Well. I guess it's down to me and me. Course, Street is there. To the extent Street can be there. ha ha. I'm just jerking your chain there, Street.

Goes without saying that in five hundred years, my name will be a household word. A hell of a lot of good that does me now. Hey you people of the future who think I'm so wonderful, how about spending New Years with me? Oh, you've made other plans? Yeah, figures.

Kind of like with Vincent Van Gohg. Where were the anal apertures who shell out the equivalent of 8 liftetimes of my wages for an orignal Van Gogh when he was cutting his ear off with lonliness? When he couldn't connect with one other miserable human being on the entire planet?

I learned a new word the other day, a French word, and being a French word, has some kind of cocked eyed spelling specifically designed to humiliate the uneducated but it sounds like Prov-i-noss. What provinoss is, see, it's the means by which people with big bucks participate in the art through their own stories of how they acquired a particular piece of art. In a way, they supercede the original master in the performance art of their own spectacularly boring lives, thus becoming kind of immortal artists themselves.

As for me, I say, give me immortality, or give me death.

Ok, I ripped off that one off from Firesign Theater.

I digress. The topic is what cheeses me off about left wingers:

They blame me. I'm just a regular asshole trying to make a living and support my many live-in parasites, or rather, my loved ones. My wages are like the Mighty Colorado, which after it's been dpped into by all the parties who've made claims to it becomes less than the stream I piss out on a Saturday night. But is that enough? Nooooooooo. There's also the fact that I, me personally, am responsible for the demise of the Spotted Owl, global warming, overpopulation, and all the other "victums" on planet earth. Give me an f'ing break, will you? It's just never enough for you bleeding heart types, is it? In addition to everything else I'm taxed for, it is my moral duty to go right out and buy myself the most expensive gold plated solar panel I can find so as to lower my carbon footprint.

You know, it used to be, son go out and make your mark on the world. Nowdays, it's hey you, you're a planet raper unless you leave no mark whatsoever, no trace of you're ever having lived.

Why not just cut to the chase and kill yourself? There it is, folks, the thinking of your liberals takent to its logical conclusion; the moral thing for you to do is to kill yourself so as to save the planet which you are wrecking becasue of your consumptive carbon emitting badness.

Kind of a different take on the relgious concept of original sin. You're a sinner because you were born, loser.

Ultimately, there is the philosophy of your liberals; it's the philiospher of losers. You're losers and you can not stand it that everyone else isn't a loser like you.

Well, forget it. I'm not going to join your club of losers. Ok? Like it or lump it, I'm not joining the club of losers and whiners and bellyachers.

jeez chas, what happened? I thought yall wuz a dyedinthewool libreal. .
I wuz bout ta send ya a letter invitin ya ta join in the yoonited order, but I guess thats out, since yer tyraid agin the compassionate liberalleys. well, happy newyear an don't leave too many black smudges where ya step, during the commin year.

Well, I hit on kind of a compromise activity for the kids. I took them to a Titan Missile Museum down by Tucson. See, Liberals can appreciate the sensitivity inherent in a trip to a museum, yet the harder edged conservatives can marvel at a machine the size of a volkswagon that could kill a million people in a microsecond. WOW!!

There's a thought. I've got the Hill AFB aerospace museum next door.

There're some wonderful works of art there, I tell you.

Let's face it. A B29 is among the most beautiful object humans ever produced. There are the laws of nature well obeyed. There is purity for you, Street. A B29 is a pure thing designed to perform a very pure human activity, wholesale mass slaughter of other human beings. There is purity for you, Streeet. There is beauty. There is poetry. It's so dark and harmonious in its intent, so pure of but the essential bear necessities demanded by a mad world. Which is what good art is all about, don't you know. See, we liberals, we know all about art.

And for a nine year boy, of course, war machines generally go over pretty well too.

There you go, an attraction for liberals and conservatives alike. Good suggestion there, Cactus.

