Why would you think he would be competent for any post? The last decade of his career and subsequent comments surely don't inspire such confidence.
Why?......While having a very successful "sue them till it hurts" career.....his gift is with juries not necessarily the law.... If he could pick voters like he picks juries he might go somewhere President wise but he can't.
Why? His softball take few risks, promise lots, defer anything difficult to succeeding administrations while delivering little and appeasing Muslim's at will administration is no poster boy for successful foreign policy. Rod
It would be to patch-up of the US image. He has a lot of friends in Europe, he'd be useful shaking hands. Doesn't get to make the hard decisions.
I was more thinking of him going after corrupt contractors and such with the same vigour he used to nail the tobacco companies. He preaches a corporate clean-up.
I think he'd look okay in photo ops but wouldn't be allowed to make decisions. Who else would look on the world stage?
Why do you counter a jaw-dropping photo of the Republican victor with one of the Democratic third-place finisher. It seems to me you could compare maple to maple. (Hey, I fit something relevant to woodworking into this conversation...)
Personally, I'd like to see Bill Richardson at State. His futile run for the nomination maybe nothing more than an angle to land a job such as that. Yeah, that sucks. But the State Department doesn't exactly post that position and accept resumes...
Actually, it's the Declaration of Independence that Tim's referring to specifically, not the Constitution wherein the reference comes from.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. ..."
It is indeed the Declaration where Jefferson parrots Locke in naming the "Creator" as the author of our natural rights. While the Constitution does not explicitly mention this, it is implicit in its very foundations. Moreover, even a casual reading of the personal lives of the Framers shows them almost all to have some at least nodding investment in Judeo-Christian ideas (Franklin) up to an including people who were deeply invested in their Christian faith (the Adams boys). To sanitize our government entirely of religious expression today is to dishonor our own history and the intent of the Framers. Were they trying to institution a state religion? No. Were they trying to exclude anyone but Christians? No. But their ideas came from *somewhere*. That "somewhere" was the Judeo-Christian notion that we are valuable because we are God's creation. Secularists/atheists hate this, and have been busy for decades trying to paint of this inconvenient part of U.S. history. I have no more respect for them than I do the snakehandler religious rightwingers who want to turn all our Framers in Southern Baptists ... but that's a grump for another day.
You gotta remember, though, that many Christians cannot accept that someone is a deist if they don't believe as the Christian believes. If you don't believe in Christ and the Trinity, then you, by definition, are NOT a deist.
The gyrations some locals go through to show that scientific theory is on a par with creationism are absolutely incredible. So far, science has sort of won, but I'd bet if we get another committed born-again in the White House, we can kiss that goodbye, and start bowing down to intelligent creation, a newer form of myth.
Bush is talked to by God. I'd guess that Huckster is, too, or, like Bush, believes he is. He probably believed the same when he got the stomach banding that he know calls willpower and diet. Or maybe it was God that told him that the Writers' Guild had ended their strike for the talk shows (another facile lie to try to keep from upsetting his heavy load of union supporters).
Basically, one pseudo-relgious nut a century is sufficient for the U.S., IMO, and I dont' give a damn what Locke or Adams or even Jefferson or even my leading founding father, Ben Franklin, would think. I feel that Eric Hoffer was right: True Believers do too damned much damage to make up for any good they may do.
Deists believe in a divine power but as I understand it, Christianity would be, to them, a "revealed religion" relying on Christ being a divine incarnation which would defy their version of "reason". Of course, how "reason" derives the divinity to begin with is a little hard to contemplate... :)
So, I don't see how any Christian would have a problem being convinced someone is a deist if the don't believe as they do. The last sentence seems almost precisely backwards.
LOL. As a resident of Arkansas I can tell you that if Ron Paul doesn't have better moral fiber and ethics than Huckabee he would be a bigger disaster than the current administration. As governor The Huck (formally "Widebody" before his gastric bypass) he had a real since of entitlement to all the gifts people wanted to bestow on him. Set up PACs to collect money he used for personal expenses. Constant controversy and questions over his ethical lapses. Average intelligence, gullible and paranoid. Just why did he take the extraordinary step of crushing all of his administrations hard drives at his terms end? He was hiding something. Instead of appointing competent people to important posts he appointed his friends and people he knew from the past because as he said "I know them and I am comfortable with them". In other words he wanted 'Yes Men". He can orate and play guitar a little. I realize no one can predict the future and how events will turn out but I t I believe he would be an absolute disaster as President. Among ALL the candidates Democrat or Republican he is the least qualified and the last I would vote for. I am a political independent and will vote for the person I judge most likely to be able to do the job. Not looking for a "nice guy" or girl, or entertainer but a hard nosed pragmatic manager with intelligence and political skill. my .02
Huh? That entire parapgraph is incoherent. A "theist" is someone who believes in God. A Judeo-Christian believer is a theist who believes God is personally knowable and has expressed Himself in a number of ways humans can apprehend (General Revelation [nature], Special Revelation [the Bible], the advent of Jesus, etc.). A *deist* is some who believes there is a creating God but one who "wound up the clock of nature" and walked away - in effect deists believe in a Creator, but not a personally knowable one.
