So christian business owners are entitled to their own views, just not entitled to act on them? If a Christians starts selling something he immediately loses his right to act according to his own conscience and religion. Why? If you don’t like smokers you can ban them from your house, your car, your land, but if you are selling something then you lose your rights of religion and free association? What sense does that make?
We should love the sinner but hate the sin, but love does not mean celebrating the sin, it means calling to repentance. The last thing Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery was “Go and sin no more”. If there was a party celebrating the woman’s adulterous relationship I doubt he would have gone and celebrated along with the sinners.
As a Christian I think we should count it all joy when we are persecuted, and I know what little we experience now is just a small taste of what is to come. As an American, a country that is built on freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, why should I be silent when I see fellow Christians being denied their rights as citizens? Because some have had it worse before? That makes no sense. Maybe it is a small thing but I have read “Le Petit Prince” and I know they only way to get rid of Baobab trees.
You may think that catering a wedding does not mean you endorse the wedding, I may have a different view, but our views don’t matter. What matters is the view of the baker, if he thinks it violates his religion that is all it takes. In a pluralistic society we should each have are own conscience and the freedom to act according to its dictates as much as possible. Your idea of the baker selling out his conscience for a vacation home is anathema to any believer.
Damn! I was so looking forward to committing rape, child and animal abuse, and doing so in a sanctioned manner. If I am going to do awful, evil things – I would want the cover of doing it against my will.
Of course that is not the case; I would resist doing any of those evil things! I would strenuously resist any action in that vein, and not because they are illegal. I would resist them because they are reprehensible acts that should always be avoided by all people. I wish there was no need for laws against them because they were so unacceptable by all of society it would ever occur to anyone to do them. But that is unrealistic and naïve – of course laws are required.
I feel the same way about abortion also but as we have finally agreed, all abortions are not equal. I am okay with severely limiting partial birth abortions. I am still not okay with outright eliminating them in absolutely every circumstance, but yes in most cases they should not be performed.
(There is a whole other discussion I don’t want to open up here about why the mother waited until that moment to decide. That suggests some other considerations like health of the mother [or even just extreme psychological dread]. This where religious groups could do so much good! Instead of yelling at young girls going into Planned Parenthood and calling them murderers, set up support ministries for them where they are loved and supported and where many options are presented [even if you are primarily hoping for a delivery and adoption option]. Then you actually have the opportunity to in good conscious council the mother to “do it early if you are going to do it anyway”. That way you stop her from killing what actually IS a viable and separate life form.) I believe if you had some skin in the game, it would stop being such a theoretical exercise where the simple solution is always viable. I also believe this would be a much more successful and effective anti-abortion campaign. It turns out condemning people is not as good a way to win converts as bearing fruit toward (loving and supporting) them.
I do not understand your arguments about playing games of chance with abortion, it seems misguided and cruel. These are important matters and rolling dice or flipping coins is not good enough!!! Again, I wish it was the kind of thing that everyone took so seriously that they would never consider it flippantly, but some law is required and right now we have a law that is more lenient than either of us would prefer. (To be clear – I am more than fine with the current law and wish the church would try to discourage abortions through means of love and persuasion rather than through passing laws.)
The thing is there are people who believe something entirely different from either of us and morally – they should be allowed to live by their convictions just as you and I are allowed to live by ours. So we agree very late term abortions are (at least) less than ideal. We probably agree by that time in a pregnancy some other consideration should be required. We also agree that early pregnancy is not murder. We do agree, but some legislation must be passed (or upheld).
I say let the existing law stand with tweaks to late term, and that anti abortion efforts should be turned to education and persuasion. Loving and kind education and persuasion – with the moral Christian leaders being willing to hear a disappointing answer. You want abortions outlawed (and have never articulated any measured nuanced stance that limits but does not prevent). So now we are where I predicted – you want to error on the side of caution and I want to error on the side of freedom. I already gave my suggestion the number of weeks any child has been delivered and then grew into a full adulthood. You have not declared any number of weeks, you talked about rolling dice.