Well, the REAL truth is, Street posted some crap here and I decided to hell with him I'll just delete it. But for some reason on this forum I can't delete the last post. So I needed to post something so his gibberish would be second and I could send it to hell where it belonged.

Anyway, you are assuming my multiple personalities would be in agreement. Rochester and the General may be my personal Ying and Yang. Rochester would be my kinder, gentler nurturing caring self . The General is my Viet Nam ERA veteran self (which truthfully, was mostly a drunk. I never left the USA).

Somehow, though, I don't want to end 07 like this, with another tirade that is exactly the same as 83922 other tirades I've dlivered unto a crowd of heedless sinners. There were lots of signs of hope in 07. Ole Belzabub, coal, was defeated once in Cache Valley, even if maybe for the one and last time for this dispensation. You'll never take that away from us. But beyond that, there's something in people to have hope about, as exemplifed that we're still here after however long we've been here, depending upon whose side your on. We can't even agree upon on how long people have been in existance and yet here we are. We've done it. We've made it here. That was no small thing. No, it's no gurantee that we won't blow it from here. That possibility is with us at all times just as it always has been. Still, that we've made it this far is solid grounds for hope. We can build on that.

Here's another one for you, Say; Back in WWII, Liberal Democrat FD Roosevelt imposed a lot of restrictions on us that were downright openly unconstitutional. American Citizens of Japanese ancestry were unlawfully detained. There was censureship and illegal surveillance and for forth.

Today, under dim-bulb Bush, we are doing many of the same things. Bush claims the right of the "Unitary Executive", which is a concept that the PResident can do ANYthing he wants. In other words, a dictator. The only president who tried to claim this before was Richard Nixon. It goes beyone unconstitutional. I'd call it anti-constitutional.

Bush takes laws from Congress and makes "Signing Statements" that twist the intent of the law completely around to suit himself. So - tell me, is mutilating the constitution to suit the whims of an inept president Liberal or Conservative?

Here's where I'm coming from Say. You've gone off like this several times before. I think you make more sense to yourelf inwardly than you are getting down in print. But it comes across like this; You see Chaster railing about the environment. Environmental issues have been tagged as "Liberal". Not sure why maintaining a liveable environment would be "liberal" other than that "conservative" law makers find that taking money from coal companies is more convenient than exercising good stewardship. But at any rate, OK, You've tagged Chaster. He's got his "Liberal" label. You see "Liberals" as carrying a lot of baggage. You then spew on Chaster for all these "Liberal" things that you hate, but which you might be surprised to find that he doesn't endorse all that crap either.

In other words, in my opinion, you are engaging in what we might call "Label think". You're not alone. These frigging Republicans have developed this to a fine art. They have become masters of character assassination and label think is a big part of it. Like, well Bush might not be much but we sure are a lot better of than if Gore had been elected, Right. Why? Because Gore was labeled liberal years ago and we all know what that label means.

I gotta add though that Chaster has engaged in some pretty heavy "Label think" a time or two himself. Truth is, maybe I have a time or two myself. And here I was thinking I am mighty near perfect.

Geez, Say, you seem sooooo very cynical about things. Is there nothing that gives you hope in your fellow madmen? Or, I should say mad-persons these days.

I hope my shrill tirades didn’t drive off ole Yankie.

Come on, Yankie. I was just venting.

Not that I didn’t mean every danged word of it and don’t you forget it.

Label-think, I think, is pretty much across the board a human trait. Yes, I do it too a lot of the time myself. As I’ve pontificated at length before, I don’t see this as inherently a bad trait. It’s a survival tool that works well a lot of the time. But it’s not perfect.

To say that Republicans do it more than others, I guess you could charge that that right there statement is in itself label-think of a sort. Except that I kind of agree with it. To my mind, that’s what makes a right winger a right winger, someone who applies label-think more dogmatically, with more rigidity, with less of a capacity to see shades other than crisp black and white. What makes a right winger a right winger is a preference for a high pass filter in the frequency domain. A guy who sees edges quite well but who can’t discern much detail.

