m pretty sure I have not, yet somehow I believe that is what it means. Is taking that His word for it? I’m sort of confident that they didn’t have such studies 2000 years ago, so how could Jesus be talking about them?
I agree that’s usually not the right way to handle inquiries. But it’s also true that some questions are stupid.
I did read the entire post. It sounds like an example of a person being misled by his senses and his impressions.
If you believe that, there’s really no point in arguing with you about evidence and examining things - it indicates you’re not much of a believer in evidence and proof.
For something like this I may want to see it for myself not for evidence as much but for any ‘spiritual’ clue or insight that may come my way. What I focus on, if anything catches my eye. I want a chance to allow God to let me see though His eyes. For me this works much better then other methods.