I have no idea. You’ll have to ask Zoe, she made up that claim.
We don’t exactly wear signs at the malls on Sunday afternoon. 
I’m not sure what you mean by “dedicated” Christian anyway. If you mean one that never messes up, there aren’t any. If you equate “dedicated” with strict, I disagree with you. In some other ways, I fit.
Sorry, Cisco. I did not mean to suggest at all that you were saying this. I was thinking of things that PRR has posted.
I agree with you that none of the externals make up for one violent death. I am a pacifist. Horrible things have been done by misguided Christians in the name of Christianity. Being a Christian doesn’t innoculate me from being a human being. I am of the same species that is slaughtering people right now in Darfur. There is not a whit of difference in the lot of us.
Ted Haggard headed a 30,000,000 member organization. It was not a church and that is not the same thing. Please tell me exactly what decisions he influenced with George Bush. Ted is gone now and Bush will be. And some day gays will no longer be treated like third rate citizens.
I’m sorry about your experiences in public schools. If you don’t complain and see it through, the problems cannot be addressed. I will bet that the Bible history class was not a requirement. Right?
The important thing is that what your teachers were doing is illegal. Make enough racket and it will stop.
But you didn’t have hell fire and damnation sermons to sit through or daily Bible readings over the intercom or teachers doing a laying on of hands for healing. These were all things that I have experienced during my career as a teacher. They have stopped.
And, by the way, teachers can mention “the Bible” in their classrooms. Why would anyone start a lecture like that?
Okay. In which public schools has “Intelligent Design” cleared the hurdles? I know that Kansas was trying awfully hard. I thought that had been shot down. You also have to have a little faith in science teachers. Most will refuse to teach it. Betcha.
I don’t know what they call themselves, but I would certainly describe any church that ascribed to the Genesis version of creation as a fundamentalist church. That is one characteristic: They take the Bible to be the literal word of God and believe in the literal truth of the stories therein.
You ask what else can cause people to believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. What makes you think that people are born knowing the truth of its age? People are just ignorant. I once had a student who asked me this: “If I sign up for a swimming class, will I have to get in the water?” You can’t blame all ignorance on Genesis.
Pax
Of course you’re right, literally, but it seems like you’re saying “You can’t blame any ignorance on Genesis.” I think this relates to what xenophon41 said upthread:
Again, that’s technically true but it’s kind of beside the point. It’s like saying that gangleaders are not the only murderers in Los Angeles and throwing them in jail will not stop all murders therefore there is no point in jailing gangleaders.
Maybe, but aren’t the terrorist fighting us on religious principals? And don’t they believe in “a god”? I do think this is a war is against religion - ours. There is nothing in Jayjay’s question that is specific to American Christians, only to those that believe in a God.
I also believe that organized religion based on a belief in God has been very hurtful to mankind.
And, by the way, I don’t don’t think anything the current US President says of the reasons we are at war should be taken at face value.
Steven
I think it’s more as if I were saying that while jailing gangleaders might do some incidental good, it’s not gonna stop illegal drug sales in LA, and it won’t get rid of gangs either. You might break the Crips and Bloods (or whatever - I’m not up on LA street gangs), but their close cousins’ll be glad to fill the vacuum, and they’ll get plenty of recruits because you haven’t dealt with the things that drive youth into the gangs.
Do you want to get rid of religious based armed conflict specifically or armed conflict in general? People are willing to die, and especially willing to kill, for all sorts of things. But they’re also willing to sacrifice blood and sweat for the general good of all. Religious belief accounts for many members of both sets. Get rid of the first and you also lose much of the second.
<snip>
Both of these statements are from the same post. You believe that abolishing religion would be a virtue and yet you say that you don’t particularly want religion abolished – you just think that things are moving in that direction. Yet when you don’t think that things are moving in that direction, that makes for dark days for you.
Your viewpoint is muddled.
I look again to your OP:
Why have you changed your mind so quickly and decided that a random person who “chooses” to believe in God is a weirdo? What happened to your pro-choice stance?
Helpful hint of the day: You don’t have to make your email address available in your profile.
Please, by the way, don’t take that as an argument in favor of organized religion. It’s intended only as one consideration of the proposition that eliminating religion would automatically be a net positive for humanity.
Does anyone give a shit what you have to say? I certainly don’t. You’re just a complete whackjob who has devoted her existence to stalkng me, pointing out logical fallacies and proofreading mistakes and playing GOTCHA games, all of which turn out to be mistaken themselves (the logical fallacies, every single one) or trivial (the fact that I proofread less carefully than I do for my scholarly journal articles but more carefully than Dopers appalls no one but you–"Hey, World! Becase PRR has left an extra “a’ in a word proves beyond all doubt that he’s lying about his credentials! Ban him now! Trolling emergency!” :rolleyes:
The fallacy pointed out above is just simplemindedness of your part, utterly unsurprising. The first statement is a relative one: it’s not that I don’t wish for the abolition of religion, it’s that I dont wish for it as much as I hope that we’re moving in that direction. People can see as virtuous all sorts of things that are not at the very tip-top of their wish-lists, but stalkers can always invent some logical fallacies by misreading people’s clear content. Get a life.
As to your other (even more idiotic) point, I think people must have the choice to decide how they feel about God. Suppressing thought on religion or even discouraging it has the effect of making religion seem forbidden and desirable, when it is neither. It’s just a species of ignorance, and the more people discuss it openly and freely, without suppression or bias, the more easily they will abandon it on their own. This isnt a very dificult or subtle point, and I only explain it here in the hope that if I point out your inane nitpicking embarrassments often enough, maybe you’ll come to understand that humiliating yourself in public doesn’t help your attempts to overcome past humiliations but only digs a deeper grave for you. The best thing you could do is climb down in that grave and make yourself comfortable and quiet. Do it now, please, with my gratitude.
