What culture that promotes life? The one that forces babies into a world that isn't ready for them, and then after they're here say "fuck you, pay your own way?"

The conservative agenda is an agenda that diminishes human dignity.

I picture him more as someone who relentlessly F5s the Democratic Underground to get his next talking point.

I don't mind politicians expressing their views that are based on religion. But if they say things like: "God is messing with our economy because of us letting gays getting married", then you know things have gone too far.

The guy in the article went too far, in my opinion.

On the matter of religious authority figures, they could do their work better by simply preaching their message and letting their followers make of it what they will. It's when the various religions have tried to wed their doctrines into immediate political scenarios that we've run into trouble, because whether or not the religious figure honestly believes their faith is one thing, but the politician is out to advance a material agenda, which is necessarily contradictory to spirituality.

The conservative agenda of being far more generous than liberals with their charitable donations, you mean?

Not wanting good works to be done at gunpoint isn't the same thing as not wanting them to be done at all, and it sure as shit isn't, "Fuck you, pay your own way."

Yes, you see, all of this "Christianity" business is really just an excuse to stop women from getting rights.

Not one person who opposes rape does so because of a belief that women should be oppressed, and I say this as someone who is vehemently pro-choice. Quite simply, they believe that an embryo is a living thing and should not be murdered.

I don't think that's a valid belief. You don't think that's a valid belief. But if you want them to stop saying that you want higher taxes on the rich because you hate rich people, stop saying they want to ban abortion because they hate women.

you mean strictly human life here right?  after all humans reduced the amount of mammals and fish drastically (I guess they had it comming)

Maybe they are on to something.

Abortion, in this case, can also be considered a gift from, "God" right?

Everything ever in life can be considered a gift from, "God" according to this person, right?

Interesting read.

I suppose i can't blame you for trying to derail the argument in a "taxes are theft" direction, since it will effectively break this thread off in a different direction and distract from the main point. But if we have all these charities, where are they? Without letting the whole thing fall off the cliff into anecdotal evidence, if they're so much better than the government at doing these things, why aren't they doing them?

Like the "free market," charity doesn't meet all of the needs it should, for various reasons that don't have to do with malevolence and have more to do with natural oversight (that and charity works better on a grass-roots scale, and can't do as good a job with the big matters of mass organization)

And let's try not to make things personal, huh?

exactly, everything a human does is actually god's will and should be considered a gift (good thing "gift" in german means "poison")