damn 19th century hippies and their opium dens!
Heh. One of these shouldn’t be in the same post by the same poster.
I gotta know what the fuck this means.
SSG Schwartz
Ah, Grover Cleveland… you master of the asterisk.
Ok, I will admit I laughed and thought of Mantle*
SSG Schwartz
For the record, I have NO problem with anyone seeking to make an oath personally meaningful. But I’ll note that I don’t think it would go over very well for me if I wanted to be sworn-in with my own oath, in the circumstance that I would be (and have been) sworn-in, standing before a judge facing a criminal charge (disorderly persons for flipping a cop the bird. :smack: So now I’m stuck sitting on the Group W bench for the rest of my life. 
).
That’s my problem. In God We Trust, … one nation under God …, etc are all actions that the Congress took, there were official acts making those changes. I’ll repeat what I said above, I see no way that adding “so help me God.” as a part of what the CJ says during the giving of the Oath of Office is allowable without amending the CotUS. The wording of tOoO is clearly given in the CotUS and there is no mention of the CJ adding anything to it, even if the oath taker would like the CJ to.
Ceremonial Deism is tough enough for me to swallow, but at least follow the fucking rules for adding those acts of Ceremonial Deism.
I am NOT an atheist or an agnostic. My official religious preference is: Other (to complicated to explain).
CMC fnord!
Nzinga, Seated you really should read some of the “Establishment Clause” cases, you might be surprised by just how many of them were not brought by Atheists. The religious have much more at stake in the Establishment clause than anyone else.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair always gets the blame for “taking God out of our schools” (which is funny, the case was about Bible reading and MMO ain’t the plaintive who’s case the SCotUS chose to hear) 'cause it’s a lot harder to whip up a good hate against a Unitarian (who,s name you’ve probably never heard, Edward Schempp), than an Atheist.
At a guess, it’s a response to Starving Artist and the assertion that widespread drug culture was a product of liberal culture of the 1960s, with the intent to humorously refute that assertion by referencing the opium dens that were common in many seaside towns in the 19th century. Which is not necessarily equivalent in my opinion, but then we have advances in transportation and communications to thank for making drugs more accessible and in demand inland.
Taber correct me if I’m wrong.
Starving Artist’s contention that drugs “didn’t gain widespread societal acceptance until the late sixties”.
So the thirties marijuana scares, and Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick out of You from 1934’s Anything Goes line "Some get a kick from cocaine
I’m sure that if I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrifically, too
Yet, I get a kick out of you "and what’s in my post here, aren’t in any way indicative of a cultural acceptance of drug use in the 20’s and 30’s.
Therefore anyone in a opium den in the 19th century must have been a hippie time traveler.
CMC fnord!
It would be interesting to find a cite for the attitudes of Americans about various drugs through the decades and actually see the attitudes about marijuana and number of marijuana users as a percentage of the population during the 20’s and 30’s vs users in the 60’s and 70’s. Opium smoking in the 1800’s vs heroin in the 60’s etc.
I wont be asking SA for a cite for this. Not just because he can’t be bothered to look for one, but because I think they’d be difficult to find. I won’t be looking for any not because I think they’d be difficult to find, but because I don’t think SA would take the time to actually read them, as I don’t think he could be bothered to read the cites in my above post to him. 
Overreacting how?
The thing is, most of these inauguration “traditions” aren’t in fact traditional at all. They were slowly added during the 1930s and 1940s. For the majority of this country’s history, Presidential inaugurations didn’t have invocations and benedictions, and the Chief Justice recited the oath of office without adding “So help me God” to it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to want to see these recent additions by the God-botherers swept into the dustbin, in favor of a return to the REAL tradition of a secular inaugural ceremony.
Traditionalism is an enemy of progress. If we observed it in every instance, we’d still be living in cave man times.
You left off ‘widespread’ in this restatement of my position, a position you include in your quote of mine above.
There is a considerable difference between a shadow or small minority of a population using drugs to the extent that laws and propaganda are created to deal with it, and the widespread acceptance of, and engaging in, the drug use that occurred in the mid-to-late sixties. Just to pull some numbers out of my ass (and to readily admit that I’m doing so), I would guess that drug use, prior to 1965 and even including marijuana, was limited to less than five percent of the population and probably considerably lower even than that, maybe as low even as 2 - 3%. I would also peg drug use among teens and young adults in the 1968 - 1973 era at being 50% or better, and I would point out that much of the drug use going on during that time involved worse drugs than marijuana, which your cites seem to focus on almost exclusively. LSD was the real biggie among the hippie crowd, cocaine was gaining a more widespread existance, and heroin, which had been around for decades and had been a big, big problem for musicians and a limited number of the urban population, was beginning to be experimented with in other areas of the population. Uppers and downers also became popular, and in fact it seemed that among many of the young population, any old pill was deemed cool to pop just to see what it did. Drugs had been popular in the black jazz and blues culture for decades (by Quincy Jones’ own admission, btw…just to forestall the acusations of racism that will surely follow this remark; though not necessarily by you, CMC), and once the British Invasion, with its musicians’ fondness for and emulation these artists began, drugs came to be seen as cool and rebellious, and that’s when the problem started to take on epidemic proportions.
