Should anyone be surprised that Republican presidential hopeful and ordained Southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee believes that "a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband" and that "I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ"?
Well, no. Especially as these "revelations" come on the heels of fellow Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's "I'm a Christian, he's a Christian, she's a Christian, we're a Christian, wouldn't you like to be a Christian too?" speech last week.
While Chris Mathews, Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan practically wet themselves over at MSNBC in praise of Romney's words -- and even John McIntire deemed it, "a nice speech on religious intolerance" on OffQ -- I found it to be a cynical screed against anyone in this nation who doesn't happen to worship the God of Abraham.
First, one should note the absurdity of Romney, a Mormon, who said, "…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration" when Mormons comprise a whole 1.3% of US residents compared to Muslim's 0.5% making any kind of speech on religious tolerance.
In his address (to Christians), Romney called secularism a religion which leads one to repeat from the line from The Princess Bride, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
He went on to declare that "Freedom requires religion."
Hmmm, tell that to anyone in Afghanistan who disagreed with the Taliban...
While saying he respected our Constitution, he confused that document with the Declaration of Independence. It's the declaration which says that men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." (Romney repeatedly made statements such as "I will not separate us from the God who gave us liberty," and "American acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God not an indulgence by government" and "in that spirit let us give thanks to the divine author of freedom.").
Meanwhile, the supreme law of the land -- the US Constitution -- makes no mention of God, a Creator, or even a "divine author."
It takes pains to not only say that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." but to say that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." (Here's a clue, Mitt: If you should god forbid (no pun intended) become President, it's the Constitution that you'd have to swear/affirm to uphold and not The Declaration of Independence.)
But again and again, Romney puts forth the notion that the only good American is a religious American:
'Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.' [Quoting John Adams]
We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.
We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders - in ceremony and word.
I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from 'the God who gave us liberty.'
And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.
The rest of us, I guess, can go to hell.
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24 comments:
me, i'll save you a seat next to me maria.
if i believed in a hell.
the really amazing and scary thing is that if you took any of these statements from these guys on the role of christianity in our country and replaced it with the name of any other religion people would be taking to the streets in protest.
think what could happen if we really were declared a christian nation.
how long would it be until there was a "right" christian religion and lesser ones?
can you sat christian-taliban kids?
knew you could!
John K. says: Oh Oh Romney is stating that he has standards and beliefs. And he mentioned God. Nothing scares a liberal more than the mention of God. Except for the mention of Limbaugh. Oh wait here, lefties like to preach their political message in church. I forgot that point.
They came for the communists and I was silent because I was not a communist.
They came for the union organizers and I did nothing because I was not a union organizer.
They came for the protesters and I did not complain because I had never taken the trouble to protest.
Now they have come for me and there is no one left to help me.
Change "communist" to "atheist." "union organizer" to "Jews," "protester" to "Catholic," and "me" to not-the-state-endorsed-cult.
John K. says: Shitrock is all upset that Romney believes in God and tells people about it. Shitrock would prefer that our inalienable rights come from him so that he can giveth and taketh away those rights at will. That, in a crux, is what bothers liberals the most about Romney and God. Romney can't take away those rights because they come from God. And that pisses off the left the most.
John just took the words right out of my mouth, well said. What could be worse than having spiritual beliefs? Let's not forget, schmuck, that the biggest mass murderers in history were atheists and wanted to get rid of religion (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot).
Let's not forget, schmuck, that the biggest mass murderers in history were atheists and wanted to get rid of religion (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot).
Hitler was a Roman Catholic (though certainly not a practicing one). The murderous policies of Stalin, Mao,and Pol Pot were based more on ideology (and in Stalin's case, paranoia) rather than atheism.
In point of fact, atheism has never been the primary motivation for violent atrocities. The same cannot be said of religious fanaticism which, over the centuries, is probably responsible for as many deaths as Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin combined.
Hitler may have been raised a catholic, but Nazi Germany centered its beliefs on the notion that the state was what was most important thing of all, not any higher power. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot indeed hated religion, just like all communists and killed all those who disagreed. Mao was responsible for some 60 million deaths and tens of millions of others died under Stalin. Come on lefties, just accept that believing in God isn't such a bad thing after all.
just whose god? i would really like an answer, please.
