Paul Harvey's take on prayer in public/Xmas (In general, a "freedom of speech" topic)

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I don't agree with Darwin, but I didn't go out and hire a lawyer when my high school teacher taught his theory of evolution.

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Oh, but there is quite an organized radical, right-wing Christain Creationist movement that has been doing exactly that for decades.It's a bit disingenuous for Paul to ignore that reality.

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So what's the big deal? It's not like somebody is up there reading the entire book of Acts. They're just talking to a God they believe in and asking him to grant safety to the players on the field and the fans going home from the game.

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What if it was a Satanist prayer, or a Wiccan prayer to the Goddess? Would all of the Christians in the stands be thinking, "What's the big deal? I don't mind!"

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But it's a Christian prayer," some will argue. Yes, and this is the United States of America, a country founded on Christian principles.

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It most certainly is not. From the Treaty of Tripoli, 1796, unanimously approved by the US Senate after being read aloud:Top Cash Earning Games in India 2022 | Best Online Games to earn real moneybold added by me.

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If we are talking some mandatory prayer before every game then I might start scratching my head, but if it is just that someone reads a prayer... BFD.

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When I went to high school, there was a manditory prayer before every football game, and it was always a Christian prayer.Graduation ceremonies were the same.

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I was quite upset to hear that where my relatives live in west suburban IL, people have been told to remove any religious imagery from their windows during Xmas. What the ????

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That is a bunch of bullshit, I agree. But one's home isn't a publically-funded institution like a school is.

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I don't get where people displaying their faith is so hostile or offensive an act, unless it is mandated or overtly an attempt to prosyletize.

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At my school, I don't think that any kind of prayer other than a Christian prayer would have been alowed. I can only imagine the uproar if a wiccan prayer or a Muslim prayer was said over the loudspeakers before the game.

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I mean if we want to get into demographics, how many hot an horny guys are watching football and would like to see such things at half time? How many would agree such things are better than a dumb marching band?

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Hey, watch it, I was in the marching band.Titties are fine, but I like marching bands.

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The documents are available if you wish to do the research. I recommend Original Intent by Barton.

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Barton is the founder of a group called Wallbuilders which is a radical Religious Right propaganda group that is attempting to rewrite US history.Some questions for you...1) What does Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli state, and was it approved by the entire US Senate?2) Where in the Constitution is God or the religion of Chrisitanity mentioned? Where is religion mentioned at all?Why don't we start with the original documents instead of a right wing Christian propagandists' book?Please be suure to check out my sig below:

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"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose."--Thomas Jefferson

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You cannot seriously be telling me that racism is legal in the USA?

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Of course racism is legal in the US.You cannot legislate thought, nor personal morals.You can only legislate behavior.

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Gzus, in Scotland if you are at a football game and you make racist comments to a coloured player then you are arrested and charged, and normally banned from the football ground for life.

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That would be behavior, although in the US one wouldn't be arrested for the racism, nor would one be banned from the grounds for life.There are extra penalties if a crime (like assault or making threats) also includes ethnic intimidation, but a crime has to be committed along with the racism.

Unless the racist insults contain the threat of violence, no, it is not illegal.

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But you shouldn’t be allowed to do that either!

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I completely disagree.The way to protect free speech is to allow more speech, not less.If I am not free to voice an opinion, I do not have free speech.

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Freedom of speech does not mean that you can just say whatever you want whenever you want.

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As long as there are no threats in the speech, yes, it does.

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Of course it is. There is no reason why someone should be legally told that they are a black bastard.

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What if somebody called them a lousy Liberal because of his political views, or a four-eyes because he wears glasses, or a fatty because he was overweight, or pizza face because he has acne, and his feelings were hurt?Is he a victim of abuse, and thould the person abusing him be arrested and prosecuted?

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An opinion that a black person is inferior to a white person and that the white person has a right to call a black person a fucking nigger is acceptable to you?

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Personally, no.I deplore that kind of hate against any group and I have, on many occasions, countered such speech with my own.

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Free speech is fine, but to have free speech that makes another human being feel worthless is disgusting.

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Yes, it is disgusting.It should still not be illegal. I don't want the government telling anyone what to think or say, as long as there is no physical threat involved or intimidation. It is not the government's job.

