Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (2155)	9/14/1999 11:21:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6418

<<< all I want is a level playing field -- so that deists [sorry, Christopher, a slip, I meant theists, of course] and atheists both have an equal opportunity to try to persuade the schools to adopt their values. >>> To you, a theist school is one in which theist precepts are promulgated. And an atheist school is merely one in which theist precepts are not promulgated. You equate that situation to "persuading the schools to adopt atheist values." That is most peculiar, it defies logic, and it is unfair. Does it not strike you that a correct definition of an atheist school should be a school in which atheism is taught? In which the children are told, "God is a myth made by human beings, for many reasons. Let us now tell you the views of the great freethinkers whose position is that this God-belief is a pathetic self-delusion, and unnecessary to a life of meaning and beauty and love. Each morning, children, we shall read from these texts, starting with John Stuart Mill, perhaps next reading Thomas Paine, and observe a few moments of silence in honor of the beauty and truth and courage embodied in these great writings." Christopher, allowing in both the priest and the atheist, as above, would be a "level playing field," which you say you want. But in a million years, your religion-promoting side will never allow freethinkers access to the minds of their children. The only "level playing field" we can ever hope for is to simply to maintain the constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state, allowing neither side to use the schools for proselytizing, but instead teaching all the children the values that we all, including you and you and me, share. We both believe children should be taught to be kind, honest, fair, responsible. They should be taught the value of hard work and the value of good works. The strength of those shared ethical values is not diminished by informing theist parents that it is inappropriate to use the state-supported public school to proselytize the children of others who must send their children there, or by informing atheist parents that it is inappropriate to use the state-supported school to proselytize the children of theists.

To: The Philosopher who wrote (2155)	9/14/1999 11:34:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 6418

In your post, you analogize a fertilized oocyte to a Jew in Nazi Germany, and a woman who wants to abort a fertilized oocyte to a Nazi. You say <<<Answer me this: on what logical basis can you say that society is entitled to say that Jews are fully human and to kill one, even if you believe they are subhuman, is murder, but that society is NOT entitled to say that the fetus is fully human and to kill one, even if you believe it is subhuman, is murder? >>> The answer is simply that Jews are fully human, as are the Blacks (in the U.S. connection) and homosexuals you mentioned. And the fact that irrational, ideological stipulations declared them not so does not change the fact. It is not I, but you, who think you can magically make things be what they are not, by stipulation; and who then desires to force your stipulated, authoritarian definition down the throats of those who don't share it. There is no confusion about whether the human victims of the Nazis were exactly that, whatever the Nazi hate-propaganda said. Hate-propaganda is what it is. The only basis for your stipulation that a fertilized oocyte is a human being instead of merely a blueprint for one that under certain circumstances and with the passage of sufficient time would become one, is your assertion that at the moment the sperm joined it, it became "sacred." This is a purely religious belief-- an item of dogma. Because you accept it in all its thought-stopping mysticism, you will, if you have your way, force all women everywhere to live by it, however much suffering it may bring to them. (I say "all." I do not know your personal view on whether young girls impregnated by their fathers, or rape victims, should be included in your compulsory motherhood program. Do you believe they should? Do you believe if your twin daughters are impregnated by a mad rapist, they should be forced by the government to carry and bear his children?) How ironic that you should choose the argument you do, when the basis for declaring Jews and homosexuals to be less than human lay in Scripture. It still does lie there, and is still stimulating crimes of hatred, still claiming victims.

To: The Philosopher who wrote (2155)	9/14/1999 11:44:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6418

Some day, Christopher, speaking of schools, we might discuss the bitter struggle against routine corporal punishment in American schools. Who defended it; what it was based on; how it came, through the passionate intervention of secularists, to have reached the reduced state it now occupies in the educational process. (Of course, the specter of religiously privatized education raises apprehension among some over whether this religiously-based attitude toward young children will reappear.) Religion has been in the schools, Christopher. In America, ubiquitous, brutal corporal punishment was one of its most defining manifestations. Secular thought has convinced most Christians, now, of the error of their Bible-based ways. (And of course there was the struggle to allow couples access to birth control. That was stipulated to be sinful, wasn't it? And thus forced on those who disagreed?) I was not being provocative when I said you may stipulate a fertilized oocyte to be a human being with more "rights" than the female in whose body those microscopic cells are lodged, and thus require the females under your domination to gestate one until it becomes a human being under penalty of imprisonment (or to obtain illegal abortions); I merely request that you restrict your stipulations and interference and force majeure to those who believe as you do.

To: The Philosopher who wrote (2155)	9/15/1999 12:13:00 AM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6418

<<<I would have been happy to have you at the bus stop distributing your atheist literature, too. I have no fear of your ideas. But you seem to have a great deal of fear of mine. That tells me much.>>> That calls to mind Anatole France's remark that the law in all its majesty forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges. That is a safe platitude for you to issue, and empty, too; and in so far as it isn't empty, it is undeservedly self-congratulatory. I spent my childhood being barraged (in the public school and elsewhere) with your ideas and every time I turn on the radio there they are again. How often have you heard anyone but that media-exhibitionist psycho, the late, rebarbative Madalyn Murray O'Hair, giving the atheist position?; and how often is the TV wall-to-wall Christian evangelists? (My husband even buys the Bible Review, LOL!) Neither you nor your children have been barraged with the ideas of freethinkers, while freethinkers live in a veritable blitz of yours. And of course since freethinkers are not proposing to insinuate their ideas, and literature, and heroes, into the schools, it is quite safe indeed for you to make a claim of even-handness, openmindedness!-- especially since your definition of atheist ideas being promulgated in a public school is simply theist ideas not being promulgated there. You get little credit for openmindedness, I think. You may think it impressive that you would be happy to have me distribute atheist literature at the school bus stop where the Christians were going to distribute theirs, but I hope you do not pretend that your (stated) view is that of most theists. When I called a local radio station proposing to do just that, I assure you there was frothing at the mouth; and the Christians' plan was never heard of again.