RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Islamic ignorance

CUT AND PASTER!!!

Considering that at least two of the major acts of Islamic terrorism against the US were accomplished during Democrat administrations (the 1979 hostage crisis and the 1993 world trade center attacks), that's a pretty silly statement to make. In fact, I would submit that it only proves my point that this is about nothing so much as hatred of republicans and Bush on your part

No, what's silly is that after discussing ad naseum that there is no such thing as a "Democrat" Administration or party, you're just so single minded partisan enough to continue using it.

It's "Democratic Administration" or "Democratic Party", Not "Democrat Party". As I've said, knowing that no such thing exists but continuing to use it because the fringe right in your party wants to rename the DEMOCRATIC Party in the worst way, just makes you look small, (willfully) ignorant and petty.

Ands yes yes, there are Democrats. that doesn't mean that they belong to the "Democrat Party" as much as you right wingers would love to think so. And yeah, it may chap your hide to have something as noble sounding as "Democratic" attached to the Democrats and not something that sounds vile, like "Rat" for instance , but too bad.

um.. oookay? Who told you that nonsense?

Here's a refresher on the issue of Sunday mail service which raged around the early 1800's.

The degree to which a secular approach to government was accepted in early 19th-century America was demonstrated by Congress' refusal to abandon Sunday mail service, which it had mandated in 1810. The 1844 invention of the telegraph would eventually put an end to the commercial need for daily mail, but in the 1820s and '30s, business still depended on the government to keep the mails moving seven days a week. Nevertheless, powerful right-wing religious leaders waged an unceasing campaign against the sacrilege of Sunday mail, which some considered a more important moral issue than slavery. But evangelical Christians and freethinkers, who had joined together to write and ratify the secular Constitution, wanted no part of government sanction for a religious Sabbath.

In 1828, Congress referred the godly mess to the powerful Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads. Its chairman was Kentucky Senator Richard M. Johnson—a general, a hero of the War of 1812, and a devout Baptist. Johnson's report to Congress uncompromisingly declared that any federal attempt to give preference to the Christian Sabbath would be unconstitutional. He reminded his fellow legislators of the religious persecutions and intolerance that had impelled their revolutionary predecessors to draw a firm line—"the line cannot be too strongly drawn"—between church and state.

So much for separation of church and state being a recently invented lie of the left.

Wonder Boy, really.... Right there plain as day you assert with all certainty that the separation of church and state is a creation of the 20th century. And it took me all of 2 minutes to show you that it was used way back in the early 1800's.

It helps having to actually research this for a paper in my political science class rather than going on the word of some right wingers book you may have read that assertion in..

Here the right-wing script goes awry, for it cannot explain why, if the founders intended to base the government on Christianity or monotheism, they failed to spell out their intentions in the Constitution itself. There was certainly ample precedent for doing so, not only in the Articles of Confederation but in nearly every state constitution.

When the Constitutional Convention opened in 1787, with George Washington as its president, legally entrenched privileges for Protestant Christianity were the rule. The Massachusetts Constitution extended equal protection of the law, and the right to hold office, only to Protestant Christians (restrictions that infuriated Adams, the state's favorite son). New York granted political equality to Jews but not to Roman Catholics. Maryland, the home state of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, gave full civic rights to Protestants and Catholics but not to Jews, freethinkers, and deists. In Delaware, officeholders had to attest to their belief in the Holy Trinity. Those were the good old days.

Thanks to the strong influence of Jefferson and Madison, Virginia stood alone among the states in guaranteeing complete civic equality and religious freedom to all citizens. In 1786, Virginians rejected a proposal by Patrick Henry to provide public financing for the teaching of Christianity in schools and instead passed an Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which ruled out tax support for religious instruction and religious tests for public office. Significantly, the new law was supported by a coalition of evangelicals, who—as a minority in a state dominated by Episcopalians—feared government interference with religion, and freethinking Enlightenment rationalists, who feared religious interference with government.

The influence of Virginia's law, enacted less than a year before the writing of the federal Constitution, cannot be overstated. The delegates in Philadelphia could have looked for guidance to a crazy quilt of conflicting state laws, rooted in religious prejudice and incestuous Old World church-state entanglements. Instead they chose the Virginia model, which, as Jefferson proudly stated in his autobiography, "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."


