Just declare the Constitution of the United States as being null and void, then. Problem solved.

Atheism is an anathema to your religious way of seeing things? With the Constitution out of the way, just pass laws that prohibit Unbelieve. Problem solved.

BTW, wasn't it Christ himself who admonished against praying like the Pharisees did, of making a big public show of one's personal dialogue with the Almighty?

-Kerry O.

This is what you said some time ago:



Really? How do you reconcile this statement with ones you've made lately about people with whom you disagree?

Pot. Kettle?

BTW, Einstein thought pretty little of quantum physics and later recanted somewhat, so if you're going to (mis)use him as your 'star witness', know that there is also a logical fallacy that covers this nicely called 'the argument from Universal Expertise'. The opinion of a genius in one field about another with which he has little knowledge is just that-- an opinion subject to all the vagaries of human vanity, prejudices and just as prone to error.

-Kerry O.

Just a guess, but I'd bet that this Christian woman wouldn't be refusing to handle paperwork recording heterosexual divorces on religious grounds.

I'm also sure that when the miscegenation laws were repealed, there was a similar acts of 'conscientious objection' to filing the paperwork for biracial couples, too. Google it up and see how what people were saying back then and compare it with present day 'political statements' like the one she is making by doing this. There were religious people back then who used scripture to justify their positions, too.

I thought public servants swore an oath to uphold the laws of the land, not just the ones with which they agree.


-Kerry O.

I can't speak for the Atheists, but *I* do it because of things that have taken place in history like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgardo_Mortara

Besides, this country still canonizes religious freedom, so it's my time to 'waste' as I see fit. I'm not doing it for the recognition and I'm not trying to 'win' anything. But when the Catholic Church thinks it can kidnap children based on it's dogma, *someone* has to oppose its 'authority'.

Because it's the right thing to do...

-Kerry O.

Now THERE's an authoritative source. LOL!



Well, considering there's only ONE atheist in Congress, I guess Christians will have to take the blame for it.

Myself, I KNOW there are two persuasions of Christians when it comes to politics-- there's the Religious Right, whose memebers beat the drum constantly, and there is a pretty silent majority many call the Christian Left.

But really, I think I can settle this one pretty quickly-- if Jesus were in Congress, do you _really_ think he'd side with the Religious Right on social welfare issues??






Wow, talk about a major league distortion! I think the cliche 'guns and butter' is pretty well understood--'guns' means military spending and 'butter' means social welfare programs.

And, I think if you check, welfare spending is about 1% of the budget and that churches couldn't possibly handle the load. In fact, wouldn't-- teakwood pews are often the kind of priorities that nose it out.

Lastly, your assertion that Atheists 'run none' is not only wrong, it's typical Religious Right bigotry.

Here's a list, by NO means totally inclusive of what's out there:

Atheist Relief Fund- collected money and supplies for Haiti Earthquake victims

Atheists Helping the Homeless- a small group based in Austin, Texas

And then there's the heavy hitter,

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Although I'm an Agnostic, I've given time and material to a church group that performs humanitarian work in Haiti. I don't even write it off on my taxes and I could care less who gets the CREDIT-- I only care that the people in need get the BENEFIT.

I suspect that's the case for most of the Agnosistics and Atheists I know. YOU wouldn't know this, most likely, because your attitude would put off any Unbelievers from becoming close personal friends (that is a guess, but seems likely.)

I really wish Fundies would drop the Holier Than Thou act.

-Kerry O.





Again, care to speculate how Jesus would come down on the issues of say the war in Iraq and making sure everyone can get healthcare?

-Kerry O.

So, what's the first thing the Religious Right does when it gets a leg up in Congress? People like Mitch McConnell say their numero uno prioity is to repeal health care and unseat a moderate Christian president. Besides bitching and moaning about how much in taxes they have to pay to support the social safety net. It's easier to drop a a sawbuck in the offering plate and feel good about yourself than to actually BE your brother's keeper.

