Nah...just one turtle, Great A'tuin.
Posted on 01/18/2009 8:59:21 PM PST by Marechal
The phrase is usually traced to a letter Jefferson wrote to a Baptist congregation in Connecticut (it had been used before that by others however). They were asking Jefferson to have the federal government to step in and protect their liberties from the Congregationalists, who were the majority in their community. It's a short read:
To Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge and Others, a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, in the State of Connecticut Gentleman,
The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist Association, give me the highest satisfaction. My duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, and in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man, and tender you for yourselves and your religious association, assurances of my high respect and esteem.
T.W. Jefferson
January 1, 1802
But until those tools are developed that can absolutely, irrefutably prove or disprove something there’s never a concrete answer.
There are physicists that present evidence for something and other physicists who say the evidence points to other things. Just like religionists who present evidence for God and non-believers who say that evidence can be scientifically explained by other things.
The things we have no ability to measure aren’t provable or disprovable. They’re just out there, in limbo, until we have the knowledge to know for sure.
And the vast majority of atheists don't give a hoot about Nativity scenes or menorahs in public places, they don't care if politicians use the word "God" in an oath that they don't mean anyway, and they don't care about what's printed on our money. These things don't pose a problem.
What does pose a problem is the spending of tax money to further religious purposes. We appreciate the restrictions put on the use of government funds for faith-based initiatives. Most of us support the aims of the various church programs that administer emergency aid to the poor and the victims of disasters, but we don't want our money being used to proselytize.
We also despise "blue" laws that use a particular religion's views on a legal substance to effect when people not of that religion can legally conduct commerce in that substance. If drinking a beer is bad, then ban it all the time, why just ban buying it on a Sunday?
I had to wait until noon on a Sunday in North Carolina just to buy a few sixpacks of the local microbrew before I could get on the road to head home a few months ago. Here I am, trying to help the local NC economy by buying a perfectly legal substance that I had no intention of immediately consuming, and they're putting up a speed bump on my way to leaving a few dollars in the local market. How did that help anybody?
There are numerous other examples of how government support of religion is used to marginalize people who are not believers, or not of the dominant religious tradition. Some protests against these are silly, but others really do try to give an official stamp of "outsider, unworthy of consideration" to people who choose to think for themselves on religious and philosophical questions.
I merely pointed out that the site is with a questionable host and the owners wish to remain anonymous.
I'm sorry, I missed that point. It's a valid one, and while I suppose the reason for it is to avoid retaliation, at some point, free people have to stand up and be counted, no matter what the consequences. But you can bet there are people who contributed to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign in California who today wished they were able to do so anonymously.
And once-upon-a-time the Greek and Roman Gods were very real to people. They may be Mythology and literature to us now, but they weren’t always. Someone believed in them.
And today, people believe in the various Hindu gods, the Islammist view of Allah, and Buddha. You and I would conclude they are very wrong. Someday, Westerners may well regard the Judeo-Christian god with the same view that we have towards the gods you regard as false. And that includes the anti-god figure of Satan.
I’d love to go through all that, but I don’t feel like debating today.
If you’re an atheist why are you in the religion forum?
And yes, I knew where the concept of Separation of Church and state came from. But it’s not constitutional.
I’m outta this thread guys. I’ve got other things to pray about. Like God not allowing Obama to completely ruin this country despite our stupidity for voting him in and looking to him for salvation instead of God. (Not me.)
Very few people pick their religeon. It is generally a part of their upbringing.
Santa, the Easter Bunny and The Tooth fairy do indeed create a community but areare primarily for children and do not deal with issues such as morality, marriage, child rearing, fidelity, citizenship and neighborly-ness the way a religeoen does.
TV and Hollywood do establish a set of common values, but these are subject to the mores and changing beliefs of men. Religeous values are much more enduring.
The False promise of Hope by the empty suit is not the same hope people have in being re-united with their loved ones in the here-after.
I think you are exactly right.
That's because those people are "quaint" and need protection from (and therefore justify the existence of) atheists.
Ironically, the same century that gave us the "age of reason" also gave us the "noble savage." The "rationalists" (including the ones that infest Free Republic) are very particular about just which religion(s) they defame and which they wave like a flag in the name of pluralism, diversity, and secularism. It's strange, but one of the implicit arguments of the atheists is that had they and not chr*stians been in charge for the better part of two millenia, they would have been very careful to leave the religious beliefs of the "noble savages" unmolested (a favor they never show Biblical creationists).
