The Glade 4.0

Believers are free to have their opinions and vote toward that end. If Rori doesn't want MJ to be legalized (which I understand isn't the case) because he doesn't think God would be okay with it, that's fine. However, I don't want a law in the books that says, "We can't smoke weed because it's not What Jesus Would Do". That's obviously hyperbole but hopefully you get the point. At that point my freedoms could be restricted based on a belief system to which I'm not even subscribed, not to mention things like that completely spit in the face of separation of church and state.

Besides, God gave us everything on this earth as our own, and free will to decide for ourselves, right? Seems odd to ban something in his name at all. Arbitrary rules made by man to try to force others into subjugation of their beliefs.

I was having a conversation with Kate, who is a fellow believer. She confronted me with scripture and I countered. MJ legislation is a sticky wicket. As I said, there is a mixed deal about legality and sin in this country. I'm against the drug for the reasons I explained and I'm for making the decision at state local or even personal level. I'd never vote for MJ legalization at a direct poll (cause I'm responsible to God for how I vote), but It's not the end of the world if it's legal.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Laws are never put on the books "because that's what Jesus would do" or "because that's what Thomas Jefferson would do" or is any other reason a part of the code.

The law just says "You can't smoke marijuana" or "you can't kill people, except in self-defense" (only in fancier language). It's irrelevant whether the law is on the books because the legislators or the people think that's what Jesus wants or not.

I'm pretty sure Rori also opposes murder because he believes Jesus does also. If there's a law on the books (which there is) prohibiting murder, it's irrelevant to what degree it's on the books because of a belief system you subscribe to or not. The important matter is whether there is a state interest in regulating the behavior in question. In the case of murder, there unquestionably is, in the case of the use of marijuana, it's more debatable. However, in either case, it doesn't matter if the law is being imposed on you because of someone else's beliefs; what matters is the actual effect of the law.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

What matters, and what should always matter, is the intent behind the law. Many laws make sense. Don't speed in your car, because it's dangerous to others. Don't steal things, because you're hurting the merchant's business.

When you go beyond that is when I get irritated. Don't marry gays, because God says it's an abomination.

There's no reason the intent behind the law should ever matter. None, whatsoever.

The effect is what matters. It is legitimate to have speeding laws because the effect (theoretically; clearly not all speed limits make sense) is to make the highways safer while still allowing reasonably fast transportation. It is legitimate to have laws against stealing, because... you know what? I'm not going to explain something so obvious as why there is a compelling interest in laws against stealing.

For things like laws against gay marriage, the effect (2 people of the same sex can't marry; as an aside, there are no laws whatsoever saying "you can't marry gays"; there are laws saying "you can't marry 2 people of the same sex", which is a minor but important difference) is not one that is easily legitimized in the way that laws against stealing or speeding are, although there is a certain amount to be said for a community being allowed to determine its own morality.

Regardless, the effect (2 people of the same sex cannot marry) is much, much harder to justify as a government interest than "you can't take someone else's property".

If there were some sort of compelling interest in preventing same-sex marriage (let's pretend it led to psychopathic disorders), then the effect of banning it (preventing psychopathic disorders which then result in violent insanity), it wouldn't matter that it's also supposedly an abomination to some people.

Conversely, stealing is also an abomination in the eyes of God (in fact, while the "abomination" status of homosexual activity is questionable, that of stealing is not; it's one of the Ten Commandments not to steal) but no one ***** about the fact that laws against stealing are very likely to be supported by religious people because it conforms to religious morality; the bottom line is that the effect is one that is compellingly necessary to make society work, and also tends to fit with everyone else's morality too.

As for you getting personally irritated.. I'm sorry to hear that. However, your personal irritation is not a compelling reason a law shouldn't be passed, either. Happily, however, I'm sure you'll find that the vast majority of laws you disagree with that appear to have primarily religious motivations also suffer from relative weakness in terms of demonstrating any compelling reason for existing.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Murder is illegal because:

A) It's in the Bible
B) Society frowns on killing our fellow humans

Not to mention

C) There wouldn't be any society without some sort of restriction on who can kill another person and under what circumstances.

What we don't do, however is say (in the unlikely event we held a referendum on murder laws ) "Wait! Christians (or for that matter, anyone else religious) can't vote on this, because they might support anti-murder laws on religious grounds and we just can't have that!"

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Societal taboos forbidding theft and murder predate the Tanakh.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

No kidding, really? As I said, no society can work without some sort of rules to keep people from killing each other whenever the **** they want.

This does not mean that major legal/religious codes of history are not a primary reason they exist in the form they do in our society.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Historically, religions have viewed nonbelievers as not being people, and therefore not being subject to any of that religion's laws. Praying to a different god has historically been grounds to be treated as subhuman, an aspect of the human condition that remained largely unchanged until the birth of a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

It didn't happen right away, and the change was not limited to the continental United States, however it is clear upon looking at human history that our attitudes about who was a fellow human being happened right around the time we decided to stop allowing churches to influence law. Prior to the separation of church and state, the ten commandments only forbid theft and murder when your fellow Lutheran/Catholic/Baptist/etc. Christians would be the victim. We can argue all we want about what the Bible says, but let's look at what people were actually doing, and the official positions of the various churches in the western world.

