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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (8682)	3/15/2001 2:37:29 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

The term Fundamentalist Religion carries more of a political tone for me than what I think of when I say belief and belief systems are fundamental to living. I have been in other parts of the world. Trust me, these cultural groups who you fear as oppressive or tyrannical or what ever were that way before religion reached them and will be when it leaves. For this reason I think we give religion a bad rap. Somewhat on that topic, there was this article in the Sunday paper that might be of interest to the "original intent" crowd, which has some overlap with the "Christian Nation" crowd, in my experience. The bad rap on religion may be little broader and more central to our heritage than you might think. A Nation Still Learning What Madison Knew nytimes.com Madison's original animus against the states was also tied to his concern for the protection of minority rights. Here, too, he challenged conventional wisdom. For most 18th-century liberals, the problem of rights was to protect the whole people against the coercive power of monarchy. Madison was the first to realize that this formula was irrelevant to the American republic, where real power lay with popular majorities, who would use legislative power to burden whichever minorities they disliked. Because such unjust majorities could form more easily within the narrower compass of a state than in an extended nation, the best way to protect rights was to enable Congress to intervene within the states, restricting the ability of popular majorities to run roughshod over minorities and individuals. That analysis was premature for 1787, but it was ultimately vindicated by the modern application of the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, which applied the provisions of Madison's original Bill of Rights against the states. In this sense, the rights revolution of the 20th century fulfilled Madison's original vision of 1787. How did Madison acquire this understanding of rights? In large part, through his powerful commitment to freedom of conscience. For Madison, as for Thomas Jefferson, the horrific religious persecutions of the 16th and 17th centuries were the equivalent of what the history of racial slavery and discrimination has been for us: the most compelling example of the systematic denial of fundamental rights to unpopular minorities. Their radical solution to the religion problem was to recognize that every individual retains a sovereign right to accept or reject the claims of religion, entirely free of the coercive authority of the state or community. Today, efforts are repeatedly made to suggest that Madison and Jefferson were not quite the ardent advocates of separating church and state that their strongest statements on the subject suggest. In fact, the more Madison thought about the subject, the more militant his thinking grew. The great virtue of his approach becomes evident the more we wrestle with the confusing interpretation of the First Amendment's religion clause that is the legacy of the Supreme Court's unhappy efforts to develop satisfactory tests for evaluating government aid to religion. Madison's radical solution to the problem was simply to privatize all religious activity. He was confident that competition between denominations in the spiritual marketplace would keep religion healthy, while freeing government from the impossible task of deciding whether, when and how to support religion. On all these questions, anyone who delves into Madison's writings will discover an original, creative, skeptical, quizzical and discriminating mind. These very qualities make him a more elusive figure to understand than Jefferson, with his passionate if problematic commitment to equality, or Benjamin Franklin, with his wit and wisdom, or even Alexander Hamilton, with his better grasp of public policy. But Madison was our most penetrating political thinker, and his birthday is well worth commemorating.

To: one_less who wrote (8682)	3/15/2001 3:23:36 PM
From: Patricia Trinchero	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

A Fundamentalist religion is one that considers the Bible to be taken in "literal" terms. They believe that what was mentioned and wrote about in the Bible is to be taken as fact. They do not believe in evolution and remove their kids from schools in favor of home schooling to prevent them from any evolutionary teachings. They are homophobic in a sense that they believe women who wear pants or play sports are "going down the road" toward lesbianism. This is another reason they homeschool their kids;ie, to keep them from dressing in gym clothes that are shorts and far too revealing. Also, changing clothes in front of other girls will allow other girls to lust after their bodies!! How do I know the above statements to be true? I was a part of a Pentacostal church for three years. The above mentioned beliefs went way beyond the limits of what I considered reasonable. They expected me to check in my brains at the church door and pick up a box of crayons.

To: one_less who wrote (8682)	3/15/2001 3:28:14 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

My religion and all of the ones you mention forbid coersion of any kind in getting people to "believe" in anything. I have seen people come to a religion or change religions but their accounting is ussually the one that they now came to accept, more closely matches what they believe in their heart, than say the religion of their father. If you think about it (and I am sure you have) the two concepts "coersion" and "belief" are incompatable. Similarly, the terms "belief" and "convert" are not a perfect match. I agree that they initially are different. There is a well known effect where victims develop sympathy with their captors. I believe that in the case of Arab terrorists, as an example, that if you are desperately poor, your religion represses you and you have little hope for a good material life in the present, that religious extremism can motivate these otherwise good people to do things that are not in their immediate interest (or mine!) This would be difficult to do to me because I don't believe in a hereafter as an absolute probability. However, I'm not sure if I traded places with some poor gay Arab man whose religion didn't allow him to express himself physically, that I couldn't be persuaded to go to heaven and indulge myself there. From what I've read (I could be misinformed) homosexuality is only a sin on Earth and that once you rise to Heaven no desire is sinful. This philosophical view, if held tightly, could alter one's value system in the material world significantly. I don't think Bosnians are violent by nature, I think it is their circumstances and tradition (for lack of a better term). It is simply the way things were done and continue to be done. The only solution that would work is to forcibly expatriate everyone there and widely separate them for many generations. After that, you could move somebody else in who doesn't have the baggage and gradually reintroduce the indigenous people. The chances of this happening are zero and it would be perceived as being paternalistic. The only organization with the moral authority to do this would be a multilateral group led maybe by the UN. In the Bosnian case, religion is probably only acting as a facilitating agent and not a proximal cause. In the U.S., the Hatfield and McCoys' feud lasted for generations. I read an article last year about how the families have now joined forces and are creating something like a theme park to exploit the history of former bloodshed. These things can take care of themselves. I don't attribute violence to people as much as I do circumstances and systems of thought. People with systems of thought that allow themselves to distinguish themselves as being more worthy of God's love than others allows them to do really horrible things in the material world which we all share. On PBS, they had an interview with the Fundamentalist Jews in Israel. These guys are as bad as any Nazi in their rhetoric, IMO. Am I to accept this from them because other Jews were persecuted in WWII? I don't think so.