You remember the old days of pro wrestling? Remember how each of the "bad guys" claimed to be the best and come from the best place, yet they never feuded with each other but only feuded with babyfaces? This is a lot like that, don't you think?
Normally, I avoid it. But the topic at the top of the post was about disbelief. I feel qualfied to discuss it.
And yes, I knew where the concept of Separation of Church and state came from. But it’s not constitutional.
That whole line about "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." is not in the First Amendment? That is not all of the tradition of separation of church and state, but it is part of its foundation.
Actually, even if religion had not driven European explorers and conquerors to dominate people in the Americas, the native populations still would have been decimated. People in the Americas did not have resistance to a battery of European diseases. Simple peaceful contact would have killed off just about as many as the conquistadores did with swords, guns, and horses leading the attack. Most diseases spread far ahead of the European colonizers.
I agree. But at some point, people have to decide whether or not they believe it, or just want to go through the motions as a cultural adherent of it, or just decide to find something else that squares with their experience and reasoning. If they decide that unbelief is the way that they should go, they usually decide that they are still going to be ethical people. Those ethics might well reflect many facets of the dominant religious tradition of the area they reside.
Santa, the Easter Bunny and The Tooth fairy do indeed create a community but areare primarily for children and do not deal with issues such as morality, marriage, child rearing, fidelity, citizenship and neighborly-ness the way a religeoen does.
It's all a matter of when individuals get disabused of these notions. I seem to remember that adults used to keep the Santa Claus myth going far further in childhood than people do today. As for religion, a lot of the questioning of it comes during adult life. For some people completely immersed in a religious tradition that permeates every area of life, that questioning might not happen until quite late in one's adulthood.
TV and Hollywood do establish a set of common values, but these are subject to the mores and changing beliefs of men. Religeous values are much more enduring.
I agree. But religious values do indeed change over time, I wonder what the Puritans would say about contemporary American evangelicals and their lifestyles. The bible gets reinterpreted and retranslated about every ten years these days!
The False promise of Hope by the empty suit is not the same hope people have in being re-united with their loved ones in the here-after.
One big difference, soon enough, plenty of people will see with their own eyes that the Empty Suit is a fraud. It's a lot more difficult to verify the whereabouts of deceased family members. But you gotta admit, the 'faith' that the true believers in Obama have exhibited up through today has been as fervent as any cult you've ever heard of.
That's all well and good, but my point was the bizarre protectiveness that "rationalists" and "atheists" have towards some people's religion even as they mercilessly attack other people's in the name of "science."
Why do you feel that science attacks your religion? Evolution is a scientific way of approaching the questions of why everything is here, it is a competing set of thought to the idea that things got here suddenly or deliberately by an outside intelligence.
::Sigh::
1)The Torah is absolute. It was written directly by G-d, not by any human being (not even Moses). Its authority is greater than that of any "science." The first eleven chapters of Genesis are history, not myth, and it tells us that the laws of nature have not always been as they are today.
2)Science can only study the world before it. How that world came into existence is completely outside its legitimate purview. The fact that all people begin as zygotes doesn't mean that the first man who ever lived began as a zygote (you have to start somewhere). The whole project of retrojecting the laws of nature into the distant past in order to discover a purely natural explanation for the existence of everything is loaded with preconceptions and prejudices.
There are a couple of magazines, "Skeptic", and "The Skeptical Inquirer", that are devoted to skepticism about the paranormal and pseudoscience. I'm pretty sure that their researchers and writers don't believe in ghosts, ESP, and the Loch Ness Monster...and yet they devote a lot of time showing that they don't exist.
Wonderful, that's what you believe, but you cannot scientifically prove that. I can go in and show that the words used conform to a pre-scientific mythology in the way simple people could understand things. You answer that the laws of nature were different then. How convenient.
The fact that all people begin as zygotes doesn't mean that the first man who ever lived began as a zygote (you have to start somewhere).