(Here we have the danger of manipulation. By some arguments test tube babies are never delivered so an argument can be made for the very second a needle injects a sperm into an egg.) I figure we leave all religious arguments out of it and pick a number of weeks one before the earliest viable life we have seen be successful eventually (with extreme medical support by the way). After that time, I would be okay with more restrictions upon terminating pregnancy. But even if we did that which would be a HUGE win for you, you would still be wanting to roll back the date. You believers are always trying to interject your belief system into our legal code. Why don’t you guys try to instill your beliefs the way Jesus instructed, through the “great commission”?
I am being encouraged to not reply directly to puddleglum again and to give other posters a chance to weigh in. For that reason and because of an ever growing ‘to do’ list I will bow out for a few hours. I do invite other posters to have their say, I want to hear the views of everyone.
puddleglum, I do appreciate the comments and look forward to a larger discussion where your views and my views are weighed and measured against other members of the board. Thank you for the discussion I will rejoin at some time in the not too distant future hopefully.
So what do others think about any of the topics being discussed?
Of course Trump is using me, like I am using him. There is nothing wrong with this, every commercial transaction I partake in is like this. I give Taco Bell some money and they give me some delicious food. No one has been taken advantage of. You say he has taken from me vast power and wealth. I have not given him any wealth. He has only the power of any president and since he has no idea how to use political power he has less than most. Now that his term is done, he has no more power.
You contrast Biden’s piety with Trumps venality, but that is not my concern as far as being president goes. I am sure you are familiar of the parable of the two sons who were asked to work in the vineyard. That applies to my thinking about politicians, ones who say nice things are not the good ones, the good ones are the ones who do things that I want them to do. You say that some of your friends elevate Trump like a golden calf, but I think that is what you are doing to the office of the presidency. The president is not the king or a priest, he is just a person working in government. I will choose my friends based on their values, my church based on how much it glorifies God, and my politicians based on how much they can implement policies I favor. In doing so I am giving Caesar what belongs to Caesar and God what belongs to God.
About Coronavirus, calling it a moral matter does not clarify or add anything. If Trump were a decent man who had stayed faithful to his first wife and went to church every Sunday, would that make his decisions about Coronavirus more moral?
I think your idea that a president can contain pandemics is hopelessly naive. The US is not some island in the South Pacific that can close up and wait for a vaccine. The US is the most interconnected country in the world. We have a large population of old and fat people which this virus targets. It was inevitable no matter who the president was that this virus was going to kill a whole lot of people. The federal government has no power to call for or enforce lockdowns, what they can do is use the CDC to educate doctors on how to treat it and finance vaccine candidates. That is what they have been doing and would have done no matter who the president was. You seem to want a president who is more a God King than a government worker.
Do you really think that if Biden was president no one would have died? You seem under the impression that there was a scientific consensus that was ignored by the President. The disease is too new and too mysterious for that. My work started putting up fliers from the CDC right at the beginning of the pandemic. Its top three recommendations for people were don’t go to China, don’t wear a mask, and don’t be mean to asian people. That was what the experts were saying, now they are saying different things because there is so much more information out there. The biggest task that faces the federal government in this pandemic is getting the vaccine out to people once it is approved. Even that the president has little control over, the military is doing that.
Agreed. These folks have an ability to make themselves believe anything by pure force of will, if it aligns with their interests. I mean, most of us suffer from this bias, but they actively leverage it to build churches, communities, entire movements.
Honestly, normies do not fully understand their capacity for self-deception. Not just self-deception, of radiating the deception to infect others around them. You can’t really understand it without spending a lot of time around these folks as one of them.
The fact is that presidents have to weigh information that you and I never have, and never see, and likely lack the expert resources to help determine them. And we can’t watch them all the time. You say that Trump implements policies that benefit you or suit your preferences. How sure are you about that? To get that visible result you care about, did he torpedo less-visible things that are also important to you?
