Should those of religious faith be allowed to run this country?

It was obviously a bait thread from the getgo, an opportunity to ridicule as usual. Nothing new there. One may decide to take the bait anyway, knowing the rules, the REAL rules, not the written rules.

No, the English impressed and enslaved our seamen for the same reason the Barbary Pirates did, because that was normal Great Power behavior and the US was simply a secondclass bit player.Your assesment of the history is a classic example of why certain religious people must be questioned very closely before they are allowed to hold positions of power. It has nothing to do with religion but rather the capability of their making reasoned, informed decisions. If, for example, they honestly believe the universe is but 6000 years old or that gays are a threat to marriage or that the Flood happened or that the TOE is not the best explanation for what we observe, then they are incapable of reasoned thought and it is questionable whether or not they would be fit to hold any office.Such handicaps should not be an absolute bar to holding office, but it is an indicator. The question would be whether they are capable of setting aside such illogical and unreasonable beliefs while performing their duties.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

This is nothing but revisionist propaganda. Sure they're upset about the Crusades: We won, we saved Europe from them, we foiled their effort at that time to take the world for Allah and they've had to pull back and regroup for the last millennium. They think they have a right to Europe, and in fact to any place they ever conquered however temporarily. And hey, they're winning it back. The Europeans are so crippled by leftist-inspired political correctness, multiculturalism and the stupid propaganda that says the Crusades were nothing but wrong, they are incapable of doing anything to save themselves from them. Well, give up your Christian roots and you get the alien god Allah, that's the lesson here. Any chance America will heed it? Naah. Might as well get yourself a prayer rug and a hijab for your wife -- or mother and sisters if you don't have a wife. It's coming. Bye bye freedom, bye bye equality, bye bye all the Christian blessings of the West, hello Sharia law.Edits for clarity and to be a tad more politic.This message has been edited by Faith, 06-04-2005 11:14 PM

Yeah right. LOLThat's why the Crusaders decided to stop of and sack Christian Constantinople instead of going on to Jerusalem.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Naah, at least not where I live. If the Muslims go too far the Hindus and Sikhs will kick their ass...EDITed to add Faith's addition.This message has been edited by MangyTiger, 06-04-2005 11:25 PM

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Oops! Wrong Planet

Not to mention that many of the Barbary pirates weren't Muslims, but rather Dutch originally.De Veenboer
Jan Janszoon van Haarlem
Simon the Dancer

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Asgara
"Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever....but get over it"select * from USERS where CLUE > 0http://asgarasworld.bravepages.com
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Why then did Washington feel the need to assure them America was not Christian, in order to keep them from persecuting what they considered to be Christians?

I know where you get your religious fantasies but where are you getting these paranoid political fantasies?Besides which, if it did happen why wouldn't you be accepting it as the will of God?I'm not saying it won't happen but it will take hundreds of years and I'd think somehow China would have to go Muslim as well. Btw, do you care at all what the Chinese are doing to the Tibetans? I don't think our government does, most likely cause at this point there is no way for Bush's buddies to make any money in Tibet. No one has found oil or strategic minerals there.lfen

I would, I do, as in fact I thought I'd said quite clearly. God's punishment. Definitely His will. The end of Western civilization because the West has abandoned Him. Thought I'd said this over and over. I hope He might change His mind because it's going to be brutal. Why? Certainly they are establishing themselves in Asia too but there's no reason they can't take down Europe first and then America. We're ripe for it. What ARE they doing to the Tibetans?Do you care at all what the Chinese government is doing to its Christian citizens?

This REALLY REALLY explains why Washington felt the need to explain to them that America is not a Christian country to get them to desist.

Faith, you are starting to provide grounds for the reservations many of us have about religiously motivated leaders, and not just Christian ones either. We worry that a president who is 'born again' might possibly be just as fatalisitic as you are...

Well it seems to me that Pres. Bush doesn't take a hard enough line on Islam, but this has nothing to do with his being born again.This message has been edited by Faith, 06-05-2005 07:23 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 06-05-2005 07:25 AM

Trying to wake people up is the opposite of fatalism by the way.

Greetings Faith,You've clearly shown -- and correctly -- that having an authoritarian Muslim government in power in the United States would be very bad (I might add that this is obviously not the type of gov. the OP had in mind). Having ANY faith-based government simply does not work in a society such as ours -- I still hold us to be a modern and sophisticated country with a wide range of philosophies and belief systems, which is great IMO.Don't you see that this is exactly why we can not have an authoritative Christian government? It goes both ways. The separation is in place to protect YOU. It's blatantly obvious. The problem is just that the Christian right is grossly short-sighted and want to impose their views on the masses at whatever cost necessary.If everyone would just take a step back and look at the other side the coin and realize that this world and more importantly this country consists of a smorgasbord of viewpoints, you would see that the need for a government independent of faith is a no-brainer.

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"Look, the Bible is VERY clear. [...] It warns repeatedly against believing what the 'world' says, what the 'wise' of the world, the philosophers or thinkers of the world say." -- Faith

Well, I haven't proposed an authoritative Christian government, although I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the term. This thread focused on whether Christians would accept a Muslim President. I answered that if that's the way the country voted, there would be no choice but to accept it, but went on to add that it would be a very bad sign for the health of the country, which I would take as God's judgment against us, which we richly deserve in my view. What "separation" means to you and what it meant to the founders may be entirely different things. I'm not sure it's completely clear what they meant, however, because the topic is so clouded by heated rhetoric from both sides, but I'm very sure they had no idea of eliminating Christianity from the public arena as it is now interpreted. The nation was solidly Protestant in their day. Local government revolved around Christian prayer at least in the New England area. Seeking God's will in the affairs of government was considered an important duty. Preachers preached on various political issues, on the rightness or wrongness of the war of independence, for instance, on the shaping of the proposed federal government and its constitution. Just to read a little in the lives of the movers and shakers of that day is to see Christianity intimately interwoven with every facet of life. It is very hard to see how one gets from that impression of a religion-soaked America to the present notion that the founders wanted a government and a public life devoid of Christian influence.This is not to deny that they wanted a separation between the church and the state of some kind however. At its most basic, this was intended to keep Congress from establishing one sect as dominant over the others, because that was a recipe for persecution of the non-established sects, which is what had happened in Europe. Getting from that to the idea they wanted a secular government scrubbed free of all Christian influence is quite an unwarranted leap, however. I would think that notion is more than contradicted by the fact that they themselves instituted Christian prayer to open all the functions of government. This is a very complex subject. The meaning of the separation of church from state isn't at all obvious, as I say above, and neither is **what the Christian right is trying to do.** The Christian right is not a monolith but represents a variety of opinions, and sorting out their views in the atmosphere of near-hysterical opposition to anything they have to say at all is usually a lost cause on a message board. Um, I'm sure you don't mean "everyone" ahould *step back,* you mean Christian fundies should realize they're wrong, period. However, there's a lot that could be discussed in this paragraph too. How we got to BE a smorgasbord of viewpoints could be an interesting investigation in itself, and whether it is a good thing for a cohesive and healthy nation is another question to think about, and THEN we can talk about whether "a government independent of faith" (the term "faith" needing much discussion in itself) is 1) needed as you claim, 2) a good idea if so.I'm not sure all or any particular one of these topics belongs in this thread.