Yes, but your comparison of gobear to Dobson is dependant on gobear intending his insults as assertions of fact. Trying to give an over-the-top insult (gobear) the same weight as dire, malicious, ignorant missinformation (Dobson) is . . . naive at worst, reaching at best.
I haven’t gone back and read all the posts in this thread, but AFAIK, you are still unwilling to apologize for the remark. In fact, didn’t you open this thread for the express purpose of justifying your remark? So, if it was a snarky, non-factual comment, how about an apology to the “fundies”?
And I don’t count your apology for hijacking the CS thread. That’s like bumping into someone in the store, and apologizing to all the other customers for interruptering their shopping experience, but not apoligizing to the guy you bumped into.
When they apologize to me for their behavior first, not before. All I did was make nasty comments, they are trying to draft a fucking amendment to the constitution to take away my rights. If you think those are equivalent in offense, you’re more of a fool than I thought.
And why do you omit any mention of Dobson’s which, in contrast to my comments, were meant to be taken seriously by his target audience? Why do you expect perfect rectitude from the people are being attacked but you give enormous latitude to the attackers?
I thought that even if the amendment is passed, the state will still be able to choose if they will perform civil unions. Is this the case? What happens if the ammendment goes through?
I haven’t seen Dobson’s comments. If he made them in the Pit, well, that’s what the Pit is for-- emotional ranting that doesn’t need to be backed up. The other forums, eg CS, are not meant to be like that. If he made similar comments outside the Pit, he should apologize, too.
JD:
This thread in GD explains that the amendment will not support civil unions. It’s somewhat of a debate out in the real world, but I think the overwhelming evidence is that the amendment won’t support CUs.
Sorry got called away. Anyway say you contribute to a church and it gets earmarked to pay the electric bill because you have said you don’t want it to go to an anti-gay group or any other group for that matter. Your money goes to the electric bill but that is less money they have to take out of the general fund that they use to support these groups. Less money they have to take out translates to more money to spend and more money to support these groups.
In short while your intentions are admirable, in the end it results in more money for them to spend. It is still part of the problem even though **your ** money will never see the likes of Dobson or Falwell.
It’s one of the great mysteries of (my) life that I haven’t yet grasped what has caused belief in archaic God(s) to increase in the US when, in the rest of the developed, industrialised, educated world such beliefs continue to taper off in the face of scientific advances.
I can only think religion must serve a psychological purpose absolutely specific to the US experience – it surely must. Perhaps it serves an emotional need in a country born in a hurry, a country born in the fire of religious idealism rather than social practicality . . . of course, I’m just guessing. But that is one distinguishing characteristic between the US experience and Canada/Australia/New Zealand, as well as European nations.
I sometimes wonder if other modern, industrialised, educated peoples don’t need Gods because those societies are rooted in other than religion - take Christianity away from the past 300 years of America, and much is missing from the bedrock of that society. Religion does serve a much more significant role in the ‘soul’ of that one country.
Whatever it was/is, the US experience of God(s) is utterly different to all comparable societies; things have happened in the past 300 years or so to take the people of the US off on an emotional tangent that, I would vouch, seems extraordinary to most 21st century observers.
I, like everyone I know in a near Godless Britain, believes our history lies not in the Christian Bible, but in our DNA and the rocks around us . . . and that to believe in Adam and Eve in the face of all that science has shown us . . . seem irrational.
As if it’s filling a specific emotional void. Can anyone see that argument; that fundamentalism in the US serves a greater purpose than belief in Jesus Christ, that to believe in Jesus Christ is to believe in the United States itself ?
I admire your fortitude, gobear, wish you well with this.
LC:
Good question. The standard answer is that the US was originally populated largely by Europeans fleeing religious persecution in Europe. There is some truth to this in the early, early days (mid-1600s), but I’m sure that those who followed were more economic immigrants than religious. And even if you do accept that “standard answer”, it was 350 years ago…
Maybe it’s just that we have a history of misfits here. Some are godless individualists, and others are religious fundamentalists. There is less social pressure to conform to a national norm. I’m thinking of the current situation in France wrt to (what we would call) headscarf-gate.