Omnitheist;
Sorry, you're wrong. The thing that all your genocidal despots had in common was the practice of violently enforcing an ideology.
The details of those ideologies (obviously) differ, but at each is the command: "Believe this because I said so."
Tell me, what does that look like? Religion or free-thought?
The Islama-fascists and the religious right fanatics are two peas in a pod. Not a bit of difference between the two, just two different ways of going about it.
Didn't the pilgrims cross the Atlantic to get away from a government who told them what religion they could practice?
I'm a Christian, but the fundamentalists who are trying hijack our country scare the crap out of me.
Do you think any of the GOP candidates would know Jesus if they met him today? I think not.
Didn't the Huckabee campaign release a statement condemning the Pilgrims because their Jesus wasn't the same Jesus that he believes in? Or maybe it was about how the Pilgrims made the sign of the cross with the wrong finger sticking out? I seem to remember something...
There are scientific studies on near death experiences in things like the Lancet that have no explanation other than a God exists. People experience things, see their lives flashed before them, and talk to a loving, apparently omnipotent light.
What the journals show is that when this is going on, the people are brain dead. So therefore, as far as we know, no thoughts can be going on. Further, studies that ask about medical equipment (a universal experience of those that have this experience is floating up from the room to see your body), show that "dead" patients know far more (pretty much everything) about the equipment used than patients who had the same procedures performed on them but didn't lose consciousness.
The kicker: this light is apparently multi-cultural. The study ran analysis for believers and non-believers and the results were the same. And the person that welcomes you to the area varies--sometimes it's a relative, other times it's Jesus, other times it's a Hindu God, etc. God is multi-cultural, who would've thought...
"There are scientific studies on near death experiences in things like the Lancet that have no explanation other than a God exists."
Actually, science has been able to replicate near death experiences. They cause someone to pass out and some have reported the same experience of a dark tunnel with a light at the end and friends/family/Jesus/etc. waiting.
The people were not in any real danger of death, but it would seem that the human mind is more than capable of supplying details to "explain" the stress it was experiencing.
Actually, the VR studies that provoked near death experiences don't apply to the study I mentioned. The guy that did the Lancet study conclusively proved that these people had no oxygen/blood flowing to their brains (after about 7 seconds, all brain activity ceases without oxygen). Generally, these patients were without oxygen in the brain for 2-5 minutes. You can't explain away that study with virtual reality triggers of NDEs. That is studying a different phenomenon.
So, as far as science knows, there can be no brain activity. The replicating near death experiences is interesting work. But there is brain activity going on, so it is basically looking into dreams/nightmares. We still really don't fully understand the purpose of dreams (Freud aside).
Further, the obvious point to ask--even if one accepts that the virtual reality studies prove that the after death experience people have is valid, and I don't--is: If it's a dream, why is it universal?
And then we move on to the big bang. There weren't two atoms, then there were, then they created the Universe. Science pretty much proved that, and in so doing proved the existence of God. But it still comes into conflict with religion because many of the teachings of the Bible are based on 1,900 year old science, which modern science can debunk. Creating the Earth may well have took six days, but it happened hundreds of millions of years ago instead of just 3,000 or 4,000. It's really ironic when you think about it. Most theoretical physicists (the guys that study space, etc) believe in a creator.
Also for the record, the study was done by a cardiologist on patients that had clinically died and were revived (which, thanks to modern medicine, is very possible).
Okay, so we know you leftists hate religion, we know you hate Bush, and we know you despise the War in Iraq. How about you do a nice post about global warming and how we have a "climate crisis" and a "planet in peril". Global Warming, by the way, is definetely a religion. Al Gore is the profit, the Earth is god, and failing to obey the scripture of computer models results in a warmed world (hell). Seriously though, I could use a good laugh...do a nice post about Al, Dayvoe or Maria. How does that sound?
BHP: Some links would make your posts more informative. Please supply.
If physical processes were unable to explain the phenomena you describe, I would agree that the findings would certainly discredit most of current dogma of all the Abrahamic religions, but I think you are being too hard on them.