Course, some of us left wingers can get that way too no doubt. I could see that in some lefties most dramatically back in the Nam conflict, which was getting pretty close to a civil war here at home. There were some vociferous lefties about who hated Nixon with such ferocity that they were approaching if not having already crossed a boundary to where they could be capable of doing something along the lines of that woman who just recently got paroled who tried to shoot Gerald Ford back in the 70s. Not Squeaky Frohm, but some other whacko who tried to shoot Ford just a couple of weeks after Frohm tried. She came that close too. A retired police officer jarred her arm just as she torched off a round, which whizzed over Ford’s head by a few feet. That story about her being paroled was in the paper just a few days ago. Maybe you saw that. She’s sorry about it now, she’s says. She admits to having been misguided.

Well, ok. But don’t let it happen again. Yes, we all want to kill our president at times, but we just can’t go around killing our presidents whenever we feel like it. That’s no way to run a democracy.

In retrospect her act seems so crazy, but she and others saw Nixon and “Nixon’s stooge, Ford” as a Hitler-like dictatorship in the making. Not to justify the thinking but to illustrate the thought process, keep in mind that, once that once tricky Dick goes beyond a certain tipping point in jiggering the apparatus of state so as to concentrate power, just as our GeorgeII has been doing too, it’s irreversible. Once a Hitler-like dictator gets enough of a lock on the apparatus of the state, it’s all over but for the process to play itself out in the predictable way in which the dictator runs your society into the ground with all those icky consequences. So that being at least many folks’ paranoid perception of events, and their paranoia wasn’t completely unfounded too, they felt that the stakes were just so high that the usual bounds of civil conduct no longer applied. You have Nazi-like characters coming into power, that calls for armed resistance.

On the other side of the coin, there was Nixon, who had gotten elected on “law and order” and who already had a powerful predisposition toward paranoia.

It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, when we respond to a societal problem by shooting the messengers of it. There’s obviously a problem. Right? Do you think people are marching in the streets and getting their heads beat for the fun of it? There’s a problem that needs some attention here. So what is the response to this? Let’s examine what is the matter here and face up to it and deal with it effectively instead of dealing with it badly which is what we’re doing now? No. It’s we need law and order here at all costs. Let us hire us a strong leader who will do whatever it takes to make it stop. That our strong law and order guy was a paranoid nut case, well that’s kind of just exactly what we wanted in a president at that juncture if we’re honest about it. There’s the flaw with democracy. We get what we want. Save us from what we want a lot of the time.

Anyway, in his paranoia Nixon surrounded himself with guys like Gordon Liddy, himself a rabidly paranoid Label-thinkster who also saw overriding interests to be defended at all costs. In the mind of Gordon Liddy to this day, there literally was a war going on and the stakes were about preventing a Castro-like revolution from taking place. Course Liddy’s paranoia wasn’t entirely unjustified either. I imagine it wasn’t discouraged in that there was this kid at the time, I forget his name, but who in the late 60s had just gotten back from Cuba and was all full of glowing idealism about Castro and who went on to become a founder of “Students for a Democratic Society” who, yes, were pretty much about a Castro-like revolution.

So to Liddy’s mind, an SS-like paralegal dirty tricks arm of the commander in chief in the defense of democracy; there was no contradiction in this. In Liddy’s mind, the establishment of a secret police for offing the bad guys was his patriotic duty and a perfectly appropriate response to the threat of communist bad guys in our midst.

Liddy was a guy who’d eat rats in the performance of his patriotic duty. He said so on the Dick Cavvet show. I remember seeing Liddy on Dick Cavvet back in the 70s a couple of years after Watergate. Liddy likened the crimes he committed at Watergate to running a stop light in the middle of a desert when no one else is around. “It’s a crime in name only,” he said.

Liddy also spoke of how in his youth he’d had a terrific fear of rats, so he overcame that fear by capturing and eating a rat. Live. Raw. (I think he said live and raw but I may be embellishing for effect here.) He also developed a tolerance for pain by holding his hand above a candle flame. “The trick about overcoming pain,” Liddy said, “is not to care.”

