Memo to GOP: Patriotism Isn’t Tied to One’s Religious Beliefs

I hate to tell you this but we have so much work that we need to do as atheists just to get along with each other.  being conservative and an atheist I find that political bias runs rampant in the atheist anti-theist secular crowd.  until we can come together we will stand still.

Wrapped in the Flag and carrying the cross indeed… [misattributed to Sinclair Lewis]

When the word “patriot” falls from the lips of the Religious Right, what they actually mean is “A White, Jesus-fearing Christian man who demands the obedience of Women, the servitude of Coloreds, the incarceration of Gays and the Right to carry Large belt-fed Weapons into Righteous Battles against the Other who are sitting on top of Our Oil. Amen.”

And silly ol’ me thinking that it simply meant “A person who feels devotion to their country.”
 

Hard to respond to this one.  I suppose the biggest hurdle is that most of the looniness about religion comes from Conservatives.  Tell us how to separate Conservatives from their religious pandering and I’ll agree with your position wholeheartedly.  And yes, liberals pander, too — but significantly less to the lunatic fringe.

According to an overwhelming majority of our Congress

Whereas if religion and morality are taken out of the marketplace of ideas, the very freedom on which the United States was founded cannot be secured;

You are absolutely right ken.  I know my party are a big part of what is wrong but I also need to vote for a party that promotes my class affiliation and things of that nature.  all people have to.  I can’t stand so much about the liberals but I can keep it to myself because I would rather see a liberal without religion than one with.  Maybe if the liberals could drop their stereotypes and feel the same way… we could advance.

“promotes my class affiliation and things of that nature”–well, there’s your problem right there.

“promotes my class affiliation”

What does that even mean?

Not to be the turd in the punch bowl or anything, but they might actually be right about that.

Morality is something of a gimme; there does need to be some sense of morality and moral rules batting about the “marketplace of ideas” for something like ‘freedom’ to be a sensible concept; morality is all about valuation, and if freedom is something that we value, then morality as a class of ideas speaks to it, even if obliquely. So that’s one that they’re just flat-out right about.

Religion is trickier, but I would definitely say as a historical matter that the idea of a radically free person, able to make choices and take ultimate responsibility for choices, is an idea that has its roots in Cartesian dualism which in turn was heavily indebted to medieval anti-nominalist views of human nature, all of which are religiously derived. The particular American flavor of the ideas referred to as foundational often have a distinctly religious pedigree. I think an argument could be made (not that I necessarily agree with it, but it is colorable),  that in order for those forms of those ideas to continue to be sensible, the religions that underwrote their current form must continue to be included in the “marketplace of ideas” if only as a historical perspective, if not as a lived experience.

For example, legal responsibility is heavily predicated upon the idea that a person can be solely responsible for their acts, certainly a notion that is reinforced by religious moral systems and assumptions of spiritual responsibility that those systems tend to assign. Now, as we learn more about the brain in action, we know now that much of what we in the past would have called willed actions are actually instinctual, or habituated, or autonomous, and have at best a tangential correspondence with the contents of the conscious mind. That discovery is a great one for neurology, but rather more of a mixed blessing when it comes to applying those findings in the practical sphere. If our systems of law and values are predicated upon an actual free-will that doesn’t exist (or at best exists in an attenuated form), what does happen to our concepts of freedom, justice, liberty, etc. ?

Memo to Hemant: The Muslim Brotherhood is not a religion. Nor is Michelle Bachmann “The GOP”.

Read the article and you’ll understand that the GOP is on both sides of this issue. Search for McCain if you aren’t going to read the article. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t read it, because it was totally unresponsive to the Muslim Brotherhood issue.

From the article: “In particular they said that Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ‘has three family members—her late father, her mother, and her brother—connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations. Her position provides her with routine access to the Secretary and to policy-making.’ ”

The article gives all sorts of credentials on these people but never addresses the truth value of that statement. Lots of terrorist and their supporters have been doctors Plus it drags in all sorts of red herrings and throw shit against the wall to see if any sticks. The author isn’t exactly unbiased either. The problem is that there has been terrorist and Muslim extremist influence on both the Bush and Obama administrations. They’ve had terrorist supporters as advisors for example. Quite a few scandals like that.

