Is Freedom Of Religion Making Sense Fundamentally?

Except I'm not a christian anymore (was raised LDS). Nor am I a conservative. I'm about as neutral and centrists as you can possibly get. This board is just so liberal that I merely seem to be a religious conservative by comparison.

I believe in all rights equally, including those who are non-atheist to be protected from discrimination from those who are atheist. I believe in your right to tell everyone you hate them, or love them, or that they can f*ck off. I believe in due process and innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of your peers. Basically the entire bill of rights applied to everyone equally, no special people. As each team wish's to disadvantage the other team they both end up hating me equally. I can deal with that because it lets me know my beliefs are on the right track.

The entire bill of rights exists to prevent the tyranny of the majority. The majority can never suppress dissenting opinions, no matter how much the progressives want to, nor can they outlaw a religion. The constitutions purpose was to lay a foundation that allows for people to government themselves via electing people who will do what the people want them to do while still providing some protection against minority beliefs. The USA was not a single solid people during our founding, we were 13 different peoples with many different sets of beliefs and idea on "how things should be done". Larger and smaller states constantly bickered over policies that would advantage one over the other and so forth. The natural state of being should be constant arguing and match's of political football as a way to prevent one side from completely dominating the other.

I might believe you if you spoke from a place of impartiality, but you don't. Saying that the Democratic party wants to rid the world of religion though, makes you sound like you can't fathom impartiality on the subject at hand. It's a preposterous presumption without a modicum of data, fueled by your own preconceptions... unless, of course, you have incredible evidence to back that incredible claim up.

That explains a host of things I've wondered about.

What exactly does that explain now?

Jesus Christ, I couldn't agree more.

The GOP is the only political party that claims to hold Christian values. So I guess by process of elimination that's why it is presumed the Democratic party would be everything else except Christianity.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Dems attempt to espouse Christian values as well.

It seems only to counter GOP proclamations though.

They try to espouse the positive, contributing values of more than just Christianity.

Except no.

The Democratic party is as for religion as the Republicans, the main difference being that religion isn't up in neon lights and the sole motivation for pretty much every action they make when we aren't talking money. Dems still want national days of prayer, cite faith for their decisions, invoke God at every turn and generally do what religious people do. Being religious in this country is as much a part of getting elected as giving unions or the private sector a ***.

Republican conservatives have essentially purged the party of all but the most hyper-conservative lunatics that money and SuperPACs can buy. This has forced many into the Democratic camp that should rightfully Republican and acts as a corrosive effect upon the party as a whole.

When your party is anti-intellectual, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-min wage adjustments and anti-everything it's no surprise when the party becomes more and more monolithic. Strategists have cited this as the primary issue in breaking the Democratic agglomeration next cycle and retaking the White House.

Most religious president: Bill Clinton. At least if you judge religious dedication to time spent performing religious activities.

There's nothing inherently wrong necessarily with a President or political figure being of any particular faith, they just have to find a way to divorce their religious motivations from policy making. Gay Marriage is a perfect example of a simple matter befuddled by religion. You can hate homosexuals all you want based on your religion, but as a policy maker you can't cite your reason as "Traditional Marriage" founded on what's written in whatever holy book.



If nothing else, perhaps Republican zeal is driving away the typical two-party system, it may in fact become a one party system (Effectively zero party), with a better gradient and less "All or nothing" *** of the current two party system. That depends entirely on American's willingness to drop arbitrary labels like "Republican" and "Democrat" and just stick with policy itself.

It's way too early to make such a claim. They hold the House and have a decent shot at taking the Senate. I don't like where the party is heading either, but it's naive to think they're going anywhere for a while.

The gerrymandering and ability for elections to be outright bought through proxies is the number one issue in politics right now.

Democrat or Republican having territories chopped up so we can perpetuate a cycle of ***candidates spewing ***everywhere is a threat to what makes America.

Having people represent districts for 30+ years also bothers the *** out of me.

Be that as it may, it's not the only thing keeping the Republican party afloat. There is no mass exodus happening yet, as the Democrats have their own slew of problems preventing that from occurring.

You mean the increased polarization that helps neither side? The Republican party has become a pasty shade of angry white guy, forcing all their potential demographics into the confused hands of Democrats. Why? Because the platform is hostile to outgroups and again this is mentioned by Republican strategists who know courting Hispanics is the path to the future along with potential Asian pockets.

Time to stop being anti-intellectual and run the numbers to avoid another Obama victory where every Republican commentator was floored when Obama won.

Winning House seats is wonderful but I assume Republicans want the White House again and you don't get it sending up softball candidates like Rubio, Cruz or Rand Paul. They're going to get rolled by Hillary and everyone knows it. If the party wants to win big again, it's time to get inclusive and stop derailing the fiscal message with *** about gay marriage, abortions, women and how some white guy feels black people should be.