“You are one strange dude,” Cavvet said, or words to that effect.

We lefties sure had our nut cases, but let’s face it; Gordon Liddy was one creepy individual. He and Charlie Mansen could have shared cells and had lots to talk about.

So there we were back in the 60s and 70s, opposing factions of paranoid fools all set to take it to the next level of struggle, armed combat. Right here in America.

There’s the thing. Factions of label-thinksters feed upon, justify, and excite one another’s paranoia to where conflict explodes. More moderated views with more clarity and complexity are among the first casualties.

Exhibit A just now, of course, Pakistan.

Exhibit B: “Either you are with us, or you are with the Terrorists.”

It’s what we fear in America these days too. The polarization will get to where we really can’t function as a democracy anymore. Seems like we’re close to if not there yet to that level of dysfunction.

Oh, I don’t know. It’s been worse before. Course it is bad today all right.

It’s only human to do this, but that’s no excuse. Seems like the stakes are so high these days that there’s nothing for it but a super-human effort to rise above that. This might be pollyannaish of me, but I kind of think a forum like this helps a tad. Where wingers of various stripes can get off our chests the stuff on our so-called minds. If nothing else, it helps just to see what on the other guy’s mind, even though it’s wrong of course.

Actually, that ideal, a super-human effort of people to rise above conflict, that right there is what the idealism of us hippies was all about back when. That’s what “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius” was all about. Ok, so LSD wasn’t as conducive to achieving this as some thought at the time, but still; it was a good thought. Now and then, here and there, we hippies had some good ideas.

I mean it’s not nutso at all to make the statement that this world could be paradise. A paradise. People taking care of the world and of each other so that we reach our full potentials. People enabled to their full potential could be into exploration of the cosmos, the cosmos within us and the cosmos beyond us. It’s so within reach. It’s so completely achievable by ordinary anal apertures such as we are equipped with. Who needs a freaking Messiah who, let’s face it, aint coming? We can do this ourselves. We have it within us to do this.

So near and yet so far away.

I hope my shrill tirades didn’t drive off ole Yankie.

Come on, Yankie. I was just venting.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gosh Chaster I haven't gone any where , well kinda but not far , home is home you should know that , right ?

Left wingers , well what can I say ? There are a couple of things we dont see eye to eye about but it doesnt make me mad as much as kinda feeling sorry for them . Why ?

Maybe one day they will know the difference between a hand out and a HAND UP and learn that help is a double edge sword .

Could be they might understand the envirment isn't about swallowing a camel and straining at a nat and blame is a slogan for slackers .

Free market and capitalism may not be perfect but any system next to it is miles away and far less .

Socialized medicine will fare about the same as public schools where average is a passing grade .

National security isn't about finding common ground between rouge governments at a communication level .

I could go on but these are some of the things that come to mind about far left wingers .

Gosh, Yankie, I kind of wish you'd haul off and get mad at us instead of feeling sorry for us. That 's such a pseudo-Christian thing to do.

The onliest of your charges I as a left winger will own up to:

National security isn't about finding common ground between rouge governments at a communication level .

Ok, yes, we were too much into accommodation of the Soviet Union back when it was about to topple.

Did you catch that piece on the History Channel, "Charlie's War." As a left winger, I imagine I'd have opposed what he was doing out of hey, let's not piss off the Soviets just for the sake of pissing offf the Soviets. Is this worth WWIII?

But Charlie Wilson was right. And what a character. It's absolutely amazing that he wasn't stopped by left wingers and right wingers alike. Somehow, through some amazing miracle on the rare occasion, somebody in Washington can get a thing done.