The problem here isn’t questioning someone’s religion but assuming that just because you are related to someone you share their political and religious views.

BTW, you are willing to tar all Republicans here, yet can’t seem to click with the fact that if true her families connection with the Muslim Brotherhood would reflect badly on them. The Muslim Brotherhood is not exactly gay, infidel, or non-Muslim friendly. They are a supremacist, terror supporting, anti-gay, antisemitic, and advocate jihad. Sure they do charity work but so did Mohammad as he slaughtered the Jews, and the North Koreans as they turned their country into a prison camp.

Criticizing someone for supporting the MB is no more attacking them for their religion than criticizing them for supporting Al Qaeda. Point out where they said she should be and advisor merely for being Muslim. I didn’t see anything in the article.

I don’t understand what you’re saying. I didn’t encourage him to change political sides. I never claimed that the Left doesn’t have problems. All I said was that if he didn’t want to be attacked for the general perception of Conservatives as it is, maybe he should be a bit clearer on where he stands. Assuming he doesn’t buy into it wholesale. 

My point wasn’t that you were asking him to change sides. Your statement showed approval for guilt by association.

So you’d be fine with someone assuming you are a bomb throwing communist sympathizing homosexual race card pulling jobless moron just because you self identify as a Democrat? Would you give Democrats the advice that they should not self identify as such unless the want the most intolerant of their opposition to assume stupid stuff about them?

Both parties are big tent and thus have a broad variety of viewpoints. Libertarians are small tent and they can’t even agree on many topics. The Democrats are right on some positions and horribly wrong on others, and vice versa with the Republicans. From my perspective and what I find important there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between them. Yet, when someone self identifies as a Republican, Conservative, Democrat, or Liberal I don’t just pigeon
hole them.

To point out a subject deep in the heart of this blog. There are anti-gays in both parties for example. My wife’s grandmother was a staunch Democrat and also anti-evolution and anti-science.

Not really. The communist in many countries have gone after certain classes and cultures and if you were a member of those classes and cultures you’d be a fool to join their party.

Kinda hard to get behind morons like our president who think just because you went to school that means you didn’t achieve what you in fact did, but that someone else did it. Hey stupid, yeah, you, Obama, you aren’t the first black president, no Bill Ayers did that. Also, stupid, everybody goes to school so how come only a fraction bother to save money to risk on a business and then succeed at it?

No this shit isn’t “out of context”, and in context it is worse. It is the worse kind of rationalization for stealing other people’s stuff. Marx would be proud.

Name just one conservative that has advocated killing everyone who disagrees with them. That statement was bigoted as is your assumption about my ability to recognize bigotry. I can’t name any liberals who wish to kill “everyone” who disagrees with them but when you loosen your criteria to fit some conservatives I’m sure it will fit certain liberals. We had some liberal idiot in the comments here just the other day wishing a meteor would descend on the Mormons and wipe them all out. Wishing for genocide. Then there was and is a whole host of liberal terrorists who advocate nasty stuff and nasty behavior, and even do it. Look up Brett Kimberlin as just one example. Look up the OWS bomb plot. Look up various attempts by liberals to get people fired for disagreeing with them. Brett was successful in this. Look up swatting. Look up the rhetoric of the liberals in OWS crowd. Look up that liberal who advocated “letting” people’s houses burn down for doubting global warming. I’ve just scratched the surface.

There is also plenty of rhetoric coming out of liberals that would put Hitler to shame. Republicans accused of wanting to destroy the earth is little different than what you’d read in the Protocols of Zion, or some propaganda from the Nazis. Jews, no,Republicans are greedy. Etc.

