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Oh, well, that ties it.  Katherine Harris cannot possibly  be qualified to hold public office.
She came out in favor of a morality-based government.
U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris told a religious journal that separation of church and state is “a lie” and God and the nation’s founding fathers did not intend the country be “a nation of secular laws.”
The Florida Republican candidate for U.S. Senate also said that if Christians are not elected, politicians will “legislate sin,” including abortion and gay marriage.
That would be the next step, ’tis true.  They’ve been forcing it upon us through the auspices of judicial fiat for some 35 years now.
Harris made the comments – which she clarified Saturday – in the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention, which interviewed political candidates and asked them about religion and their positions on issues.
Separation of church and state is “a lie we have been told,” Harris said in the interview, published Thursday, saying separating religion and politics is “wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.”
“If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin,” Harris said.
Well, sounds like she’s bang-on right so  far.  Which means we can expect the knee-jerk reaction from the secular humanist fucksticks in 5…4…3…2…
Her comments drew criticism, including some from fellow Republicans who called them offensive and not representative of the party.
Yep, right on time.  Apparently these dimbulbs have forgotten the words of John Adams, who said – and I quote:  “We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”
Memo to those “fellow Republicans”:  Your asinine claims that Harris’ beliefs are “offensive” and “not representative of the party” will no doubt come as a shock to the millions of Christians in Flyover Country™.  You know, the ones who are about to vote your skanky asses out of office because you’ve misplaced your spine where those matters are concerned?
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who is Jewish, told the Orlando Sentinel that she was “disgusted” by the comments.
Yeah, well, most of us are disgusted that you continue to waste our oxygen, you Demoscummic dipshit – so I guess we’re even, aren’t we?
Harris’ campaign released a statement Saturday saying she had been “speaking to a Christian audience, addressing a common misperception that people of faith should not be actively involved in government.”
The comments reflected “her deep grounding in Judeo-Christian values,” the statement said, adding that Harris had previously supported pro-Israel legislation and legislation recognizing the Holocaust.
Now I gotta admit – this bugs me.  Why issue a “clarification” on anything?  Say what you mean, mean what you say, and if the leering press bleats about it, simply respond, “I said what I said, I stand by it, and if that doesn’t meet with your approval…too damned bad.  Next question?”
The squawkers down there need to be disabused of their little delusion of self-importance, if you ask me.  The lapdogs down there are trying to be the next Woodward & Bernstein, when the lot of ’em are barely qualifed to write puff pieces for the Home & Garden section.
Harris’ opponents in the GOP primary also gave interviews to the Florida Baptist Witness but made more general statements on their faith.
Which is why I wouldn’t give two shits for whatever ability they thought they had to represent me.  I want my  representatives to have this trivial little thing called a spine, y’know?
Sorry I don’t live in Florida, Katherine.  I’d  vote for you.
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13 responses to “How dare  a candidate be…(gasp!) religious???”
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There is no God. The concept of sin is meaningless. Harris was advocating forcing her own delusions on those who do not ascribe to them. Thus, she is unqualified to hold representative positions. She should be forced to resign.
Psalms 14:1.
Oh, I dunno.  I’d say your parents committed quite a few.  Starting with doing such a shitty job raising you.
“Forced to resign”?  Gee, who’s forcing their delusions on whom now?
PotKettleBlack™ much, dumbass?
[blockquote]
Psalms 14:1.
[/blockquote]
“The fool hath said in his heart, [There is] no God…”
Using the Bible to prove the existence of God is like using the illustrated edition of Peter Pan to prove the existence of Tinkerbell. Your verse is meaningless.
[blockquote]
Oh, I dunno. I’d say your parents committed quite a few. Starting with doing such a shitty job raising you.
[/blockquote]
Denouncing my behaviour (which is calm) and insulting my parents in the same sentence makes you appear hypocritical.
[blockquote]
“Forced to resign”? Gee, who’s forcing their delusions on whom now?
PotKettleBlack™ much, dumbass?
[/blockquote]
I am under no delusions.
Has anyone other than me noticed that the anti-Christian left has no problem forcing their beliefs down our throat, but if those of us who claim Christ try to promote our faith, dare to do so anywhere but inside a church, we are evil incarnate?
“Psalms 14:1.”
How can someone argue against the evidence?
Only to those who fail/refuse to acknowledge the historical aspect of the Scriptures – a fallacy atheist morons routinely commit.
Okay, let’s take the ad hominems  out of it.
You, sir, are expressing the views of an idiot.  And I didn’t insult your parents – only the job they did raising you, which was apparently piss-poor.
