Yeah, like them there penguins. Notice how they have built society into what it is today...oh wait, that was humans. My bad.
Nobody is forcing you to marry a man, or even a woman. It's a matter of personal choice. So butt out of other people's lives and curse them in private if you must.
2 more things. That simple fact that you mentioned the word music and MTV in the same sentence indicates that you haven't watched the channel in about oooooooooooooooohhhhhh......10 years at least. and I don't give a fuck about western Europe.
what the hell are you talking about? the only thing i'm advocating is that your religious values shouldn't be forced on others that don't share them.
american society is what it is today because of the tolerance for others people's views, something you're arguing for the opposite of.
i'm well aware of what MTV has become, doesn't matter. neither videos nor non-stop reality shows turns kids into social deviants. you should. their tolerant secular societies have on average a much higher standard of living than we do - less crime, better education opportunities etc.
Change the phrase "tolerate for" to "enthusiatic advocation of" and see if the first part of your post still makes sense. This society doesn't tolerate a million things. Gay marriage must somehow be one of those things that the normal majority has to promote? We sure as hell tolerate it enough as it is. My girlfriend is a regional manager for a large corporation in the biotech industry. One of her employees had a dent in his car so he stopped by our house to have me look at the car. The fruitcake got out of his car wearing Daisy Dukes and a sleevless green shirt that didn't cover about 12 inches of his stomach. Yeah, I told him he needed to get back in his car and get the fuck out of my neighborhood. Oops, guess I am a bigot. Good thing I am not religious, then I would be really fucked up in the head.
You are so right, kids these days are just a perfect example of manners and morality. As for their high standard of living, sounds like paradise. Move there, tell me how you did it and I will join you. Oh wait, isn't it illegal in Germany to say that the holocaust didn't happen? Maybe America needs to get its shit together and make people who deny the moon landing = criminals. Not to be a bigot or anything but what is the racial makeup of these amazing secular societies of which you speak? Do they pay illiterate trashy women more welfare for more babies? If not, sign me up.
Actually, American society is what it is today because we're culturally more conservative than Western Europe. I know what you were trying to say, but if we lived the values that many espouse, we would look exactly like Western Europe and we clearly don't.
Have you spent much time in Western Europe? We're much wealthier than they are, regardless what the GDP numbers say. Our poor are much better off than their poor are. Our middle class live a much wealthier lifestyle than do our counterparts in Western Europe. We live with more goods and services within our reach than does the average Western European.
we'd be better off. i meant what american social progress has been made has come in spite of religious conservatism, not because of it.
depending on what country you're talking about i'd dispute most of that. certainly our poor are NOT better off, particularly inner-city, than in say scandinavia. the point was however they compare, secular western europe is doing just fine. by bypassing traditional religious values they are thriving, not falling apart.
Again, how much time have you spent in Western Europe? Comparing our poorest of the poor with a country with radical income redistribution is cherry picking. Take the average Western European's standard of living with the average person in the US, and the US is not just a little further ahead, but much further.
So, the religious tradition of charity has been a negative on our country? Ever been to a hospital? Ever seen who runs most soup kitchens? Ever been to an old folks home? I'd put those institutions run by religious organizations up against ones run by the government any day of the week.
no i've never been to europe. if you can point me to a quality of life survey that considers multiple social and economic factors favoring the USA i'd be interested. the ones i've seen indicate we are running behind overall. in any case i brought up europe in the first place as an obvious example that secular societies do not automatically collapse into crime-filled degenerate social chaos, which bodyman implied. societies do not need religion to be healthy and thrive.
what christianity has contributed to the tradition of charity in the US is more than offset by its baggage of prejudice and social divisiveness with other cultures. yes i've been in all those places as a patient or helper. from what i've seen their effectiveness is correlated to financing, not religious motivation.
Did this line of crap come right out of the PC handbook? Government hospitals are some of the best funded around, and they squander their resources. Do you think Walter Reed was underfunded? And as for where those religious organizations get their money, think about it. Here's a hint: contributions from members.
good comeback. you don't need to look any further than the gay marriage issue to see an example of the prejudice and divisiveness that comes directly from fundamentalist christianity. it's all over this thread. yeah walter reed is evidence that all government funded hospitals squander resources. and i'd argue that funding varies locally if any of this were relevant. notice that i didn't disagree with the notion that religious people do good things. if they can still do those things without trying to impose fundamentalist values on everyone it would be great, but so far that's not the case.