I would be much more interested in knowing the percentage of the population engaging in drug use during those periods, as well as the age and population percentage of those whose attitudes are being measured. And even at that of course, you still won’t be taking into account LSD, cocaine, uppers and downers, etc., all of which began to flourish in the mid-to-late sixties.
It seems to me that your position is that if any drug use or acceptance of drug use at all occured prior to the sixties, it debunks my contention that drug use exploded both in terms not only of acceptace of but in the desire for drugs (driven firstly by the motivation to try to be cool, and secondarily by the pleasurability of the drugs’ use themselves) during the mid-sixties, and I would submit that that is far from the case. I’d really like to know why it is that every time I bring these issues up, so many people around here feel that if they can show that they existed to some trivial degree at some time in the past, it debunks my contention that the problem became widespread in the sixties?
Well, as you can see, your sad face got to me ;)) so I went back and read them, hence my post now. I didn’t respond earlier for two reasons: number 1 - your impatient, combative and off the mark post to me on page one of this thread (post 31), and 2 - I was engaged in several simultaneous arguments at the time while also in need of wrapping things up so I could leave, and I didn’t feel, in light of the fact that I didn’t think your cites would add up to much (a prescient belief, as it turns out :p), that there was anything to be gained by engaging you as well.
Points for honesty, but you can’t really make a wild guess and then expect the analysis that follows to have any credibility.
Rather than my addressing each point, have some easily-found cites on drug usage.
Illegal drug use in 1920s Canada
Public perceptions of drug use
I note that some of this refutes SA’s assertions, some of it supports them and a lot of it is in the yeah-but-no-but category (for example, opiates were widely used in the 19th century; the jazz scene-related upswing was a resurgence, not an initial growth). It’s also worth noting that the reason that so many more drugs were used in the 50s and 60s is that there were so many more drugs. Cocaine may have been around for a century but LSD and a lot of the amphetamines were invented or refined during or after WWII.
I’m still looking for data on actual numbers of users in the pre-drug law era - one source puts the number of addicts in America in 1923 at about one million, although that cite shows various other statistics as well. A number of the sources cite key groups for drug use as doctors and women (including upper and middle class women), especially uppers (including cocaine) and downers (including heroin, opium and morphine). WW I also brought with it a wave of soldiers who either had become addicted to painkillers or who used drugs to “treat” their PTSD (as we now know it to be).
Marijuana did indeed proliferate during the jazz era (having previously been popular with Mexican immigrants) - but the Jazz era was the 1920s. Pot use peaked in 1979, hitting over 60% usage with some demographic groups, but has “fallen dramatically” since then.
Next time, Google before you start throwing numbers around.
You know, after SSG Schwartz’s post I’m thinking I shouldn’t have said overreacting (actually I didn’t say overreacting, I said ‘over reacting’ because I didn’t know if it was one word.)
I’m hearing what you are saying. I am all about having a militant streak. I have been really feeling the revolutionary vibe coming off of Dawkins. I likes it. But it threw me off to see atheists tripping about the kinds of thing that Christians usually trip about. It’s not unreasonable. It’s just not really that cool vibe I like about atheists. But hey, the world doesn’t spin on cool vibes.
Actually I realize that, but the point is you are a minority. Religious belief, or lack thereof tends to inform upon people’s opinions and that’s the only point I am making. If people are too stupid to realize that pointing out evidence of outliers doesn’t really advance the argument, that’s not my problem. So you all can keep extrapolating things wildly about my opinion, but you’re quite simply wrong. My views are far more nuanced than that. I am just trying to juggle an argument with about a dozen people who all want to oversimplify things, and then berate me when I won’t respond to stereotypes and pat sloganeering.
**
Euphonious Polemic** Pointing to my ignoring of half a dozen idiots doesn’t even equate to the superlatives you are throwing around. Just because I think that YOU and Der Trihs are fucking idiots, doesn’t mean I think everyone is. When an argument is too stupid to refute, there is no point in arguing with it. Not all arguments are equal, not all BELIEFS are equal, nor should they be considered equal. You can believe anything you want, I am not required to respect what you believe, nor are you required to respect what I believe. So far since you have made me aware of your existence by going on a snit fit crusade, I have yet to see a very well thought out cogent argument come out of your mouth. You think that the very basic aspects of the argument are incredibly controversial things to say. shrugs I engage with far more intelligent atheists on a regular basis, and I have the utmost respect for them because they at least attempted to understand the basic premises before they started shouting people down as ‘bigots’.
Sometimes you have to when someone oversimplifies to such a point that the discussion becomes untenable.
It’s not a subjective statement at all if you know anything about Islam and Christianity. Christianity has more allowances for other beliefs worked into it in the form of ‘My Kingdom is not of this World.’ and ‘Render Unto Caesar’ and all that. You could say that Christians are less tolerant than Buddhists actually, though Buddhism isn’t a religion in the way Christianity and Islam is. It’s a collection of spiritual traditions loosely based on the teachings of the Buddha. Actually values as I understand it is a term coined by Nietzche, and if you are religious you are living the life of that religion and not transacting in values.