Bullshit.  You’re under three that I’ve counted:  1) that there’s no God, 2) that an elected representative should be “forced” to resign from her office for expressing views with which you – a UK citizen with no voting rights in this country – might disagree, and 3) that people of faith should be disqualified from holding public office.
See, we have a Constitution over here that expressly forbids that.  Perhaps you’ve heard of it.  It came about the time we kicked your ancestors’ asses back across the pond.
…
Now on to little Genthe.  I’m suspending my rule prohibiting your comments until you’ve shown me your proof concerning evolution only because I have a vested interest therein – that being slapping those comments down so hard it’s gonna hurt. (chuckle)
Glad you said that.  Let’s take a look at who exactly “undid that”.
Stern called it “absurd” that only 424 astronomers were allowed to vote, out of some 10,000 professional astronomers around the globe.
“It won’t stand,” he said. “It’s a farce.”
424 out of 10,000.  Less than five percent, for those of you following at home.  We have bond elections on Saturdays in Texas that get more turnout.
How about we poll the other 9,576 astronomers and ask ’em what they  think?  Whaddya wanna bet that a majority of ’em that the idea – and those who support it (including, apparently, you) are a bunch of crap?
Real brave hiding behind your keyboard up there in Maryland and saying that, aren’t you, nancy boy?
I’ll happily put King David’s credentials up against yours any day, dumbfuck.
Feel free now to climb back under your evolutionist rock.  That is, while you’re waiting for it to evolve into a fern. (guffaw)
*snort*
That is an assertion that is so logically absurd that you can only even make if you don’t believe in logic, reason, or science.
The existence of a Creator is so logically sound, ALL SCIENCE would cease to be relevant if a Creator didn’t exist.
But, if you knew anything about logic, you wouldn’t be an atheist.
So, make up your mind: either you believe in the absurd (in which case, stop paying any attention to science), or, a Creator exists (in which case, throw out any science which tries to disprove the Creator that created the rules the science is trying to figure out.).
“How about we poll the other 9,576 astronomers and ask ’em what they think? ”
Sounds allright. I don’t know how astronomy defines stuff. Looks like they either kept Pluto a planet, but also added more things like, or demoted it. Consistency required something to change. Looks like they’ve spent a lot of time coming up with these definition.
But you still get the point that the designation was by humans, and humans get to change it.
First off, apologies for the dodgy coding in my last post. I’m used to UBB code.
Lord Spatula Wrote
Which historical aspects are they? The fact that there is no contemporaneous mention of Jesus when he was alive? The fact that the gospels, the first of which is from Mark, was written around AD 70 or later, decades after the crucifixion, based on second or even third hand oral accounts?
Also, may I ask to which form of Christianity do you ascribe?
Okay, let’s take them individually.
There really isn’t. For proof, consider what is classically known as the ‘Problem of Evil’. You’ve probably come across this in some form or another but I’ll briefly restate it for those who haven’t.
According to Christian teachings, God is Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnibenevolent. However, the fact that evil exists means he can’t be all three. Therefore he cannot exist.
How do you answer that?
Her views indicate that she thinks poorly of those members of the electorate who don’t conform to her religious views. She thinks they’re sinners. Now that the people know this, the potential for allegations of conflicts of interest is endless. Even if she has never allowed her faith to influence her job, from this day forth any decisions she makes which appear to benefit a Christian over a non Christian will be suspect, even if the decisions are perfectly fair. Her claims about “legislating sin” can be used as ammunition against her. Her credibility thus undermined, she will not be able to perform her job as effectively as someone untainted by accusations of pro-Christian bias. For the good of the Party, she should resign.
Public confidence is a form of commodity. Politicians depend on a healthly supply of this commodity to to do their jobs effectively. If the public loses this confidence, for any reason, then the politician’s ability to perform is weakened. Politics is perhaps the only job where the mere impression of wrongdoing is grounds for firing. It may not be fair, but that’s just the rules of the game. If Harris’ comments come back to haunt her and result in a significant loss of public confidence then she will probably be forced to resign at some point anyway. I think she should do it now and save herself the potential embarrassment of having her credibility further tarnished.
Of course, she was fairly elected and as such has every right to stay to the end of her term, should she choose to. I don’t think it would be in the best interests of either the party or the electorate, however.
This is a strawman. I didn’t argue this. I do not think people of faith should be disqualified from public office. Katherine Harris’ “crime” wasn’t in holding a faith, it was calling everyone who didn’t share it a sinner.