In the first place, both the "omnipotent light" experience and the "out of body" experience are certainly not described by the patients while they are "having" the experience -- that is, while they are brain dead. Patients must describe the events afterward. So -- far from being unquestionable evidence of the existence of any Flying Spaghetti Monster or some such -- the whole enchilada might be explained by some artifact left in the brain as a false "memory>" Certainly there dozens or hundreds of rational explanations, and the fact that we have not yet determined one does not in any way prove anything. The fact that it happens to humans across cultures and religions strongly indicates that it is a physiological phenomenon, not a spiritual one.
Second -- and this is the real explanation, beyond any shadow of doubt -- exhaustive metaphysical research conducted over a very long period of time by the most intelligent and best trained has determined once and for all that all these mysteries, including the Big Bang, are all revealed to have been triggered by one force, more powerful than all other forces ever reported combined, more benevolent than any supernatural being ever postulated. I am speaking of course of the ultimate font of life, beauty, wisdom, and everything else in the universe -- Al Gore, the elected 43rd President of the United States.
Some may ask, "If Al Gore is so powerful, why didn't He make Himself President?" There are actually two answers to this question:
First, Gore wanted to punish America for impeaching Bill Clinton, so He made us endure George Bush for a full eight years, maybe more. Katrina was also part of the punishment, as was American Idol. (Note that it is called American Idol, not Iranian Idol.)
Second, the question is silly. Jesus didn't make himself President of Judea, did he?
See van Lommel, Pin, "Near Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: a Prospective Study in the Netherlands." The Lancet, 2001. That isn't free access, but the Pitt med/biosciences library should have the journal.
Here is a free article translated from a Dutch news magazine.
http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/death/de-touber.htm
And I am a liberal, and I do not hate God. Please stop with the crap that says liberals hate God. See God's Politics by Jim Wallis.
That's an interesting article, BHP. Van Lommel seems to be a bit of a zany, though:
"Van Lommel contends that the brain does not produce consciousness or store memories...[He speculates,] I suspect there is a dimension where this information is stored - a kind of collective consciousness we tune into to gain access to our identity and our memories."
So he thinks your identity is transmitted to you from another dimension. He says later that your brain knows to pick up your information as opposed to mine because there is DNA associated with the data, which the brain detects and decodes.
Quite a fascinating theory, but I'm not sure we should call it science.
That theory isn't science. But the study on the NDEs is. It was published in the Lancet a peer-reviewed journal that is basically Europe's equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Specifically, what is science is the fact that the people who were "dead" saw their own body and what the doctors were doing to it--something that isn't possible if there's no brain activity. We really don't understand why this is, and it may actually be beyond our ability to ascertain. So the cardiologist came up with an explanation that fits with that. And explanation mind you that is really no different than the concept of a "soul" being planted somewhere within the body and leaving upon death--the concept which most major religions are based upon. That part is theological speculation, not science. But the fact that people remembered correctly what was said/done to them even though they were dead and (as far as we know) therefore shouldn't be able to see or hear anything is science, and is beyond our understanding.
Your actually comparing an idiot like Al Gore to Jesus Christ? Wow...
I thought you would like to know that Huckabee was on Hardball with Chris Matthews saying that he "going to ammend the constitution to god's standards"
I'm scared now, if this guy (however nice he is) gets elected im moving out of the counrty. I think its nice that you have such high hopes but that doesnt belong in my government, god isnt in our amendments or in the bill you just killed that would of raised child healthcare.
WE ARE NOT a christain nation, nor our we a mormon one, or a evangelical one...if you start mentiong god you exclude people, which is not at all what are counrty was set out to do..
"..and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
If we start excluding people in our nation, OUR OWN people we shall perish from this earth and instead it would be said.
-and that our theocracy of the faithful, by the faithful, for the faithful only, shall triumph over all other heathans.
I dont know about you but I think everyone has forgotten seperation of church and state. It was put their for a reasons so that EVERYONE could join in the melting pot.
one nation under god? you do realize that it is a rhetoric peice right? not fact...not text to be followed by the book. Not every single word written in every single major peice of american rhetoric is verbatum and must be followed blindfully . One nation under god was written when there was mostly people who believed in god in the naiton, not the case today.
And if you had time to think. maybe just maybe. Jefferson wrote that so the people would make the people feel more united? That doesnt mean 200 years it has the same meaning...things change..
GASP!
At least the democrats understand change, even though i think there hogging it all espically Obama.
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