The last line in this otherwise worthless article states:
- "...There is no political party in this country at this moment that is presenting a compelling alternative to the president that is willing to embrace people like me— evangelical and pro-life and actually supporting limited government..."
You cannot be evangelical and pro-life and support limited government. That is a practical impossibility.
Both evangelism and pro-life support require big, invasive government programs to intrude into private life, and policing of the populace's mind and thoughts and communications.
There simply is no other way to for state-sponsored evangelism and pro-life programs to work, practically speaking.
Buncha fucking idiots.
So unless I want government to enforce my position, I must abandon that position? If I believe it's wrong for people to eat meat, but also wrong for me or the FDA to force others to eat veggies, I must be an idiot? Why such hostility toward people with different ideas? Even if someone wants strict government control over people's sex and medical decisions, that is a minute fraction of what government does. (I didn't read the article.) All the users I respected for being able to articulate non-mainstream views have quit Hubski, or at least quit putting much effort into it. I also find exploring issues increasingly unsatisfying. At least we have #funfacts.
Well, no. You gotta dig a little bit. If you are Evangelical and Pro-Life, you subscribe to two sets of beliefs that strictly curtail the behaviors of other people. The only way to enforce a person's adherence to a specific set of behavioral standards, is through policing (in one of its many forms). Since both of these things involve both private practice and public actions, you now need a way to inspect how someone spends their private time, as well as their behaviour in public. Now you need a system for monitoring the thoughts, conversations, and actions of every American, in public and private spaces. I know you are going to reject this thinking, or write it off as "slippery slope", but these slopes have already been slid down in my relatively short lifetime. It's not difficult to picture them happening again. Example: A doctor cannot help a woman save her own life, by advising her to abort a tubal pregnancy. She has to suffer and die from her pregnancy. How does the State know the doctor did not inform her about abortion? Because they recorded the exam and interactions between the doctor and patient. Example: A school teacher informs students that dinosaurs lived 50 million years ago, and is fired because she is mis-informing the students that the world is more than 6,000 years old. (Or the teacher mistakenly brings up Egypt, which has a written record and physical artifacts dating back more than 6,000 years.) Remember, Evangelical =/= Christian. Evangelical is a proselytizing Christian. A radical Christian, like a radical Muslim. Someone who wants to promote and enforce a specific flavor of Christianity. Pro-Life is someone actively against the practice of abortion in every circumstance. That's what these words actually mean. So while there are less-virulent forms of both beliefs, those terms are well-defined and well-understood by the people who wear them proudly in public. They are the Christian version of a burka or headscarf.
Beliefs alone do not curtail behavior; hence your next sentence mentions enforcement. To repeat my example, I may believe eating meat is unethical. This alone would not curtail anyone's behavior. I might advocate for some kind of enforcement, or I might try to peacefully persuade people that my position is correct, or I might quietly fret and wish the world were a better place. It seems to me that you are assuming that people who oppose these behaviors must necessarily approve of exercising government power to dissuade or prevent people from the behaviors. It is hard to have a discussion when you get to define the terms. Don't some pro-life people condone abortion when the life of the mother is in jeopardy? I think I understand your big idea, and I don't discount your concerns about a slippery slope. I just find your language very absolute and self-righteous, the same characteristics that make it hard to discuss ideas with a religious ideologue. ("You cannot be evangelical and pro-life and support limited government" -- when, again, enforcement of morals would be a very small slice of government activity, and doesn't everyone support a limited government to some extent?)If you are Evangelical and Pro-Life, you subscribe to two sets of beliefs that strictly curtail the behaviors of other people.
I think you are reading things into my statement that aren't there. There are Christians ike yourself, and of several different types, that believe in Christianity and practice it in their way. Evangelical Christians are a specific subset that PUSH the beliefs onto other people. Imposing the belief system upon everyone is the definition of evangelical. You are one of the more moderate Christian flavors that does not champion the imposition of Christianity upon all people. I'm simply saying that a government based upon the idea of forcing all residents into a specific belief system is going to require an enormous security/surveillance apparatus to measure people's adherence to these beliefs. Therefore it is cognitively dissonant (or willfully ignorant) to believe that evangelism is compatible with the goal of "small government".
I think this is one of those cases where if you repeat a mantra long enough, it stops having any actual meaning and starts to have its own thing. Slogans have never needed to be consistent or logical; that's kind of the point.
