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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Lao-Tse who wrote (50470)	5/29/1999 9:13:00 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Bob, why do you find it appropriate to make a determination of what is or is not Christian behavior?

To: Bob Lao-Tse who wrote (50470)	5/30/1999 9:18:00 AM
From: Johannes Pilch	Respond to of 67261

>If I, as the speaker at a function, request that the audience indulge in a moment of silence and they instead take the opportunity to recite a prayer to their God, then they have disrespected my request and have disrespected me.< In your case perhaps this would be true. Nevertheless it is not necessarily true in the case of the young lady who made the request in Maryland. The true circumstances are a bit more complex than you make them here. Had the ACLU not imposed its religious will upon her, the young lady likely would have said “let us pray.” This had been the practice. The folks in the audience understood this and since the rule against prayer did not apply to them they went ahead and prayed. Did they disrespect or have contempt for the young lady? Of course not, and she likely knows they did not. Did they have contempt for the rule under which the young lady herself was oppressed? Eeeeeyup. >They have demonstrated that they believe their wishes to be superior to my request. That is, no matter the reason, disrespectful.< Well of course it is disrespectful, but the disrespect is not necessarily directed toward the young lady, and this is the issue. Those good folk in Maryland were doing nothing dishonourable. ME: >"...private statements by some of the Founding Fathers that seem against public religion (though publicly these men had great difficulty and fear of speaking their thoughts...)"< YOU: >Exactly. You've forgotten the message and worship the creed.< You worship the message and know not the creed. You must know the creed in order to understand the message. Otherwise you seriously risk believing some empty-headed monochromatic view of whatever you are trying to learn. I know both the message and the creed, and I worship neither. Now the point here is that those Founding Fathers who held unorthodox religious views at the time, hid them for the most part because they understood them to be unorthodox. Perhaps today it would be analogous to a president who privately believes all homosexuals are criminals but who when speaking publicly avoids the topic completely by claiming all law-abiding citizens should be free to live in peace. The private belief is outside of public orthodoxy, and so most people having the private belief will have difficulty and fear publicly speaking it. Judge it as you will, and so will I. We are still allowed at least this freedom.