The Redeemer’s Paradise
(Lk.23:43, 2 Cor.12:4, Rev.2:7)

Chase said (Jan 3 2008, 12:31 AM)
I mean it’s not nutso at all to make the statement that this world could be paradise. A paradise. People taking care of the world and of each other so that we reach our full potentials. People enabled to their full potential could be into exploration of the cosmos, the cosmos within us and the cosmos beyond us. It’s so within reach. It’s so completely achievable by ordinary anal apertures such as we are equipped with. Who needs a freaking Messiah who, let’s face it, aint coming? We can do this ourselves. We have it within us to do this.
So near and yet so far away.

REPLY:
Ahh Paradise, where people are taking care of one another. That’s the goal, isn’t it, the ideal. This is called the transformation of the United Effort into the United Order, what the Lord called loving God with your all, and loving thy neighbor as thyself, where the impurities have been sifted out, that all who remain may support all in reaching their full potential to explore the cosmos within themselves and throughout the universe. So well put, my brother. The exploring is what the FLDS call revelation and lifting up or ascension, not only to explore the cosmos but to create it as an expanding universe, as the gods of new worlds and universal systems.

This is only possible by purifying and perfecting each plane (M-K), beginning with the endowment of the universe within. Then it is awakened and developed, only when the Life Force of the Messiah has claim through that obedience of the laws which are constitution, on which it is predicated (D&C 98:5, 130:20). Otherwise, it is just as you stated: So far away that it’ll never happen. In saying that “Messiah aint coming”, you not only cut yourself off from that living potential, the string-energy of Christ’s Life-Force from which all potential proceeds, but you also fulfill Christ’s own prophecy (Mt.24:48, Lk. 12:45).


Street

Silence is Golden
(“…and know that I am God”)


You all still pooin cheese, left and right, are ya? Just flinging it every which way.
Well, how’s everyones’ bowels? It is good to remain silent as you ponder a bit, and sit to shit, in response to my comments, to broaden your wit. That’s just a natural response to loose bowel sindrome, and then you’re not so silent are you! KABOOM! I know, I know. You peepull read my posts and you say: “Well, I could just shit”. Why yes you can, with my permission. So hold on to your hat. You can cry bye and bye, poop your soup with a sigh, squeaky clean Mr. Bean. Let it fling, let it fly.

Street

"Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents—an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming."

Let's presume the above is correct and we spend, yes, a bunch of resources on cutting carbon emissions. Will that kill us? No. And there could be a bunch of upsides to it. New industries and new innovations will drive economic development. Reliance on countries like Libia for oil will be lessoned.

I heard on NPR yesterday where our state department is looking to kiss up to Libia these days. The same regime that authorized blowing up a 747 over Scotland and a night club in Germany. Why? Because oil is life to us as things stand now.

There's an endorsement for solar energy if there ever was one.

Also, even without climate change, there's a little matter we don't hear much about, with increasing levels of atmospheric carbon resulting in increasing acidity in oceans, putting a major food supply for a good portion of humanity at risk.

Now let's presume the above is just self-serving delusional wishful thinking and wrong and we do nothing but business as usual. The consequences of that could be coastal flooding, disruption of agriculture, new disease pandemics, and quite possibly a major die off of homo sapiens.

To me, not as a person who "knows" what is the case, but as a reasonable earth grounded risk manager, it's a no-brainer that we get about cutting carbon emissions. Even if it's already too late, I'd rather be doing everything possible to bring about a positive outcome here.

I'll be dog damned if I can understand the cynical defeatist attitude that is so popular these days that says, hey, it's all a big joke; there's nothing anybody can do, and let's sit around and let everything we hold dear go to hell. What is this? What country is this?

I guess a guy like conservative columnist William Rusher would say, hey, it's nobody's role to manage planet earth, that it'd be arrogant of us to presume that humans are up to that role. How arrogant of one to presume to know better than the White Northern European Guy in the Sky who Created us and our world.

There's something to that all right. I'm the first to admit to being not all that well qualified for the role I've taken upon myself, the role of planetary manager. Thing is, we already are managing it, or rather mismanaging it, by default. That we've already changed atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppm to 390 ppm, people we are in the business of planetary management here whether we like it or not. The question becomes not whether we are in the business of planetary management but whether we're going to do it well or badly. Right now, it's badly. Obfiscute all you want, I don't know how anybody apporximating a sentient being could put it any other way. As is, people are running the planet into the ground as far as it being the one and perhaps only place in the universe that is friendly to our existance.