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There are ways to voice an opinion in a proper fashion. If you want coloured people out of America then there are peaceful ways of putting your opinion across. There are official channels for voicing your opinion.

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That seems unduly oppressive to me.Anyway, if someone is so raqcist or hateful that they are willing to say it in public, then alls the better to know who the bastards are, as far as I'm concerned.

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How do you think Scotland brought in her laws against racism? We didn't acheive it by calling people niggers and Paksis. Decent people complained about the dehumanisation of others by racist abuse and the laws were passed.

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So, you passed very oppressive speech laws. I'd be very uncomfortable with that in America.It is not the government's place to legislate a homogeneous morality. It is the greater culture's job to change that.Tell me, have the laws against racism made people less racist?Remember, the US is made up of 50 states, and each state has many laws which are unique to each state. The Founders wanted the individual states to remain as independent from the federal government as possible.

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This is obviously where a decent moral society varies from America. Americans do not see a problem with being free to call someone a black bastard, yet other societies are horrified by this.

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Many Americans, probably most, are horrified by someone being called a black bastard.We just don't think the government has the right to legislate what people say, through words, or art, or music, or theater, or literature.If someone is angry at their black ancestors being enslaved by white slave owners, do they have the right to make a sculpture showing a white man being lynched by a bunch of black men? Wouldn't that offend and demean the whites?

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They are all victims of verbal abuse.

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I am sure you know that verbal abuse can have long term psychological effects on a child.

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Of course.But should the name callers be arrested and prosecuted by the government?

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I would also like to think that if a parent heard their child calling another child 'fatty' that they would horrified and punished their child accordingly.

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Yes, I would hope so as well.Do you think that the bully should be prosecuted, though?

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Unless it was America of course, where the child would remind the parent that it is their right to be able to call another kid a fat bastard.

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Just because it is his legal right doesn't make it the right thing to do.With great freedom comes great responsibility.I guess the Founders didn't want the federal government to be a parental figure to it's citizens.

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No wonder there are so many divisions in American society.

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I would not want a homogeneous society, where I was told what I could or couldn't say.

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Can I make a couple of comments?

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But of course.

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I seem to be a little confused about what can and can’t be done in the USA, and whether the kind of things Brian is shocked by would really be allowed to happen in the States. According to Holmes there are laws to protect people from verbal abuse, so the kind of things that Brian is so against (like monkey noises at football matches, or other examples of raw race hatred) would also be illegal.

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In the US you are not allowed to badger or intimidate or threaten someone. IOW, you cannot get in their face, impede their movement, touch them, shout or yell in their face, etc. That would be considered an assault, no matter if what you said to them was race related or not.If you add racial flavor into it then you are subject to additional penalty if you are convicted.

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If this is true then there isn’t too much difference on either side of the pond, although our laws (from what I can gather) might be a tad stricter as to what is defined as racial hatred.

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Actually, compared to the US, the UK is quite a lot more restrictive WRT freedom of speech. IT is much easier to convict someone of slander or libel in the UK than in the US, for example, because your laws regarding acceptable speech are quite a lot more restrictive.

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I think very oppressive is a bit harsh and that this is where the emphasis probably differs between the UK and the US. I suspect (although I’m no expert on the law) that the thing that shaped the UK laws was the need to protect people from unacceptable treatment. It’s all well and good saying that if everybody can answer back etc but does this take human nature into account?

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This is where I am thinking that I don't want the government as a parent.

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I don’t think it does — people just keep their heads down and mutter about how wrong it is.

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Well, perhaps in the US people feel freer to speak up and counter that kind of bullshit themselves instead of waiting for the government to "make Johhny stop touching them". Indeed, that is what we see here.Remember, nobody is allowed to put their hands on you, nor are they allowed to threaten or intimidate you.

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That’s why legislation was passed to stop people being treated differently because they happen to be in the minority.

