Posted on 10/05/2007 5:29:02 AM PDT by Kaslin
I think that, to the extent the religious conservative vote is declining, it has primarily to do with shifting priorities. In today’s world, a lot of folks probably consider Islamist terrorism and the looming Social Security/Medicare crisis to be somewhat more important issues than getting abortion banned, stamping out porn, or making sure homosexuals can’t marry. Social issues are kind of suited to a time when we don’t have to worry about our society’s physical survival and fiscal solvency.
A few big ones:
Original Sin: The ultimate Big Religion con game. No one can ever feel any sense of self-worth ...and must pay an intermediary to intercede on their behalf.
Eternal Damnation: The wildly disproportionate penalty applied to any human activity which threatened to slow down the the intermediaries' cash flow.
The Wrathful God: A projection of the human ego, the elevation of a stern and merciless father figure to back up the intermediaries' demands for land and gold.
These aren't the doctrines of any legitimate religious faith - they are what results when humans rewrite religious texts for two thousand years to suit their own purposes. Tools to scare the flock into submission, and cow the upstarts.
Islam's additional and more extreme doctrines of jihad and suicide attacks in Allah's name push its subjects too far, and end up hurting the imams economically - which is one of the primary reasons why Rome became rich, while Mecca (until the relatively recent Gulf oil boom) remained disorganized and dirt poor.
The 1960's were a gross overreaction to these doctrines - as so often happens, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. The doctrines were a rather brutal but fairly efficient way of making dumb people behave themselves - once they were removed those people were lost, and Great Society liberalism poured gasoline on the flames.
Regardless, the younger generation with tremendous volumes of information at their fingertips aren't going to adopt religious conservative beliefs in any significant numbers. When they encounter these doctrines for the first time, they are going to fall down laughing.
Republicans who choose to represent the demographic who believes in these doctrines at the expense of those who do not might achieve a pretty good political result today, depending on their districts. But their political futures look very bleak. These types of Republicans come across to the younger generation as backward-looking, anti-technological, witch-burning fearmongers, and that allows total idiot Democrats who are at least awake enough to pay lip service to the Internet generation's priorities to keep winnning elections they have no business even being competitive in. Cantwell, Murray, and Boxer spring to mind - these dim bulbs were actually considered the smart candidates in their last races.
You indulge in revisionist history when you pretend that it was the fault of the religious and moral values of the entire history of the American civilization that somehow justified the moral decay and leftism of the sixties rebellion. American's of good morals and good will are still standing against the sixtes moral filth movement. In case you did not know, this is called the culture war. The conservatives are trying to preserve our culture against the perversions of the American left and most of decadent Europe.
The immoral left was wrong then and they are wrong now even if the rest of the world agrees with them. That would only prove that the world is in rebellion against moral truth.
Your condemnation of the conservative moral values of the entire moral history of the American civilization sounds almost word for word like the far left anti-Christian bigots on Democrat Underground.
Your problem is with the Bible. Laughable is your self importance and self appointed judgement that you have superior knowledge about sin, the after-life, punishment for sin, etc. Unfortunately for you, your self-annointed standard matches the foundational beliefs of the far-left lunatics on the other side of the culture war.
If you want to see your views encouraged and your rants against the foundational religious views echoed minute by minute, just move over to the Daily Kos, The Democrat Underground, the ACLU, Bill Maher, Rosie ODonnell, or any other website championed by the lunatic fringe of the decadent far left.
Do you believe in moral absolutes or do also condemn the acceptance of moral absolutes just like the far left liberal extremists? What is your moral stands on abortion, homosexuality, incest, prostitution, and other 'sin'? Who's side are you on?
Since you don't like the 'old doctrines' that you condemn, let's hear your superior views on good and evil, the afterlife and absolute morality.
barf alert.
Republicans who talk like you won’t attract a single voter under age 65. If they would focus on keeping the government small and spending under control, the “culture war” would take care of itself.
And thus in their smug piety,doom the only nation left that can protect them.When the hordes raise the standard of the Marxist -Nanny state,the first to go out will be the religious,then the intellectuals ,then the rest.Politics and religion cannot be separated,to put someone in power who only reviles you,is an act of suicide.The third world hordes will empower the fascists,who promise bread and circuses,the middle class will be cannibalized,the elite,who have trade our country away piece by piece ,will be beyond justice,ensconced in their mansions and safe in their off shore holdings.
I agree with focusing on keeping the government small and keeping spending under control.
However, your suggestion that the culture war will take care of itself is misguided. Since you seem to favor the far left's view of the culture war, it would not seem important to fight against them in that same culture war; you are on their side after all.
