Obama supports Ground Zero mosque. Religious freedom or is he being too PC?

I wish I caught this digression sooner, but it slipped by me. Let's stop it at this point.

Anyone replying to Rrhain's message subject to a suspension (if you can't read the "off-topic" banner, you're an idiot).

Unless you can make a solid case connecting it to this topic's theme.

Adminnemooseus

Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Added 3rd paragraph.

---

New Members should start HERE to get an understanding of what makes great posts. Report a problem etc. type topics: Report discussion problems here: No.2 Thread Reopen Requests 2 Topic Proposal Issues Other useful links: Forum Guidelines

Admin writes: It really helps moderators figure out if a topic is disintegrating because of general misbehavior versus someone in particular if the originally non-misbehaving members kept it that way. When everyone is prickly and argumentative and off-topic and personal then it's just too difficult to tell. We have neither infinite time to untie the Gordian knot, nor the wisdom of Solomon. There used to be a comedian who presented his ideas for a better world, and one of them was to arm everyone on the highway with little rubber dart guns. Every time you see a driver doing something stupid, you fire a little dart at his car. When a state trooper sees someone driving down the highway with a bunch of darts all over his car he pulls him over for being an idiot. Please make it easy to tell you apart from the idiots. Message 150

as in imposition on sacred ground.

If the ground is so "sacred" then why are we building commercial office space on it?

I want to say "I don't get the controversy", but I do get the controversy - it's a bunch of bullshit "think of the victims" meant to conceal anti-Muslim bigotry.

Don't get me wrong, I hate religion, and Islam as a religion has a lot of problems. Much of it stands in stark contrast to the principles I hold dear. But one of those principles is religious freedom, and that's a freedom I depend on in order to stay an atheist. You know who they come after, after they're done with the Muslims?

Us.

“If the City of New York denies the zoning approval sought for this site, it will blatantly violate [the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act] and expose the city to one whopping lawsuit that is extremely likely to succeed,” as Chicago attorney Dan Lauber [4] told Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet. "A federal law adopted by a Republican Congress makes the denial the Republicans seek blatantly illegal."

Source

New York Mayor Bloomberg writes: “The attack was an act of war — and our first responders defended not only our city but also our country and our Constitution,” he said, becoming slightly choked up at one point in his speech, which he delivered on Governors Island. “We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights — and the freedoms the terrorists attacked.”

Source

---

"A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way"
-Carl Sagan

hooah212002 New York Mayor Bloomberg writes: “The attack was an act of war — and our first responders defended not only our city but also our country and our Constitution,” he said, becoming slightly choked up at one point in his speech, which he delivered on Governors Island. “We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights — and the freedoms the terrorists attacked.”

QFT

Beautiful! Thanks for finding that.

---

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. -- Thomas Jefferson

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers. -- Barack Obama

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

Beautiful! Thanks for finding that.

except a mayor cannot declare what is or isn't an act of war and the 'first responders were not defending anything, they were looking to help the injured.

talk about a major distortion of the facts

You do realize that arabs and muslims are not the same thing right?

ahh the nitpickers and over-literalists, where would we be without them?

archaeologist writes: except a mayor cannot declare what is or isn't an act of war...

Anybody can recognize an act of war when they see one.

archaeologist writes: ... and the 'first responders were not defending anything, they were looking to help the injured.

Firefighters might not be pledged to protect our rights and freedoms but police are. Did you forget the police?

---

Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

Your dumbfuckery knows no bounds, does it? Where does it say Mayor Bloomberg declared it an act of war? You do realize he wasn't even mayor at the time of the attack, right?

---

"A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way"
-Carl Sagan

ahh the nitpickers and over-literalists, where would we be without them?

If it wasn't for people pointing out the facts, you'd still be just as wrong.

But at least you'd have some sort of an excuse for it.

ahh the nitpickers and over-literalists, where would we be without them?

---

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. -- Thomas Jefferson

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers. -- Barack Obama

We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

"onifire" writes: Personally, I could care less if a mosque was built on ground zero. I don't think ground zero is anything more that a piece of property where something bad happened once. This personal attatchment to this piece of land as some kind of representation of freedom and America, to me, seems rather pointless.

I agree. We are being hypocrites if you ask me, expecting tolerance in Iraq, and Afghanistan, yet giving none here.

I mean there is a Mosque 4 blocks away already, and there is a non-denominational chapel in the Pentagon 80ft from where the plane crashed, and Muslims go there to pray.

I do sympathize with people though, not being able to distinguish the average Muslims from an extremest one. How are we to know the difference? They hide amongst themselves, and us too. But I don't think these people are Al-Quaeda, or the Taliban, looking to set up a place to pray next to ground zero. They probably are ashamed of terrorism.

I think we as Americans should embrace the idea, and show the rest of the world that we can just get along.

riVeRraT writes: I think we as Americans should embrace the idea, and show the rest of the world that we can just get along.

I completely agree.

I think we as Americans should embrace the idea, and show the rest of the world that we can just get along.

Well here is one thing we agree on.

---

There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002

Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969

Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

It's terrible what happened to those buildings, and worse what happened to the people in them. But that's it really.

I quite agree - can't say I'd feel the same way if I was more affected by the events of that day, but I hope I would.

Why the constant reminder of what happend that day and the treatment of this property as holy ground?

Mid-term elections, that's why. This isn't the only Muslim building being protested this summer, and I'm sure there were plenty of Muslim buildings erected between the time of 9/11 attacks and the beginning of summer, this year. Now that the story has gone national, it's perfect red meat to get the conservative base riled up & ready to vote in November. Fear & loathing are all the Republicans have to get their people to the polls. And it's working - voter enthusiasm is higher among the conservatives than it is for the liberal/progressive base.

Predictable answer, but it is a bit irrelevant. Ask a muslim terrorist about his justification and he will say his religion ask a catholic priest and he will not quote scripture (unless you can show me one that does). Maybe the bible and christianity could be used to justify pedophilia by a very twisted mind, but as far as I know it isn't. So as I said, in my first post, the source for those priests actions isn't their religion. The same cannot be said for muslim terrorists.

Priests weren't a perfect analogy. A better on would be abortion clinic terrorists.

Ask an Islamic terrorist why he is a terrorist, and he'll usually refer to his religion (not always - many militants just don't like America dicking around in their back yard, especially when said dicking around involves dropping bombs and killing civilians).

Ask an abortion clinic terrorist why he's a terrorist, and he'l refer to his faith, too.

Clearly by the same logic that leads to banning mosques near Ground Zero, we should also ban churches near any medical facility that might possibly perform an abortion.

The whole thing is patently absurd on its face to anyone who actually thinks about it for a moment, and who legitimately values religious freedom.

Unfortunately, as is most often the case in America, it would seem that Constitutional rights only apply when one is defending one's own actions; freedom of religion obviously ceases to apply if you're the wrong religion.

It's not a "slap in the face." It's not a "victory mosque." It does function, intended or otherwise, as a test of America's true commitment to its professed ideals, just like the various tests of free speech. It's really, really easy to say you believe in the freedom to worship according to the dictates of your own conscience and to be free from discrimination based on the expression of that freedom when everybody's religion is the same, or at least enjoys public approval. It's easy to believe in the freedom to say what you want without legal consequence when everybody says the same things.

The Constitution rights we all claim to believe in and uphold were not made for the easy decisions. They were not made for the majority. They were made to protect unpopular minorities of faith and opinion. If you cannot build a building representative of an unpopular faith, then religious freedom does not actually exist. Freedom is, by definition, the ability to dissent from the majority, to be different from others.

This is America's biggest failure - the failure to actually stand up for what we say we believe in.