As long as that's a broader version of "faith" than is typical, I would agree. But it's laughable to suggest this phenomenon is only limited to the religious.
You're going to have to substantiate that some, because as it stands it just sounds like the usual edgelord derp derp religious people are dumb nonsense.
Keep in mind the specific group that we are talking about in this post. The American Evangelical conservative. They compose a subsection of the larger group of 'Religious people.' This group openly and unabashedly pursues and promotes science denying, literalist interpretations of the bible that run counter to what we can think of as scientific consensus. Young Earth creationism is one example. The teaching of abstinence-only sex education as a method to reduce incidence of teenage pregnancy is another. The point is that this group is very good at saying 2 + 2 does not equal 4. When you have practice in this you are better at it than people who do not. The American Evangelical conservative composes some percentage of all religious people. The American Evangelical conservative is better at Double think than the average person. Religious people when taken as a group can be said to be better at doublethink because constituents of the group are. To use an example of specifically twisting words: When a parent abuses a homosexual child when they come out or afterward, many will say that they love their child and that the abuse is motivated out of love. To the best of my knowledge one cannot love a person and also physically abuse them. The word has been twisted. I don't know of many non-religious people who abused their children when they came out of the closet. If this example is particularly vulgar or hateful I'm sorry but it is the first one that comes to mind because it is close to my heart.
Except that's not what you said. You said that "religious people" (without further qualification) are better at ignoring the meaning of the words they use. This is not a logically consistent or supportable statement, since you haven't shown that it applies to even half of religious people, much less most or all. All Protestants are less than half of the total number of Christians, and of course Evangelicals are not the majority of Protestants (or if they are, depending on the numbers you use, it's barely). Meanwhile, Christians represent less than half of all religious people on Earth. Using the most generous numbers, Baptists of all kinds Pentecostals Misc. Evangelicals Mormons Jehovah's Witnesses number 489.8 million. That's 53% of Protestants, but only 20% of Christians and 6% of all religious people overall.Religious people when taken as a group can be said to be better at doublethink because constituents of the group are.
It's a general principle my guy. Non-religious people don't have conversations like 'Wait, we should FEAR and love god?' 'Nono, you don't have to be AFRAID of god, you just have to be respectful of the fact that he could end all that you know in fire and torment instantly and for no reason. Not AFRAID but RESPECTFUL.' As another example. Non-religious people don't have to have the same slippery relationship with words that religious people do. The bible says 'Fear and love god' and people worm their way around the word 'fear' to make it mean 'respect' even though the literal word is 'fear.' At the churches that I am familiar with, this type of discussion and thought process features heavily. This is not 'all religious people are dumb.' This is 'Religious people in aggregate exhibit a behavior that non-religious people do not.' and that behavior is the non-literal interpretation of the written word. English majors dissect The Great Gatsby for meaning, disagree about symbolism and intent. They don't do it with the regularity and familiarity of a theologian whose whole job, as far as I can tell, is to play religious texts and history like an instrument.
It's pretty clear that you're letting your own bad experiences with a single congregation color your perception of religion as a whole. I don't know where exactly you're quoting from with the "fear and love God" bit, so I can't say more on that point. But I have to wonder how productive it would be to do so.
Sharia law would work just fine for them if you tweaked it a little. You forget: "I support limited government" usually goes hand-in-hand with "there's nothing in the constitution that says a thing about the separation of church and state." They're not anarchists, after all, they just generally feel that their social organization can handle civil governmental duties just fine. After all, things started going to shit the minute we stopped going to church on Sunday.evangelical and pro-life and actually supporting limited government...
This is literally the belief at the foundation of the American Conservative. And it is absolutely terrifying, the stuff you have to forget to make that version of the past your "ideal". After all, things started going to shit the minute we stopped going to church on Sunday.
I've said something like this before, I know it. This is the legacy of Nixon and his cohorts. Plain and simple. The fundamental lie of conservatism here is that they care about anything but preserving power to protect the elite and their interests. All their social issue stands flow from the point of being a cudgel against blocks who'd benefit from Democratic policies more or less. I'm much more curious why I don't hear more about the privacy aspect of Roe v. Wade from pro choice advocates. I agree that women's rights to choose what to do with their own bodies are their own, but isn't it a much broader and easier to agree on point to say that the government doesn't have a right to view your medical records and decide what procedures you have done? Man or woman? Privacy was the crux of Roe and I never hear that word in debates.