You seem to think that the left is not on a constant, relentless, nonstop attack against conservative Christian values. This is the very thing the far left was rebelling against in the nineteen sixties. The anti-Americanism of the left is anti-Christian at its core.
It just took the far left many years of Big Government School attacks on parental morality. This is one reason Ronald Reagan and other moral conservatives wanted to shut down this leftist, immoral propaganda machine.
In lockstep with the education monopoly are the decades-old, Big leftist news media attacks against conservative morality, Big Entertainment attacks against conservative morality and the Constitutional revisionism of liberal activist judges who overturn the long-established, accepted interpretation of what the Constitution had always meant to the states that gave it to us in the first place.
Your suggestion is that we move to the moral left and concede the national morality to the Bill Mahers, Hugh Hefners, Phil Donahues and the pimps and the perverts. No thanks.
You may get your wish and the left may very well eradicate our moral traditions and the very idea that there is an absolute right and wrong. They are still wrong and their values have no basis and are no reflection of eternal truth.
If you want to move to the left to get votes, go ahead. Only, you should admit you are moving toward the left and are adopting their values in place of those of traditional Republicans and conservatives.
An incredible assumption you've made here. Actually, a number of them. 1) Religious conservatism is based upon ignorance. 2) Religious conservatism is based upon fear. 3) One cannot be religiously conservative and offer an alternative to Democrats.
Of course, none of them are based on anything other than supposition and anecdote. And are thus interesting, provocative and untrue.
What really takes the cake is Jeeves sick attempt to blame religious conservatives for the leftist rebellion of the 1960s, when it was the relgious conservatives who had held it in check for almost four centuries. It was not conservative parents that asked for this immorality to be pushed upon their children, it was decadent liberals who violated the parents trust by spreading leftist lies and immorality to other people's children.
Old Landmarks, these liberals like Jeeves will never answer questions such as the ones you specifically asked Jeeves to answer. He launched the attack and then lost his ability to read and specifically outline his enlightened liberal worldview.
They refuse to honestly answer legitimate questions about their own dogmatic views, they can only attack America's traditional values while never explaining their own basis for right and wrong, good and evil, absolute morality.
They know they have nothing to say or they fear that their answers would expose them for the Democrat party clones that they are. Ann Coulter scored some direct hits against these phonies in several of her books and it highlights what we all already knew.
You instead want government funding and advocacy for conservative ideals, which solves nothing - it just makes the government bigger and a lot of political hacks happy. They'll stage a Republican vs. Democrat puppet show for as long as you are willing to pay their salaries. The only thing that freaks all of them out is serious talk of spending cuts.
The more energy conservatives put into actively fighting Leftist culture through political means, the stronger they make it. "What you resist, persists." Just like the Left's ludicrous anti-war campaign has made Bush's hand a lot stronger, as people have been able to see the quality of his opposition. Ignore the Left, stop government funding of it, and it will shrivel up and die by itself as people realize it has nothing to offer them.
You have revised history so badly that it is probably a symptom of your brainwashing from which you will never recover.
I don't know how old you are, but you either don't know about the Big government school leftist influence that has given authority to systematically destroy traditional morality so that our children will be good little moral leftists like yourself. In case you didn't know it, the public school system is big governent at its worst. The parents did not ask to have godless schools, this is why they were never godless until the far left took over and ran the coup. The parents paid for the schools and big government leftists changed the rules after a few hundred years using activist judges who abused their oath of office once they came into power. The left never liked the Constitution inherited from the founding states and neither does anyone else who supports the revolutionary activist courts which illegally revised the Constitution without amendment.
You know nothing about the history of the United States if you think the Constitution did not allow religious conservatives to have influence in laws intended to preserve basic morality and civility in their cities and communities. These basic laws had always been legal until anarchists and leftists used their judicial powerplay to undo laws that had existed legally for almost four hundred years in some cases. The population had them in place for a purpose, just as the people who voted for the Constitution had them in place and they were never unconstitutional.
Now answer the questions that were put to you directly by Old Landmarks. If you want to launch your attacks, then at least have the guts to stop acting like a liberal and answer the questions.
One other thing, the left IS USING big government to brainwash children toward the left, but since you like the results of this immoral brainwashing it apparently slips your mind as you instead target the people who hold to the foundational values that have always strenghted this country.
That primary ticked me off. Damn the RNC.
I voted for Bush in 04 because I knew a Kerry presidency would be no good, but I wasn’t happy with him then about some things, and still am not.
But your world view is that America is going down the drain, and you spend your time looking for negative examples to confirm your belief. As long as you are convinced that your "godless this!" and "godless that!" and "evil leftists!" rant is going to play well with undecided and younger voters, there's no discussing the subject with you. The bottom line is that the religious conservative messages and doctrines are a huge turn-off to people the Republican Party desperately needs to win elections.