There is the saying about politics that if you saw the sausage being made, it might put you off your appetite. What if you witnessed the sausage-maker coming out of a men’s room stall and heading straight for the kitchen without first washing his hands? Do you tell yourself the oven will surely be enough to kill the fecal bacteria? If we can’t trust him to wash his hands after taking a dump, do we trust him to prepare, cook, and serve sausage safely?
Character matters. It governs what they do when we aren’t looking. And when you have a purely transactional character like Trump, you can be assured he’ll only follow the transaction to the extent that he’s forced to, and he will definitely shit all over your interests outside the narrow confines of the transaction (if it suits him).
If you don’t think Trump will shit all over you outside of your transaction with him, then you don’t truly see your relationship as transactional. You know he won’t shit on you because you share exactly the same values.
This is a bit of cherry-picking deception here. Yes, the initial science was patchy, 9 months ago, when the disease was new. After a couple of months science noticed it was wrong, and made course-corrections (as science continually does, as Republicans and Trumpers are absolutely, categorically incapable of doing).
Trump/Republicans soundly rejected those course-corrections and continue to do so. They reject current safety guidelines, they hawk miracle cures that don’t pan out (whatever happened to hydroxychloroquine? remdesivir? shooting bleach and sunlight into the body? Is this halting the carnage in South Dakota?)
You are presenting a false choice on the border. It is not Trump’s idea or another reality where every refugee finds a home and no one gets hurt.
If there are open borders then tens of millions of immigrants come to the US each year, this is not a hundred and twenty years ago when the country was empty. Immigration is already unpopular and Trump was elected to deal with it. Think of who will be elected if we just open the borders. If we don’t open the borders but allow everyone who crosses with a kid to stay then coyotes will use kids to take the long and dangerous journey across cartel held border crossings into the country. Many of them could die in the crossing. I am very familiar with the parable of the sheep and goats but your invocation of it is just question begging. It is far from clear that open borders will help more people than it will hurt. If you are in favor of open borders than make that case, don’t just expect me to assume that is the best policy because it sounds compassionate. I think it is a collective action problem, what makes America great is the norms and mores of its people. If you allow all who want to come , those people will bring their more and norms, and if you bring enough people then their norms and mores replace our current ones and the place they fled is recreated here, helping nobody and hurting everybody here. That is why I believe it is ultimately more compassionate to have reasonable limits on immigration.
Packing a court has had a certain meaning since FDR tried it almost 90 years ago, it doesn’t mean appointing judges to fill vacancies on lower courts, it means expanding the number of Supreme Court seats in order to gain a partisan advantage. The Senate has fulfilled their constitutional duty to accept or reject the president’s supreme court nominees, that is not court packing either. Why the disdain for McConnell? He is a church going man seemingly faithful to his wife of almost 30 years. He seems like a very moral person when compared to Trump.
I have gotten everything I expected from Trump, he promised to appoint Federalist Society approved judges to the Supreme Court and he appointed three. He promised to lower taxes and regulations and he did. He has done much better on foreign policy than I expected. You say that Biden has already done more, but he has done literally nothing except give a speech. I like speeches as much as the next guy, but if I want a great speech I can all up one of Reagan’s on youtube. You seem to prefer symbolism over substance. Who cares if Trump doesn’t admit defeat? When Inauguration Day comes Biden will be in and Trump out and nothing he can say between now and then will change that. Neither a gracious concession speech or a bunch of crazy tweets will have any effect, so who cares what he chooses?
Not if the baker is the business owner. There are benefits to running your own business, and there are drawbacks. If treating all of your customers with the same level of professionalism is beyond your ability to comprehend or to tolerate – then go work for a church or Christian school because you do not have the detachment necessary to own a business.
