"Pro-God is the only endorsement of "religion" on FR. People like you and me actually do fit under this umbrella. I would have been zotted long ago, otherwise. You would have been zotted long ago if this were not the case. FR is "not a liberal debating society" in the above words. Reference is made to liberal trolls. If you're going to have a hard time making your argument on FR, it will be impossible in the real world."
I am unable to imagine what point it is that you are trying to make with that post. I have said nothing about any "liberal debating society," and "pro-God" sounds like a pretty strong endorsement of religion to me.
Further, my remarks concerned the nature of conservatism and not the FR mission statement, which which I have become rather familiar over the past several years.
["Meanwhile, the Old Testament Patriarchs, including Solomon and David, were not exactly conservatives in the way that you would define it."
Oh? And what tenets of conservatism did they reject?]
You are a great debater, by the way.
The tenets David and Solomon would have rejected, if conservativism in 1400 BC meant what you say it means today, were the idea that a man of great power should settle for less than 300 wives and 400 concubines.
Patriarchal conservatism has followed examples like that (or of Mohammed) for thousands of years and it includes the sexual behavior of many in the Catholic priesthood for 2000 years (sadly, this entitlement is often now directed at little boys).
The majority of men in this world who call themselves "conservative" would be thinking of this patriarchal view...even if, schizophrenically, some adhere to religions that want to keep women under control whom other conservative men don't want controlled.
Conservative men fought conservative men for 6000 years of recorded history...over resources and women. It is all about who gets control.
But this I don't understand about religion:
Suicide bombers kill themselves to get a patriarchal job servicing 72 virgins. Foreign insurgents in Iraq are enticed by tales of Iraqi women wanting sex with freedom fighters. Yet they support a religion in this life that stops young women from even being nice to them.
I don't understand how any Muslim man can call himself "conservative" who wouldn't want the opportunity to get what he clearly wants. But we all know how these bozos get around that: they go to Australia and rape innocent women for not wearing veils. Our job in the WOT is to turn these guys into real conservatives by deprogramming them out of a religion that is counterproductive to what men really want...and start teaching them how to grasp what they really want conservatively, not religiously.
The WOT clearly shows that religiousity is not always conservative. Look at the alliance, albeit a fake one, between Islamic extremists and the western left. That may be a bad example, because they are so far following a conservative principle of attempting to completely defeat their conservative enemy (the USA) rather than ally with us. But they sure as heck all vote liberal. Why would they put out their eye to spite their nose? Answer: religious people, at the lower levels, often don't think conservatively when organized religion tells them how to behave against their personal interests.
What you call Judao-Christian would be more "Paulist" to me. But that is a whole different discussion of organized religion. Suffice it to say that the Catholic priesthood and the Vatican wasn't always about morality and religion. It was conservative only in that it wanted power (and sex) and was willing to use various control mechanisms to get it.
And if I said the Catholic priesthood was only acting "conservatively" when they took advantage of people under their control...I hope I don't sound like a fascist.
Lord Palmerston was conservative because he wanted world control (and sex) at all costs even if it meant that England would be friends with the anti-monarchists in France who had long since executed their royalty. He was a realist and the conservative men approved of him and his womanizing more than they approved of Queen Victoria. He was one of the MEN who created the British Empire...while Queen Victoria watched and fretted about "moral values" in the same way that liberals today fret about the "morality of it all" when they condemn us modern conservatives who are shaping the world in the manner that we want and securing the oil for future maintenance of our superpower status and standard of living.
If I sound like I, like so many British conservative men of her day, did not like Queen Victoria's attitude, I hope I don't sound like a fascist.
Yet Queen Victoria, ridiculed by men in England, became popular in what was becoming a moralistic matriarchal American society. The legacy popularity of Queen Victoria in the USA and her influence on the modern American evangelical movement cannot be easily dismissed as a myth.
Nor can we ignore the matriarchy/patriarchy debate.
There is a reason why premarital sex is off the political table in the 21st century. Conservative men are split on the issue. And increasingly, so are women. It won't be back on the table in our lifetimes.
Someone at Amazon actually made a cogent comment when she noted that some "conservatives" in America might run like lemmings to buy a book that condemns sex...and not know that they are taking the Republican Party over a cliff in thinking that this book is supposed to be part of the "culture war they want to have". It concerns me that the liberals might perform jujitsu on Republicans who overreach. They'll let us have our "culture war" until a red line is silently crossed.
Lord Palmerston and the British conservatives would demand that this woman author go back to the kitchen. To them it would be Queen Victoria mouthing off. Apparently to a lot of guys on FR today...this woman author is automatically our spokesperson if we haven't read her book.
Single males who completely disagree with your idea of sexual morality (maybe 20 million who vote) aren't so enamored of the word Republican that they would vote for a continued matriarchy if that were the main issue in an election.
Let's stick to condemning the homosexual political agenda. You know: the one where we grant them the socalled right to "marriage" and then their next policy is to win the "right" to donate blood. We can all agree that this is a left wing nightmare. On heterosexual "rights" there is very little agreement as reflected by the past 10 years of no Republican policy on the matter.
By the way, the above is no defense of libertarianism nor do I "approve" of the way Lord Palmerston may or may not have thought of women as sex objects.
I just point out that there is a long history of patriarchal conservatism that competes with that of the Apostle Paul.
Plus, the definition of liberal and conservative really do alter drastically in place and time. Julius Caesar was a liberal. Anyone who fought for his interests against certain Roman families was a liberal. Plus "conservative" in Germany today means being against cigarette smoking while liberals here think that George Bush is responsible for banning cigarettes in the USA...so they smoke "to spite Bush".
Politics can get to be a bad joke when things like the Iranian nuclear crisis don't make it so damned serious.
I meant "libertinism". I never use that word because its not a philosophy one has to adhere to when one simply states that a woman should decide for herself what is best regarding sex with a man she really likes.