The Great Faith Debate

[SeVeR]

You're the only one playing word games astro. You say the preachers are teaching we should hate gays, and then you back up a step and say they are just teaching that gays lifestyle is morally wrong. Theres a difference. Find me a protestant preacher who is preaching that we should HATE gays and I will paypal you a couple bucks.

There are plenty of Christian preachers who teach people to hate gays. Yet i'm guessing you're going to retreat into one division of Christianity where there are maybe fewer extremists than in other divisions. Who did you say was playing the word games?

 

And Astro specifically said that hating the gay lifestyle is something that directly leads to hating gays, in fact i'll go further and say it's the same thing. So no, Astro isn't playing word-games, and once again you are.

 

And from your response to my earlier post, the answer is no, i didn't mean a ban on gay marriage. I was proposing a hypothetical situation where a Christian government is in control of the US and bans homosexuality altogether. They would be locked up for being gay. If that happened, would you support the government?

[ThunderJam]

It would be totally uncons!@#$%^&*uional to ban homosexuality and therefore of course I wouldn't support it.

[AstroProdigy]

That wouldn't stop most Christians. Technically up until the mid 1800s there was a law that homosexuality was punishable by death. This was along with the cons!@#$%^&*ution. Obviously people who hold the bible above the cons!@#$%^&*ution will play mind games to try to give the bible superiority over the cons!@#$%^&*ution. An example of this is the office of faith based initiatives that gives funding to Christian groups and uses the money to encourage conversions. This is a blatantly uncons!@#$%^&*utional act, but most Christians don't care because the bible means more to them than the cons!@#$%^&*ution anyway.

 

For that I'd say most Christians or at the very least a large proportion of them (conservatives mostly) are unpatriotic and a threat to America. I guess Christians just don't belong in America and if they want to stay they should become atheists. Sound insane? Then why does it sound normal to so many Christians when "Christians" and "atheists" are switched? Hypocrites much?

Edited October 10, 2007 by AstroProdigy

[ThunderJam]

For that I'd say most Christians or at the very least a large proportion of them (conservatives mostly) are unpatriotic and a threat to America. I guess Christians just don't belong in America and if they want to stay they should become atheists. Sound insane? Then why does it sound normal to so many Christians when "Christians" and "atheists" are switched? Hypocrites much?

90% of my church is conservative, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more patriotic group of a few thousand people. And yes christians having no place in america sounds ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS. You should have no place in America just for saying that. And I don't think "atheist have no place in america" sounds normal. America wouldn't be America without all of our differences.

[AstroProdigy]

I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot. I'm a patriot.

 

Am I a patriot yet? Here let me try again...

 

Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops. Support the troops.

 

How about now?

 

Being a patriot in America is having a careful eye on the actions of all authority and making sure that authority doesn't try to destroy the precious freedoms provided to us by the cons!@#$%^&*ution. You also need to educate yourself so corrupt politicians can't trick you and support helping your fellow countrymen if you want to call yourself a patriot. George Washington was adamantly opposed to getting entangled in pointless foreign wars. Immigrants coming to America and living the American dream is also a fundamental part of our country. Oops conservatives fail with these.

 

I was making the point that both statements are ridiculous. How many Christians think atheists have no place here or at least subconsciously comply with that belief though?

Edited October 11, 2007 by AstroProdigy

[NBVegita]

Astro you are way off kilter.

 

Part of being a good American is yes questioning your governments actions when warranted. Part of being a bad American is questioning every action just because you can. Most of what is stunting anything happening in our government is A) committment to corporate lobyists, and misquestioning the wrong things.

 

George Washington was adamantly opposed to getting entangled in pointless foreign wars. Immigrants coming to America and living the American dream is also a fundamental part of our country. Oops conservatives fail with these.

 

Ooops the librals fail too. Bush had the majority vote of both liberals and conservatives going into Iraq. And what wonderful immigration policies have the liberals come out with in the past decade?

 

As of now the liberals are no better than the conservatives.

[SeVeR]

NBV, that only shows that the liberals are actually more conservative than they appear to everyone, and not the other way round. This is because it's still conservative/republican ideals that are doing the damage. They just happen to get enough support from bought-out democrats. So yes, both parties are as bad as eachother, but liberalism isn't the problem.

[NBVegita]

liberalism is just as bad as conservatism.

