Jesus Versus the Atheists (Washington State Gov. Gregoire insults Christians Worldwide)

Townhall ^ | Dec 6, 2008 | Bill O'Reilly

[SeekAndFind]

Just in time for the Christmas season, Washington State Gov. Christine Gregoire has insulted Christians all over the world. Inside the state Capitol building in Olympia there is a traditional holiday display featuring a tree and the Nativity scene; perfectly appropriate since the federal and state Christmas holiday celebrates the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.

But this year Gregoire decided to add another item to the display. Standing alongside the baby Jesus is a giant placard designed by atheists that reads: "There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

You read that correctly. The governor of Washington State has permitted an attack on religion to be displayed in her office building as part of a Christmas presentation.

Even the producers of "The Twilight Zone" would have rejected this script as being too far-fetched. Gregoire's behavior is offensive, insulting to all people of faith and totally incomprehensible.

Unless you know what's going on in Washington State.

Seattle now rivals San Francisco for secular-progressive nuttiness. The city fathers are allowing public nakedness in city parks and nude bike riding, and in Fremont, a Seattle suburb, they actually put up a statue honoring Vladimir Lenin, the father of communism.

Some on the Seattle school board actually supported denigrating Thanksgiving by teaching children about the atrocities against Native Americans by the Pilgrims.

In addition, Washington State voters have passed assisted-suicide legislation, and the state gives out free birth control pills, including the "morning after pill."

On the quality-of-life front, the streets of Seattle are full of homeless people, but they don't have to be out in the rain. The city will pay to house alcoholics and drug addicts if they want it. They can actually get free furnished apartments. Taxpayers, of course, pick up the tab.

Outside of the Seattle area, Washington State is fairly conservative. But the big-city population base rules, and far-left zealots are running wild. However, they may have overstepped on this Christmas deal.

I believe that most Americans, even those living in the far-left enclaves, respect uplifting traditions like Christmas, where peace and love is the theme of the great day. Calling religion "enslaving" doesn't exactly fit into the peace and love scenario, does it? Can't we all just get along for a few weeks in December?

The answer to that question is no. Not in Washington State, where the governor believes a few nuts have a legal right to run down the Christmas tradition in the lobby of the Capitol building. At this point there is little left to say except this: Where are the wise men when you need them?

[Earthdweller]

Yes...but you are one of the bad rebellious heretics like me.

[muawiyah]

You still don't get it do you. Use www.google.com, not FR. They reference us, as needed, but we are all individually responsible for referencing them.

I found 7,000+ references to the exact scientific experiment in 5 seconds.

That you still can't use Google.com tells me all I need to know about you!

[tflabo]

"God who gave us Life gave us liberty...and can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed thir only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when i reflect that God is just..that His justice cannot sleep forever"....Thomas Jefferson (American Vision)

PS. This notion of TJ being a Deist is revisionist myth!

[Clemenza]

There are still some old meeting houses around ~ I know of one near Crawfordsville that's maintained out of charitable contributions. There are more of the old type in the Eastern states.

There is one of the latter located just a mile from where I live:

The Friends I have met (three come to mind, one in high school, and two in adulthood) were/are of the "inner light"/not very Xian variety. Most who were in my area moved west after the Revolution (mostly to Indiana and Iowa, per a former neighbor of mine who is a Friend of the Societal variety). Despite their role in the founding of many towns in my area (and many more in PA across the river, William Penn being a Quaker for those folks reading this from Rio Linda), there are very few left, and they were a small minority even in the later Colonial period.

[muawiyah]

Eversion in sea cucumbers is a form of autotomy in which the animal ejects its internal organs as a defensive strategy, effectively turning itself inside out.

At the same time seems to me any Atheist would be literally ejaculatory over the idea of grabbinghold of an authentic scientific study that compares holy joes and atheists.

[beelzepug]

No homeless in Seattle? My gosh, you can hardly turn on the nightly news without hearing a story about which local church is going to be the next to host “Nickelsville”, the traveling homeless circus.

The alcoholism problem with homeless Native Americans is very bad. I can’t understand why some of the huge profits from Indian casinos aren’t being used to help their less fortunate brethren.

[muawiyah]

Still, did you ever realize that being from Indiana and belonging to a Christian (brand name) church of some kind was like being about as mainstream as a Catholic in Rome?

[Earthdweller]

"There are many passages in the Quran that denegrate Jews and Christians by calling them apes and pigs. "

Yea...like they will get to display something like that openly in the US. Nope, the privilege of disgusting degrading insults is a privilege only afforded Atheists here...and maybe a few of us heretics like the "throw away" founders that started this place./s

[Earthdweller]

I didn’t know that...does that mean we can throw people off of tall buildings now and call it a holiday?

[Clemenza]

Again, Jefferson's lord was not the trancendent being in three parts that I was raised to believe in at Our Lady of Lourdes. His was more of the "watchmaker" variety, who created the world, but did not intervene past creation.

