Religion does matter in politics!

It is often said in the public square that a person's religion doesn't affect their politics. This is fundamentally wrong. It would only be true of everyone was at least a deist of some sort. Once rational people are brought in it is categorically wrong.

When someone believes in a deity they accept the idea of a "perfect" being. This means there could be a perfect political system, a "right" and "wrong" etc. A rational person understands all political system are flawed and that their is no such thing as absolutely right (outside of mathematics and physics).

This means we the reasonable get shafted since many of the people who are elected have a flawed view of the political system to begin with and they cater to the masses, i.e. the people who think there is a "perfect" solution. So can one have a meaningful political discussion with these believers? I don't think so since they have a axiom that is ridiculous. Agreed?

Two language speeches

It happens that I sometimes watch Canadian speeches on a non-cpac channel. I find it rather annoying that they keep changing languages. I'd have no problem if they just stuck with one (whichever). I imagine it's an attempt to gain French support. But I really wonder if it does work. For someone bilingual it ends up annoying me.

Two America's

When people bash the US (for one of many reasons) I usually start my retort with: Remember, there are two America's. What do I mean by this? Well you really can't group all American's into fundamentalist-Kansians. For instance, if you look at the Morons v. Evolution/Science, NY isn't a staging ground. So the basic problem is that the dumb American's have an unusually loud voice over intelligent America. But don't think this isn't true of Canada as well, remember Alberta! It just happends that our middle-country isn't completely retarded (and more importantly doesn't have enough political sway to do very much). In the end it is ignorance and religious fundamentalism we tend to be annoyed at so we should concentrate on the views of the person not their nationality. It would be incorrect to say Iranians mistreat women as all muslims do since Iranian people are largely non-religious (despite living in a theocracy). The failing is with interpretations some book not the persons nationality. Bashing nationality only tends to let the people band together with their country-men, bashing their beliefs beliefs them thinking (or some approximation of it).

Got my number!

You fit in with: Atheism Your ideals mostly resemble those of an Atheist. You have very little faith and you are very focused on intellectual endeavors. You value objective proof over intuition or subjective thoughts. You enjoy talking about ideas and tend to have a lot of in depth conversations with people. 80% scientific. 100% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Sounds about right ;-) Let me know what some of you guys get.
I like how scientology = Christianity + some reason.

Same old story, but getting more uncivilized

Thinking about the war in Iraq, what lead up to it and the many aspects of it, one single phrase haunts me the most: "[...]our time in history will be remembered for new challenges and unprecedented dangers." I'm not too knowlegable about world history but it hardly seems plausible no nation has ever had something similar. Insurgencies are certainly nothing new. They haven't been that deadly. Now I know the American media (and people) have trouble sticking with a story that's not celebrity related (Hurricane Katrina is almost gone from memory), so is it related that they don't look to the past for a similar situation and its solution?

Also, watching The Torture Question on Frontline, I have to ask the question about how this is different from the Nazi's? For some reason it is a highly offensive to compare anything to the Nazi's to which I hope is because in the public square it would be a cheap political stunt (like 9/11 has become). So if your someone who gets annoyed at this go away. I think there are differences and they actually seem to be pointing in the opposite direction I'd expect. From what I know about the Nazi's they wanted no prisoners and so tried to kill all of them. The problem they faced was it became psychologically damaging to murder people since it is very personal to shoot someone in the head. So "bottom up" solutions where enacted and become the death camps literally abstracting the killing. From the radio shows and web info they always said this was developed by those on the ground not from the top. In the U.S. case (as you can see from the documentary) the top merely opened the gates for "harsh" interrogations and gave leeway to what harsh meant. So again you have a "bottom up" approach which created the worse abuses, not sanctioned at the top, but not clearly forbidden. The scary part is that the Nazi's did this to abstract the killing where as the Americans are making it more personal. Why is this scary? Because you aren't seeing the Heart of Darkness of a "monster", but looking deeper into the human Heart of Darkness that beats in all of us.