What is Liberal?

Deists aren't Christians. Some are closer to it than others, however. Jefferson was on the other end of the spectrum. You don't REALLY mean the absense of "BY" as if it weren't the Pilgrims who founded the universites?? Who then? The Indians? I said Puritans founded it. Puritans founded it. The quote says they taught in accord with Puritan philosophy and turned out Puritan ministers. Do you have a point?This message has been edited by Faith, 07-22-2005 05:53 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 07-22-2005 05:56 AM

Yes, that is the naive ideal. I'm saying it doesn't work. There are forces in the world it doesn't take into account. You might try asking respectfully, instead of autocratically. However, if we stuck to America's model it *would* be better, as its strength comes from its realistic recognition of the fallen nature of humanity and the solution of preventing any one faction from rising above another. This is laid out most cogently in a famous chapter in the Federalist Papers I believe though it's been a while and I forget which. Hamilton? In any case it is about limits on power of any one political faction, or branch of government or individual, such as term limits, checks and balances of powers between the branches of government etc. Unfortunately they didn't see that they'd failed to make sure the judiciary was properly checked and balanced.And, even the best of systems can be overtaken by a popular tyrant. Just change the laws to accommodate him. If he's foreign, change the law against having a foreign President (no I'm not saying Schwarzenegger is a tyrant). If he (or she) wants more than two terms, we can change that law back too. With the judiciary on his side ideologically all kinds of manipulation of the laws is possible. And too, in a time of disaster, such as a truly crippling terrorist attack perhaps, a coup, even in this country, is quite possible. A Hitler-level bad guy IS possible in this country because of our departure from its founding concepts. And besides, some of the founders warned that it was up to us to preserve the government they'd created. If enough people don't understand our government forms -- and I think the majority opinions here at EvC show that few here do, having bought the leftist revisionist definitions -- and fall for a charismatic bad guy, there's nothing to stop the complete subjugation of the nation to a Hitler type.Anyway, originally the American model was the opposite of utopian idealist systems which try to mold human nature and only end up subjugating and murdering people to cram them into their system. The problem for us now is that gradually the utopian mode of thinking has been creeping into the system and the public mind and corrupting it subtly but thoroughly. Leftist Political Correctness with its arrogant dictatorial insistence that people toe its moral lines and its utter intolerance of dissenting points of view is the main sign of this corruption. This mentality derives directly from the New Left of the sixties. It is fundamentally opposed to the basic American concept of freedom. If the Left hadn't been aggressively dismantling the Christian and moral character of the nation, and even its most basic principles of tolerance and freedom, there would have been no need for a Christian uprising. It's a defensive movement though cleverly styled by the left as on the offensive. You share the leftist worry about a return to the true character of America.

Paul's recommendation of celibacy as the best choice was said to the most unruly of the churches of the time, the Corinthians, with their wild pagan backgrounds, and it had to do with the least encumbering way to serve God, not any rejection of sex. It starts with Paul's admonition a couple chapters earlier about the rampant fornication in the church, even a man who was sleeping with his father's wife. A couple verses before the one you quote, Paul admonished spouses not to defraud one another of sex, and said that the body of each belonged to the other for sexual purposes. Nevertheless he recommended celibacy but only for those who had the strength for it. He was a realist and acknowledged that some people didn't have that strength.I heard a teaching on the advice to stay single some time ago, and unfortunately don't remember all the particulars but the idea was that the recommendation was made in the context of the ongoing Roman persecutions of Christians at the time. Being unencumbered by marriage made the persecutions easier to deal with. Having family responsibilities and children in particular would have been a terrible burden of anxiety in such a time.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-22-2005 06:43 AM

I don't recall you giving a definition of abortion but I did respond that I have no reason to offer a definition unless I know what your point is. I made the distinctions I make, and otherwise it's in the dictionary.

The way people here talk you'd think the borderline atheists Jefferson and Franklin were the authors of America and the hundred or so other founders of deeper Christian views were negligible.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-22-2005 06:49 AM

All that emotional bluster doesn't help at all. There are reasons why people have the views they do. It might be illuminating to understand the different frames of reference involved. I was interested to see both this thread and yours get proposed, but unfortunately the idea is a big bust as far as clarifying the premises of the different viewpoints in a rational way. Just the familiar emotion-based denunciations as usual.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-22-2005 08:11 AM

Your logic is spurious. A child has the potential to be an adult and IT WILL BECOME AN ADULT UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES. We regard it as a human being in both phases. I will grant that a fetus has a somewhat lesser standing than a living person, and this is reflected in the Biblical laws by the way, but nevertheless it is more than a "potential" human being, it is simply a human being in an early phase of development. It does not change its basic makeup from one phase to the next, it simply grows as all organisms do, unfolding their own character. A sperm cannot grow up to be a child, so its "potential" is not inevitable as the fetus' is, neither can an unfertilized ovum, but a fertilized one can and will under normal conditions. And yes, modern science makes for all kinds of ethical headaches.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-22-2005 08:15 AM

All those things WERE true of the nation for all its prior existence up until the last few decades. Are you saying America was a theocracy until the sixties? The mentality of the country is no longer Christian despite this supposed majority of Christians. We never used to have legal abortion, support for gay marriage, objections to Christian displays etc., and yet we were not a theocracy as you seem to be claiming we must be in such a case. If the majority are Christian, it's interesting that the majority have no say in anything any more as all these emblems of our Christian character are being pulled out from under us.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-22-2005 07:22 AM

An excellent description of exactly what the Left is doing these days.

