American Politics Thread VI: Can't We All Just Get Along?

[New haven america]

It also doesn't help that the US has a 250-some year history of basically acting like a Conservative Christian Theocracy. There are Christian countries that still have it as a state religion in the modern era that are less evangelical and puritanical than the US is.

Course that makes sense, most of the original settlers of the US were basically the Christian Taliban. Fun Fact: The Puritans used to capture people and cut off their noses/ears and brand them as heretics (With a big ol' H on their face) if they didn't fit into their exact definition of what a Christian is. Quakers were favorite targets for anyone wondering.

The evangelical idea of control didn’t really take off until the 1900s. Prior to that most evangelicals wanted nothing to do with the government seeing it as a bastion of sin

And yet the US was still run as basically a theocracy before then.

Says a lot about religion in the US.

[North Washington Republic]

Southern Baptists hate Orthodox people and even have slurs specifically for use against us. I've known lots of fellow converts who were disowned by Evangelical parents for converting to Orthodoxy.

It’s almost like sectarian violence has been the cause of many wars.

The idea that two conservative religions would get along because they are both conservative religions is just laughable

Hmm, I actually think that a lot of conservative Christians were willing to put their theological differences aside to fight the culture war.

[Thermodolia]

Not everyone, though. Notably not, since you emphasized it, many AMERICANS.

If you're going to argue that most of the grandparents of most Americans weren't Christians of some stripe, then you're just going to be wrong.

Hmph. Not my fault you're unwilling to fight as tooth and nail as you claimed.

The question was why the Right fights dirty. My answer is that the Left refuses to fight fair.

My conscience isn't seared enough to fight dirty. I'm not like the others.

So christians that interpret the religion differently than yourself are "decayed?" Is every denomination but one decayed, then?

Look, scripture is pretty frank here.

Romans 1:26-27

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

I Corinthians 6:9-10

Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

I mean, it's clear as day what Paul had to say about sexual morality here. If a gentile church has the audacity to defy the words of the Apostle to the Gentiles, then I think it's fair to say that there's been some decay.

Oh, and if I get warned/banned for quoting a scriptural passage that uses the s-word for male homosexuals, it'll only prove my point about the religious intolerance of the Left.

You can easily get your point across without resorting to using such language. It’s not intolerance to be against calling people names

[Catarapania]

I'd favor the high degree of interconnection of an extended family, but we have to start improving things somewhere. Going back to the nuclear family is a good first step.



The way I see it, the things I listed are themselves proper ends, rather than means to separate ends. With the exception of the nuclear family, which is the first step towards returning to the natural order of society.

Ok so are you in favor of government programs which would help like assistance for working families so a parent can stay home?

Yes.

Are you in favor of sex education so that accidental births don’t happen?

Depends on what you teach about how to avoid said "accidental births." Teaching children about birth control only encourages fornication later in life, which I would be opposed to.

Are you in favor of government assistance for single parents or assistance to help people keep a pregnancy?

Yes, as well as programs that force the men responsible to provide for the woman in question.

However, the Democratic party as it currently stands is too devoted to the erosion of everything I believe in for me to even consider switching parties.

[The Temple of the Computer]

Southern Baptists hate Orthodox people and even have slurs specifically for use against us. I've known lots of fellow converts who were disowned by Evangelical parents for converting to Orthodoxy.

Evangelicals typically believe that Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy are “pagan”

As the Grand-Inquisitor and Witchfinder General of the Evangelical Vatican. I can confirm that Both Catholics and Quakers worship the devil.
Source: A youtube video told me so.

[Thermodolia]

It’s almost like sectarian violence has been the cause of many wars.

The idea that two conservative religions would get along because they are both conservative religions is just laughable

Hmm, I actually think that a lot of conservative Christians were willing to put their theological differences aside to fight the culture war.

You’d think wrong. Conservative Christians can’t even agree on what to fight against

[Catarapania]

If you do bring your beliefs into discussions, people have a right to disagree with them.

It's not about disagreement, it's about treating them as illegitimate and having no place in discourse.

This.

[Washington Resistance Army]

Tell the folks at home about the various anti-Christian persecutions.

Unironically this actually supports my position. Someone always ends up on the other end of the sword if one religion has more power over all others, so maybe we should just avoid that idea entirely.

Only way I can see this being done is through a millet system then. *shrug*

Or we can just keep on keeping on. Separation of church and state is arguably the only thing the United States still does fairly well. Sure, religious people can influence society through voting in people with their beliefs and whatnot, but the lack of a state apparatus that can kick in the door and say "Praise Jesus or die" is a pretty nifty thing.