Look we have both made our cases and we are not going to agree, nor does it seem we will politely disagree. If you cannot comprehend that anyone else’s wedding is not an ethical concern for you then you cannot be reasoned with. We are done here. No Christian is having their rights denied by serving a gay customer – only their right too be prejudicial and to impose their own standards upon others is being denied in these cases.
You and I are never going to agree what the role of the POTUS is or should be. Let us stop wasting each other’s time. I will only suggest your view is very simplistic, and I imagine you have little respect for my view.
Trump has taken from all of us because of how he abused his powers to have the US government and many foreign governments stay at his hotels and resorts. He plays it off like it is chump change but it adds up to significant money and it is all done to curry favor with a world leader. After his presidency he is very likely to sell state secrets because of his transnational nature. He is already weakening our nation by creating instability in our institutions of defense and intelligence mere weeks before a transfer of power. I can fathom only two possible reasons for this, the first is that he is a petulant little child who is throwing a hissy fit because he lost an election (this is certainly true but might not be the whole story). The second reason is that he is beholden to some foreign power and is performing these unprecedented and foolish actions to have his debt forgiven or to secure rights to build buildings that will be profit centers for him in the future). I have no doubt you will defend these actions and justify them somehow along with Trump’s other shortcomings.
Concerning the virus, you are so good at missing the point, allow me to congratulate you! Trump’s immorality is in allowing the avoidable deaths, hospitalizations, and infections of many, many Americans in order to “keep the economy running”. (As you correctly point out, some would have died anyway – but Trump could have cut that number by a half to three-quarters.) His philandering is only evidence of his poor character to me – I don’t really care, it does not affect me at all. It just shows me he will cheat if he can. He never fooled me, he is still fooling you. I do believe if any decent person had been president for the last year significantly fewer would have died, been hospitalized, or even caught the virus at all. But Trump wanted a booming economy and sacrificed human lives for that goal. That amounts to murder in my book, you do not agree and never will.
There was a scientific consensus and Trump did ignore it. He is still ignoring it, and just because he is a bitter prick he is doing all he can to limit Biden’s chances of being effective in the first half of next year. Wearing masks and social distancing would be effective if it was done universally but Trump keeps telling his army of mindless followers that masks are for wimps. The consensus did evolve, but Trump resisted it as it developed and still does. The White House is one of the best places to catch the virus, if you can’t get in there, any Trump rally was the second best place to catch the virus.
Last question on this matter, who do you think commands the military?
No one is endorsing an open border, it is so like a Trump supporter to equate a border wall with immigration policy. The other side of the debate wanted to spend the same (or even larger) amounts of money on immigration but spending it where people actually cross – not out in the middle of nowhere. (By the way the border is thousands of miles long and almost none of it has any physical barrier at all.) It was well known four years ago as it is well known now that almost all the drugs and almost all the ‘undocumented’ infiltrators come in through legal crossing points. But instead of spending the money wisely to actually address the problem, Trump insisted upon building a wall that is visible but not in the least effective.
The border is not very far from where I am sitting right now, and I have relatives who have worked on the other side of it running plants as a result of NAFTA. I have led mission trips across the border (back before I renounced my faith). I can assure you that your view of coyotes and cartels are better suited for cartoons than reality. (Which is not to say your contentions NEVER happen, just that they are rare. Years ago I even participated in a stakeout of a drug shipment which was travelling through the state. Once they left the truck stop in our location without unloading anything, and were picked up by others in unmarked vehicles, we left and went home.) You might have bought into Trump’s view of brown invaders from the south, but I have worked with and for Mexicans as well as a few Central and South Americans both legal and illegal for decades and they are no where near the danger you imagine. Your fear of morals and abnormalities of the brown people is drastically out of place in this discussion. I have personally dealt with many of these people on both sides of the border and they are mostly good decent, hard working, family oriented people. The drug problems in my community is almost exclusively non-Hispanic. You are far more likely to run into black or white drug suppliers and that is just the plain truth. I do not mean all Hispanics are saints, but neither are they the great danger you imagine. The ones who do turn to crime are usually quickly identified and either incarcerated or deported (for the most part the community does not want them causing trouble and bringing law enforcement around so they are not protected).