The Humble Devildog Wrote:
I take it you are a Christian and by ‘creator’ you mean the Christian God.
As you will see, Monotheism is so fraught with logical errors as to be untenable. Atheism, by contrast, is not a philosophy and contains no beliefs. By rights, the word atheism shouldn’t even exist. After all, we don’t have words for non astrologers, or people who don’t believe Elvis is still alive. Atheism, at the end of the day, is simply an adherence to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty, that your beliefs should be proportional to the evidence one has to support them.
There is no creator. To see this, simply ask yourself “Who created the creator?”
Can you also please explain how ‘All science’ would cease to be relevant if a creator didn’t exist? I know of know physical laws predicated on the truth of scripture.
So unbelief in a creator is prima facie absurd? You’ve yet to explain why and forgive me for not taking it on your say so. I contend that unbelief in a creator is the only rational option because there is no hard evidence to support this creators existence and an overabundance of evidence that disproves his existence (like the existence of evil, for instance).
Your second clause about how the existence of a creator would somehow obviate science just makes no sense.
The Christian answer to the “Problem of Evil” is simple. The world is not as originally designed due to humanity’s fall from grace. (Atheists should agree that humans in their current state are neither perfectly knowledgeable nor perfectly desirous of what is right.) God could erase all outward manifestations of evil by reducing humanity to sock-puppet status, by erasing our ability to act as moral free agents. That would make everything all tidy for God, but our lives would be meaningless without the ability to initiate anything on our own. God’s goal is therefore to minimize the sum of all evil, both temporal and eternal. He can see the butterfly effect of every possibility and we can’t, so what he allows to proceed confuses the heck out of us.
Atheism IS a belief system. To believe that something unobserved does not exist is a statement of faith. (Aren’t scientists the ones who go around saying that you can’t prove a negative?) The Elvis comparison is flawed, because we have material evidence tha he died. The astrology comparison isn’t, but just because we don’t have a word for anti-astrologer doesn’t mean the concept doesn’t exist.
(The leap of faith to disbelieve astrology is a short one, though. And even if astrology is real, you couldn’t get useful info from it, since you’d have to deal with the infinite horoscopes of everybody that interacts with whatever the issue is that you’re divining.)
If there is no God, does objective morality exist? Virtually all humans believe in the latter (even if they disagree on what is and isn’t moral). Theists will argue that since law cannot exist without an intelligent lawmaker, a transcendent moral law cannot exist without a transcendent lawmaker. Atheists can believe that such-and-such is moral, but do they have any arguments for proof? They can demonstrate whether X is injurious or beneficial to A (unless injury or benefit is spiritual in nature), but how do they argue that we are obligated to respect A’s welfare?
Well, who the Hell™ else  were you expecting to do it?  The Vulcans? :-/
No worries.
Oh, I dunno.  Would you rather start with his birth, his carpentry career (sketchy, but it is  mentioned), the water-to-wine thing, the resurrection of Lazarus…?
Boy howdy, I sure did enjoy reading that 230-year-old Bennie Arnold biography of George Washington, didn’t you…?
And this proves…what, exactly?
I suppose you have concrete evidence to show this?  Absoulte proof that those who penned the Gospels were lying?
This ought to be good.  Pass the popcorn…
You may.  You’ll get a blank stare, as I don’t have the foggiest notion what you’re talking about, but you may  ask.
Because you  say so?  Sorry, but I’ll need better than that.
Actually, no – I haven’t.  Better get some more popcorn…
“Omnibenevolent”?  This is a word?  “Omnibenevolent”???
Simple.  I throw the non sequitur  flag and penalize you 15 yards.  What’s one got to do with the other?
Almost, Einstein, but not quite.  If she holds traditional Christian viewpoints, she thinks that all  are sinners, herself included.
Yeah, well – too bad, so sad.  Her constituents very likely knew what she believed, and voted for her anyway.  Religious tests for public office are still verboten  under our system of laws, so tough toenails.  Sucks to be you and all that.
Not very well in that particular district, given that she won there fairly easily last cycle.
Because you  say so?  Again, you’re going to need much, much  better than that.  That you don’t agree with her views doesn’t affect her credibility one damned bit.
That’s really the rest of your screed.  Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better next time, hm?
Alan K. Henderson wrote:
In the Bible, humanity’s fall from grace occurred because Adam and Eve ate forbidden fruit. Modern science has proven that there was no Adam, Eve, or Garden of Eden. Therefore there was no fall from grace. As such, this particular Christian answer to the Problem of Evil is a complete non sequitur.