See, that's why your post's logic fails-- Christian churches don't even begin to have the means to be doing what's claimed and they are stingy about the government money it takes to do it, preferring to spend it on guns rather than butter.

Or healthcare.

WWJD.

And that's another reason I don't believe in militant Christianity-- because if there were a God, he'd punish the people that talk out of both sides of their mouths.

-Kerry O.

I've actually been in that position, and I can tell you from experience that one sometimes gets horrible advice from someone one trusts as an expert.

Trouble is, *I* was the one that bore the brunt of their incorrect 'choices'. That doesn't mean that there was any malice or subterfuge involved-- they had the best of intentions, they just didn't have all the facts or the modern technology to reach a more informed diagnosis/prognosis.

And for some maladies, placebos work just fine. No harm, no foul. But to tout, for example, some like aspirin as being the cure for everything is a mistake, too. Because of my personal biochemistry, NSAIDS like plain old aspirin could conceivably set up a chain of events that could kill me.

But I'm not preaching against the evils of aspirin on that basis-- I'm just saying nothing works for everyone.

-Kerry O.

Living in Pennsylvania, I have to say I never saw anything that approached the hard sell the Toomey campaign put on in the closing days of the campaign. Everyday I went to the mailbox I could count on a new round of 8 1/2 x 11" glossy, full color flyers touting "MORE JOBS LESS GOVERNMENT". Even Comcast, the second most agressive junk emailer in my parts, couldn't keep up with him.

Being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall St., I think Pennsylvanians will rue the day they sent this guy to Washington. He's a throwback to the Bush Administration days, cast from the same mold as Phil Gramm and Rick Santorum.

-Kerry O.

No defense it needed if the 'officer' claims he is Barney Fife and he threatens to take you to the Mayberry jail and throw you in a cell with a drunk named Otis. All you have to do is change the channel.




Your whole argument fails on the logical fallacy of petitio principii-- the Latin term for the assumption that the very issue under discussion must be true by incorporating the conclusion of the argument into the premise that 'proves it'. It's a form of circular reasoning used constantly to 'prove' things in the Bible.


-Kerry O.

Sheesh, you guys can't even agree on what your 'Father' wishes and fight like cats and dogs. That you love your tether is more about you than about us, and if you take our refusing to be 'domesticated' to your food animal way of thinking as sin, who cares- it isn't disobedience, it's an inborn refusal to be placed under the yoke.

You know, Live Free or Die?

-Kerry O.

If one tethers a baby elephant to a stake and gives it a limited radius of choice of movement, even when it grows to be one of the most powerful animals on the planet, it will remember and takes it on faith that that limited range=its range of choice of movement.

The religious fundamentalist's concept of Free Will is a lot like that. It makes its adherents think that they can choose not to die by never testing testing the limits of that spiritual tether. Everything becomes a black & white choice based on faith in something that can't be proven or tested by inspection.

But, since it would NOT do to have elephants roaming free, those who choose another way, i.e. to live in the wild, they must therefor canonize domestication. Those who don't make such a choice to be domesticated are like the stray and vagrant deer of the field. They have to be scared into submission by something like Satan, the great hunter of stray and vagrant souls.

It never EVER occurs to them that one doesn't HAVE to choose domestication freed from a life of strife and danger over being a food animal in the wild. It only peripherally occurs to herd animals that by Freethought, one can be a powerful spiritual omnivore in one's own intellectual right.

-Kerry O.

I think your 'teddy bear' headline is kinda cute and the rest seems fine. If you try to write a profile that will make the angels weep in hopes that The Perfect Guy will fall out of the sky, the smart money will see it as being too contrived and deploy their parachutes.

More than anything, finding True Love on these sites is like shopping at Wal*Mart-- you have to rifle through a lot of cheap merch to find that one-of-a-kind future family heirloom in the clearance aisle.

-Kerry O. <---- roadkill on the Internet Highway of Love

Ask, and it shall be opened to you. :)




There. Happy now? :)


-Kerry O.