By bringing up the sheep and the goats, I was not advocating for open borders. I was advocating for decency and humanity while refugees await hearings or findings. The Trump administration absolutely separated families on purpose to discourage refugees from arriving and asking for asylum, this is well documented. If you were the least bit willing to see Trump’s evil and selfish motives concerning destitute women and children wanting refuge I would bother to go into further detail. As it seems likely you share his view and are unlikely to consider other options I will save us both the trouble.
One last thing-- during the last election cycle FOX News and the Trump Campaign (then Trump Administration) described these poor refugees fleeing violence with little more than the clothes they were wearing as a convoy. Convoy is a term with a military origin, it means a war campaign making its way to a field of battle. I noticed back then that neither FOX nor any other conservative outlet showed any video of this “convoy”. The more fair minded media used the term “convoy” only to mock FOX News, they called the approaching groups of people as refugees and showed them walking all the way through Mexico, or crowded into and packed on top of old school bus style vehicles.
The point of that is the group of people were exactly the same humans. But the right wing media portrayed them as a threat approaching in a convoy. The left wing portrayed them as victims of violence fleeing their homes and seeking peace and freedom. Since I could see them with my own eyes, it was pretty easy for me to judge which side was closer to telling the truth.
This country has never had a sensible comprehensive immigration policy, and with the divides we demonstrate we are not likely to soon. It is sad, but everyone including you and me are dug into a position. I actually pity people who are so blinded that they support Trump. That includes most of my family and most of my friends, and it includes you too. I once held all the very same views you do now. But I looked and experienced and made decisions upon what was reality – not what I wished was reality. Because I have high hopes and fondness for all of you as human beings, I hope you get the chance to see reality some day.
In the mean time, you are entitled to your views, your opinions, your own voting decisions and all the freedoms we have discussed above in detail. I will respect those views and opinions. I hope you read some of the things I have recommended and I remain open to discussing all of the topics from this entire thread further if you or anyone else wishes to.
The 70 million who voted for Trump had 8 years of Obama/Biden and 4 Years of Trump for comparison. Another week won’t make a difference.
It’s a population that requires something greater than itself. These are folks who cannot find meaning within their own minds. They are puppets acting out God’s plan. Trump is sent by their God to cleanse the world. It must be true because what has happened is all part of HIS plan. Trump’s defeat in the election was the Devil’s work.
The hope of redemption lies in the son - an Eric Trump candidacy.
God help us!
Getting back a bit to the OP, I think it would depend a lot on which day of Trump as observed. I doubt that the average day of tweeting hate, playing with his phone during the daily defense briefing, playing a round of golf and then watching Fox News before turning in would do much for him.
But if you could pick perhaps October 30 2019. You might change a few votes.
It is clear that Trump views Evangelical Christians as a tool to be used and whack jobs to be scammed, and he very likely expresses those sentiments in very explicit terms in private to his family and to loyal colleagues. While his base may ignore or excuse his breaking of norms of decency, it is much different if it directed at them personally, and no one wants to feel that they are taken for suckers.
Of course since Biden is not in favor of open borders (that btw is a big lie from the Republican leadership) you are coming with a lot of arguments from ignorance.
And once the pandemic is controlled (that the efforts to control it are “fantastic” is once again, a big lie from the Republican leadership) the economic reality is that we do have plenty of space and need for limited immigration.
Also, if anti-immigration was popular it is clear that even Trump realized that he would had been a bigger loser if it had concentrated on that issue now.
There are already thousands of crisis pregnancy centers. Of course “pro-choice” politicians want to outlaw them because they cut into Planned Parenthood’s revenue.
