But, of course, Fundamentalists see nothing wrong with taking little digs at the Unbelievers like mischaracterizing them as liars when they rebut The Agenda with pesky facts. Of being incapable of understanding the Truth, of being like you stated above 'easily impressed', mischaracterizing them as rubes and pawns of Satan.

Doesn't your religion teach something along the lines of 'you get what you give'?

To boot, you didn't touch any of the facts posted above. Are you throwing in the towel?


-Kerry O.

Read it again. I said he was one of its champions. NOW who isn't grasping distinctions? Both Madison AND Jefferson worked on Virginia's religious freedoms bill, which predates the Constitution.



Of course it does. The VERY words "a wall of separation of Church and State" are spelled out by one of the Founding Fathers himself. In plain English! He said it! And, apparently, O'Donnell doesn't know he said them.

And if you want to get all 'insightful', puzzle me this: if they indeed intended this to be a CHRISTIAN nation, why aren't the names Jesus or Christ or Christian spelled out right in the Consitution or its amendments in equally plain English?



Sorry, not my job. The Courts have done that.





Oh please. Pat Roberston and Jay Sekulow, that dynamic duo who brought us the ACLJ, have filed a suit to prevent it. That's an easy-to-verify fact.

And this quote from Newt Gingich can't be interpreted any other way:







I never said you were a monster. I think you do have some bizarre Fundamentalist viewpoints you defend with equally bizarre Biblical paraphrasing and this is one of them. I'd make you a deal that if I searched the archives and found it, you'd recant, but you'd just complain I was taking your direct quote out of context or other such debating tactic. You've made a lot of those kind of "deals" in the past and then walked away from them when people held your feet to the fire.


-Kerry O.

No, that's a truism-- the phrase 'Separation of Church and State' does indeed NOT appear in the First Ammendment. However, one of its champions, Thomas Jefferson, IS on the record elsewhere saying that that WAS his intent of what WAS there. It's a legal doctrine as old as the Constitution itself. For O'Donnell to pretend it doesn't exist doesn't bode well for her candidacy.



And the Religious Right proved they were talking out of both sides of their mouths on the issue of religious freedom when they tried to prevent PRIVATE LAND from being used for a mosque in New York recently.

If one is the LEAST bit objective about American's Founding Principles, one sees over and over and over again in The Federalist Papers that the movers and shakers behind the Constitution fully understood how the rights of minorities needed protection against the tyranny of the majorities and the mischiefs they could inflict on law-abiding members of those minorities.

You yourself once wrote here that Unbelievers slaughtered at the direction of God Almighty in the Old Testament were indeed fortunate because they could sin no more. With that kind mindset, who WOULD trust fundamentalist Christians to NOT do legal violence to minorities were the First Amendment not there as a stumbling block to their religious and political ambitions?

-Kerry O.

Well, you're a conservative and instead of condemning Bush for holding it, you used it to refute an assertion that Bush's religiosity crossed the line.

I just read in the news today that one of the Tea Party candidates claimed that the First Amendment didn't _really_ have an Establishment clause in it pertinent to religion.

Oooops.


-Kerry O.

I don't recall anyone appointing you umpire, Mr. Bicep. For your information, one of my best friends is a woman for longer than all my other relationships with women combined.

Having testicles doesn't _necessarily_ mean one doesn't have any self-control.

-Kerry O.

j

I'm sure you know of the phrase 'Friends with Benefits'? Sometimes it means that the guy gets the benefit of fixing the girls' cars and electronics.

And sometimes, too, the radars stay on but he's just not that into you and there's a Failure to Launch. That one rarely works out well, either.

Honest enough?


-Kerry O.

Sure, and I've done so in the past. They usually don't last, though, because Three's A Crowd. Then too, sometimes women can't handle having the guy having the power to say 'No.'

-Kerry O.

Isn't that interesting? One wonders what would be said if Obama did the same thing...

-Kerry O.

Um, how would a terrorist supporter have gotten into a "Closed Door Meeting" in the first place? Or are you taking liberties with the phrase 'terrorist supporter' to mean anyone who doesn't support George Bush or the Religious Right agenda for America? BTW, does this 'terrorist supporter' have a name?