Ironically, it appears as though the separation of church and state has actually made everyone, believers and otherwise, to be "better Christians" by their own definition of the term.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Historically, religions have viewed unbelievers as unbelievers. It's been very, very rare to view them as "not being people" and to the degree that happens it's also a product of ethnic differences, especially outward physical ones.



If you exaggerate considerably, perhaps. You seem to ignore the propensity of many religions for trying to conver people, forcibly or otherwise. It makes little sense to convert a "subhuman".

Now, second-class, or third-class citizens, yes, many religions have treated nonbelievers that way, but lets not overstate our case, shall we?



Even assuming this unspecified "time we stopped allowing churches to influence law" existed (which it does not), the fact of the matter is that the Ten Commandments do NOT only forbid theft from other people of your own denomination. I don't know where you're getting this "official positions of churches" nonsense from, all you're doing is making very vague, unsupported assertions about the course of history, and about the official positions of churches. Aside from the fact that we're talking about hundreds of different types of church which you seem to think you can just lump together as all having a particular position the fact is that while some churches did, at some points advocate or allow behavior that would seem to indicate that's exactly what they thought, it's hardly any universal "official position" that was held.



Ironically, "separation of church and state" does not mean "churches are not allowed to influence law". Such a thing would not be "Separation of church and state"; it would be "Believers are not allowed to vote."

Since believers are allowed to vote, and to varying degrees do vote according to their beliefs, and are allowed to run for and hold office, the fact is that the church does "influence" government a great deal, and despite your cute little comments about a country founded on liberty, part of that same founding was the prohibition on religious testing for the holding of office.

In other words, the Founders were not stupid enough to pretend they could end church "influence" in any practical way; the only thing they could do was create a system where the influence of any church (including mosques, temples, and whatever else) was indirect, and reflected by the number and dedication of their membership, and where none of those memberships was prohibited from exercising its influence.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Since corporations are people (/gag), are churches?

Yeah, I gag when people make that statement too.

The ruling wasn't that corporations are people, it was that the freedom of speech can't be taken away from you just because you are part of a corporation.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

What ruling? Corporations have legally had all the rights of a separate person since they were legally defined. It's one of the purposes of a corporation.

(And yes, it's a shitty set of laws.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Thats not true, corporate personhood only got equal treatment with individual rights in one case (and it was an accident as the court clerk forgot to transcribe the word "not" in the ruling and before it could be corrected it was cited in other cases which became backbone for such treatment).

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Yeah! Smoke um if you got um.

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"None is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people safe as they are the
ultimate guardians of their own liberty."- Thomas Jefferson

"Yeah, I'm rehearsing my poker face. I don't handle stupid well. *sigh*" - Farsky

Not all. Corporations cannot vote, for one thing.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Hah! Not in the normal sense, at least. Corporations vote with $$$ and to say anything otherwise is naive.

Poison the well much?

All this is doing is extending the definition of voting to any expressing of views that might affect someone's voting.

There's nothing wrong with using your financial resources to convince people to see things your way as long as it's not a matter of actually paying for votes.

Is it problematic when corporations (or unions, or anyone else) use the money to lobby politicians in ways not easily examined by the public? Yes; that's why such activities need to be held to strict standards of accountability.

However, a corporation ultimately just represents the interests of its stockholders in whatever matters pertain to the corporation.

All this complaining that corporations, or unions, or whoever should not be able to spend money in order to get their views out there basically comes down to "Ideas I don't like should not be easy to get into the public eye." That's why money is, essentially, speech. Trying to make it subject to regulation is a backdoor way to regulate freedom of speech, by controlling the resources that make it possible to exercise free speech in a meaningful way.

There's also the fact that we already have freedom of the press. The press consists of a large number of corporations, but no one claims that them using money to get certain views out there is a problem. There's no reason news agencies should be able to say whatever they want, but politicians should be free to restrict the ability of other corporations to get their views to the public.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The vast majority of people repeating that meme are using the Citizen's United ruling as their basis.

It's my understanding that the main purpose of incorporation is to establish a separate entity to protect the assets of the people involved.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I'm sorry, but if you don't like the woman or her positions, how is calling her this an appropriate response?

I'm usually hard to offend, but geez. It's bad enough to be constantly bombarded with people calling women *****, sluts, bimbos, etc when they don't like something the women have done (see comments on other message boards and on news articles, etc.) It'd be nice if we could avoid that here.

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?

I'm very much doubting calling her a cum dumpster has anything at all with her being a woman. Her husband is also a cum dumpster.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Yeah, but now I have a visual image of Hillary as a prostitute. That's cruel and unusual punishment.

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?

Oh, dear God... Get your brain soaked in bleach ASAP.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

(But my point still remains. Go after her on her statements, with my blessing, but leave the slurs out of it.)

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?