I'll leave you with the words of Ronald Reagan (the inscription on his tomb, in fact), who understood this concept a lot better than most FReepers do:
"I know in my heart than man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and there is purpose and worth to each and every life."
Doesn't play will with the Original Sin crowd, but it's the simple truth.
Your false statement about Big Religion as you call it is far out of line with the country our anscestors gave us. What you label as Big Religion is apparently freedom of relgion mentioned in the first amendment.
Apparently your liberal hobby horse is that it was our religious heritage and faith in God that has brought the left into power and allowed someone as far to the moral left as Hillary Clinton to be considered for office, Congratulations. You are part of the problem.
In your frenzy to jump onboard with the immoral left, you have developed an idiocy of labelling as Big Religion, a basic conservative faith in God. You must hate the pledge of allegiance. You would have hated the debate at the 1787 convention where they used the Bible as a source for enlightnment far more that any other source.
You are on the wrong side of the culture war, the wrong side of history and you have a habit of revising historical truth to match that of the far left.
If you don't think values are important, you have your head in the sand. The answer is not to leave your head in the sand and concede our moral culture to the Big Secularists (they are far worse than your mirage of Big Religion) who are at war against our country. Just because you have waved the white flag and surrendered to the far left, don't expect those who love America to do likewise.
You and other secular extremists love the fact that the public schools have been used by the left and have helped achieve the results in young people's hearts that has destroyed their values.
Instead of targeting this big government at its worst, the public schools, you say nothing, just like the others on the secular left. As long as Big Government serves your cause you are delighted by it.
Now, answer the questions.
If you don't want to be called godless and leftist, then stop thinking, acting and writing like one.
It is hard to believe that you make ridiculous secular liberal remarks on Free Republic where there is much support for God and then you go overboard to support the far left's false accusations against religious conservatives.
You obviously take your talking points from the anti-American secular left when you indulge in your negative attacks against freedom of religion.
To make matters worse, you indulged in liberal rants and then you prove to lack enough spine to answer my questions. This is another symptom of liberalism that you share with those of the far left, a lack of courage.
You need to study for about ten years or more, nonstop, before you stoop to make anymore ignorant remarks about how our culture has been degraded due to morality that is informed by conservative relgious faith.
It has been pointed out to you that the left has used the big government public schools for immoral liberal brainswashing against the wishes of parents and then you are so blind to think that this is a good thing. You do indeed support compulsory big government liberal brainwashing as long as it is used to destroy our relgious heritage. Enough with the nonsense that you don't support big government, you do support it and you are happy with the predictable outcome that has resulted.
How about answering the questions I asked you, since you claim to be such an authority about eternal truth.
I did the same thing, I was disappointed with some of Bush's pet bills such as the "no child left behind" boondoggle but there was no way I would have voted for Kerry.
But there is a vast difference between Bush and Rudy, and although I would never ever vote for Hillary or any Democrat I can think of with the possible exception of Zell Miller, I can't hold my nose tightly enough to vote for Rudy either. I would reluctantly vote for either Mitt or McCain, but not Rudy. My first choice would be Hunter but he won't be in the race after the convention, so I will vote for Fred in the primary and any Republican but Rudy in the general.
No. Neither of you are asking out of a sincere desire to know the answer - you are neurotically trying to find holes to pick in my arguments so you can validate your own opinions. You seem to find the mere existence of contrary opinons extraordinarily threatening.
And though you've offered it up freely in previous posts without even being asked, your opinion of me is none of my business. ;)
You are dodging like a true liberal. You are obviously uncomfortable with the weakness of your answers, so you have great fear of posting them.
It is much easier for liberals like yourself to launch drive-by attacks of true conservatives and then give some lame excuse for your cowardice when you are asked to answer questions that only liberals fear answering.
Find holes in your arguments? You don't have any arguments and your entire attack is unprincipled liberalism that favors big government coercion while claiming to be against it. You don't like this country, you don't like the first amendment's freedom of religion and enjoy seeing it attacked for forty years by leftists who are funded by big government tax money. In this, you are no different than the worst of the far left zealots like George Soros and Hillary Clinton.
you are neurotically trying to find holes to pick in my arguments so you can validate your own opinions.
Hardly. The fact is that you made a liberal attack and when questioned, you ran and hid rather than answer the revealing questions.
You are ashamed of your answers so you are afraid to post them. This leaves your liberal cowardice beyond doubt.
Thanks for demonstrating you have very little idea what a religious conservative actually is. That clears up a lot for me.
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