I don't know. How do you get through to people that maintaining in good order a place that is perhaps the only place in the universe that is friendly to people is a good idea?

When it no longer is the friendly place we know today, maybe then you'll see what I meant.

Yup there you have it Chas and have shown it as well , everything cheesy about left wingers ,

One moment your saying"- I have to concede that we lefties have a lot to answer for when it comes to climate change. Would that we could go back to the 70s and not have derailed nuclear power "

Then the next time you say "- I don't know why we're arguing, Yankie.
Let's go get nuclear".

and then you also say "- Whose job is it to manage the planet earth so that it can continue to support people anyway? Not I, says our EPA. Not I, say our president Dick Cheney"

You slam the very EPA that for all these years you liberals have patted yourself on the back for bringing about . And Dick Cheney ? He spent considerable time trying to promote nuclear power that if he had his way would do more for the environment the all the Democrats have ever done and would ever be able to do . No more acid rain from our coal power plants not to mention zero emitting pollution using hydrogen as a source of fuel .

But I guess this is what makes you libs so cheesy , your attitude

" Well, I guess it comes down to ole Chaster and anybody else he can persuade to join in. "

You guy's are so arrogant and full of yourselves , its bad enough you have been wrong for decades what could do the most for our environment but you have the gull to pretend you would do more now then what you chose not to do in the past . But still you go on condemning others as if you are enlightened and care more for our planet then those who have tried to accomplish the greater good .

I know Chas, you'll admit you may have been wrong but your heart was in the right place for the right reason . Your heart might be in the right place but your eyes have been shut and your ears so full of your your own words nothing got through , no reasoning or consideration of facts.

Open your eyes and take a good look Chas , and then honestly tell me who's standing in the way of positive improvements regarding protecting and preserving this environment you preach to us all the time ?
Whats it going to be , your selfish pride or the our environment ?

You talk about management , well if you could manage getting yourself and others out of the way more would be done , lots more .

One thing about us environmentalist types that seems to rub people the wrong way most egregiously is our seeming presumption of knowing what’s best for the planet and everyone on it. I’ll own up to seeing myself as a planet manager, but the other side of the coin is that I see you as a planet manager too. The question isn’t whether you and I are planet managers; we are. Any critter capable of altering the makeup of the planet’s atmosphere is in the planet management business whether it likes it or not. You can be a planet manager by taking that responsibility seriously or you can be planet manager by defaulting to the status quo, but either way, you are a planet manager. You’re not so much a planet manager of today’s planet but of the planet your grand kids will live on. Doesn’t that make your responsibility even more important? I don’t see it as being at all arrogant or being all full of self-importance for people to take that responsibility seriously. You are a responsible person on this world, and you ought to take that responsibility seriously. Right?

Seeing as we are in the planet management business whether we like it or not, the question becomes what constitutes responsible planet management? I don’t claim to know all the answers on that but I think it is as plain as if it were written in bold letters across the sky that responsible planet management has to include our reducing our carbon emissions pronto. I think that needs urgent attention at every level from the chief of state on down to the individual. I’ve been accused of having a religious-like zeal on that stance, but I don’t see it as necessarily a religious value that survival is job one here. I wish religion would weigh in on it more, seeing as this is perhaps the most urgent moral matter of our time. Seems to me like more than a few of our Latter Day Saints have been a day late and a dollar short on this matter, but it doesn’t necessarily have to spring from religion. That survival is job one seems to me a value even more fundamental than your most fundamental of religious values. I mean let’s survive first and then we can get into arguments over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and so on, but we have to survive in order to have that luxury.

Keep an eye on this Jelly fish invasion. I got me a suspicion that is the tip of a really nasty iceberg that is looming up.

