The Totalitarian Leftist Tactics against the Right

Scanning through your old messages, at a minimum you've objected to Obama's LGBT guidelines, fairly strenuously and critically. More generally you object to laws at a federal level that you believe would be more appropriately addressed with a patchwork of inconsistent state or local level laws. You think individuals should interact with one another to figure things out instead of having laws. And finally, people who believe other than you are totalitarian in their thinking.Labeling people authoritarian isn't going to communicate what you mean to others, not without several paragraphs of clarification. That's how you know you're misusing the word. Hey, you're a nihilist, let me explain what I mean by that...--Percy

Percy it's not necessary to explain every little thing to us; we are at least supposedly adults. We know what nihilists are

Erroneous attribution.

State churches existed in most colonies to one degree or another. This included tax support of churches & ministers (with court enforcement of payment) and even compulsory attendance. Enforcement likely varied widely. Separation of church and state in the United States - Wikipedia Edited by 14174dm, : No reason given.

are sure they aren't Nazis?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_29yvYpf4w

Correct. Maryland was a Roman Catholic refuge, Pennsylvania a Quaker refuge, Virginia (the first to include religious freedom as a constitutional right) was primarily Methodist and Presbyterian with an overlay of Church of England, New England mostly Puritan. The one thing all agreed was that each must be protected from the other.

Totalitarianism probably requires brutality to maintain itself; since you can't control everything without provoking opposition, but that doesn't mean that someone seeking to impose a totalitarian regime is going to start out by kicking a pregnant woman to death.My concern here is that your line of reasoning sounds pretty much identical to that used to shout down criticism of any unjust assumption of state power. When we say that some new anti-terror law is wrong because gives the security services arbitrary powers; or that the Poland's govenrment is behaving dictatorially by trying to overule the Supreme Court, people protest that this trivialises 'proper' dictatorships; as if anything is fine as long as you don't kill 6 million Jews.This sort of thing should be protested and criticised before it gets that far.ABE: I don't think there's anything totalitarian about advising schools they shouldn't prevent transgender kids from using the bathrooms of their choice. My issue was with the line of reasoning, not the specifics.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

Not to limit Christianity, no, merely to make it possible for all those denominations represented in each colony to coexist under a united government. There was no idea of limiting Christianity as such at all, just to avoid a state denomination at the federal level. It was a Baptist church that was particularly concerned other denominations might dominate them, so Jefferson reassured them that they'd have freedom to follow their own convictions. The influence of generic Christianity, however, was pervasive throughout the new United States, in the government, in the schools, in the courts, this was a Christian nation through and through. The main Founders were Deists but the vast majority of the population were true Christians and the new institutions reflected that fact. The Bible was the foundation of education, prayer opened the sessions of government, court decisions favored protecting Christianity.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Obviously that's not what I have in mind. That isn't a practice based on the religion itself, it's what happens when a denomination has all the power, which WAS limited by the First Amendment. Simply practicing what the Bible teaches doesn't lead to persecuting anyone, and that's what I meant by religious freedom. All the Christian denominations in those days took the Bible as their authority, differing on what are called secondary points but not on major doctrine. That is why it is possible for generic Christianity to have complete freedom, as it did for the first years of the nation.Legal gay marriage is the first thing to come along that actively conflicts with Biblical Christianity. Free speech isn't the same thing since there is incendiary speech that isn't allowed, but a Bible-based denomination shouldn't need to be limited because it doesn't threaten anybody. SoSo there isn't anything you could find from the era of the Founders that recognizes a need to limit any Bible based denomination, EXCEPT the provision that there be no established state denomination at the federal level. The principle quoted from Jefferson can easily be applied to other freedoms, but besides the establishment clause not to Christian denominations. As far as I've seen or you've demonstrated so far.Biblical Christianity IS Christianity, all those other recent denominations that promote homosexuality and other elements of the liberal worldview are deviant from true Christianity. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Again Faith, that is simply not true. Every Christian denomination is based on the Bible so gay marriage does not conflict with Biblical Christianity, only with some chapters of Club Christians interpretations of what is Biblical Christianity. The position you market is exactly the reason we need the protections of the First Amendment; so that "YOUR Christianity" cannot be imposed on anyone not a member of your cult.

Some points to consider1) you are including Catholics as Christians here2) Religious tolerance laws singling out Christianity were not unknown. The law that the Catholics passed in Maryland to welcome the Puritans did. (The Puritans repeated it after both their revolts). Nothing in the U.S. Constitution singled out Christianity.3) Jefferson is on record as supporting religious freedom for Muslims and Hindus.4) Madison was firmly against government support for Christian denominations.So where does this idea that the Constitution gives special privileges to Christianity come from, when it is not in the text and both Jefferson and Madison would have been against it ?

Yes the dominant culture was based on Christianity. So it acted through the legal system to protect itself and suppress others.Note that a couple colonies/states only allowed Protestants to hold office. I guess Catholics aren't true Christians and can be oppressed by the Protestants.What about Jews, Native Americans, African native religions, etc.? Native Americans were already here and enslaved Africans had no choice. Why would it be acceptable to force them to pay for & attend Christian services?The First Amendment was a conscious effort to protect the citizens from having a religion imposed upon them by those using the power of the government. That is why official public school prayers are banned while voluntary prayer led by students on school grounds is permitted.

Wrong. Not backed up by facts or history. None of the things we think of now as fundamentalism existed before the Second Great Awakening. Most americans had rejected the strict teaching of Puritanism and Calvinism at the time of the founding of the USA. The Constitution was written in a way to keep those forces from dominating government and society.

I'm not really sure what your point is here. I mean, I don't disagree with any of this. I was just pointing out that Faith was blaming the wrong group for things. SCOTUS was not acting as a legislature - the legislature was. Naturally her response was to confirm that the SCOTUS acting beyond its authority was a red herring.The Totalitarian concept is that SCOTUS' same-sex marriage decision was forcing private citizens to bake cakes for gay weddings is nonsense. That's all I was pointing out. That 'forcing' is the same 'forcing' that requires private citizens to bake cakes for interracial marriages. It wasn't the Loving decision, but Civil rights laws that created it. Faith would do well to keep these things....straight.

There's a lot of anti-Christian revisionist "history" out there so I have to ask what your source is.I think it was a big mistake that the Constitution didn't specifically define Christianity as the foundation of the nation, since it functioned as that nevertheless and even the Founders embraced it in practice if not theory. There were Christian leaders who strongly objected to the Constitution's leaving out of any reference to God, and there was a movement for years to incorporate some statement of God's role into a Preamble. It's odd to think but God is part of the UK's Constitution and even a part of their educational system more than it is in once-Christian America.