Now, confronted with the Constitution's silence on divine authority, revisionists like Wonder Boy repeatedly fall back on the specious argument that since everyone took God's omnipotence for granted in the 18th century, there was no need for the framers to make a special point of mentioning the deity. If that were true, there would have been no bitter debates in the states about the nonreligious language of the Constitution. Moreover, this line of reasoning is self-contradictory, coming as it does from a political/religious ideology that backs the appointment of "originalist" judges—those who insist that the Constitution can only mean exactly what it said at the time it was written. It is ludicrous to suggest that men as precise in their use of words as Adams and Madison would, perhaps in their haste to get home to their wives, have simply forgotten to mention God.

well the hostages were taken outside the US. Reagan's dealings with the hostages (October Surprise) combined with the whole Iran Contra dealings financed a lot of death.
Reagan gave a lot of aid to Saddam and bin Laden during the 80's.
Yes the 1993 attack was on Clinton's watch but, unlike 9/11 and Bush's fuck ups, I've never heard any charges that Clinton was negligent. And with the Arkansas Project blaming him for murder and drug dealing and every other crime under the sun I figure that might have come out if there was even the slightest charges.
Clinton did the rational thing and put a lot of CIA power into tracking down bin Laden, meanwhile Republicans were bitching that bin Laden was a waste of time and he was just trying to distract from Lewinsky.
Bush ignored the bin laden warnings, focused on missile defense in his 80's retro phase. And then Bush invaded the wrong country over false evidence which resulted in more terrorists and more hatred of America and also squandered the trust the world had in America.

G-man, you like to bitch whenever Bush is brought up but the fact is that as the current president pushing more and more warfare and violence he is very much central to the issue of terrorism. and he is central to many of the other issues in the world.

I for one am curious as to why Wonder Boy and his kind are so single minded in heir belief and desire to have the United States be thought of as being founded as a "Christian Nation". Of, by, and for, Christians, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary??

I have my suspicions (which have nothing to do with God or Religion) but I ask it openly first.

Well.. the fact that the people directly responsible for the attack were quickly caught, tried, and imprisoned might have a lot to do with that.




yes. Wag the dog. Clinton did nothing about terror. And many other baseless accusations, coming soon to a theatre near you.



Oh, and don't forget " no one could have imagined airplanes being used as missles".

this line has always bugged me. there was a tv show that may that had terrorists trying to crash a plane into the world trade center to start a foreign war for oil.
the military had a scenario involving hijacked planes crashing into buildings.
so the idea was out there. had the military followed procedure and not been told to stand down they would've been on those planes within a few minutes of them going off course. they were able to get Payne Stewart's plane that summer after going only a few miles off course.

I still maintain that there is much about 9-11 that we, the public, will never know.

I still feel that it was allowed to happen so that Bush could gain support for his planned war.

And so possibly was Pearl Harbor, to encourage US citizens to go to war, which they might not have done until the Axis powers had already gained too much of a stranglehold on the world.. which they just about had, at that point in late 1941.

Indeed, there are a lot of facts about 911 that doesn't add up. A lot of events that need further investigation and explanations.

But that the allegations that the Bush administration caused is too far a stretch if you ask me.

And yes, it could have been an inside job, and yes, Osama Bin Laden is the perfect scapegoat, but I doubt it.

And about Pearl Harbour, didn't some of the Japanese generals object to it because it would not be in their interests to provoke an enemy they knew they had no hope of defeating?

If I had been the Japanese Prime Minister, I would have ordered an invasion of Australia instead.

Or I would have made Japan a democratic republic before having to seek asylum elsewhere, being hunted down by right-wing nationalists.

Yeah, I had heard that, too.

I think near the end of " Tora! Tora! Tora! " one of the Japanese generals
says something like, "We have awakened a sleeping giant. "

Hi, my name is Chant and I would like to ask a serious question regarding muslims, Islam and pigs.

Earlier this week a company here in Denmark announced that they were developing a new type of bio-fuel.
To be more precise, a fuel made from dead animals mixed with diesel oil. This is of particuliar interest to farmers whose livestock have been inflicted with various diseases that disqualifies the meat for food.

Now, here comes the actual question. Among these dead animals are dead pigs. And as we all know, to muslims the pig is a "dirty" or "unclean" animal and they are not allowed to eat it.

But are they allowed to use it as fuel for their cars?

No they are not allowed to use such a fuel.

Pork is like Krytponite to Radical Muslims.

It makes them weak and sick.