[Thermodolia]

The evangelical idea of control didn’t really take off until the 1900s. Prior to that most evangelicals wanted nothing to do with the government seeing it as a bastion of sin

And yet the US was still run as basically a theocracy before then.

Says a lot about religion in the US.

Except it wasn’t. The US wasn’t run as a theocracy. I’d like to see what proof you have of such claims

[Punished UMN]

It’s almost like sectarian violence has been the cause of many wars.

The idea that two conservative religions would get along because they are both conservative religions is just laughable

Hmm, I actually think that a lot of conservative Christians were willing to put their theological differences aside to fight the culture war.

My sect is like 0.25% of the US population and its leadership consists mostly of elderly Greek, Syrian, and Russian men who weren't born in the country, we don't really have a stake in the culture war.

[Senkaku]

“We’re being treated badly for being perceived as foreigners instead of for trying to impose extremist theocracy on the nation, please feel bad for us!”

That's literally true though, the Orthodox Church has zero influence on politics and large numbers of clergy are victims of xenophobic hate crimes every year. Many Orthodox priests are afraid to wear their clerical clothing in public for fear of hate crimes, and I personally know two priests who have been physically assaulted by people who used Islamophobic slurs at them.

Well, I hope they persevere and that their public wearing of silly hats does much to further the interests of the one true church.

I beg you to someday make this argument in a room full of LGBT people who survived the AIDS crisis lol

Believe it or not, society changes over the course of 30 years. The historical treatment of LGBT people is deplorable, but that doesn't mean that many Christian communities are not in danger of dying out within the next 10-20 years. I'm not exactly anti-LGBT anyway.

Go ahead, explain your fears to someone who literally did see their community wiped out and who saw Christians of every stripe turn their backs on them as it happened! Go tell them that society needs to have compassion for you and how your specific little sect is most deserving of it, I’m sure it’ll go over well. I suspect at this point the best thing would be for every faction of your vicious little cult to dwindle to extinction and stop parasitizing Western civilization, but unfortunately I also think your fears are hysterical and overblown and that reactionary Christianity in all its forms isn’t going anywhere.

[Catarapania]

The way I see it, the things I listed are themselves proper ends, rather than means to separate ends. With the exception of the nuclear family, which is the first step towards returning to the natural order of society.

you've been ignoring me,

I have, like, 15 people on my ass, and you don't take the time to proofread.

[North Washington Republic]

If you do bring your beliefs into discussions, people have a right to disagree with them.

It's not about disagreement, it's about treating them as illegitimate and having no place in discourse.

And conservative Christians have a LONG history of treating others like that, even going as far as killing other Christians. As Harry Truman said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the Kitchen.”

[The Temple of the Computer]

And yet the US was still run as basically a theocracy before then.

Says a lot about religion in the US.

Except it wasn’t. The US wasn’t run as a theocracy. I’d like to see what proof you have of such claims

I think most of the Founding Fathers were deists rather than Christian, but I could be wrong.

[Thermodolia]

Ok so are you in favor of government programs which would help like assistance for working families so a parent can stay home?

Yes.

Are you in favor of sex education so that accidental births don’t happen?

Depends on what you teach about how to avoid said "accidental births." Teaching children about birth control only encourages fornication later in life, which I would be opposed to.

Are you in favor of government assistance for single parents or assistance to help people keep a pregnancy?

Yes, as well as programs that force the men responsible to provide for the woman in question.

However, the Democratic party as it currently stands is too devoted to the erosion of everything I believe in for me to even consider switching parties.

Well at least you aren’t against spending money to achieve your goals. Unlike some conservative Christians. That being said you and your religion should have zero power over state affairs

[Catarapania]

If you're going to argue that most of the grandparents of most Americans weren't Christians of some stripe, then you're just going to be wrong.



The question was why the Right fights dirty. My answer is that the Left refuses to fight fair.

My conscience isn't seared enough to fight dirty. I'm not like the others.



Look, scripture is pretty frank here.

Romans 1:26-27


I Corinthians 6:9-10


I mean, it's clear as day what Paul had to say about sexual morality here. If a gentile church has the audacity to defy the words of the Apostle to the Gentiles, then I think it's fair to say that there's been some decay.

Oh, and if I get warned/banned for quoting a scriptural passage that uses the s-word for male homosexuals, it'll only prove my point about the religious intolerance of the Left.

You can easily get your point across without resorting to using such language. It’s not intolerance to be against calling people names

It is when one of the major figures in one's religion "called people names."

[Kowani]

y'all could have called me if we were going to do a thing on cultural dominance damnit
gimme a bit there were some good ideas and some very dumb ones here

[The Temple of the Computer]

y'all could have called me if we were going to do a thing on cultural dominance damnit
gimme a bit there were some good ideas and some very dumb ones here

Oh hey Kowani A.I, how is your day going?