It seems odd that you have never heard of a hypothetical, but there is never going to be a game of dice and abortion, it is a philosophical issue exercise to clarify the issue. The point is that the unknown nature of when the unborn baby acquires humanity should incline us toward protecting it instead of letting it be killed.
If the Democratic plan for immigration is not open borders then they will necessarily involve detaining people who attempt to cross the border illegally. If they cross the border with kids then they will be separated while the parents wait for their hearing. Thus either the democratic plan is either open boarder or family separation.
That is if we continue the way Trump decided to follow the law, it doesn’t seem that it will the same under Biden, and again: it is a big lie from the Republicans in power to say that keeping families together is the same as open borders.
How can you follow the law without separating families?
The point is to not do it haphazardly and indefinitely and not lose track of who are the parents of 500 children. You follow the law while caring about not inflicting unnecessary additional suffering. Obama deported more people than any of the immediately preceding administrations, so enforcing the law in a way that’s not scandalous can be done.
This underestimates how hard it is to find people in rural South America during a pandemic. That is different than what Obama faced when his administration separated kids from their parents at the border. The reason the parents brought the kids to the US in the first place is that they want them here. Most seem to prefer the kids stay in the US with family or friends rather than be reunited with the parents in their home countries.
There was no pandemic in 2018 or 2019.
And now, to some larger points:
- Gotta admit, it’s been impressive how evangelicals are so pro-family that thousands of children being ripped from their parents didn’t give them heartburn, and how they are so pro-life that hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths just here in America aren’t upsetting them either.
Without casting aspersions on any individual evangelical, it is plain that, as a group, whatever the true motivation for evangelicals’ opposition to abortion, it’s got nothing to do with being pro-life. When hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens die unnecessarily and this Administration does jack shit to try to stop it, they’ve given away the game. There is no more need to engage evangelicals about abortion or take their opposition to it with the least bit of regard for their moral seriousness. Rather, they deserve to be ridiculed and then told to fuck off.
You have raised the point that people would have still died under a Democratic Administration. Certainly! But we might have been as effective in our response as the African continent has been, maybe even more so. Obama left us with plans and preparations in place for when the next pandemic hit us, and Trump threw that all away. The Clinton Administration would have had all hands on deck in January, when it might have been possible to test and trace every individual case of every infected person.
And simple things like a national mask mandate, once it became clear that aerosols were one of the significant avenues of transmission, would have done wonders - still would, dammit: we’re looking at another 100,000 or so Covid deaths between now and the inauguration, and even now it doesn’t have to be that way.
Pro-life, my ass.
- I don’t know if you raised this, but there’s the ‘yabbut on the whole Trump is still better’ argument.
Fuck that shit. We lefties felt the same about Obama in 2008. But did that stop us from criticizing Obama when we felt he was off the track? Hell no! When he ‘negotiated with himself’ as the phrase went, during the 2008-09 winter, and presented a stimulus bill that had already been cut down to what he thought would be a good compromise between the two parties (which everyone knew they’d cut down further, and they did), we pointed this out loudly. And when Obama didn’t include a public option in the ACA, ditto. And on and on.
You’re free to let your leader know what he’s doing wrong, just as Nathan the prophet did with King David. But it’s been crickets from evangelicals with respect to the Covid massacre, just as it was with the family separations. Even now you defend him.
- Finally, there’s the whole persecution thing. This is where I call bullshit on evangelicals being born-again Christians. I’m sure a few are, but c’mon, man. If you know the Lord of all creation, if His presence and love have taken up residence in your heart, the stuff that y’all trot out as evidence of persecution would be too fucking small and insignificant for you to more than barely notice in passing. Is His presence in your life, is His love in your heart, so small that these things matter, that they’re the continual burr in your underwear that they clearly are, judging by the way y’ll keep bringing them up? Where is evangelicals’ evangel, what is their Good News, what life-changing power can they witness to when little things have such power over them that they get worked up in a lather of offensensitivity? It’s like an anti-witness.