not really, but if someone had a medical emergency, up there, good luck getting help in a timely manner.
In my opinion you are saving our culture... from lame ass white people who think they are smarter than every one because they live in Vermont. I say bring it on.
Let's not forget Pacifico and also those lame ass people in DC that run this country. I used to think it was an east coast thing but take a look a Kalifornia.
Re: Talk is cheap Actually, we need a survey of what people actually DO about their beliefs. royalstilton is closer to what I was getting at when he said "suffering is not popular". As far as American Christians go, their "faith" is non-existent. If you take the NT seriously, Yshua didn't preach an ideology that you can claim to believe in without doing anything about. He didn't even say to do nice things as long as it's convenient for you and won't cost you hardly anything. I suspect if he did come back, the folks he'd be pissed off at most are the idiots at the megachurch waving their hands around like extras in a scene from Cats with one eye on the jumbotron. For the vast majority of American "christians, "faith" is something they mouth for one hour a week and then completely ignore the other 167 hours. Which, to be fair, can hardly be surprising in a society designed precisely around doing the opposite of what Yshua taught. I suspect the same is true of Muslims, Hindus, etc.
Re: Talk is cheap Ratdog, I never thought I'd say this but I think you are correct. Christians are taught, "...for many are called but few are chosen". I suspect a lot of church attendees are keeping their options open. I think where we disagree is in another biblical quote, "judge not, less thou be judged". If people chose to do the former, it is none of my business. I know that many non-believers are greatly irratated when someone appears to make judments about their life style. Rightfully so. Not to provoke a fight here but aren't you questioning/making judgments about those who attend religious services?
Re: Talk is cheap i want to say publicly that i think this is a very astute post. i think you may be a bit hard on some of the megachurch crowd, but here in SoCal there are plenty of Jesus folks who drive their ML550 -- nothing wrong with that inherently, since you need to take the kids to soccer practice -- into the parking lot, spend an hour and fifteen minutes schmoozing, and drive back to Newport Beach, complaining that the music was too loud again. some of these folks own a very nice Bible, and, if pressed, can find 1 Thessalonians. consumer Christianity is very popular.
Re: Talk is cheap What options? They just like living the secular American lifestyle and modify their Christianity to allow it. The judgement started with them, and it's perfectly valid for non-Christians who are going to be inconvenienced by religious-based legislation to see if the Christians can take the stuff they are dishing out.
Re: Talk is cheap There are plenty of things that religious people would like to do, such as censorship or illegalization of abortion or restriction of birth control. And there are things that they are doing now, such as keeping homosexual relationships less legitimate than heterosexual ones.
Re: Talk is cheap I don't have a problem with judging people and I don't really have a problem with people judging me. A lot of the time, judgements are no more than thoughts. I do have the right to have a problem with judgements about me that I don't like though.
Rational exchanges, what a concept. Gordon, I think you hit on many of the animosities in these threads. No one likes to be judged unless of course, that judges agree with you. Hypocrisy drives most people nuts. That is at the root of political problems in the US today. The other guy is a hypocrite, don't ya know. I suspect that is what irratates Ratdog about mega churches; but even that hypocrisy sent an awful lot of money to Haiti recently. Insert your own platitude here. I'll go with the mile in the mocasins thing.
Re: Talk is cheap but don't you sometimes think that people whose ideas differ from your are less intelligent or that they're operating from a particular sort of ignorance? and isn't that a kind of judgment?
Re: Talk is cheap It completely depends on what the difference of opinion is and where it's coming from. I'm quite sure that would be the case with everyone. I'm quite socially liberal, I'd legalise a lot of illegal drugs. If someone disagreed with this and put forward a reasonable reason why, I certainly wouldn't look down on them for it. I have no problem with sex before marriage, contraception or the legality of early abortions, if someone disagreed with this and when asked why, said "because I'm catholic", then of course I would judge that person to be a raving moron. And I think I'm well within my rights and the boundries of reasonableness, to do so. Of course, this is a judgement but judging people, in itself, is not a bad thing. As with a lot of discussions on here, it really comes down to how different people use the word. I wouldn't say I'm a judgemental person and I don't think that's a particularly good thing to be. Making judgements about people is pretty inevitable though.
Re: Talk is cheap Sure they are, if you don't follow the precepts of the dominant religion. Ask MitH if it's inconvenient to try and get a beer during Ramadan. Having to follow the rules of a religion you don't believe in easily rises to the level of "inconvenience", if it doesn't blow right on by.