This is very true, and you don’t need to believe in a mythical ‘Fall from grace’ to argue this successfully. Your argument here successfully resolves the problem of human evil.
However, what about the problem of natural evil? Consider hurricane Katrina. Over 1000 people died, and millions more lost everything. It is safe to say that nearly everyone left in New Orleans after the mismanaged evacuation believed in a merciful, compassionate, and all powerful God.
But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to New Orleans? Surely he heard the prayers of the old men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics only to be drowned there. These were people of faith, who prayed throughout their lives. If our world is truly the fruit of Gods creation, he cannot escape blame for the needless suffering caused by natural disasters.
Bertrand Russell demolished the fallacy behind your argument nearly a century ago with his famous teapot argument. As his response appears to me to be perfect, I simply offer it here:
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
If a valid retort to Russell has ever seen the light of day, I’m not aware of it.
Yes, there is such a thing as objective morality. I’ll explain in a moment, but first I want to dispense with the idea that the existence of objective morality is contingent on the existence of a Creator to lay down the law. Consider the following argument.
1) Either God endowed us with a transcendent moral law, or he didn’t.
2) If he did endow us with such a law then it, like the world, was solely his creation.
3) If something is ‘good’ because God decrees it to be so, then whatever is good is entirely and utterly arbitrary. If God had said ‘massacring small children with battleaxes is good’, this would be equally as acceptable as the statement ‘telling the truth is good’. The definition of ‘good’ is relegated to ‘good is whatever God says is good’. ‘Good’ has effectively been stripped of all positive moral connotations – it is an entirely empty and nebulous description of a divine decree.
4) If, on the other hand, it is because something is good that God decrees it, it follows that whatever moral laws there are exist independent of God, are thus the creation of man.
Now, this may seem like an argument for subjective morality, but it really isn’t. It merely proves that objective morality cannot come from God. If he created morality, it has to be arbitrary. If he didn’t create morality, then his existence doesn’t have any bearing on the question in the first place.
This may be a bitter pill to swallow but, as it turns out, it really isn’t that big a deal. The idea that raping and killing children can only be wrong if there exists a God that says it is completely ignores the fact that, by dint of both evolution, and environment, psychologically healthy humans are endowed with a sense of empathy and compassion. One could attempt to make the argument that this sense is a gift from God, but this ignores point 3 of the above argument. It also ignores the fact that even animals possess these traits. For example, it has been observed that mice show greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar ones. It has also been observed that Chimps display a demonstrable sense of fairness when distributing food rewards.
Our sense of empathy and compassion enable us to act in ways which minimize suffering and maximize happiness, for ourselves and those around us. Clearly, there are psychophysical laws which underwrite human wellbeing, and an understanding and appreciation of these laws forms a solid basis for objective morality. Our intelligence enables us to think of actions in terms of the happiness and suffering which may result from them. Our empathy and compassion generally guides us towards courses of action which maximize the former and minimize the latter. Atrocities like the Holocaust may cause one to doubt this, but all such atrocities really prove is that empathy and compassion are not universal, and can be easily suppressed.
Moreover, religion were necessary for morality, there should be some evidence that atheists are less moral than believers. There is no such evidence. In fact, the 50 countries ranked lowest in the 2005 U.N. Human Development Report are all unwaveringly religious, while the countries ranked highest all display rates of atheism higher than the global average. Of course, this doesn’t mean that belief in God fosters societal dysfunction. It could well be that societal dysfunction fosters belief in God. However, it does mean that religion is not necessary for the development of a healthy society, and that a religious society has no guarantees of being successful or peaceful.
If I could sum up the case for atheistic objective morality in a single sentence it would be this: Everything about human experience suggests that love is better than hate for the purposes of living happily in this world.
This is an objective claim about the human mind, the dynamics of social relations, and the moral order of our world. While we do not have anything like a final, scientific approach to maximizing human happiness, it seems safe to say that raping and killing children will not be one of its primary constituents.
We live in a world where everything we value is eventually destroyed by change. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents nothing more than a vast spectacle of loss. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste not realizing that it will be the last time they do so. Death robs us of everything we work for and hold dear. Just think about the enormity of it for a moment. You and I will die. Our kin will die. Everyone you pass on the street today is going to die. What possible reason can there be to treat them with anything but kindness in the meantime?
That, in a nutshell, is atheistic morality, and irrespective of God’s existence it’s the closest thing to objective that we’ve got.
