Quote:
Originally Posted by TRANSPONDER
The only reason I cut it is because I advise reading the original above. I could piggy back on this and chirp 'That's what I was saying'. But it would be like sticking a blue feather in my ass and pretending I'm a peacock.
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LOL! Interesting visuals you provided.
But, by all means, if that's what you were saying, go ahead and say "That's what I was saying!" I try not to step on toes or steal thunder if I can help it.
Plus, I really didn't get a chance to read all the posts in this thread. I just saw Goldie's quote and I thought eeeek! I have to put away some misconceptions contained therein.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TRANSPONDER
Goldie ought to feel ashamed, not just for the foolish way he bashes atheism when so much is wrong with Christianity of various kinds, but he ignores (and thus tacitly approves) the threat of global Islam - just so he can bash atheism.
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Sure, and he can tacity approve of global Islam because if that's the way it becomes, that's how things will be. I'm not really sure why, but Goldie tends to have a rather cavalier attitude toward religious oppression and terror while attacking atheism with a gusto that says, "The lady dost protest too much, me thinks."
Because it's woefully easy to make atheists your target when you believe you are sitting safe and comfy, far away from any kind of religious tyranny. But what he apparenly doesn't seem to know is that tyranny backed by fundevangelist religion is right around the corner. And I'm not exaggerating or hyperolizing. I only wish I were being a Chicken Little.
As one author wrote, and I'm paraphrasing just a bit, "The Founders expected the possibility of a tyrannical president and they compensated for that with our three-branch system of checks and balances. They even anticipated foreign meddling by other world powers hoping to influence the results of our elections -- one of the very reasons for the electoral college. BUT, what the Founders never anticipated and therefore never safeguarded against was a tyrannical president and an apathetic congress that went along with him. The Founders believed that there would be enough members of congress to prevent there ever being a majority that would side with tyranny. It took 240 years to reveal their mistake."
Given the business Goldie is in, he should realize that he would be targeted as one of the first subversives of the New Religious Order; he wouldn't just lose his business, he would most assuredly also lose his freedom and, quite possibly, his life. Give religious die-hards any real power and they will exploit it to the hilt, and using terror as a weapon is built right into their religious paradigm: The Hellthreat.
As I've said before, one of the worst things to have ever happened to America was coming out of WWII unscathed and with such a comparatively small number of wartime deaths -- less than half a million (Russia lost 27 million just to compare).
Far too many Americans saw our colossal good fortune as a divine blessing and mandate to create a Pax Americana. The money poured in, there were more jobs than people, our standard of living reached epic proportions (if you were white, at least), and we took our place as the "good" superpower arrayed against the "evil" superpower, the USSR. Yes, yes, it was all God's will dontch'ya know, it was God who planted his flag firmly in the Ozarks of Arkansas and said, "Here, I will stay!" Americans became the new Chosen of God, the new Israelites, and this "American exceptionalism" still exists even today when massive amounts of religiosity is causing our nation and culture to circle the drain like a turd in a flushing toilet. And of course the turd has lipstick on it ... because religion has been selling us lies forever, but it's horrific right now.
And so, because our cities were never bombed, our streets never saw the marching of jack-booted fascists, no swastikas flew over our state capitals. There were no Holocausts here, no "Night and Fog" policies carried out by the Gestapo. Nor did we have rampaging Russian soldiers raping and looting everything in sight -- nor did we have Japanese savages committing the Rape of Los Angeles instead of the Rape of Nanking (the Rape of Nanking was so violent and barbaric that even the Nazis were horrified and tried to send an envoy to negotiate an end to the bloodletting; Japan refused).
Perhaps if we had had some or all of those things happen to us, we would not take our freedom so much for granted as we do. There wouldn't be this resurgence of fascism and authoritarianism -- as if any of those people have any conception of what being ruled in that fashion really means. The result of this is that a significant number of Christians - tens of millions of them I would estimate -- have decided to figuratively sell their souls to the devil in the hopes of being able to ramrod their barbarism down the throats of every American alive regardless of what each individual believes (and they aren't very big on individualism anyhow -- except where money is concerned when it becomes "survival of the fittest" -- conformity is the name of the game).
And Goldie would be standing shoulder to shoulder *with* me instead of taking the opposite stance against me. Having a theocratic tyranny for a government is not at all a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" prospect. Life in these United States will be very different, one predicated on fear, paranoia, superstition, and ratting out one's neighbor and co-worker to the secret police in order to secure a promotion or to settle a property dispute. This happened all the time with the Gestapo (Nazis), the Kempeitai (Imperial Japan), the NKVD (Stalinist Russia), the OVRA (Mussolini's Italy), the Ustaše (Croatia), and any number of other authoritarian secret police units around the world.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TRANSPONDER
I don't believe that he can hate atheism that much.
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I don't think he does either or I would be schellacking him on a routine basis.
I get the feeling that he simply enjoys matching wits with atheists more so than the fundamentalists and evangelicals on this board -- and can you blame him, really? Especially when the fundies ignore your posts, quote your whole post and then leave a one-line snipe, or mash the "report post" button -- yes I *know* you cowards are doing that -- until their left click button on their computer mouse finally breaks from overuse. They just want us to sit down and shut up -- even on this forum, that's what they want, so imagine what it's like in the real world.
Like when you have an Alabama supreme court judge claiming the 1st Amendment is only for Christians. How can we even trust our judicial branch and our court system if the fundamentalists, evangelicals, Dominionists, and theocratic fascists have infiltrated even the highest positions of power? Or when a sitting president says he's not sure if atheists are American citizens and they certainly aren't patriots because this is a nation under God, by golly!
It's as if the people (no, not ALL of them) south of the Mason-Dixon line just can't be happy unless they are oppressing, bullying, scapegoating, subjugating, enslaving, or discriminating against one minority group or another.
This is why this issue isn't a joke anymore -- nor is it merely an academic debate. This is as real as it gets and I don't think enough people are awake to this fact.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TRANSPONDER
He may, but I know he is smart enough to know that he's talking a crock. I may be wrong, but I suspect that it just makes him feel good in beating down the thinkers who overran the forum through sheer talk.
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Perhaps that's part of it, too, I dunnae. Although is he really "beating" them down? I'm not so sure about that. And, as I intimated earlier, I generally leave him alone despite his incessant atheist-bashing, but I've also said that could change if the bashing goes too far. I think, and I could be wrong, but I think he may have been somehow convinced to become a patheist -- because it seems to me that, a loooong time ago, Goldie said he was an atheist, too, or perhaps an agnostic. My memory is usually pretty friggin' good, but I don't trust it quite as much as I used to.
Anyhow, another long post from me ... and one that the fundies, evangelicals, and those with 10 second attention spans can just ignore. If they can control their impulses, that is.
So I'll leave you with the last words written in Malcom Nance's book:
The Plot to Destroy Democracy:
"Stop reading now. Get out there and save democracy."
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