We do. We say that humans evolved from zygotes that were from a common ancestor that existed somewhere before humans and the other apes diverged. Think of it as a painted wall that when the paint was freshly applied, it was bright red. Over the years, exposure to sunlight has caused the paint to fade to a dull orange. At what point is the wall no longer red, and then became orange? It's very difficult to say, all we know is that it used to be red (because we took off something attached to the wall sometime soon after painting and saw the original color), and now it's orange.
The whole project of retrojecting the laws of nature into the distant past in order to discover a purely natural explanation for the existence of everything is loaded with preconceptions and prejudices.
There's one big difference. If additional observational reproducible evidence is found, the scientific theories change, that is the very essence of the scientific method. With religionists, no amount of evidence is enough to change the preconceptions and prejudices. Or, it takes hundreds of years for them to accept that the Earth is spherical, not flat.
Not at all. I'm merely not erecting a fallacious distinction between the two.
The only real working difference between the words faith and trust is that faith implies one acts based on the trust.
Religion does not pass this observational test. Actually, it fails quite spectacularly, since bad things happen to religious people all the time.
Bad things happen to everybody. Thus showing that a religious doctrine that says that no bad thing will ever happen to those that believe it is false. However, you seem to have unwittingly presumed that all religious faith included such a doctrine.
The fact that we all accept that parents exist helped demonstrate a fallacy in an invalid argument.
While it would also be invalid to say that:
"I know unicorns don't exist because they don't grant every request."
We probably agree unicorns don't exist, thus the conclusion of the argument in this case is correct. However, the argument itself is still not valid. I can tell its not valid by applying it to something I know that does exist, and yet does not grant every favor that is requested of it.
Likewise, arguing that prayer is not always granted is not a valid reason to conclude that God does not exist. It simply does not speak to the matter one way or another.
Noting, that it was offered as an argument against the existence of God, reasonable people must conclude the argument is worthless, and that the web site has undermined its credibility.
Pardon my intruding, but I fail to see how refusing to constitutionally establish one religion as being best for a nation is the same as erecting a wall of separation between (all) religions and the state. It seems to me the latter is a far more intensive action than the former. Indeed, in the former case, the state could provide funds and other support for religions at will. In the latter it cannot. It seems that Mr. Jefferson’s advocacy has replaced the plain text upon which he might have been commenting
Yes, and uniformitarianism is what you believe. The fact that uniformitarianism is naturalistic does not make it true.
but you cannot scientifically prove that. I can go in and show that the words used conform to a pre-scientific mythology in the way simple people could understand things. You answer that the laws of nature were different then.
You don't know a thing about the Torah. You're all puffed up because you've read the English translation and because you assume naturalism. You don't have the slightest idea of what the Torah is.
You answer that the laws of nature were different then. How convenient.
How convenient for you that natural laws are eternal and unchanging so that you can know everything about everything. Only, let's see . . . there was nothing in existence until the "big bang" . . . but the "big bang" was purely a natural phenomenon . . . but nature didn't exist until after the "big bang" . . . so . . . the "big bang" was caused by its result? Oh yeah. That's rational.
We do [start somewhere]. We say that humans evolved from zygotes that were from a common ancestor that existed somewhere before humans and the other apes diverged. Think of it as a painted wall that when the paint was freshly applied, it was bright red. Over the years, exposure to sunlight has caused the paint to fade to a dull orange. At what point is the wall no longer red, and then became orange? It's very difficult to say, all we know is that it used to be red (because we took off something attached to the wall sometime soon after painting and saw the original color), and now it's orange.
Yes, and we start with 'Adam HaRi'shon. The fact that you find naturalism aesthetically pleasing does not prove that naturalism is a sound assumption.
There's one big difference. If additional observational reproducible evidence is found, the scientific theories change, that is the very essence of the scientific method. With religionists, no amount of evidence is enough to change the preconceptions and prejudices.
Baloney. Nothing could ever shake the naturalists' preconception that only nature exists--even the fact that it did not always exist but exploded into existence ex nihilo!
Or, it takes hundreds of years for them to accept that the Earth is spherical, not flat.
You evidently are not as intelligent as you think. The idea that "Columbus proved the earth is round" is a nineteenth century myth invented to support evolution. The ancients knew the earth was spherical, positing it as the innermost of a series of spheres. And have you ever heard of the "antipodes?"
Why don't you learn Hebrew and then study the four senses of the Torah (PaRDe"S), and then get back with me?
Nah...just one turtle, Great A'tuin.
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