Next time you are somewhere and a radical Muslim has a gun and is about to do horrible things to Americans,just throw a package of bacon at him!

He'll go down like a sack of potatoes!

Remember - eat and carry pork products with you at all times, or you'll be letting the terrorists win!

What does that have to do with me?

Would training pigs as suicide bombers against terrorists be considered using "Dirty Bombs"?

No, that would be considered a damnned good strategy!

Remember the (possibly apocryphal) Blackjack Pershing story! I always thought we should blanket all terrorist sites/nations with pork rinds before be blow them up so they know that they aren't going to heaven.

Clever!

maybe Animal Farm will come true as pigs are elected to fight terrorism.

The new secret weapon in the war against Terror!

An angry pig dude!

Now I'm gonna have "War Pigs" stuck in my head the rest of the day.

Thanks, Jerry!



You say that like it's a bad thing, Sammitch...

You know what you can do with your slanderous suspicions.



It was only by quoting me in excerpts out of context that what you quoted from me loses its clarity.

The "separation of church and state" simply is that no sect of Christianity will be imposed on the entire people of the United States, as the Anglican Church was in England, and as the Roman Catholic church was in Italy and other large sections of Europe.

But God is referred to four times in the Declaration of Independence.

And the Constitution is not simply dated, but also inscribed "in the year of our Lord..."

Further, the clear role intended of the Bible and Christian principles in American democracy is clear in the writings of virtually all our founding fathers.
As I said before, Christianity was intended to be taught in schools, and God was frequently referenced in our courts and government up until the 1960s. Even the Supreme Court, Senate and Congress still open in prayer, as do our Presidential inaugurations, and chaplains are provided in all branches of the U.S. military as well.

You seem to feel "separation of church and state" means the total separation of Christianity from any branch of government or education. Clearly Jefferson did not see it that way, and none of the other founding fathers even use that phrase.
Jefferson did no major writings on the subject, and his only use of the "wall of separation between church and state" phrase is in an obscure 1802 letter Jefferson wrote in response to an inquiry by the Danbury Baptists.

Jefferson simply meant that religious leaders should not control U.S. government. Not that all mention of the Bible or Christianity, or even prayer, should be banned from our schools and government, as has been increasingly occurring over the last 40-plus years.



What you suggest simply insures that Christians will be marginalized and isolated from having any representation or political voice in establishing the morals and government of the United States.

That is absolutely not what our founders intended:




And here is further expansion on the political manipulation of the wall of separation of church and state phrase, as explained by Christian history scholar David Barton.

Um... you forgot to comment on this part.

You don't even know what they are and yet you call them slanderous.





I see you omitted the parts where you were completely obliterated in you assertions, such as "separation of Church-State" being a 20th century creation. So please dn't speak to me of quoting you in excerpts. It's your bread and butter, dude.



That's your "proof"??!!! Falling back on a once-common manner of dating important papers as unrevealing of religious intent as the use of B.C. and A.D. is today. Again, what about the Constitution ITSELF? Nothing. You'd place more weight on the dating on the top of the document than on it's content.

As for The Declaration, I already pointed out that the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence and many state Constitutions at the time had references to Go inside them and religious restrictions and tests.

 Originally Posted By: whomod

When the Constitutional Convention opened in 1787, with George Washington as its president, legally entrenched privileges for Protestant Christianity were the rule. The Massachusetts Constitution extended equal protection of the law, and the right to hold office, only to Protestant Christians (restrictions that infuriated Adams, the state's favorite son). New York granted political equality to Jews but not to Roman Catholics. Maryland, the home state of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, gave full civic rights to Protestants and Catholics but not to Jews, freethinkers, and deists. In Delaware, officeholders had to attest to their belief in the Holy Trinity. Those were the good old days.

Thanks to the strong influence of Jefferson and Madison, Virginia stood alone among the states in guaranteeing complete civic equality and religious freedom to all citizens. In 1786, Virginians rejected a proposal by Patrick Henry to provide public financing for the teaching of Christianity in schools and instead passed an Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which ruled out tax support for religious instruction and religious tests for public office. Significantly, the new law was supported by a coalition of evangelicals, who—as a minority in a state dominated by Episcopalians—feared government interference with religion, and freethinking Enlightenment rationalists, who feared religious interference with government.

