Was it wrong to mention Jesus at President Bush's inauguration?

Great Debates
41

Brought it on ourselves? The man has basically all but now admitted to committing Perjury - personal like or not, he’s dishonest, and a dishonest man should not be running this country.

Just so you all know, I’ll be heading off to bed soon, unfortunatly I cannot argue with you all night. I would also like to point out, before then, that there is a BIG difference between someone who calls themself a Christian and someone who actually is.

You said it yourself: Christian nuts bombing abortion centers. I think abortion is murder, but so is killing the people who abort. Inevitably, wackos are going to, at times, give this religion a bad name…but that just doesn’t matter if they’re acting against the religion’s teachings in the first place.

Needless to say, I seem to have hit the nail on the head in predicting what the posters here would be life in terms of belief and argument style. Not tooting my own horn - just seemed obvious.

42

Have you yourself ever taken the SAT? My dog could get 1200. Okay, an exaggeration, but you get my drift. It’s a basic high school equivalency exam, and 1200 is a 66% score. So, after high school, he took a test rating him at 66% of the understanding of the material he had just spent years learning. That’s a gap of a full third, and you’re holding this up as an indicator of intelligence? I look at it as an indicator of his intellectual slackness, myself.

I took the SAT cold (no studying) and got a score of ~1530. I don’t consider that a boast, I give it to show why I have zero respect for the SAT. It’s an indicator of basic knowledge, and as far as I’m concerned, if you can’t even get at least a 1200, you’ve got a major, major lack of information that you need to even begin to have a rudimentary understanding of the social, political, historical and technological matters that affect our lives every day. I spent zero effort, yet passed the test in the top few percentile of that year. I find the fact that people actually study for the SAT, and struggle to achieve even passing scores, as one of the worst commentaries on the intellectual apathy that pervades this country.

…and now, is embodied in this country’s President.

It’s no wonder the rest of the world rolls their eyes at us.

43

Where do you draw the line concerning the wackos? Someone who bombs a clinic, yeah they’re a wacko. What about someone that sits down and starts preaching to me without my asking? Are they a wacko? What about someone that tells me I’ll go to Hell (the place that their religion says is the most terrible thing you can imagine) because I don’t think the same way they do? Are they wacko? That’s the problem, how do you determine which ones are crazy. It is partly a black and white issue, but there is one big ol’ gray area.

What about Bush executing those people? Admittedly I’m not up on my Bible reading, but I have a hard time believing that it was Christ that supported the whole eye for an eye thing. And I doubt Christ would have supported capital punishment considering he was a victim.

44

TWTCommish:
Suppose I assert that “Most crimes are committed by people who ‘don’t defend all organized religion’ and ‘don’t agree with everything the Catholic Church does’ but who do just ‘follow the Bible.’ Of course I have no actual basis for making this claim.” Got a problem with that? In fact, I suspect that a substantial number of crimes are committed by people who are at least nominally Protestants, and would thus agree with those statements. (Of course, they would no doubt also confess what bad Christians they have been and what miserable sinners they are, especially when they are before the judge or the parole board.)
This page–along with a number of other web sites–references a study by Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith showing vanishingly small numbers of atheists among prison inmates (e.g., 8 “non-religious” inmates out of a total of 1,533 prisoners in Sing Sing). Further research indicates that this study dates back to the 1920’s, but it’s still more facts than you’ve brought to the table. This page and this page cite more recent statistics of Federal prisoners showing that 156 of 93,112 (0.17%) prisoners were self-identified “atheists”. 13,878 were listed as “No Preference” and 4,503 as “Unknown”; as in the general population, “No Preference” and “Unknown” can’t be necessarily be assumed to be identical with “atheist”; at any rate, about 80% of the prisoners had a belief in or identification with a religion.
Now, either retract your statement (“most crimes are committed by non-religious people”), or back it up with facts, or I will introduce you to an SDMB Forum called “the Pit”.

45

From that cite by romanticide, I did some basic math, taking only those that looked obviously Christian, and came up with 79.1% Christian. Atheists, by contrast, were .209%. Santeria, on which voodoo is based, and which is your classic heathen, multiple gods and demons, animal sacrifice kind of religion, comes up with all of .157%.

So much for Christianity and goodness.

46

I agree that the SAT is a load of crap in most respects - it’s not an accurate test, but what’s the average score? Like 1000?

The only point I’m trying to make with that is that he’s not a stupid person, plain and simple. As for the rest of the world - let them roll their eyes. We’re America, d*mnitt, and as it is we’re the most generous country in the whole freakin’ world.

If we get hit with a Tornado, few countries come to our aid.

Oh, and for the record, I think America should be much more ashamed and humiliated over our last President, as opposed to this one, who major flaw right now is that he’s inarticulate. I’ll take that over dishonesty any day.

47

So you are 27.5% smarter than POTUS. I guess I will just have to give your opinions more weight in the future. By the way, My SAT score, which I took with a hangover after being in a coma for a week was…

48

TWTCommish: a small word of advice: never ever defend a politician’s honesty. There’s no profit in it. The only reason why you would ever think Dubya’s more honest than Clinton is that you don’t yet have enough info on him.
Nixon was a Republican. 'Nuff said.

49

Because public places and/or proceedings involve people. That is, lots of people. And in America, most of them are Christians.

Said Christians, however fervent or Bible-thumping they may or may not be, don’t particularly feel their beliefs must be The Thing That Cannot Be Mentioned, because your sensibilities are too easily offended.

If you believe in another deity, that is perfectly fine. When a Buddhist president is elected, I’m sure you’ll be misty-eyed as the Buddhist invocation is given at the inaguration.