 

On a broad scale, a too conservative country doesn't change enough, and a too liberal country changes too much.

 

You need a balance of the two.

[SeVeR]

I agree. Although i think right-wing is quite clearly to blame for America's current problems.

[AstroProdigy]

Misquestioning the wrong things? It's this discouragement of questioning that lets people hide things. Everyone should be questioned.

 

You forget that liberal doesn't necessarily mean forever changing as there is a point that satisfies more moderate liberals that is actually mostly achieved in certain countries. As you know our country tilts towards the right so why not have it tilt away from the right? Tilting it more to the right is what's been the problem ever since the Reagan years.

[NBVegita]

No we don't need to tilt to the right, but we don't need to tilt to the left either.

 

It's this discouragement of questioning that lets people hide things. Everyone should be questioned.

 

Too much questioning results in nothing getting done. Case in point, the new congress questions your motives if you have to pardon yourself to take a !@#$%^&*, and nothing gets done...except for creating more groups designed to question more people.

 

There are things that need to be questioned, like why congress is passing a 12 billion dollar water reform bill when only 6 billion is needed for the project, and there are 6 billion dollars alotted to states for private interest groups and personal reform project. (this includes both democratic and republican states)

 

But not everything needs to be questioned. If you question everything, nothing gets accomplished. Now if you don't ask enough questions, too many things get accomplished, and sometimes not very good things.

 

Ultimately the people have to fight to elect people we need not question all the time. Unfortunately with every politician having a corporate agenda, and their private interest groups, thats nearly impossible.

 

And I do agree Sever, the right wing has been far too right, I just surly hope that we don't end up with the opposite ordeal either.

[AstroProdigy]

Because Congress being ineffectual is because they ask too many questions not solid Republican opposition to anything they do even health care for poor kids.

 

If you don't question everything people will find a way to sneak things through. You shouldn't overly question everything, but you need to give everything a second look if you want an uncorrupted government.

 

Ultimately there will never be people who will be pure as politicians and we shouldn't expect it to be so. Ultimately the people need to watch what the government does and question that government because otherwise the government will take part in as much corruption as they're allowed.

 

I don't think it's possible to have a liberal regime in the US. The extreme left is just too small compared to the extreme right and because of that only times of severe crisis (the way the Great Depression provided Roosevelt's progressive programs) could possibly do it. It works to the right too. Bush has only been able to do a lot of the stuff he's done because of the crisis brought about by 9/11.

Edited October 12, 2007 by AstroProdigy

[ThunderJam]

Because Congress being ineffectual is because they ask too many questions not solid Republican opposition to anything they do even health care for poor kids.

Huh? Were you drunk when you wrote that lol?

[AstroProdigy]

Wow TJ the one thing I find from conservatives in a debate is when they utterly fail they revert to trying to make a joke from posts instead of debating them. Congratulations on failing.

 

I was in a rush when I wrote that so let me clarify:

Congress being ineffectual has nothing to do with asking too many questions. It's because of pretty solid minority opposition on the Republican side in Congress combined with a guaranteed veto make things ineffectual. Republicans will even reject health care for poor kids which shows just how little they're interested in compromise.

[NBVegita]

Now they haven't released the details of the health care plan, so I can't side with it one way or another. But here is where the republicans/conservatives asked questions, and didn't (apparently) like the answers.

 

The original scope of the program was to help families who make too much money for medicaid, to get medical treatment. From what I've read, and this hasn't been disputed on the democratic side, that the bill would expand, so that families beyond that scope would be able to use this for medical !@#$%^&*istance.

 

The Administrations (public) arguments have been that they've found loop holes that would allow illegal immigrants access to these funds, that undeserving families, not the poor deserving families would be able to take money and that it is a large step towards socialized health care in the U.S. (publicly) They support increasing funding over 5 yearsl. To counter the democrats run a "think of the poor kids" campaign, and say that it is improbable that illegal immigrants would be able to get access to it.

 

"This bill would shift SCHIP away from its original purpose and turn it into a program that would cover children from some families of four earning almost $83,000 a year. In addition, under this bill, government coverage would displace private health insurance for many children. If this bill were enacted, one out of every three children moving onto government coverage would be moving from private coverage. The bill also does not fully fund all its new spending, obscuring the true cost of the bill's expansion of SCHIP, and it raises taxes on working Americans."