The GOP is well-known for making shit up and falsely accusing innocent people of supporting terrorism. Objecting to libel does not require pretending it’s true. It’s up to the known frauds making the accusations to support them with something other than the voices in Bachman’s head.

Yes some people are atheists for “illegitimate” reasons. That is why the word rational comes before atheist in my post. Oh, and Wiccans are not atheists

I’m really trying to figure out why you had a problem what I said. Clearly,  I didn’t stereotype Ray and I pointed out that this perception exists in large part because it’s perpetuated by many other conservatives.

I made two major points:

1) The conservative movement has been hijacked by whack jobs

2) These whack jobs are framing the argument

Are you denying that these statements are true? Sorry, but you are in denial if you simply dismiss them as “fringe nuts”  Unfortunately, they are a huge voting bloc and are a big part of the base of the Republican party.

To prove my point… aren’t Beck,  Rush and Ann Coulter considered conservative heroes? I’ve listened to these folks a lot over the years and they  all pander and cater to the anti-evolution/ we are a christian nation crowd.  Both Coulter and Rush endorse “intelligent design” and have made incredibly stupid  statements about evolutionary theory.  Beck, along with Rush and Coulter sign on and push out right lies and revisionist history about the founding of our country. These folks are hugely popular among self-identified conservatives and give the marching orders ( especially in the case of Rush) to  their troops.

Pointing out that some on the left are idiots is meaningless.  Hell, all one has to do is tune into Bill Maher’s show on a regular basis to see and hear some fool make irrational and idiotic statements.  But this doesn’t change the fact that the old Barry Goldwater conservatives have been over shadowed by the loonies.  

 ??? Who wants to steal people’s stuff? I am by no means an Obama apologist but I read the entire statement and it was taken out of context. Obama was talking about roads and infrastructure.  Not some Marxist I wanna take all  your shit and give it to the poor speech.

I think that you’re right, insofar as linking the two directly (which they seem to want to do by implication) would be illegitimate. It is true that morality is essential for breathing life into concepts like “freedom” and significant dimensions of that concept (and others) were derived from religious sources, but it is not the case that “religious morality” is in any way responsible for its existence or continuity.

The problem with the statement is it can be read to be innocuous, or even as a very good point (in the case you point out of an attempt to forcibly remove religion, such as it is, from the public conversation such as in the former USSR), but they’re hoping that because those interpretations are plausible, it will give cover to the implication they wish to advance: that religion itself and its moral systems continue to nourish freedom in America. That’s an argument that is hard to support.

 The problem with McCarthyism is that they were using hearsay, coerced fake confessions, guilt by association, and just outright making shit up.   McCarthy was an enemy of the Constitution, and an enemy of America.  And today’s Republican cult worships him, because they are delusional traitors.

… And the Democrat party isn’t full of “whack jobs” who are “framing the argument”??? Look at OWS, and morons like Elizabeth Warren. Get real. Most organizations get outsized influence by their most extreme believers. Same is true with other political parties like the Libertarians. Same is true with non-profits like PETA, WWF, NRA, etc.

Problem with politics (and with majority voting) is there end up being only two choices each with a hodgepodge of supporters. It stuffs opinion, what is a complex multidimensional on many topics and on many rationales, down to not even a one dimensional universe, but a two valued one.

So it is extremely I’ll advised to use stereotypes given the reality.

Elizabeth Warren is a “moron”?  You’ve just lost any shred of credibility you might have thought you had remaining. 

Exactly. But many think that it was wrong because that outing communist in and of itself was wrong. It isn’t. Just like outing Nazis or members of the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t bad.

Last I checked money was stuff. When you take other peoples money against their will without proper justification that is stealing. Obama’s justifications in that speech for taking even more money from the wealthy consisted of things like the fact that they had some great teacher (probably one they paid for at their private school mind you), they had help, that they live under the US system, etc. All the time using the word “somebody” as if it excluded the people whose stuff he wanted to take stuff from. Unfortunately it doesn’t. He also spoke as if the stuff he was planning on taking was being given back. As if he was only taking back what was undeserved. The entire time denigrating achievement by pointing out that there are other people who are smart or who work hard who are not as successful. He made a straw man argument that the wealthy think they deserve what they have merely because they work hard and/or are smart. Which is moronic. They deserve what they have because they are responsible for creating it.