The point is the framers established rules for changing the Constitution and they are not being followed, they are being circumvented, as you seem to realize. I didn't mean to imply it was set in concrete, only that it supplied the reasonable means for its alteration over time, respecting the principles of MAJORITY rule and the WILL OF THE PEOPLE. That is not what is happening now.

I've made my case extremely clearly over and over in the last few hours, and far more rationally than the sorry excuses for reason and logic that are applied in favor of abortion here; shot them down one by one, and the puzzle is why it escapes you, but there's no point in being puzzled by this strange incapacity after a while; I've done the job sufficiently whether anyone gets it or not. It's frustrating, it's insulting but there's no point in making further efforts.My statement about how Orwell's 1984 describes today's leftist misuse of language wasn't "helpful"? If it isn't obvious, simply spend some time observing the way the left uses language. Think about how the terms "rights" and "freedom" are used by the American founders vs. the New Left and Political Correctness. You have to have some intellectual distance to do that though. "Pro-choice" is a language twister, legitimizing murder. I've already made many of these points. "Hate speech" is a prime example of co-optation of the language to an ideology. "Bigot" is a powerful weapon and obfuscator at the same time, another case of co-optation. "Diversity" is a fun one to unpack; it utterly reverses the old meaning of the term. "Multiculturalism" contains a wealth of revisionist doctrine. "Imperialist" was the term of choice in the 60s and it still has its uses for bringing down the West. It may help to know something about the sixties New Left in understanding the context. I haven't seen Michael Moore's film but from all I've heard it's a classic example of tendentious language in the service of Marxist revisionism, which is exactly what Orwell was targeting.

We have both. Majority is always the primary principle. A representative government should reflect the will of the majority if it's truly representative.

I humbly beg to differ. The right does not use lying terminology. They say what they mean. The left spins words to control the ideological meaning they want to get across.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-22-2005 12:59 PM

No, what they did was completely unConstitutional. The SCOTUS was LEGISLATING when it did that, and USURPING the will of the people. Sometimes the majority will is wrong, but in a representative government you don't pre-empt their will, you work for change through democratic means. For instance, Wilberforce was a lone voice in Parliament against the slave trade in England, and over time his views finally prevailed. That is how a representative democracy rightly works, by persuasion, not force. Lincoln was opposed to slavery but he had the good sense to respect the will of the Southern people and be patient with them for the sake of the Union.The MO of the left, however, is to arrogantly cram their moral standards down everybody's throats, and only ONCE in a while are they right, and it doesn't matter, they are wrong to do that to anyone ever, whether they are right about the moral issues or not. They are usurping the Constitutional processes. They are much wronger about their attitude to people, this snarky sneering self-righteous contempt for the average citizen of this country that is heard on this site as well as all over this land since the Left started calling the shots in the Culture War.It is wrong for the SCOTUS to impose their own morality on others so highhandedly. That is exactly what is leftist and unConstitutional about them. The human race is fallen and the genius of democratic systems, especially the American system, is to allow people to be wrong. Again, we should work by PERSUASION, not FORCE, and disrespecting the will of the people and in fact treating the people with that leftist elitist contempt I'm talking about, that superior air of the blue states, is arrogance and it is tyranny. What the judiciary does is exactly NOT what the framers had in mind. Yes I know about Marbury v Madison -- they certainly may determine the constitutionality of laws, but that is not what they did, they created a new law and forced it on the people. That is also what they did in Roe v Wade.Before you accuse me of saying this because I'm a racist or something, I have to say that I'm happy with the RESULTS they achieved in the civil rights battle. My problem is with the hideously dangerous precedent they set by going over the heads of the people. Means and ends and all that. The judiciary has become a monster of abuse of the citizenry and the Constitution. We don't have a government that is reliably of, by and for the people any more because of this leftist arrogance.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-22-2005 01:23 PM

The right way to go about it then would be to follow the democratic constitutional methods they laid down for making such changes. Instead the judiciary has been forcing the secularist view on the nation against the will of the Christians who are still a huge proportion of the population of this country and that is unconstitutional and in fact tyrannical. And if we dare to have a voice in any of this the secularists treat us as if we aren't even citizens of this nation, with an amazing sneering contempt.