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In business, and employnent and education, yes. However, the government has no right to legislate personal opinion, nor the voicing of that personal opinion. I think very oppressive is a bit harsh and that this is where the emphasis probably differs between the UK and the US. I suspect (although I’m no expert on the law) that the thing that shaped the UK laws was the need to protect people from unacceptable treatment. It’s all well and good saying that if everybody can answer back etc but does this take human nature into account? I don’t think it does — people just keep their heads down and mutter about how wrong it is. That’s why legislation was passed to stop people being treated differently because they happen to be in the minority. So when you say:

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you’re missing the point slightly. The way to reduce racism etc is to increase education of the issues, and while part of the function of such laws is educating people that such behaviour is wrong, their main use is protection.

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There are already laws against assault and intimidation and threatening behavior.Is it the government's job to protect each citizen against being insulted or offended?I think not.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 01-06-2005 08:30 AM

Contra, you are confusing the issue.There are laws against assault, including verbal assault, harrassment, intimidation, and threats in the US, regardless of race.There are also "ethnic intimidation" laws with add extra penalties if you commit a crime with that flavor.Now, if a teacher assigns "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in her class, and someone gets insulted by the repeated use of the word "nigger" which appears in that book, should she be arrested?Should the producers and arists who make gangsta rap in which whites are vilified and insulted, be prosecuted?

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The founders are dead and what they wanted is utterly unimportant. They were just people, not saints or polymaths whose insight should somehow be priviliged across the centuries. Thats no better than theists privileging their prophets regardless of how badly out of date and manifestly backward their claims are.

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The "founders" are worm-food and don't matter. Live in the now.

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The founders of the Socialist and Communist movements are dead and what they wanted is utterly unimportant. They were just people, not saints or polymaths whose insight should somehow be priviliged across the centuries. Thats no better than theists privileging their prophets regardless of how badly out of date and manifestly backward their claims are.The "founders" of Communism and Socialsism are worm-food and don't matter. Live in the now.OK, using your logic, neither one of our preferred governmental models is valid because of the obvious non-living status of their respecive founders.Now what?

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The leader of the BNP was recently arrested for incitement to racial hatred after being secretly filmed in a party meeting in the back room of a (presumably) priovately owned pub. And rightly so. Incitement to racial hatred is incitementy to racial hatred whether its carried out on public property or private.

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So, someone in the UK can be secretly bugged or filmed in his own home saying "I hate those black bastards" and then be sent to prison?Anyway, what exactly did that man do to incite racial hatred?

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The American system by contrast accepts that any amount of hate speech is viable as long as the speaker is wealthy enough to own the land they stand on.

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What the fuck are you talking about?Gosh, contra, you do have your head up your ass when it comes to what things are like here in America.I would say that the greated amount of overt racial hate speech comes from poor, uneducated people living in isolated rural areas who have a desire for a scapegoat to blame all of their problems on and to feel superior to.

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What they wanted has been tried and tested. What they wanted produced the greatest, the most prosperous, the most blessed and the most free society ever.

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Actually, while we are the most prosperous, we also have the greatest divide between the rich and the poor of any industrialized nation.We have nearly a quarter of our children living below the poverty line.

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It wasn't broke until folks began fixing it.

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So, do you think that we shouldn't have given women the right to vote, or something?

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Now we're loosing it, one law at a time. At the rate you revisionists are revising, it'l be gone soon and we'll join the loosers and the oppressed. I've been watching it's moral and Biblical decline for 50 of my nearly 70 years along with the loss of personal freedom; freedoms which Biblical principles bring.

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If you want to see what it's like to live in a Theocratic nation, you could look at Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. Iran, too.

[qs]Everything was just fine so long as we allowed slavery, denied women the vote and the right to own property, enforced segregation laws......[/quote]

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These things were accepted nearly worldwide at the time.

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Um, so what?You are the one saying that everything was fine until "we" started tampering.The above are some of the things that the "tampering" rectified.Do you think they were good changes or bad changes?

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In spite of them, people were desperately wanting to migrate to America.

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True.

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Even many of the slaves who had Christian masters had had a better life here than in the pagan jungle tribe where they often lived in fear and danger.

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Really?Tell me, Buz, let's pretend that you live in the inner city with lots of gangs around. Then let's say that you were abducted in the middle of the night and were whisked away to a tropical paradise to clean toilets or grow and harvest cotton in the fields, where you were not allowed contact with your children or wife except maybe once or twice a year, but there were no gangs around so you didn't have to live in fear and danger.You don't speak the language in this new place and you had to do everything your master told you to do, and you were not allowed to leave. You don't have any rights, no money, no freedom whatsoever.Would you prefer that life or the previous one?