 

Just an excerpt from the administration about it.

 

Now if what the administration says is true, I support the veto fully. If it is not, then I don't support the veto. Plain and simple.

 

But as stated prior, there is not enough information on this subject to make a decision, as anything we hear publicly about this is going to be bias. So we must wait until the details of the bill are presented to us before we can make a decision as to if this is right or wrong.

 

What is ironic is you are in favor of questioning your government, yet you condemn the vetoing of this without even asking why he's vetoing it, or questioning the contents of the bill.

 

Because Congress being ineffectual is because they ask too many questions not solid Republican opposition to anything they do even health care for poor kids.

Wow TJ the one thing I find from conservatives in a debate is when they utterly fail they revert to trying to make a joke from posts instead of debating them. Congratulations on failing.

 

Why are you criticizing Thunder for asking you, albeit in a joking/sarcastic manner, to rephrase a sentence that was terribly written, borderline incoherent and one that he simply did not understand?

 

And I cannot remember exactly...but I'm 90% positive that the bill was originally proposed by Bill Walsh...who happens to be a republican.

Edited October 13, 2007 by NBVegita
Last sentence.

[ThunderJam]

Wow TJ the one thing I find from conservatives in a debate is when they utterly fail they revert to trying to make a joke from posts instead of debating them. Congratulations on failing.

Don't even try to push that kinda crap on me astro. You wrote a friggin dumb as crap sentence that no one in their right mind could understand, and you try to relate my inability to understand ur nonsense to my political views failing.

[AstroProdigy]

NO TJ I relate the way you jump in to insult me on a bad sentence instead of asking in a decent way and make that the entirety of your post to a failure in your argument.

 

NBV I'm glad you included the quote about families making $83,000 a year being able to get coverage in your post because you turned an otherwise very reasonable post into a propaganda piece. It turns out $83,000 is the highest amount of possible income that would be eligible for coverage and this is only applicable to New York with the most expensive city in the country to live in. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to live in Manhattan? $83,000 makes you rich in Alabama, but in New York City it gets you in pretty bad shape. Just owning an apartment will cost you almost a million dollars now and don't get me started on renting one. What does this all mean? It means that what Bush totes as wasteful spending is actually just GOP spinning and I actually have looked into the matter further to know this seeing how you seem to think I haven't questioned anything from this bill.

 

It also won't raise taxes on working Americans unless you consider CEO's working Americans because those are the people Democrats are looking to roll back the Bush tax cuts from (only if a Democrat takes the presidency because otherwise a veto is ensured). I find this very reasonable as a way to pay for health care for kids considering these people already get the wonders of tax write offs to pay a smaller percentage of their income than average Joe does to the government.

 

I also think Bush and the GOP get to talk as if they care about fiscal scrutiny now because they only talk about it when it comes to helping the poor like say spending 35 billion dollars over the next 5 years, but when 450 billion dollars are spent on the military each year and 190 billion is going to be spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year then that's little cost. There's also the massive pork spending during GOP control of Congress to worry about. If Republicans want to truly go back to the original intent of their party of fiscal responsibility they need to do it everywhere instead of just where only those poor and working class people they don't care two ASSS about anyway suffer.

 

As for illegal immigrants being able to get something out of it this would probably be little and considering how crucial they are to our economy and how little they will ever see from the money they pay into our government who really cares?

 

For the matter of extending government coverage to children who already have private coverage that is a legitimate claim so if instead of trying to turn a bipartisan bill into something it's not using political spinning they pushed to change this it probably would have. Then again I don't know much about this part of the issue and I've had trouble finding information about it that doesn't come from sound bytes of Bush or someone working for Bush.

 

You can also make the argument that Democrats are using this issue as a political tool and to that I'd say to an extent they are. However, this is politics and the entire time Democrats didn't play the Republicans' game they've been battered for it. Republicans have been heavily playing politics to erode on the Democrats for a while now so if Democrats do it once in a while with already compromising bills then so be it.

[ThunderJam]

NO TJ I relate the way you jump in to insult me on a bad sentence instead of asking in a decent way and make that the entirety of your post to a failure in your argument.

Sorry didn't realize it had become politically incorrect to have a sense of humor.

And you implied that this is something that CONSERVATIVES all/only do. ROFL what a joke.