I'm looking at you Rick the *** Santorum.

I haven't seen any indication of change except for the polarizing of people's opinions. It's more like people are shoe-horning themselves into their parties, as opposed to adapting the party to them, or looking else-where; but I guess that's not too outlandish an idea in a two-party system.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. You guys are just making it sound like the Republican party is dying and the Democrats are just sucking up all the extra votes. Reality check: They're not.

Or they could do something really crazy if they want to stick to social politics and actually take a properly conservative stance on most of those issues.

I find it very curious that the Republican Party lost its footing during the Reagan and Bush years. With the benefit of hindsight and some liberal bias, the '80s weren't really the best decade we've lived through, but at the time things seemed to be going well and the White House got rather lot of credit for it, rightly or wrongly. Nevertheless, the Religious Right and a few other fringe groups employed the kind of media savvy that they've since forgotten or lost and maneuvered to take over the GOP and twist it down some rather dark corridors. It's rather baffling, though it was similarly baffling when the Democratic Party had Barack Obama in the White House, control of Congress, and accomplished almost nothing over the course of two years.

It really would be nice if we could take the old people of the country and rattle their teeth around until they accept that we don't need to be hog-tied to the same two idiot parties that've been chasing each others' tails for 150+ years. I want to say that younger people are open to the idea of more than a two-party system, but my pessimism tells me that I'm giving far too much credit to people aged 18-35, likely as a consequence of personal bias.

When people are making it a habit of saying "I'm Republican but not *that* kind of Republican" your brand is probably in shape for a fix. Seeing some racist dipshit get lifted up as 'muh freedoms' only to get disavowed when they go on bizarre rants about race is becoming a chore.

Yes, slavery was this wonderful thing for lazy foodstamp blacks and hispanics work hard and I should know, they're the ones raising my children and cleaning my yards. No one cares about asians because they don't exist except as a WWII-era caricature of love you long time and enemies of the US who perform cyberattacks before delivering up that large po' fai wai.

Ideally I'd like to see more parties in the US, especially because more parties mean the rich *** have to spread their money rather than throwing it directly into the coffers of option A or B which means better candidates and less of this red v. blue crap we've got going on. Let the Tea Party have their own organization dedicated to summoning machinegun Jesus, the moderates have their fiscal platform and the far-leftists assure us that what we need is more government everywhere. Let the people decide what we want.

But of course neither Dems or Republicans would want to have to you know, articulate a message about why we should give a *** about them. Better to play into this sports team esque craze.

To be fair, there are quite a few people who self-identify as liberals but refuse to call themselves Democrats. I really do hope that the widening gap between the two parties creates a new central party, if such a thing is even possible. I'm not holding my breath, though.

The fact that not all of us Republicans are proud to be Republicans^TM is a good indicator that we are not as worried about getting a victory for our team. Both sides are guilty, and the Democrats are worse. They are a loosely connected group of smaller sub-groups that would hate each other were there not a common enemy, like NCAA football - everyone else vs the SEC. Both sides have their scoundrels, but the Dems have downright @$$holes - 0bama, Hillary, Holder... How you can celebrate these clowns... only team spirit would explain it. You want the "win", not matter the cost. You seek validation achieved through narrowly won media-filtered popularity contests. If only there were a group of people who were more interested in taking us away from these bought-and-paid-for politicians... oh wait, there is one, but you have been conditioned by your trainers to mock them.

Adding to your list of asshat clowns.. pelosi, feinstein, reid, kerry and lolbiden. Its amazing that living legal citizens vote for these people candidates. Oh wait half of them have power and it wasn't even voted on. /facepalm

Persecution complex so stronk.

Sparth has me imagining the Tea Party gathering up crystals to summon their own primal, MachineGun Jesus. The more they lament, the stronger he becomes.

Henry Wallace tried in the 40's. It didn't end well.

Though I think his Progressive movement was more left than central, unless you consider both Democrat and Republican's as Far Right and Further Right, like I would.

Meh, I've heard so many interpretations of where the parties lie on the political spectrum that it's practically pointless to even talk about it anymore. All that really matters is whether or not it'd be possible to fit another party in-between them. I don't think it would work, but if it got enough popularity to at least shake up the establishment a bit then it might be worth the attempt.

Today both parties are extremely far right.

As indicated by the political spectrum:


EDIT: Ignore the You one, it was just an image search.

Gee, that's not subjective at all. You can tell because it's a graph, and graphs are always forged of pure science.

It's only been the most widely used and accepted way of classifying political positions since the late 1700s.

Political ideals and affiliation is largely based on subjective judgement calls, so I don't see how this is an invalid approach to classification.

The bigger issue is again, sticking with arbitrary labels instead of just core ideals.