Just by you saying that, you know your answer doesn’t adequately meet the question. But it’s got you considering something different, which is good.
But there very much is a social norm, it’s an irrational belief in an ancient God, at least from the pov of an outsider like myself. That is the exact opposite of misfits. And there is enormous pressure to conform to that norm, not just in conventional terms (media, family, peers, pressure to be ‘normal’, etc) but in this historical sense of it being ‘American’ - some of your very identity is tied to this religious norm.
This is not a criticism, it’s the point from which others have to begin to attempt to understand why the people of your country have uniquely gone down this path. There is, after all, an explanation somewhere – it might be in the water supply or the food chain, but I tend to believe it has to be in history. Somewhere.
So in this observers view, Christian fundamentalism an extraordinary, spectacular, irrational, emotionally-driven (imho) social norm.
And perhaps as interestingly, if one accepts the potential for a link between belief in Jesus Christ and identify/belief with the nation state itself (as per my last post), belief in Jesus Christ can then be fuelled by patriotism, and patriotism can also be fuelled by belief in Jesus Christ because . . . belief in both is, ultimately, indistinguishable.
Perhaps at that point, some may understand why to outsiders the US can sometimes be scary.
…and further
“There is properly no history, only biography.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good post.
Gobear said:
Maybe I’m feeling a little trollish. Or maybe the thread has died down enough for me to ask a genuine question. But while I can see the comparison better when it comes to gay bashing, when we are talking about same sex marriage and the attempts by some to prevent that while doing nothing else to hurt gays and lesbians (and you must admit that most people who let their religion or their “weak stomachs” drive their opinion on SS marriage would never call for your murder) isn’t comparing oneself with the victims of the KKK or the Nazis just a wee bit over the top? Just a scosh victimish? Perhaps even somewhat shrill? This is NOT the rise of the Brown Shirts. Yeah, I can see the camel’s nose, too, but that is a decrepit, old camel who can scarcely get down on his knees anymore, much less nose his way into a tent. He is getting to be a joke, jumping up and down as best he can and demanding attention.
Ignore him. That amendment is going nowhere and now is not the time to get overly dramatic about it. Marches and shouting matches will not win this fight just as the Stonewall riot did not win homosexuals the rights and respect they have today. What did it was gay people showing the world that they were good, kind, even normal people and not the child-molesting fiends of fiction. The battle is nearly over and victory is in sight. There are still some skirmishes ahead but if good people stick together, gay and straight, religious and not, ten years from now few people will find married gays odd and our descendants will look at this battle as some quaint remnant of a bygone age, much like London_Calling and his European friends view American religiosity.
BTW, as I am my church’s librarian the assistant pastor has given me only two rules: no fiction and no Dobson. His attitudes toward gays is only part of what makes him creepy. You atheists are asked to leave the “no fiction” opening alone. We know what you think. 
But it does. Believing an obvious load of drivel written by camel jockeys 2000 years ago is the absolute truth about everything is by nature stupid and ignorant. If I were to tell you that I thought rock carvings of lizards and birds on the walls of caves made by aborigines were made by the creator of the universe and that we should order our days based on our understandings of what those rock carvings said, even if that meant ignoring things we’ve learned since then that have tons of evidence to back them up, I’d be pretty damned stupid and ignorant. Well, the Bible’s pretty much the same thing.
Thing is, just about anybody on the planet could make a list of things that you are ignorant about. Different people know different things. If you believe that ignorance is damnable in se, then your judgments about ignorance are just boomerangs. Fighting ignorance begins with self.
This is where I reveal the depth of my current paranoia, the fear that has gripped me ever since I saw the President call me and the man I love a threat during the State of the Union address. It got me to thinking about what happens if we lose this fight. So I started doing some research, which is one of my usual responses to fear. It hasn’t helped.