Edited October 15, 2007 by ThunderJam

[wub]

this has turned into a 2 man, pointless battle of who has the bigger penis. congratulations.

[Bak]

the money for the bill is going to come from an increase in the cigarette tax, not income taxes.

 

also, I want our government giving health care to illegal immigrants, as well as children with parents who make up to $83,000, as well as all children with parents stupid enough not to have health care for their children. choices for health care are great because they lower costs and increase efficiency, but let's require that everyone have some kind of health care so that those who don't have health care are protected from themselves.

Edited October 15, 2007 by Bak

[AstroProdigy]

From my experience on other forums this is classic conservative forum debating. Then again it's also classic debating for any illogical side so there you go.

 

Bak you're barking up the wrong tree if you think you can compromise with the party of Jesus. Logic is just naturally not a part of it.

 

Anyway this IS called "The Great Faith Debate," but it seems to have turned into a debate about American politics.

[ThunderJam]

Bak you're barking up the wrong tree if you think you can compromise with the party of Jesus. Logic is just naturally not a part of it.

Wow. Republicans = the party of Jesus now? And logic has no part in that party? You either are getting worse and worse, or you need to start explaining your outrageous statements better.

[SeVeR]

Wow. Republicans = the party of Jesus now?

Statistically Christians are much more likely to be republicans, and atheists as democrats. http://www.christianpost.com/article/20070...Republicans.htm

 

I've seen countless other polls that show an even bigger difference between the two parties.

 

And logic has no part in that party?

As a result the republican party can use the God word alot more to get unquestionable support from their Jesus-club. Incidently, the Republican party also appeals more to patriots, so all they need do is say "America" and "freedom" every other sentence and they get big support that way too.

 

You either are getting worse and worse, or you need to start explaining your outrageous statements better.

In your last four posts you haven't made a single arguable point.

[NBVegita]

It turns out $83,000 is the highest amount of possible income that would be eligible for coverage and this is only applicable to New York with the most expensive city in the country to live in. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to live in Manhattan? $83,000 makes you rich in Alabama, but in New York City it gets you in pretty bad shape. Just owning an apartment will cost you almost a million dollars now and don't get me started on renting one.

 

Then don't live in manhatten. There are hundreds of areas OUTSIDE of manhatten, or even out of NYC itself, with very reasonable rates but you might, omg not that, have to make a commute into the city...heaven forbid you join the millions of other people doing the same thing. If you're making 83k a year, under no cir!@#$%^&*stances should you own an apartment worth over 12 times your yearly income. That would be like a man making 30k a year and owning a house that was worth 400k.

 

A friend of mine is now working down there. Originally they made him a job offer for 45k year for a low level position in a company down there. Because of all the "hype" on how expensive it is to live around nyc he was going to refuse the job. After I sat down with him, we found a nice suburb, out of the city, where his commute by train was only 30-45 minutes, depending of course on delays, where he had one of the nicest apartments the city had to offer, and yearly, estimating high, including rent, which covered utilities, transportation, food and household expenditures it was only going to cost him about 23k a year. We checked into it, and had he planned to be there for a while, he could have gotten a house for cheaper than he was paying for rent on his basically one person suite.

 

If you can't afford to give your children health care, then maybe you need to rethink where you are living.

 

Also I'd like to find the job(s), because obviously they wouldn't make a law for just one, where you make over 80k a year, but dont get benefits. !@#$%^&* even most full time retail/fast food/grocery clerks get medical benefits.

[NBVegita]

Statistically Christians are much more likely to be republicans, and atheists as democrats. http://www.christianpost.com/article/20070...Republicans.htm

 

I've seen countless other polls that show an even bigger difference between the two parties.

 

That just proves that you can stereotype Christians as Republicans, not Republicans as Christians.

 

"Sixty-six percent of Republicans report that religion is very important compared to 57 percent of Democrats."

 

9% isn't a huge gap.

 

As a result the republican party can use the God word alot more to get unquestionable support from their Jesus-club. Incidently, the Republican party also appeals more to patriots, so all they need do is say "America" and "freedom" every other sentence and they get big support that way too.

 

I guess that goes back to trying decide if it is logical to believe in god, or not to believe in god. To you, because you can't prove that there is a god, it's illogical to believe in god. While others believe that all of the unexplained phenomenon are enough to show evidence of god.