Ja,

The only thing I can tell you for sure is that there are worse things than dying. In some ways, it's a kindness the universe bestows on us when time has taken its toll on both your physical bodies and that part of spirit which lingers in this realm.

I was raised by Born Agains. They've all since gone to the eternal rewards in which they believed. They are gone from my sight, but they live on in my memory. As a secular humanist, I believe that the best of what we are passes on into what many of those who share that faith would call 'The Racial Memory'. And part of that Racial Memory is feeling both a deep-seated joy AND sorrow at such things as this sentiment from John Donne:




-Kerry O.

Thank you, yes. I'm six years post-op with only the scars to hint that anything that deadly ever happened to me. I seem to have lost the ability to speed read with the same very high degree of retentive comprehension I had before. Still, I count myself very fortunate.

-Kerry O.

Thank you, yes. I'm six years post-op with only the scars to hint that anything that deadly ever happened to me. I seem to have lost the ability to speed read with the same very high degree of retentive comprehension I had before. Still, I count myself very fortunate.

-Kerry O.

And you were healed of such. Our father works through people. He doesn't just show his face and say behold may Kerry be healed. No, our father works through people. That's where our conscience comes from. That is our father speaking to us to do his will. And our father gives us certain different abilities and skills to help others. It all boils down to where YOU want to give the credit to. If you want to rob our father of his blessing of you being healed and give it straight to the doctors so be it. But nevertheless our father gave them the knowledge and the ability to heal you of such.



No, that's strictly YOUR OPINION. You admit you have no evidence. On the other hand, I can point to EXACTLY what healed me and tell you which doctors and clinicians spent a good part of their lives and a LOT of HARD WORK discovering and perfecting these techniques. I researched this as if my very LIFE depended on it- because it _did_. So it's not going to sit very well with me that someone with a religious one-track mind needs to steal the credit for this and give it to the object of that one-track-mindedness.

Truly, you weren't there and you don't know one thing about that ordeal-- neither the science or the experience. Sorry.

I have a neice who does this, too. At the time I was going through this, my mother was dying of an agressive cancer. After she died, my niece wrote me saying that Mother could have had a healing from "The Lord" if she had only the courage to ask for it. Here was someone who's biggest life's problem was deciding which Bible college she was going to be able to afford-- someone who had lived a pretty comfortable life provided for indirectly by that same grandmother who helped her Mother make it through nursing school to make a good living so that she needed for nothing-- judging the very source of that comfort harshly. When my sister finally left her husband because of child abuse and his refusal to do anything towards supporting the family in lieu of his Church work, my neice became openly verbally abusive to my sister. She turned even the most religious folks in my family against her, and then moved far away to escape the results.

That's what excessive religiosity does to some people. They completely lose their perspective in their religions.


-Kerry O.

Well, opinions vary and here's another one, this time from Sean Hannity:



-Kerry O.

Never mind that you completely dodged the point, did it never occur to you that Christ was just a MAN, too? Needed to be to make the legend stick, because a god is immortal. But I guess since contradictions are transparent to you, you probably wouldn't.


-Kerry O.

Does that not cut both ways in the case of Senator Reid, then? Right off hand, I'd say that if you want to compare their respective dirty laundries, even conservatives like Malkin think Ensign's is pretty darn bad and it would be better if he were to, as she put it, Just Go Away.




Well, you apparently didn't know him as well as you thought, huh?

And the old pattern is repeated, that when conservative Republicans act EXACTLY like liberal Democrats, they :::ahem::: "Made mistakes", whereas the latter have ______ <insert descirptions of grevious world shattering crime here). Sure, there's no doubt that touting one's image as a Promise Keeper for political advantage while screwing around is a pretty hefty mistake. But then offering up hush money to keep it quiet? Priceless. Far, far worse than anything you've accused Reid of in this "Thread He Doesn't Want You to Read."

BTW, I never defended "Billy Boy's" actions. His lapse of judgement might very well have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back and tipped the scales, making possible the disasterous Bush presidency.

-Kerry O.