Re: Talk is cheap within your rights, yes, but within the boundaries of reasonableness, no. what you may not see is that you're imposing your sense of what's "good" or "better" on someone whose sense of "best" is rooted in an age-old morality that is defined by what a large majority of people think is God-given. it's completely unreasonable to say to that person or persons, "your shouldn't think that way because there is not God", since that statement is unverifiable. now, if it comes down to the issue of whether people in the majority can legislate against abortion ( as the most current and possibly most divisive example ) there are those who believe quite strongly that it's not good for a culture -- in the long run -- to allow people to abort babies [ if they aren't going to be babies eventually, why does anyone want to abort them? ] mostly for convenience sake. the question of whether there are compelling reasons for some abortions is another matter, which can be discussed separately.
Re: Talk is cheap OK, that specific example might not have been the best one to use since it was always going to bump us off topic a bit. But, speaking in general terms, it is surely with the boundries of reasonableness for me to judge someone as, speaking politley, unilntelligent. Or, less politely, an idiot. Obviously it is a subjective (and relative) subject so my judgements may be different to others but as long as they're fairly reached, I don't see the problem. What you didn't see is that I was not imposing any kind of view of what is good or better on anybody. Firstly, judging someone to be stupid if they disagree is very different from 'imposing' my view. And secondly, I was not judging someone as stupid for disagreeing with me. If I'm judging someone on opinions which are reasonably divisive (like the leaglity of some issues or religion) then I'm more likely to judge them on their argument or reasoning than their conclusion. Having opinions simply because they were handed down to you via an organised religion or because that's what most people in your society think, without much thought for yourself, is urely the hallmark of an idiot. That's what I was trying to say. As I said, I accept that some people have a different opinion to me on this without thinking they're stupid. I can't help saying that the last part of this paragraph is something I might judge someone on. I made it very clear, and I always have when speaking about this issue, that I'm in favour of allowing early abortion, specifically because I don't think aborting 'babies' is right. A fertilised egg is not a baby or a human being. The difficulty comes in deciding when the fertilised egg does become a living human. I don't know what your anti-abortion view is based on but that is a pretty silly argument in my opinion. What reasons would you see as "compelling"?
Re: Talk is cheap Judgement is inherent in rational thought. In fact, judgement is inherent in our most basic consciousness. When we delineate and define, we judge. We do this by breaking apart reality into quanta and naming those quanta. The First (or Second, depending on your denomination) Commandment deals with idolatry. Some Christians take this literally to mean that you shall not make a physical idol. But the real idolatry happens in the mind. It is the conscious mind that mistakes the physical idol for a true depiction of God. Any Christian who worships the Bible or the "Word of God" (translated by their human preacher or by their own human mind) is unwittingly engaging in idolatry. That does not mean that idolaters should be punished by other men. Idolatry is itself its own punishment as it prevents the person from experiencing the spirit. Religious rituals are based on the "mystery". This is intentional. If you understand with your mind, you aren't able to commune with God. American Protestants have taken advantage of the "free market" of ideas we have in the United States where we lack a state religion. The result is a lot of intellectualization of religion, which defeats the whole purpose of religion in the first place. The megachurches are a reflection of this phenomenon, where we find all kinds of intellectual justifications for hypocritical behaviors. It's basically Madison Avenue style evangelism, and it does nothing to uplift people or society. Anyways, judgment is a fact of our conscious minds. It's not going away. We are human and only partly of the spirit. We live in a material reality where judgment is a necessary aspect of life. We test ideas, we make decisions, we create and modify routines. We also decide what people we want to associate with, cooperate with, invest with. All this stems from our ability to judge. If Christians are going to intellectualize their behavior, then they will judged.
While there's more than a bit of Jewish character to New York, most of the Jews here are secular. And as far as California goes, there are actually quite few practicing Buddhists among the Asian community in the US - in fact, there are far more Christians than there are Buddhists.
That's true. And a lot of long-standing American Buddhist churches with primarily Asian attendees resemble secular community centers for recent immigrants.
Re: Talk is cheap when we are talking about values issues, like premarital sex and abortion, there's going to be the niggling question of "good" and "bad", and certainly, if you have that paradigm, then "good/better/best". the comparatives are going to be based on non-standard opinion often enough, but many people aren't against abortion simply because they are Catholic. they are Catholic because they believe that Catholic Christianity represents a value system and moral truths that are founded in the revelation of God's Word to us humans. sometimes they think those things without a lot of critical thinking, but other people have examined the issues carefully and come to the conclusion that what they consider to be good and trustworthy evidence -- not evidence that you accept, granted -- weighs strongly in favor of their view. telling that person that he isn't intelligent because he holds that view is judgmental to the extreme. you do like to throw insults around, don't you? as i said before, the whole point of abortion is to eliminate the birth of a human, except in the relatively rare circumstance where it is to protect the health of the mother. it's not disingenuous to say that an embryo isn't a person. it's just like Bill Clinton saying "I didn't have sex with that woman." no, he didn't put his penis in her vagina. he simply let her puff on his cigar.