[QUOTE=pseudotriton ruber ruber]
I proofread … more carefully than Dopers QUOTE]
Proofreading error here: I omitted the word “many” before “Dopers.”
Good lord…we’re seeing a complete breakdown from smug, militant, and arrogant to paranoia, entitlement and megalomania. Seriously, take a break from the keyboard, salamander-man. The person digging the hole isn’t Zoe…
In the spirit of honesty, you’re exactly right here. It was an elective, I took it, learned a lot, I’m glad I did. I read the whole bible that year.
It was nothing resembling an objective history of the bible, though, trust me.
My name is Lisa and I’m happy to meet you. I’m a practicing Catholic, my kids attend parochial schools, and I think blue laws are stupid.
In southwestern Kentucky (aka the Bible belt), where we own a lake house, many of the formerly dry communities surrounding Lake Cumberland voted in 2003 to go “moist.” (For those unfamiliar with the term, a “dry” county is a place where it is illegal to sell liquor.) This was met with a great deal of jubilation from our resident neighbors, who had been driving 1 1/2 hours to Jamestown, KY (the nearest wet county) to buy their liquor. The fine folks on our street are the genuinely nicest, and drunkest, people I’ve ever met. So much for dry laws.
I tend to stay away from the religion and atheist threads because they just depress me. I understand what PRR is saying. I know from whence he speaks. I also understand what Cisco is saying, of the two, I’d say that Cisco has learned how to be more diplomatic about his atheism and that PRR doesn’t much care about diplomacy, since he started a pit thread, I would guess his tone would be different if it was in another forum.
I live in the south, my atheism is not common knowledge among accquaintances (or my baby sitter) because of MY experiences in telling people. I tend to get two standard responses. That I must be morally bankrupt or I am evil. Yes, I can tell from the looks I get, that people think less of me because I lack religion. Yes, I have had my moral character questioned for no other reason or evidence based on my lack of faith.
My lack of faith has been mocked. “You believe in God, when you were in labor you were screaming OH MY GOD.” “You believe in God, whether you know it or not.” I accept that some people really seem to need religion. Part of me wishes that I could surrender to a power that would forgive and redeem me, however, that does not seem to be possible. As much as I think sometimes that I might “need” religion, I also recognize that it really can’t serve me in the ways that I need, nor would I be able to serve it.
In my heart of hearts, I am a ragingly pissed off atheist who goes off the deep end every time that people want to mix church and state. I hate that after 9/11 most of the signs were “One nation under god” instead of “United We Stand.” I hate that shit is on my money. I get pissed off when I read crap about how the Ten Commandments should be in our courthouses. I get damned well offended when I hear fundies talking about how persecuted they are. I want to rage when I have someone tell me to have “a jesus filled day.” When the Jesus-freaky poker player acts like an asshole but preaches the word on every break I want to slap him baldheaded. I want to use the full depth and breadth of my vocabulary on people who tell me I MUST raise my daughter with some message of faith.
And yet I must function in this world. So I don’t go around pointing out every offense. I keep my mouth shut. If I was as vocal about my lack of religion as folks are about their religion, my quality of life would most definitely suffer. I live in a world where I am not “as free” to believe in what I believe (or lack thereof) as many. I would like that part of our world to change. I would like to live in a world where morality is not tied to a relgion, but to a person. I would like to live in a world where this world is the reward. Where people act how they act, live how they live because of the rewards gained in THIS lifetime. I would like to live in a world where folks fight evil because evil is BAD, not because god said so.
Oh, and I find it offensive when folks attack other folks about their jobs when they disagree with them. Hell, someone has to be a professor. Maybe he/she doesn’t fit your mold of what a professor should be, but that doesn’t make it any less true. If you bring in someones profession to bolster your argument, I just tend to think you are a jackass.
There are dry communities in New Jersey and I could be wrong but I don’t think it has anything to do with religion. There are several towns in NJ that are dry.
Moorestown NJ, voted best place to live by Money magazine last year is dry.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2005/index.html
From Wikipedia:
“The rationale for maintaining prohibition (against the sale of alcohol) on the local level is often religious in nature, as many Protestant Christian denominations discourage the consumption of alcohol by their followers. Similar laws designed to restrict the sale and consumption of alcohol are also common in the Mormon-dominated state of Utah.”
Parentheses mine.
If it’s not religious in nature, what’s the rationale?
Maybe they think it will lower property values or bring an element they don’t want into the town?
It may have started out that way for religious reasons but for whatever reason the town wants to keep it dry. My sister sells real estate in Moorestown and it’s a pretty wealthy area.
The town I live in has always been dry. Of course, 100 years or more ago, when the laws were enacted, they were religious in nature. Since then, the culture of this particular suburb has changed dramatically, and it is now literally one of the most liberal towns in America (recently voted the most liberal town in Illinois by one organization). There are still plenty of churches, but most of them seem to practice the most liberal forms of their respective religions that one can imagine.
All that being said, the town’s restriction on liquor sales has not loosened up nearly to the level that surrounding towns allow. We have no liquor stores, no place you can order a drink without ordering food as well, etc. So, not completely dry, but pretty strict. Now it seems to be more of a “maintain the quality of the community, keep out the noise and the drunks that bars tend to generate” than anything that has to do with religion of any kind. They just don’t make descisions here based on religion. They do make decisions based on what they think the atomosphere of the community should be, but it’s not religion-based.
I was playing on Zoe’s [what I perceived to be a] typo. I don’t ask every Christian I meet how they feel about blue laws.
I feel you. I still get stuff like this occasionally but I got it a lot when I lived in the south. I dated a girl used to tell me, “you love Jesus, you just don’t know it yet.”