[Catarapania]

That being said you and your religion should have zero power over state affairs

How would you react if I told a gay person "You and your orientation should have zero power over state affairs"?

You're no better than those Texans who want to keep black people from voting.

[Thermodolia]

Except it wasn’t. The US wasn’t run as a theocracy. I’d like to see what proof you have of such claims

I think most of the Founding Fathers were deists rather than Christian, but I could be wrong.

Not only that but many where outright atheists. Hell Tommy J rewrote the Bible to benefit him. The founding fathers where very much not Christians.

And they made note of it in several treaties and writings where they said the US is not in any way a Christian nation

[North Washington Republic]

I think most of the Founding Fathers were deists rather than Christian, but I could be wrong.

Not only that but many where outright atheists. Hell Tommy J rewrote the Bible to benefit him. The founding fathers where very much not Christians.

And they made note of it in several treaties and writings where they said the US is not in any way a Christian nation

Thomas Jefferson was a Christian deist.

[Senkaku]

There’s less daylight between some Russian guy in Brighton Beach and the Southern Baptists than you’d think

You literally have no idea what orthodoxy even is or you never would have said that.

Russian orthodox isnt even close to being the only form of othodoxy.

Russian orthodoxy isn’t the only form of orthodoxy therefore Russian guys from Brighton Beach cannot be orthodox, got it

When they’re lining up on the same side of the pitch, you might consider that their sectarian differences are no longer preventing them from trying to hang you.

So I guess the quakers, who are some of the most pacifistic people out there, want to hang me because they are a religion?

No, but the various Eastern Orthodox types will either actively side w the American right or just accommodate themselves if they have to live under that regime, so not really the same position as the Quakers

The idea that organized religion should play a significant role in determining state policy seems to be the fundamental disconnect here. If you somehow trust a bunch of zealots (or worse, priests) to keep the trains running then I guess that’s your burden to work through.

I said nothing of the sort. Just that people shouldn’t be discriminated against because they are apart of a religion.

The idea that anyone in the US is discriminated against for being Christian would be laughable if it weren’t such an insane perversion of the very concept of discrimination, mostly employed by reactionaries to bewilder the public by misleading them about the severity of the suffering both of actually oppressed groups and their supposedly “discriminated against” masters

[Punished UMN]

That's literally true though, the Orthodox Church has zero influence on politics and large numbers of clergy are victims of xenophobic hate crimes every year. Many Orthodox priests are afraid to wear their clerical clothing in public for fear of hate crimes, and I personally know two priests who have been physically assaulted by people who used Islamophobic slurs at them.

Well, I hope they persevere and that their public wearing of silly hats does much to further the interests of the one true church.

Believe it or not, society changes over the course of 30 years. The historical treatment of LGBT people is deplorable, but that doesn't mean that many Christian communities are not in danger of dying out within the next 10-20 years. I'm not exactly anti-LGBT anyway.

Go ahead, explain your fears to someone who literally did see their community wiped out and who saw Christians of every stripe turn their backs on them as it happened! Go tell them that society needs to have compassion for you and how your specific little sect is most deserving of it, I’m sure it’ll go over well. I suspect at this point the best thing would be for every faction of your vicious little cult to dwindle to extinction and stop parasitizing Western civilization, but unfortunately I also think your fears are hysterical and overblown and that reactionary Christianity in all its forms isn’t going anywhere.

If the monk last year who had his skull bashed in by a guy wearing a Trump hat hadn't been a Christian, would you make a crass joke about his being permanently crippled by a hate crime?

My religious community didn't even exist during the AIDS crisis, Sen, my parish didn't even exist during the 2012 mid-terms. I know plenty about the AIDS crisis and how awful it was, and that Christians were in large part at fault. I wouldn't spend as much time as I do (not on this forum necessarily) reaching out to LGBT people if I weren't. That doesn't mean that a church headquartered in Damascus, Syrian Arab Republic, is responsible for what Reagan and the Neoconservative revolution did.

[Fauzjhia]

That being said you and your religion should have zero power over state affairs

How would you react if I told a gay person "You and your orientation should have zero power over state affairs"?

You're no better than those Texans who want to keep black people from voting.

... I fail to see how gay person are trying to impose their lifestyle on others, and have any power over state affairs.

[Thermodolia]

That being said you and your religion should have zero power over state affairs

How would you react if I told a gay person "You and your orientation should have zero power over state affairs"?

You're no better than those Texans who want to keep black people from voting.

I never said that individuals couldn’t run for office but I said and I meant that a religion as an institution should not have any institutional power over state affairs.

It’s hardly comparable to gay people, as last time I checked being gay isn’t some sort of institutional religion/organization.