From Stephen Mansfield’s unauthorized 2004 campaign hagiography, The Faith of George W. Bush. In it, Mansfield sets out an account of events following upon that phone call, based on an apparently recent interview with Robison:




-Kerry O.

And of course those odds go down considerably if you're in N. Ireland where Protestants and Catholics have been killing each other for decades.


-Kerry O.

Some of the more radical ones on here have frequently stated we MUST nuke Iran.

Madelalyn Murray O'Hair was the frequent target of death threats after her suit before the Supreme Court was won in the early 60's and which declared compulsory prayer in public schools to be unconstitutional. She and two members of her family were murdered and federal agents were left to solve the case after the Austin P.D. showed a marked apathy for finding the person(s) responsible. Even after the murder was found and convicted, he was sentenced to only 20 years for three murders.

More recently, radical Christians have called for atheists to be barred from holding public offices.

Jesus himself is purportedly quoted in the Bible as saying "Think not that I come to bring peace to the world, but a sword." (And yes, I KNOW that it will be stated that that was only a metaphor not to be taken literally. But if that's true, why do the same people who way that take EVERYTHING Islam says as literal?)

-Kerry O.

I'd say the number would be porportional to that of other religious creeds.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, would you say that was the work of Muslim extremism or just that of the Baath Party (which, if memory serves, was started by a Christian)?

Or how about this? Were the Viet Cong extremists, or a product of the time in which they lived? And if so, where are they now that America is again making nice with a unified Viet Nam?

-Kerry O.

They go nicely with the Blue Screen of Death.

-Kerry O. "Galaxy not found- press any key to reboot Universe."

If Microsoft made lightbulbs, they would get a patent on bulbs that suck darkness instead of ones that gave off light. (And declare them an industry standard.)

-Kerry O.

I don't take any chances. I have a cynical profile AND a dishonest picture.

-Kerry O. "...and I'm going to take all the money I've saved on contraceptives over the years and use it to buy a boring, dependable car."

If you're trying to imply that that's typical Muslim behaviour ( and I don't believe it is, it's just the work of extremists brainwashing those children), haven't you dealt your argument that Obama is a Muslim a fatal blow? I doubt that you can find one instance of him approving of that sort of behaviour.

I would suggest that merely the fact we are still in Afghanistan also bodes ill for the argument that he's a closet Muslim.

But hey... opinions vary.


-Kerry O.

Precisely. But Gummi seems to think there is some link.

-Kerry O.

But Gummi, when the surgeons at Johns Hopkins did surgery on me, they were getting rid of something (if you believe God makes people) of something allegedly put there by your god. Apparently, I was born with the abnormal lesion and it just got worse.

And that lesion did not consist of my or other peoples' sins or disobedient actions. All the prayer in the world couldn't have made it go away. The ancient Hebrews, even on their best day, couldn't have designed and built the machines that the doctors used to diagnose and pinpoint it. The doctors of the middle ages could never have developed the skills to deal with it either.

It's fortunate that I was born in the Age of Reason. Otherwise, my life would have probably been a short and painful one.

-Kerry O.

Yes, but did he _choose_ to attend those schools? Did he embrace that radicalism?

How could he? He was only a child at that point.

We all know stories of people who were raised in less-than-ideal backgrounds and circumstances who threw off the yoke of wrongheaded thinking and went on to become exemplars of society.

Likewise, we probably all could name people from privileged backgrounds who went on to commit awful crimes.

One thing is for sure-- we can repudiate our parents, but somehow some particle of the relationship bubbles up to the surface sometimes to haunt us if the sum of the parts of that relationship didn't add up to an ideal one.

-Kerry O.

Truth be told, you're not a bad sort-- I've had far more agressive leisure debate partners over the last 20 years of discussing politics on the Internet. The nature of the beast seems more aptly described as triage surgery in a war zone. A lot of the ideas die on the table and it's a messy bidness.

Paradoxically, often the most interesting people are the ones with whom you disagree the most vehemently. And they're often the ones who have the most staying power, as they can take a roundhouse punch with a million dollar smile and land one in their opposite's intellectual solar plexus before their opponents know what hit them.

I'd never run for office myself. LOL, these days you have to some kind of masochist with a post-grad degree in narcissism to get anywhere.



-Kerry O.