From what I’ve learned, nobody ever believe that things can get as bad as they do. Nobody ever sees the brownshirts coming.
And we’ve been in sight of victory before.
Things looked good for homosexuals in Germany in the aftermath of the first World War. There was a thriving homosexual culture, gay bars and cabarets were trendy places for the avant-garde to hang out, and an emancipation movement for homosexuals, focused on the elimination of paragraph 175 of the criminal code was in full swing. How many people would have believed that in a decade, homosexuals would be driven into camps and worked to death in numbers reaching the hundreds of thousands?
It was an enormous leap, but the steps taken to get there were small.
I’m starting to think that there’s a lot more to lose in this fight than the right to marry. If we lose this, we’ll be branded by the Constitution as a separate class of citizens, with fewer rights than non-gays. And according to the polls, the American people won’t object to this too much. We don’t have the ability in most places in the US to challenge being fired because of our sexuality. We can be kicked out of our houses for being gay, and we can’t do a thing about it. We don’t have a lot of resources to fall back on, legally speaking. It was only a few months ago that laws which condemned us to jail for loving each other were declared unconstitutional.
I got this in my email on Tuesday.
That’s part of an email I get regularly from the gay and lesbian community center.
The idea that we’re out of the woods, that the fundies are defeated, that we’ll be equal in no time and have nothing to fear is tempting, but I don’t have enough faith in humanity to not have examined the other options. Things can revert; they can get worse for us, and can even get worse than we can imagine. We’re an easy target, and in a country that’s moved towards religion as heavily as this one has in the past couple of decades, we’re a likely target.
I know, I sound paranoid. I know it seems impossible. But it’s happened before. And there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again.
Meanwhile, my boyfriend and I will keep watching the news, keeping tabs on how bad things get. And we’ll hope that we’re smart enough to leave the country before things get too bad; hope, basically, that we won’t delude ourselves into thinking that this can’t happen here until it does, and it happens to us.
Lastly, I want to mention that when Jewish people are sensitive about laws being passed against them as a group, nobody calls them paranoid. People understand their history of persecution, and realize that caution in this regard is a natural reaction. The gay men who died in the concentration camps are just as dead as the Jews who died there. And we have just as much reason to fear persecution as Jewish people do.
Nobody believes it can happen here and now. Nobody ever has.
[1] Rictor Norton (Ed.), “One day they were simply gone”: The Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals. Updated 21 Dec. 1999 <http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/nazi.htm>
For further information on the history of the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, please see these links.
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx/
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/nazi.htm
http://www.xs4all.nl/~kmlink/07gayhistory/framegayhistory.htm
We are all ignorant about many things. After all, who can know everything?
But the things on gobear’s list…to believe those things requires willfull ignorance.
So, you are ignorant of the circumstances that might compel someone to hold those particular beliefs. Just why is your ignorance any less willful than theirs?
The interesting question (for me, anyway) is why do so many Americans choose the path of wilful ignorance, why do they deny science in order to follow an archaic God ?
That is simply irrational. Surely anyone in the 21st century can see that is ignorant ?
Imho, there has to be a deep-seated emotional need in the character of the people (born of historical reasons and fuelled by the desire to conform) for something so plainly wrong to supersede what is perceived by peoples of all comparable countries to be common sense and/or an educated pov.
To the people of the US the Christian Bible must serve a purpose much more significant than the text it contains; the peoples of other countries have history itself, or great social achievements, or have something they share that contributes to them having a collective identity.
The people of the US have the Christian Bible. If you believe in your country, you believe in the Bible. How many times in an American’s life is that line sold to you overtly, covertly and subliminally ?
God Bless America ?
Enlighten me. Lib. What are the circumstances that would lead a reasonable person to those beliefs?
Do you hold those beliefs?
I would like to applaud gobear for this thread and his consistent, strong, and well argued stance. But more than that: for his righteousness.
Keep it up, buddy.