Lord Spatula wrote:
But we can’t find objective corroboration of these incidents outside of the Gospels, the earliest of which was written 70 years after his death. The only documents which state Jesus turned water into wine are the Gospels, and the people who wrote them weren’t even alive when Jesus was. In fact, the earliest mention of Jesus by someone other than a Bible contributory is found in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews in 94AD, some 58 years (approximately) after the crucifixion. Josephus didn’t mention anything about miracles.
I’m sorry, I don’t follow.
Simply that what we know of the historical aspects of scripture comes from people who weren’t contemporaries of Jesus, who weren’t privy to the miracle’s they wrote about, and whose stories were fed to them second, third, or even fourth hand, by the children of the children of those who were alive at the time. As such they make for poor historical records.
I never said they were lying, just that their testimony wouldn’t pass the criteria for historical reliability we use today. I’m not blaming the Gospel writers for this. The standards for evidence were simply a lot lower back then. I’m sure that they believed in what they wrote. My point is just that we shouldn’t take what they have to say at face value, given just how far removed they were from Jesus.
Well, all I wanted to know was what type of Christian are you? Are you a Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Pentecostal, 7th day Adventist, what? It isn’t really important, but I wanted to clarify this because I didn’t want to ascribe to you beliefs that you don’t necessarily hold.
Yes. It means ‘All-loving’. It was only coined recently, though, so it may not be in older dictionaries. You can find out more about it here
I was rather brief before. I’ll try again. All Christians, regardless of denomination, believe that God possesses three abiding characteristics. The first is omnipotence, the second is omniscience, and the third is omnibenevolence. However, we see evil in the world every day. This means that God either:
a) Can’t do a damn thing about it, in which case he’s not omnipotent.
b) Doesn’t know about it, in which case he’s not omniscient.
c) Does know about and can stop it, but chooses not to, in which case he isn’t omnibenevolent.
In short, the three characteristics attributed to God by Christians of all stripes are inconsistent with the existence of evil in our world. For instance, 500 million people died of smallpox in the 20th century alone, many of them children and babies. Moreover, death by smallpox is prolonged and excruciatingly painful. The disease causes hundreds of pustules to break out on the skin, an agonizing process which leaves the survivors permanently scarred and sometimes even blinded. Why didn’t God prevent this suffering? There are only three explanations. Either he couldn’t, he didn’t know about it, or he didn’t care to act. Any one of these explanations is sufficient to disprove the existence of God as he is currently conceived by Christians.
But what business does she have holding non-Christians to Christian standards of behavior?
This doesn’t change the fact that she is far more vulnerable to accusations of conflicts of interest than she was last week. As I’ve already stated, politicians which are vulnerable to such accusations are less able to perform efficiently than those who are not similarly tainted.
The problem with Russel’s analogy is that there is no philosophical reason to believe that there is a teapot in orbit. Humans have a natural propensity to think and behave as if they were under the authority of someone who transcends humanity, so there is a philosophical argument for God.
There’s a third alternative you overlooked. God created humans as primitive versions of Himself, and God loves humans. He knows what is good for humanity because He knows what is good for Himself. Thus God is not arbitrary – that would assume that He would violate the blueprint and fail to love humanity – and human creation is not independent of God.
Mice got prejudice!
Why should I care what happens to the rest of society, especially the unfamiliart sorts? That we shoudl place any objective value on any particular individual or group, or even all of humanity, is still a leap of faith.
This fails for several reasons. First, you’re failing to control for each specific religion; religions are not morally equivalent to one another. Second, you’re not comparing societies where religion is dominant with those where atheism is dominant. (And you don’t want to, since the only examples of the latter are Communist – assuming that the public conforms with the State on that issue.) Third, per-capita atheist concentration is not an accurate measure of overall religiosity. And fourth, tthe U.N. Human Development Report measures living standards, not morality (or freedom standards, for that matter.)
I once took a close look at the Index of Economic Freedom and discovered that it predicts poverty better than it predicts wealth. Per-capita GDP varies widely among free nations, but is uniformly sucktacular among “mostly unfree” and “repressed” nations(the two lower scales). I suspect that the UN report similarly is a better predictor of overall cultural evil than of overall cultural enlightenment. Relatively enlightened nations may vary on the UN’s subset of quality-of-life issues (especially since some are socialist basket cases that have the best of intentions but are inefficient as hell), but the most evil societies, citing the Palestinians as Exhibit A, will be too obsessed with evil to even think about those issues.
I would expect Cuba to be near the bottom of that report. But I don’t think I’d blame Catholicism for it.