Pledge of Allegiance, Rd. 2

martin is the most rational person I've ever met, and yet I've never met him.

I shall be interested to see if this argument goes any further, because martin's already won it. Some people just don't want to admit it & will continue on with their beliefs regardless of what's logical.

 

You did read what I wrote about the history of the phrase, correct? If you explore that history a little further, and examine the climate in which it was instituted, you may realize that it doesn't take some God-hating liberal to want it out of the Pledge.

 

all i am saying is that i know a universe appears to exist, and that people are making up various reasons how it got there, all of which are based on stupidity or folklore or fear or nothing. i dont go around acting like i know who did or didnt create the universe.

i would prefer if you dont use the power of our government to try and trick my children. thats what the pledge of allegiance is.

cant you understand? there are some issues which you can discuss and argue, an others which all assertions are made up. red and i can argue the merits of the national debt, and he might offer some reason why it is bad, and i might counter with some evidence why it doesnt hurt the economy. thats a real question we are equipped to discuss. but with god, 100% of anything you say is made up! you cant even discuss it because it is based on faith which means you are an idiot and you dont give a damn about reality.

so that sort of thing doesnt belong in schools which are supposed to teach actual knowledge, not faith.

 

my final word on this is that i have invented a term called "isolation of delusion" which is how i describe a relatively sane person's ability to keep their belief in magic and wizardry confined to religion without really affecting their ability function normally. this explains how otherwise cool people like george bush and sabanfan are still worthy of respect, because they deal with most things normally, without dragging insanity into it.

to me it seems weird that a person can believe in the magical virgin birth and resurrection and all that and still be normal otherwise. but smarter people than me do it all the time.

 

the argument that God does not exist in the constitution does not mean that the US does not legally acknowledge the existence of God. if fact, the opposite is true. the problem is today we have secularism. Since darwin, we now have people who believe in the possibility of evolution as well as the existence of God. this never crossed our forefathers minds. for god to not exist in government wasn't even a thought. while they did not want a theocracy, George Washington's proclamation upon becoming president was quite clear.

"Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor . . ."


to argue that they were against religion in government is faulty and misinformed. most americans believe in separation of church and state yet also believe that prayer in school, acknowledgement of God and the ten commandments do not violate the constitution.

20th century secularists are working in reverse trying to apply this term when such thoughts did not even exist. It wasn't even an argument.

As the Supreme Court of Florida said in 1950: "Different species of democracy have existed for more than 2,000 years, but democracy as we know it has never existed among the unchurched. A people unschooled about the sovereignty of God, the ten commandments and the ethics of Jesus, could never have evolved the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. There is not one solitary fundamental principle of our democratic policy that did not stem directly from the basic moral concepts as embodied in the Decalog and the ethics of Jesus . . . No one knew this better than the Founding Fathers."

 

I agree with you I like alot of what martin says because he says it without bias.

I have expressed to him my views on the matter of religion, which is all organized religion is wrong. Religion was created to control man, in ever shape and form. It was to create a parent figure to point out the right and wrong.
But I believe there is to much that happens to be left up to chance, there has got to be a greater power that does control things, but to put a face on that power is where things get screwed up.

I have never really gotten an clear opinion from martin on his beliefs, well not beliefs because I know he dosent have any oneway or another, but more or less his thought basin on the subject.

The thing that gets me is that you could have a guy on the street corner shouting that he has talked to god, and everyone calls him a bum. But isnt that how every religion started except in those few times the people chose to follow instead of giving them a quater.

 

And thus, you have the difference between Religious doctrine and laws. Religion determines peoples beliefs for them, so that they know how to act in each situation withouth any regard for their own rationale. Laws, on the other hand, exist on the rationale of making the distinction of which acts violate the freedoms and rights of other individuals. Laws do not exist to distinguish 'right' from 'wrong', because those two terms are not universally agreed upon. While 99% of the people in the world may agree that murder is wrong, it is illegal because it violates the right of another person to exist.