What is untrue is that folks hid their bibles when he was inaugurated. TJ had a strong record of support for christian minorities in his pre-presidential rhetoric and actions. His famous letter to the Baptists on "separation" being, of course, anti-establishmentarian, rather than anti-religous.

Nevertheless, Jefferson would not be what you and I would consider a Christian. Like most men of his time, Xianity was his main cultural point of reference. But as far as believing in the bible and the resurrection, you would be far mistaken to count Jefferson as a Christian.

Now, as to the point of the United States being a "Christian nation.": Only in the sense that a. a majority of the people of the US at the founding were Christians of one form or another and of various levels of devotion (the Scots Irish of Pennsylvania were often out and out anti-clerical and unchurched. It would take the second Great Awakening to change that). and b. our legal system, rooted in English common law, is heavily influenced by Christianity (along with Germanic and Roman legal traditions).

[muawiyah]

A point about the Quakers. New Sweden was located, more or less, in what is now Northern Delaware, Southern New Jersey, Southeastern Pennsylvania and North to Western Maryland.

They were all fat, dumb and happy as hogs chopping down trees and making babies and William Penn came along and decided SE PA would be a great place for Quakers.

He brought in so many of them they actually drove the Lutheran, Free Church and Church of the First Born Scanderhoovians OUT of SE PA to an alternative site known today as York County PA.

From there they settled North to New York along the Susquehanna, but only on the West bank of the river ~ and that was to keep away from the Quakers who were persecuting them.

The Episcopal church today owns all the old Scandinavian Lutheran churches in SE PA and parts of Maryland. They are kept mostly as museum pieces ~ and are probably a bit delicate for regular worship services.

The Plain church Germans and Amish who now dominateLancaster county PA came in later as Quakers found more opportunities to get rich further North and East in the vicinity of Philadelphia.

[Pelagius of Asturias]

I want to tell you about a dog we had several years ago and it will explain my attitude toward homosexuality - Our Cocker Spaniel mix was becoming sexually mature and he was apparently experimenting. He tried to mount our neighbor's Setter; needless to say, the male Setter was not amused. The first time the Setter turned and snarled at our dog. The second time, the Setter actually caused our Spaniel to let out a yalp and run home. I think our dog got a lesson about the natural order of things.

[muawiyah]

Defenestration involved a toss of a couple of stories ~ it wasn't invariably fatal.

But no, don't do that. There are plenty of hog slops around. Just push 'em off the feeding steps.

[HerrBlucher]

He didn’t just want to redact the bible to fit his beliefs, he DID redact the bible to fit his beliefs. He was a Deist as were most of the founding fathers.

[Pelagius of Asturias]

Just don’t continue trying to categorize all atheists as being the same, you are wrong, just like it would be wrong for me to categorize all Christians as believing like Westboro Baptist members.

[AlanGreenSpam]

In all fairness, the State Bldg IS STATE property and putting a nativity scene is an obvious instance where they’re NOT separating church and state.

Get it people?

Even if you’re a Christian, one would ideally think you would want our government to be neutral to religion. Posting a Nativity scene is not neutral by any stretch of the imagination.

Furthermore, if those of you who post that it is “insensitive and insulting” to Christians would take a look at yourselves, you’ll see that you’re sounding NO DIFFERENT THAN liberals do when they whine that you “insulted” them by referring to them as socialists or whatever...

Have strength & conviction in your personal beliefs and you can see beyond these trivial events.

There’s bigger fish to fry than this one.

[muawiyah]

Again, about Jefferson, hard to tell the difference between him and an Arian.

[CE2949BB]

1 - I have been using Google. You said it was posted at FreeRepublic and I used terms that you used.

2 - The closet article is from PLoS ONE. Losing the Big Picture: How Religion May Control Visual Attention. If that is the "study" you're talking about, you may need to re-read it a few times. Your understanding of it is flawed.

A couple juicy excerpts:

This outcome suggests that religious belief biases the way people attend to and process visual events: Calvinists showed a less pronounced global precedence effect than atheists, indicating that practicing this religion might lead one to attend to more local aspects.

...snip...

According to our approach, social experience and procedures (in our case religion), and the selective reward they provide, can induce the emphasis on and higher weighting [12] of socially relevant perceptual features and characteristics of processed events. We speculate that exercising a religion and being exposed to particular religious practices may lead, among other things, to a chronic bias towards particular attentional control parameters. The sphere sovereignty principle underlying Dutch neo-Calvinism has led to a rigorous “pillarization” (segregation) of Dutch society and established the idea that, in a nutshell, everyone should “mind his or her own business”—which among other things inspired a rather liberal policy regarding drug use, abortion, or euthanasia.

[muawiyah]

He didn’t publish it. Lots of folks do that ~ rewrite the parts they don’t agree with.

[Eva]

Your little story about the natural order of things is exactly why the Gay agenda is to brainwash children before they become sexually aware. They are stealing the innocence of childhood and replacing it with confusion and fear.