Well, Say. I still come back to that my bottom line is survival is job one. Is that liberal or conservative? Survival seems like sort of a conservative value in a sense, conserving of our butts. After we get that done, then we can get into whether Christians have more perfect ones than Jews or whether maybe the Muslims have the most perfect ones. It's a tough call really. But first, job one is to conserve them.

But, ok. I will try to look into the writing of that O'Rourke dude at some point when I can catch a break from trying to save the planet.

And Yankie, you are too an activist. Everytime you gas up the buggy, you are a very powerful activist for a specific future of our world. The question is, are you a conscious activist or an unconscious one?

One thing I like about Ann Coulter, she comes back in an interesting way with a bit of humor. Seems like so many of our Christian fundamentalists are the silent hateful type. Course, I hasten to add, they don't hate us. No, they hate our sin. Still, though, in order to get at the sin there's nothing for it but to make its container a living hell. Make life a living hell for sinners seems to be the purpose in life for a goodly number of our Christian saints.

That Coulter is willing to come out and engage people I think is always more conducive to a saner society than are the silent hateful types.

Ok, Ann Coulter does infuriate us liberals by holding up a mirror to us and having us growl at the reflection. Geez, what a mean trick that is to play on a poor primate anyway.

She points out, correctly, that there is a symmetry between our charges of Christian intolerance of non-Christians and our intolerance of Christians. How maddening to be hit over the head with the thing you’re charging “them” of doing.

There is, however, a legitimate point of view here that can be defended. There is a legitimate concern in how amazingly quickly a community can be transformed for the worse through religious indoctrination. Exhibit A for this is Utah’s FLDS. Exhibit B for this are the ultra extreme radical Muslim “schools” of Saudi Arabia.

In all honesty, far and away the majority of Utahns are quite mainstream. Having come up in the heart of Mormon country, I got a decent education that included being taught the basics of the theory of evolution in one class and also “Book of Mormon studies” in another class. Being brought up taught religious principles isn’t in itself anything to worry about.

At the same time, however, we do have here in Utah very graphic displays of what can happen to a community over just a few generations when you displace genuine education with fundamentalist religious indoctrination. In very short order, one or two generations, you can transform a bunch of regular ordinary people into people who behave outrageously by any standard of civilized behavior.

Ok, so there probably have been exaggerated accounts of this, but still, there’s no denying that within FLDS communities we’ve seen some behaviors you’d have to say amount to dysfunction by reasonable standards. I’m making value judgements in that claim but I think reasonable value judgements. I think it’s a reasonable value among human communities that the young folk should be well cared for, well educated, and enabled to their full potentials. Ok, so members the FLDS may be far from the worst offenders on this front. Still. When you have parents actually willing to throw their kids into the streets of what amounts to a foreign country for them because the “priesthood” pronounced those kids “unworthy”, there’s some extreme behavior that’s of concern.

When people are so indoctrinated that the priesthood is the unquestioned authority of God that they’re willing to hand over their adolescent daughters to being married to whomever at the whim of this priesthood, there’s extreme behavior that’s of concern.

When people engage in inbreeding to where you have unusually high incidences of genetic disorders and people go along with this because they’ve been told this is the “Will of God”, there’s extreme behavior that is of concern.

Now, zoom over to Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family experienced almost an overnight transformation from extreme poverty to taking in boat loads of money. (Here, Yankie, is a pretty good example of unconscious activism of your ordinary Americans.) And so, as you’d expect, you started to see excesses in their behavior that put fundamentalist Islamic clerics’ hijabs in a twist. So then, the ruling family, seeing themselves in real peril from civil unrest, sought to appease the fundamentalist clerics by throwing a bunch of money their way for them to establish “schools” to teach a very extreme paranoid form of Islam that was all full of hate for the West and for Jews and so on. Within a generation of this extreme indoctrination having displaced genuine education, you had some young folk willing to drive airplanes into buildings. That kind of thing is of concern.