He had to lie, use fallacious reasoning, misdirect, and use words improperly to come to his conclusion that he is justified to take more stuff from the the wealthy (note that they already pay the vast majority of taxes). Since his justification is improper his forced takings are in fact theft. Marx did this same exact sort of thing, except that he claimed that the rich didn’t earn anything they had via ridiculous reasoning. For example assuming that workers and capitalists were mutually exclusive classes, and that savings of capital (machinery for example) contributes zero to production.

Obama uses the word “somebody” fallaciously just like Marx uses worker. Marx claimed that capitalists deserved nothing and were parasites because labor produces all goods. Totally ignoring that people can work, save, and convert the savings from one form of capital to another. A fisherman who saves up fish, drying them, then lives off the fish while build a net, has converted his labor to a form of capital that increases labor productivity. There is not theft or paratism involved in this. Ifbhe uses his net he can save even more, and make more nets. He might even start hiring people to use his nets and pay them more in fish than they could earn on their own. If his net is ten time more productive then he can afford to pay the worker twice what the worker would normally earn and still get a large portion of the benefit from the net he made.

What Obama’s speech fails to recognize is that the somebody else he is talking about belongs to the very group he denigrates. Guys like Bill Gates are great teachers, they own businesses that pave roads, they already pay taxes out of proportion to the services they use, etc.

What is extra moronic about this argument is that it can be and is even more applicable to the poor. The poor are even more dependent on help, way more than the rich. If tax rates are to be based on services received from the Federal government then the poor are not pulling their weight. Especially since 40% or more of the wage earning population pays zero to support the federal services they receive. Morons like Elizabeth Warrne argue that business uses a disproportionate level of government services like having their trucks on the road, but they already pay taxes on profit, and all those delivery trucks filled with food are in the vast majority delivering food to the non-rich. Warren, being an economic ignoramus (sham indian and writer of many a bogus research paper) doesn’t understand this. The rich don’t shit more than the rest of us, nor do they eat significantly more. So they don’t in fact use as much public service as she imagines. Especially not the services that people like Obama and Warren like to spend all the new taxes on.

Obama outright lied in that speech about cutting spending by trillions when he did the opposite. Plus took credit for making lots of millionaires. Which goes exactly with his theme that people who are successful do not deserve credit for what they produced, somebody else is, and therefore, Obama and his cronies should get the money.

Elizabeth Warren has a history of making basic math errors in her research. Moronic mistakes like thinking and increasing percentage of a decreasing number is automatically bigger. She thinks 90% of a dollar is naturally more than 10% of a million. Either that or she is a fraudulent researcher. Read it and weep:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/06/elizabeth-warren-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-utterly-misleading-bankruptcy-study/18826/

The US naturalization application asks “Have you ever been a member of THE COMMUNIST PARTY OR ANY OTHER TOTALITARIAN ORGANIZATION”

Shouldn’t Michelle Bachman be answering questions about Domionism?

Mostly a wild tangent on my part.

We’ll probably disagree on what kinds of threats Dominionism and The Muslim Brotherhood are, and how anyone is connected to each.

I simply think that goal of God’s law is not all that different from the goal of world government.

I have heard Americans speak as if they think their party winning every single election would be some kind of panacea.  I can’t express how completely opposed I am to that.  I don’t care what party it is, if they have a complete lock, we’ve lost.  And my broken record on this is that we’re actually pretty close to that here in the US.  We have effectively two choices, which is one more than they had in the Soviet Union.

Also the some of the evidence he was using to justify the property seizure in the speech was false. For example, the Internet was not created by the government to help business. The Internet was developed by Xerox to allow people to use their copiers regardless of location. The Internet was developed to sell copiers.