The influence of Virginia's law, enacted less than a year before the writing of the federal Constitution, cannot be overstated. The delegates in Philadelphia could have looked for guidance to a crazy quilt of conflicting state laws, rooted in religious prejudice and incestuous Old World church-state entanglements. Instead they chose the Virginia model, which, as Jefferson proudly stated in his autobiography, "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."

I think that's what gets your goat. That it extends protection to EVERYONE by not favoring just one religion.

Religious reactionaries of the 18th century, by contrast, were honest in their attacks on the secularism of the new Constitution. One North Carolina minister observed with forthright disgust, during his state's ratification debate, that the abolition of religious tests for officeholders amounted to nothing less than "an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us." The Reverend John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York minister, declared the absence of God in the Constitution "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate" and warned that Americans would "have every reason to tremble, lest the Governor of the universe, who will not be treated with indignity by a people more than by individuals, overturn from its foundation the fabric we have been rearing, and crush us to atoms in the wreck."

The marvel of America's founders, even though nearly all of the new nation's citizens were not only Christian but Protestant, was that they possessed the foresight to avoid establishing a Christian or religious government and instead chose to create the first secular government in the world. That the new Constitution failed to acknowledge God's power and instead ceded governmental authority to "We the People…in order to form a more perfect Union" was a break not only with historically distant European precedents but with recent American precedents, most notably the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which did pay homage to "the Great Governor of the World," and the Declaration of Independence, with its majestic statement that "all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." It is worth noting here that the Declaration was a bold and impassioned proclamation of liberty, while the Constitution was a blueprint for a real government, with all the caution about practical consequences (such as divisive squabbles about the precise nature of divine authority over earthly affairs) required of any blueprint.



John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, to name only a few, were prolific writers who contradicted themselves (and one another) frequently. They certainly believed in some form of God or Providence, as Enlightenment rationalists preferred to call the deity, but that is all we can conclude with reasonable certainty. Jefferson's political opponents in the early 1800s were as mistaken to call him an atheist as you are are to claim him as a committed Christian. (For one thing, Jefferson emphatically rejected the idea that Jesus was divine and instead regarded him as a great but wholly human teacher of morality.) Adams' critics and admirers, then and now, have been equally misguided in their attempts to portray him as a man of orthodox faith.

What did distinguish the most important revolutionary leaders was a particularly adaptable combination of political and religious beliefs that included strong hostility toward all ecclesiastical hierarchies. The Enlightenment conviction that if God existed, he expected humans to rely on their own reason to conduct earthly affairs; and the assignment of faith to the sphere of private conscience rather than public duty. These convictions carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution.



I already addressed this point. You asserted that Separation of church-state was a 20th Century invention and now after being proven wrong you're backpedaling and minimizing Jefferson's thoughts on the subject.

The founders themselves had varying ideas about how much distance to place between their own beliefs and their public roles. Washington saw nothing wrong with issuing presidential proclamations of thanks- giving to God; Jefferson considered such proclamations unconstitutional. Justice Scalia predictably cites Washington's thanksgiving proclamations in support of Ten Commandments displays and dismisses Jefferson's position. In an amusing 1814 letter to his friend Thomas Cooper, Jefferson noted that even Connecticut—which had still not dropped religious restrictions in its state constitution—declared that "the laws of God shall be the laws of their land, except where their own contradict them."



You seem to place Christianity, which is the majority religion in this country as somehow being the minority religion and in peril of being marginalized by the atheist majority. Odd for someone who rails against the claims of victimhood from REAL minorities.

someone goofed on their bold tags.

"God" is a generic term used by many, if not all, religions in some form or another. so is "creator."
In fact back then it was an accepted "fact" that there was a god and it was risky to even hint that there wasn't or that the bible was wrong. which is why Jefferson wrote his own bible that took the fairy tale and stripped away the magic and sci-fi to make it more of a generic morality tale. but Jefferson was afraid of the backlash from it so it was hidden away until one of his decendants uncovered it.

I omitted a lengthy bit of filler material on your part, that bypasses my point with interpretations and rulings decades later. The 1962 U.S. Supreme Court ruling removing prayer from schools could be listed by you also, but it does not, in the slightest represent the intent of those who signed the Constitution and Declaration.
It was a completely arbitrary ruling, with no prior precedent, and with no intent to rule based on what our founders actually intended.

My concern is not with 200 years of rulings, but with the beliefs and intent of the original framers of our government.