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Oh, come now. What percentage of America's children were forced to do this.......certainly a tiny percentage of all the children and there has been after America was established, relatively miniscule incidence of starvation and far less poverty than in most of the world.

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Buzsaw, nearly a QUARTER of our children live below the poverty line.You have this pie-in-the-sky image of America that just isn't true.Here are some stats for you.A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE US AND OTHER RICH NATIONSI seem to remember, however, having this conversation with you about a year ago, in which I showed you that the US does not have the best standard of living in the the world for it's citizens. [qs]Where We Stand publishes an index of economic prosperity that takes into account all the following factors: productivity, salaries, equitable wealth distribution, luxury-goods consumption, trading strength, poverty, personal and national indebtedness, inflation control, business strength and credit-worthiness. And the best-off nations are:Germany 1382
Japan 1363
Switzerland 1332
Canada 1216
United States 1178
Netherlands 1087
Sweden 1079
Norway 1061
United Kingdom 1049
Denmark 920
Finland 910Poverty level (More):United States 17.1%
Canada 12.6
United Kingdom 9.7
Switzerland 8.5
Germany 5.6
Sweden 5.3
Norway 5.2Children under the poverty level:United States 22.4%
Canada 15.5
United Kingdom 9.3
Switzerland 7.8
Sweden 5.0
Germany 4.9
Norway 4.8Deaths from malnutrition (per million):Men Women
United States 7 13
France 4 9
Canada 5 7
Japan 2 1
United Kingdom 1 2
Norway 0 1This is a devastating statistic for those who believe that America's greater commitment to individualism translates into greater individual freedom. In reality, the social democracies of Northern Europe are the freest societies in the world.The United Nation's Human Freedom Index compares the amount of freedom that citizens of different countries enjoy. It considers the right to travel, assemble, and speak; the absence of forced labor, torture and other extreme legal punishment (such as the death penalty); freedom of political opposition, the press and trade unions; an independent judiciary; gender equality; and the legal right to trial, counsel of choice, privacy, religion and sexual practice.The United Nations Human Freedom Index (0 = least freedom, 40 = most freedom. More.):Sweden 38
Denmark 38
Netherlands 37
Austria 36
Finland 36
France 35
Germany 35
Canada 34
Switzerland 34
Australia 33
United States 33
Japan 32
United Kingdom 32

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Why do you think people were waiting in line to emigrate here?

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Because they wewre starving or being killed/persecuted in their own countries.Just because we had more food here doesn't make us utopia.

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I do not consider racism to be an inherent property of humans - I regard it as a poisonous ideology that is actively circulated. The supprression of hate speech is entirely in accordance with the protection of democracy, becuase hate speech is necessarily a public appeal for some citizens or groups to be treated differently under the law (such as repatriation) and is thus antidemocratic. There is not element to which "honesty" is relevant, and to describe the suppression of hate speech as keeping it inn the closet is wholly wrong. It is more akin to weeding it out, and preventing its further propagation.

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OK, so should Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan be arrested for inciting racial hatred when he talks about whites and Jews?He's a member of a marginalized group in the US. He's black.But he says very inflammatory things about whites. Should he be arrested?

What the above graph says, for example, is that in the United States, 7 men and 13 women per million people in the population died from malnutrition.So, if the US has around 300 million people that means that 2,100 men and 3,900 women died from malnutrition in the US.

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Surely you jest.

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No.What's wrong with the index?What independent index do you suggest using that you feel is better?We have the largest percentage of our population in incarceration, by far, than any other industrialized nation. We have the death penalty. We just instituted the Patriot Act and the SCOTUS just made it OK for a US citizen to be denied due process. People at the highest levels of government are doing their best to circumvent the Geneva Conventions WRT imprisonment and torture.I'm not saying we are the worst, but why do reject the UN index out of hand without an explanation?This message has been edited by schrafinator, 01-07-2005 09:03 AM

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"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose."--Thomas Jefferson

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Oil for food?

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What does the Oil for Food program have to do with these statistics?