Also it is businesses that pave roads with money that is in large part coming from business and the rich. Obama also fails to recognize that businesses themselves are examples of people working collectively to achieve goals. He acts like the only way tomcooperate is through government. Scanned through his entire speech the other day and I could write a small book on all the deceptions, self or otherwise, if I were to fisk it.

 And you believe all the stuff you get on the web?   Note that the Xerox protocol (XNS) postdated the start of the Arpanet (the immediate predecessor of the internet) and was not the major protocol used by the Internet (TCP/IP).  

As to the alleged Al Gore statement see http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
Al Gore used the word ‘created’ not ‘invented’ and, as he pushed the major funding proposals that got the internet off the ground, he has some share in the creation of the internet (still a bit of self-promotion but not a flat out lie).

brianmacker declared without the slightest speck of evidence: “many think that it was wrong because that outing communist in and of itself was wrong”

Who?  Anyone other than moldy old strawmen and the voices in your head?  Surely no one here has said any such thing. 

Right-wing lunatics and liars have made so many false accusations of terrorism that the fact that a member of the GOP claims someone has ties to a terrorist organization is actually evidence AGAINST such ties.  Just like McCarthy’s witch hunts could never have actually caught a real spy, because that was never the point, it was all about ruining the lives of innocent people and spreading fear for political gain.  No Republican can be trusted, they all forgot how to tell the truth years ago. 

 Are you at all interested in CLOSING the gap between the rich and the poor?

LOL, apply your standard to yourself and maybe I’ll consider filling you in. Not a speck of evidence in your comment.

Closing or reducing the gap? Closing no. That implies a complete removal of all incentive in the market and millions of dead people as the economy collapses. You’d have to give a definition of poor, rich, and what you mean by reduce before I could give you a short answer. I’m not going to write a long comment to explain all the factors you need to take into account before your question is specific. Right now it is a nonsense question.

Think about a world of clones who all start at minimum wage and save over their lifetimes until they are rich. Their lives all follow identical trajectories. In that world I would like to maximize the gap between the rich and the poor. That would make everyone best off.

So clarify your question to take into account factors like this that leftists tend to get themselves confused about, and I’ll consider answering it.

Do you have some plan that you have in mind?

Convincing argument.

It’s obvious that no force in the universe will penetrate your armor of willful ignorance.  Have fun with your army of poorly-constructed strawmen.  

Now you are just trolling. Sorry to tell you this but both parties are full of liars, dirty trick players, etc. Yet here you are worshiping the Democrats. Can’t have someone questioning your gods, eh? I mean how naive do you have to be after Jon Corzine steals billions and Obama doesn’t lift a finger, well except to keep a tax cheat treasurer, and a Fed Chairman has transferred trillions from the poor and middle class and deserving rich to the undeserving rich through bank bailouts.

Brian, I hate to break this to you, but you don’t really have the power to read minds.  You’re just hallucinating and making shit up.   Nothing you’re saying has any bearing whatsoever on reality, and the political positions you’ve made up for me out of whole cloth have no connection to me at all. 

No, actually I did not say that, you just hallucinated it, because you are totally batshit fucking INSANE! I just mocked you for still being obsessed with a stupid soundbite over a decade old that never had an iota of relevance even when it was fresh. But you can’t afford to let go of that little nonsense talking point, because without rotting piles of long dead strawmen you’d have nothing at all.

Oh, and to fully disbuse you of your belief that Al Gore was telling the truth he even admitted it was bullshit: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/g/goreinternet.htm

I’ll bring it up in response every single time some lying politician or ignorant supporter tries to use it in justification of some stupid policy. As I will this Obama quote as long as he is politically relevant. That and the fact he thought there were 57 states, thinks Austrian is a language, etc. This current speech is right in line with his other statements like “… “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”, and his decision to hire consultants and appoint a Fed chairman who follow this advice with freshly printed money.