Again: Their original intent was for the Bible to be a part of education and government, and the ONLY restriction on that was to not allow one denomination of Christianity (such as Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism, as I already said above) to be imposed on all citizens as an obligatory state religion.

The rest of what you post, while law that may apply to specifics of other cases, is just diversionary fluff on your part here.





Again, I already said that the private writings of Washington, Jefferson, Morris, etc., that I've quoted several times elsewhere, make clear their belief in Christianity and its essential role in Americvan government and education, and that its absence in Greek and Roman attempts at Democracy is what doomed those states to failure. That in the absence of Christian principles, American democracy would be doomed to failure as well.



It doesn't bother me in any way.
So what?

The Framers allowed for all religions to be tolerated, but they intended for Christian principles to be the guiding moral influence.

The education bill (unclear in what you quoted, without source) was possibly rejected because it was feared one sect of Christian ideas could be imposed through that particular state-funded program. Or that it was redundant and a waste of tax dollars, in such an already strongly Christian and literate community.



Your source seems more focused on proving the bigotry and anti-semitism of the founders, rather than the intent of the founders. Even in the way it described those quoted.

These were founders who had left a Europe that had state-imposed religions, and there was heated debate, I'm sure, on how to safeguard religious freedom in the U.S., from falling under the same state-imposed sectarian hegemony.



Again, if the framers wanted a total secular break in the Constitution, they would not have included the phrase "In the year of our Lord..."

They would have simply written the date.

Clearly, they wished to include some degree of Christian reverence, as is evident in their other personal histories and writings.



There are a lot of liberal revisionists out there who allege all these guys were Deists, etc., or otherwise try to historically water down their clear beliefs.


That they believed in the Bible itself, and not the external church doctrine of any denomination.

That makes them neither Deist nor non-Christian.



As I said, my concern is not with arbitrary court writings interpreting, and often discarding, the Framers' original intent regarding the role of Christianity in American government.
My concern is with what the original framers themselves intended, as evidenced in their own actions and writings.

I fail to see that you've made a convincing case for exclusion of Christianity from government. I'm at this point utterly lost in just what it is you are trying to prove.



There's nothing to disagree with here. There was some controversy among the founders. They all seem Christian, and again seem to just debate to what level Christianity should be included in government institutions, law, education, etc.
The only question is to what degree it should be included or limited.

Any of their debate is a far cry from not even being able to pray in school or bring a bible, or to even display the 10 Commandments in a state courthouse.

Again, what is your point?




There can be no question that, despite Christians being the majority in this country (about 33% of churchgoers, but over 90% of Americans polled describe themselves as "Christian", although clearly not all of them are Bible readers) that despite this, there is a clear and stated intent by any number of radical groups to marginalize and silence Christians from having a voice in our government.

It's not paranoia when these groups state that as their intent, and with elite liberal judges on their side, leverage court rulings that are in complete opposition to the beliefs and values of a majority of Americans.

I seriously doubt it. Was this some history book sold in a christian bookstore?

Washington appeared to be a sincere Christian. Read his declaration of the first Thanksgiving

Jefferson appeared to believe in God but his writings show he was the type of man that needed concrete evidence. As previously mentioned the Jeffersonian bible removed all miracles and concetrated on moral logic. It is said he later recounted this action on his death bed, but that's a bit suspect.

Look, Ive got more than one degree in American history and I even teach it to this countries youth and what I've learned is this: This country was started for a hundred different reasons by thousands of different people. To some it was meant to be a Christian nation from the begining (The puritans called thier settlement "a city on the hill" , a beacon for others to see true Christian charity.) To some it was all about making money and bettering their lives (even at the cost of others), and to many it was meant to be a fresh start. Georgia was started by James Oglethorp to be a place for English debters in prison to get a second chance, while at the same time King George just wanted a buffer zone of poor people between the profitable Carolinas and Spanish Florida.

I think that's one of things that makes this country amazing is that we can all do, feel, and think what ever we want and we can lead the lives that we choose.

God I love living here!

Amen.

I completely agree.

I think I mentioned in my paper that I pasted here that both sides are essentially right and wrong. Which is pretty much what you said. It was a secular government started by mostly Christian men. when either side tries to negate the other is when we run into problems. Or when people try to rewrite history altogether to CONFORM to their particular biases.

i don't deny they had religious views and beliefs, just that they created a "christian government" as wondy insists. I have nothing but respect for the founders because they didn't try and impose those religious beliefs on the government they created.