Well originally pagan was a derogatory term created by Christians to refer to anyone who wasn’t a Christian or a Jew. I am not being disrespectful to polytheists at all. You’re reaching in order to find some way to justify your recreational outrage.
Well, I never said that and have corrected you several times. So maybe your intent isn’t to argue honestly. Because I have said at least three times that I wasn’t describing a conspiracy. Try going and reading a little bit about Islam and its vaunted ‘tolerance’, rather than just spouting liberal platitudes at me.
The point you are missing is that Christians view this as a turning away from God toward atheism. I’m sorry this simple concept is difficult for you to grasp in your race to claim the defender of the victims merit badge. Talking about the culture war and its aspects is not, ‘rudeness’.
Sure, I agree with you that the place to do it is not through government. Something you apparently didn’t notice because it didn’t suit the carefully crafted picture you are drawing was when I said that it is actually blasphemous from a Christian perspective to associate God with money. That part seems to have passed you by though I said it at least half a dozen times in this thread.
Right, well you have your preferences and others have theirs, and everyone votes accordingly. Removing religion from the public sphere isn’t value neutral as you like to portray it, and that’s the problem with this discussion. Christians are labelled as bigots if they don’t see it as value neutral. It’s simply not value neutral.
Yeah I admit I’m pretty focused on atheists in a thread about atheism. :rolleyes: Again you’re ignoring the point. That’s not my problem, at the end of the day you’ve said nothing I didn’t already know, but have ignored many things I’ve said that you don’t know. This isn’t ivory tower stuff, this is like 101 level material.
Again you aren’t in a position to judge as you aren’t willing to put down your sword long enough to learn the basic premises. This is pretty common against liberals who want to argue for tolerance while being extremely intolerant themselves. Their idea of tolerance is Christian traditionalists giving up their beliefs for secular humanism. Toleration of Christianity isn’t on the menu anywhere. So really, it’s not me that’s the bigot, it’s the other way around, but that’s neither here nor there I suppose.
I didn’t accuse atheists of valuing child porn. I am sorry such elementary concepts are beyond your capacity. You took a whole bunch of statements, decontextualized them and then crafted them into a rather unsophisticated point that does nothing by satisfy your emotional need for some down-home RO.
Euphonious Polemic Here is a scenario I have for you. It’s another argument that I thought was too stupid to engage. It’s with someone on another message board.
He said:
Oil has nothing to do with the success of Dubai, because Dubai itself has no oil wealth. He attributed Dubai’s success solely to the fact that it’s run by an enlightened Monarchy.
Do you think that it would be important to continue to argue with someone who is convinced that oil wealth is insignificant to the growth and success of Dubai?
Major highjack territory here, so apologies to the OP.
I guess I’d make a post and point out to this person that although revenues from oil and gas CURRENTLY account for only 6% of Dubia’s revenues, their economy was built on the back of the oil industry. I’d also point out that if there was no oil revenue in the surrounding countries, it’s likely that Dubai would not be doing as well in the areas of construction and financial services.
I’d throw a cite in too (hopefully better than this one, but…)
Perhaps your person is making the mistake of thinking that only oil wealth WITHIN a country can contribute to that countries success.
If the person shows evidence that they’re willing to engage in honest debate, then continue. If they just simply keep repeating “oil wealth is insignificant to the growth and success of Dubai” then disengage with them.
I would not advise telling the person “your argument is stupid and I will not talk to you because you obviously cannot understand me” as your first reply.
And what if people point this out and it doesn’t penetrate? (which it didn’t)
He’s more an ideological Monarchist with an axe to grind against Democracy. We did explain to him that Dubai is a financial center dealing with investments in the Middle-East, which are generally going on BECAUSE of oil wealth.
That’s essentially what the person did.
It’s never my first reply. On this message board people pulling out the ‘bigot’ card early or who can’t say anything but, ‘atheism isn’t a belief, it is the lack of belief’, don’t get much patience from me because I’ve already been the rounds on that one and to engage it would be to engage conversations I’ve had a million times with the same people.
It may be rude but I find it easier to tell people why I am ignoring them than to have them start side conversations about how I am ‘side-stepping’ their cogent point. (that wasn’t particularly cogent.) I have no patience for people who think that Christians who care about their beliefs are merely bigots.
Actually your first reply to one of my posts on another thread was simply a rolleye. Your second reply was to call me stupid.
And I have little patience for people who think that all morality derives from religion, and atheists are therefore by definition, amoral.
You oversimplified a person’s point in order to fit your preconceptions of such people. What other appropriate response is there? I didn’t call you stupid, I said your argument was stupid, which it was. You can clearly comment intelligently on Dubai, but not things that fall outside of your zone of commitment.
Good thing I never said any such thing. I said ‘Belief informs morality’. So that the morals of a Christian are going to be different from those of an atheist. Shouldn’t really be controversial. Though being upset that Christians think they are right, is rather silly IMV.