That’s what religious indoctrination can do. It’s powerful stuff. First thing you do, you deny people genuine education so that they’re in the dark about how the world works. Then, it’s a simply matter of telling them what to fear and hate. The human imagination being what it is and people being in the dark, they tend to latch onto what they’re told out of fear and ignorance. This strategy works well for controlling people on the cheap. With this kind of strategy, you can transform ordinary people who generally get along well with one another into people who are the most destructive animals you’ve ever seen. The difference is like night and day.

That’s what the concern is about. That’s why we get exercised by displays of religious scriptures being enshrined into public buildings where the business therein is supposed to serve everyone. That’s why we get exercised about creationism being taught in schools. For that to be taught in a religion class, fine, great. But for that to be taught as how the world works in place of actual biology could be disastrous, especially during this day and age when our food is literally being re-engineered by these principles. We’re getting to where we can be re-engineered by these principles. It might be might be a good idea for a populace to be well schooled in these principles, assuming we want to be competent of making the calls on how these technologies are to be applied or not.

This is a legitimate concern. Yes, it can and is taken too far at times, but it is a legitimate concern.


Course then you get that symmetry again. We environmentalists get charged with seeking to rule people through fear too. There’s a difference, though, between trying to get people to pay attention to real dangers in the road ahead and trying to manipulate people through fear. Seems to me those who seek to influence you through seeking to increase your understanding of how things actually work, climate scientists, for example, don’t deserve the charge of trying to manipulate people through fear.

There’s a good test of credibility for you. Those whose efforts result in increased understanding of how things work have earned credibility. Those who merely obfuscate and create the maximum amount of confusion in how things work haven’t and are probably more about keeping you in the dark.

Another symmetry you get, well we Christians too have a legitimate concern about public deterioration of public morality being a threat to society. A deterioration of public morality leads to a break down of society. The family is where you make or break public morality. Hence the emphasis on the family and “values”.

There’s something to that, all right, but here in Utah I suspect that has more to do with rural vs urban more than about religious vs. non-religious. Crime, for example, has more to do with population density than with how religious people are. If Mormons really truly want to maintain that good old neighborly wholesome family oriented way of life like we used to have, the thing to do there is to reduce your fertility. The threat to that wholesome way of life, more than your atheists, is just large numbers of yourselves.

That’s a thing you don’t like to hear, but therein is part of the problem. You tend to regard those who tell you things you don’t like to hear as your archenemy trying to do you out of your religious way of life. That’s not the case. You keep driving blind here without paying attention to what’s ahead, that’s what could do in your religious way of life.

I haven't beat my wife in I don't know how long, Say. Plus, the court ordered anger managment course did help some. I realized I had "issues." Ok, have issues.

My word , the price of this freedom of speech sure comes at a cost .
I kinda wonder after this little bout between you guys who paid the most . One thing is for sure you both loose .

And Sayit it looks to me it cost you and you lost the most. Yup, if the cost you have to pay delivering personal attack means anything to you and how low you had to dig.

Your not half the man I think you are unless you make right for your words Sayit. As I see it , its not a matter of swallowing your pride but trying to muster some up .--- Make yourself proud would you .

Well, one thing is for sure; the FLDS has an image problem. Kind of similar to the image problem the LDS had in the early 20th century. The LDS solution was an image overhaul under David O McKay. Course, that image overhaul is what led to the schism between the LDS and FLDS in the first place. The FLDS saw that as a sell-out of the fundamentals.

So, seems the FLDS is between a rock and a hard place.

You blame everything for this but the obvious thing. You blaim the media. You blaim the wicked world. You blame us liberals. You blame the state. You blaim a few "bad apples" among the members. You blaim everything but the obvious thing, that the fundamentals themselves are fundamentally flawed.

I wonder what Ann Coulter thinks about Mormons. My guess is that, if Ann Coulter were Queen, Mormons would be catching a lot more grief than they ever got from us secularists.

The ferocity of your response earlier, Say, suggests to me that I'm not what's really bugging you. You&#