If you are an athiest, you are a non-believer in something. So don’t believe. Your belief system involves not doing something. Our belief system involves doing something.

You have every right to be an Athiest, Satan worshipper, Pagan or whatever else you want to be or not be religiously in America. But this whole idea that religious expression in any situation other than in private is an affront to otherwise-believing people is crap.

I won’t make you pray. You don’t tell me when, where and whether I can or can’t. Deal?

(It may be important for you to know that last question is rhetorical.)

50

I knew someone would interpret it that way :rolleyes: I honestly wasn’t trying to “brag”, I was just giving it as a reason of why I feel about it the way I do. I simply didn’t care about the SAT, and still blew it away. I don’t think it means I’m some amazing genius, rather, I think it means the SAT is just so banally simple that anyone should be able to blow it away. I have no respect for something that I did not have to work for, and I feel no pride about an “achievement” that took no effort…and thus, I have no respect for anyone holding up the SAT as an achievement. Wow, you passed basic education. Good for you.

51

TWTCommish:

Let me put it this way–I’d be very surprised if, in absolute numbers, more serious crimes were committed by non-Christians than Christians in this country, due simply to the fact that there are so many more Christians than non-Christians. You’re saying that even though non-Christians compose–what is it?–twenty percent of the population, they commit over fifty percent of the “serious” crimes? I find that extremely hard to believe.

52

Doesn’t the Protestant Ku Klux Klan carry around a cross? Didn’t the Roman Catholic Spaniards commit genocide against the god-less heathens in the New World? How about the terrorists (on both sides) in the middle east killing for Allah or to defend land that their religious beliefs say belong to them. Have you looked at the relative crime rates in Oregon and Washington (the two least church going states in the US) and compared it to Texas and the other Bible belt states? How about the religious pro-life people that blow up Family Planning clinics and shoot Doctors.

Boy this makes my blood boil

53

Getting back OT…

In every big ceremony I’ve ever been at, public or private, someone at some point gave a prayer. Every, single, time. And the deity cited was invariably God-with-a-capital-G. At no point did anyone ever protest, and no one at any point, before, during, or after the ceremony, even bothered to ask if there was anyone who might be offended. (I’m pretty much an agnostic and I find these more tiresome and annoying than anything.) The general assumption is that if you don’t believe, just shut the hell up and don’t spoil it for those who do.

Like it or not, there’s a powerful assumption among many Americans that if you don’t worship God-with-a-capital-G (am I the only one who finds this practice really presumptuous?), you’re a bad, bad person and will go to Hell and stuff. And in large, formal gatherings, people are going to pray. Period. And if you try to stop them, in all likelihood they’ll scream bloody murder. Personally, I’m completely against public prayer. In addition to Jesus’ own admotion that prayer should be private, which I totally agree with, I don’t think anyone’s cause is well served by forcing one’s religious beliefs on those who don’t believe. However, many people do believe, and I certainly don’t feel it’s worth it to raise a huge stink over an occasional prayer, so I grit my teeth and ride it out.

Now, in the case of George W. Bush, given the man he is, the party he’s in, the company he keeps, and a voiciferous Coalition that’s going to be watching his every move (especially in the wake of Godless Commie Clinton), there’s no way in heck that he’s going to have an inauguration without some kind of religious trappings. And yeah, it’s kinda tacky, but it’s only once every four years, and it’s not like anyone’s forced to go, so I say let’s not raise a huge stink over it.

I’d be much more concerned if a group of religious radicals tried to take over our parks, libraries, police departments, streets, banks, etc. If that ever happens, you can bet that I will be on the streets raising hell and demanding justice along with the rest of what should be a massive protest.

54

That seems like a negative approach to things, don’t you think? Nixon was a Republican: whoop-ty-doo.

The reason I think Clinton is so terrible is because not every President is involved in a sex scandal, bombs a country to draw attention away from it, is accused of rape and sexual harrasment by several other women, and basically admits to lying under oathe after he leaves office.

Now, no one is totally honest, but I think Bush is overall an honest person. I’m not cyncial enough to believe that all politicans are dishonest.

55

Maybe it wouldn’t if you had read what I’d said correctly: if they follow the religion, they will be an asset to our society. That is true - a good Christian man or woman is a nice person by nature. However, many are not where they should be.

In short: the Faith is against these terrible things you mention, and if some “Christian” goes nuts and blows up an abortion clinic (yes, abortion clinic - family planning? C’mon), he’s acting against the religion. Isn’t this obvious?

Gadarene: This goes back to me mentioning that a lot of people call themselves Christians, but are not Christians. You really believe 8 out of 10 people strive to please Jesus Christ and live by the ways of the Bible? My grandmother goes to church now and then, and she believes in some kind of God, but as far as I know she’s not truly a Christian.

And besides: I figured they’d makeup a large part of the population here (apparently they made up 30% of the world’s population back in 1998 or so), so you’d have to look at the rates in relative terms to the population numbers.

56

If a Christian commins an immoral act, he is no longer a Christian - therefore, all Christians are moral people?

Nice display of circular logic.

57

matt moves his chair another few inches north
not much space is left in matt’s bedroom to move his chair

58

Uh, nice try. :slight_smile:

I believe there are some things that, if the person has truly given his or her hear to God, a Christian will not do…plain and simple.

My friend has asked me that several times: what if I’m a Christian, but I kill a bunch of people? To be frank, if you’re really a devoted Christian, I don’t think you’d kill a bunch of people.

That clear things up?

59

Exscuse the spelling mistakes in my last post - for some reason It won’t let me edit my post to correct them.

60

It sure does. It’s usually referred to as the “True Scotsman” fallacy, and it is indeed circular logic, or more exactly, begging the question.

See also:

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~acr/argue.htm