Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
No, no, no...all that terrible stuff must have been a result of secularism. That is what the Atheists claim this government was formed to be...right?
The early leaders of this country demanded that Religious based philosophies such as "Love God, and each other" and the "Golden Rule" had to be completely "separate" from the government.
So, you had the law allowing all those listed things...since it was secular.
They even said that The Constitution was not adequate to govern people that were not morally based in a Religious philosophy...but it didn't matter then, because most were and they never figured it wouldn't always be that way.
But, of course, they wanted to set it up so they could have the latitude to be the slavemaster, gender oppressing, genocidal barbarians *they* got off on being. A "Do Unto Others, as..." setup would not have worked for that.
It took guys like THE REVEREND Martin Luther King, President of The Southern CHRISTIAN Leadership Conference, to help finally get things completely squared away.
The article has it backwards. Moving away from the secular system that sanctioned all that horrible stuff...to more of the concepts like the REVEREND King promoted...is why it has gotten better.
Let me add a few more:
*the criminalization of homosexuality
*interracial marriage bans
*marital rape, which was legal in all 50 states until the 1970s (NC and OK, the last two holdouts, finally criminalized it in 1993)
*lack of child-labor laws, which allowed children to toil away in textile mills and mines and factories
I've made this same point many times. Over and over, I'd seen people dismiss the 'increasingly immorality' of this day and age. I always wonder what that could be. What that we do today could possibly be an increase in immorality over things like slavery? My guess is that it is some combination of not legally oppressing gays, not censoring television enough, not banning pornography, and so forth.
Yes - there are plenty of people would would happily accept back all those horrors of yesterday in exchange for gays being forced under threat of law back into the closet, and TV reverting to Leave It To Beaver-type moralizing and propriety, and a combination of laws and social pressure (read: political correctness) forcing women back into the kitchen where they'd have to wear modest clothes.
A lot of what fundamentalists decry as moral decay is actually the decay of their hegemony in the marketplace of ideas. It's being ruined by the transparency and democratic nature of the Internet, by higher levels of secular education, particularly in STEM disciplines and philosophy, and by the simple fact that their largely white, anglo-saxon protestant privilege is disappearing as WASPs become Just Another Minority. Indeed, races and ethnic groups are mixing so vigorously that already most children being born are of some mixed parentage.
Finally the default deference and respect enjoyed by religion, especially the Abrahamic ones, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Special pleading and confirmation bias are no longer ignored even for the religious.
It's not a great time to be a fundamentalist or even just any sort of believer, really.
But only fundamentalists are addicted to gloom n' doom-speak.
Which IS kind of prescient.
Because they're a dying breed. They're at a spiritual dead-end, evolution-wise.
But there's good reason to hope their children, or grandchildren, will be able to think for themselves and begin to grow.
And atheism is still a tiny tiny minority. Most Americans rather elect someone who cheats on their spouse than ever consider an atheist. No surprise since historically speaking, atheist leaders have committed the greatest acts of mass murder in human history. Your kind is apparently despised in society. Also, the surveys show that evangelicals are the one Christian segment that guess what, is NOT dying.
No, no, no...all that terrible stuff must have been a result of secularism. That is what the Atheists claim this government was formed to be...right?
The early leaders of this country demanded that Religious based philosophies such as "Love God, and each other" and the "Golden Rule" had to be completely "separate" from the government.
So, you had the law allowing all those listed things...since it was secular.
They even said that The Constitution was not adequate to govern people that were not morally based in a Religious philosophy...but it didn't matter then, because most were and they never figured it wouldn't always be that way.
But, of course, they wanted to set it up so they could have the latitude to be the slavemaster, gender oppressing, genocidal barbarians *they* got off on being. A "Do Unto Others, as..." setup would not have worked for that.
It took guys like THE REVEREND Martin Luther King, President of The Southern CHRISTIAN Leadership Conference, to help finally get things completely squared away.
The article has it backwards. Moving away from the secular system that sanctioned all that horrible stuff...to more of the concepts like the REVEREND King promoted...is why it has gotten better.
Do you not have a proper understanding of how government works? That's really the only way you can think all of this is true.
The secular government ended slavery. They ended male exclusive voting. The government is not a force of evil. For example, if you knew your history (real history), many of the founding fathers actually opposed the idea of slavery. They also knew that by outwardly opposing it, many slave owner would have serious problems with the newly established government, so they reluctantly let slavery be, a system that they did not invent, need I remind you. It was already in America before the US government had actually even existed. It's worth noting that in many of the territories the US acquired, slavery was illegal in these places. The government also abolished slavery, making it unconstitutional to own slaves, a hundred years later, only facing some resistance from souther states, who went so far as to leave the union out of fear and hatred for Lincoln.
Also, capitalizing words does not make them more significant. What was it MLK wanted? For the government to act. Many people within the government were very much on board. But because the government does not act as a single body, as you seem to imply it does, just having some people support it does not help when many elected by the people who oppose MLK are unwilling to act.
And atheism is still a tiny tiny minority. Most Americans rather elect someone who cheats on their spouse than ever consider an atheist. No surprise since historically speaking, atheist leaders have committed the greatest acts of mass murder in human history. Your kind is apparently despised in society. Also, the surveys show that evangelicals are the one Christian segment that guess what, is NOT dying.
For the 113th time, jeffy - I'm not an atheist. Not that you're ever troubled by things like facts.
Morality is not a commodity that a society has a certain measure of, but rather is a qualitative condition along a progression. Morality has always changed over time. The Old Testament stipulates the treatment of slaves. [Exodus 21:7-11, et. al.] The New Testament can be used to rationalize excluding women from religious leadership. [1 Timothy 2:11-12, et. al.] Liberation Theology exists specifically to calibrate interpretations of the Bible so they no longer rationalize economic and social injustice.
After a millennia of relatively slow change in morality, we are three hundred and fifty years into a period of steady progressive change in morality. That tends to result in these spots where, figuratively speaking, society trips over the spots where the carpet bunches up: These conflicts due to reactionaries who think the morality of several decades ago (but not several decades before that!!) was some absolute ideal, and that subsequent changes in morality are somehow bad (even though those changes are right along the same path that morality was on when it reached the point that they favor, several decades ago).
Just like the progression of morality over time is not new, neither is the existence of reactionaries. There are always a certain number of people who get stuck in such patterns of thinking. Right now, in this country, perhaps we're in a period where there are more reactionaries than is typical. That will affect how much such conflicts come to a head, of course.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