The ignorance that most self-proclaimed modern "sophisticated thinkers" exhibit in this matter is profound. Science in its perfect form can only ever be about *how things work*. Science cannot - by its very definition - speak to questions like "Where did it come from?", "Why is it here?" or "What does it mean?" That's why it is perfectly possible to acknowledge the value of science, accepting its results where they are valid, and at the same time be personally devout in one's faith. Only the truly arrogant (and ignorant) think science trumps theology. The fact that a few people have misused religion and abused science does not speak to the larger issue in any meaningful way.
And scientists have "Aha Moments!", mathematicians pursue "hunches", philosophers "contemplate". Your arrogance is exceeded only by your ignorance. The human thought/creative process is complicated. It is not easily expressed in words. People faced with difficult decisions find various ways to work through them. It is hardly your place to decide which methods are- and are not "acceptable" until/unless every single thing you do is rooted *exclusively* in a rational process - something NO functioning human can claim.
Yeah, unlike those fine "rational" atheists/anti-religionists of the
20th Century that were responsible for ... lessee now ... about 100 MILLION dead. You fear the leader with a life of faith. I fear a conscience-free atheist who thinks science has all the answers, there is no God to whom they answer, and they are free to do whatever they wish. This has nothing to do with defending a particular religious tradition. It has to do with the observable damage that secular atheists have wrought upon mankind which is many orders of magnitude worse in kind and scale than all the abuses by religionists over history.
Oh, and one more thing - it took people of Judeo-Christian faith to do something in Western culture that NO one had done for the preceding
9000 years: get rid of slavery. Slavery is recorded in almost every part of the human history we have available. It was those "religious nuts" in Western Europe and the U.S. that forced their respective nations to face the moral foul that is slavery. They did this in less that 500 whereas slavery had been nicely tolerated by virtually every culture for the preceding nine millennia. So before you blather on about the evils of religion, you might try and acquaint yourself with some slight understanding of factual Reality, because the absence of religion - Judeo-Christianity in particular - has done a whole lot more harm than its presence. I can provide more examples if you like.
"Science in its perfect form" ? What in the hell does that even mean?
That is absurd! Sure it can! I encourage you to read about "God of the Gaps".
Ancient man: Why do we have dark followed by night? Don't know, must be God. Why does it rain? Don't know, must be God. Where did this meteorite come from? Don't know, God must have sent it here. What does it mean when I get nauseous after drinking sour milk? Must be God punishing me.
Lets look into your "Why is it here?" question and use MRSA and other antibiotic resistant bacterial strains as an example. Bacteria demonstrate evolution before our very eyes. We know "why MRSA and antibiotic resistant strains are here" and it they were not before. Over use and mis use of antibiotics.
Bible rigid Christians would disagree with your above statement. Literalist bible thumpers have a problem accepting evolution and being devout at the same time. Mainly because they are told that every living organism was "created" at the same time. Dinosaurs walked the earth with humans, etc. We now know (Science filling in the Gaps) that this is not the case.
Why are the two documents so unalike in their inclusion/exclusion of the mention of a Creator? Are not many of those who wrote and signed the Constitution the same as those who wrote and signed the Declaration?
This is a real question -- I'd never seen the disparity between the two before this thread.
It was more-or-less assumed in the writing of the Constitution. There were open expressions of faith during its writing including opening sessions with a prayer.
It's called a "boundary condition argument". Assume science were perfect. What could it "know". It could know how things work, how the universe operates, how life evolves/adapts, etc. It could NEVER know where it all came from, why things are the way they are, what - if any - meaning it has, taken as a whole. Science it a utilitarian philosophy that is strictly limited in what it can examine - it is limited to those things open to the empirical/rational method. But there are lots and lots of other things that matter to humans than just those that can be inspected by reason and science by its very structure must be mute on these questions.
I encourage you to explain - just in principle - how by sticking stictly to science we can ever discover answers to questions of first cause.
Modern Man: I have this nifty swiss army knife of utility value called "science". Since it has provided so many interesting results for me and given me useful consequences I will assume, without proof, this is the only form of knowledge that exists or that I need. I will dumb down my quest for Truth to that which is limited to purely rational inspection and make fun of or demean anyone else who has larger questions.
A purely mechanical question well below the level of ontology I was asking.
Now I understand your reasoning: Because there are people who improperly apply a school of thought or method of knowledge the entire method is invalid. Guess what Sparky? You better abandon science. I can show you any number of bad science practitioners just as you can show me bad theologians. But unlike you, I don't presume science is invalid because some people abuse it.
Truly ignorant on your part. I have studied and been schooled by
*both* rational empiricists, mathematicians, AND theologians. The smartest of the bunch - by a mile - were the theologians. This doesn't make them right. But your dismissal of theology to the benefit of science means that you've simply switched religions. Instead of treating science for what it is - a utilitarian philosophy of knowledge - you've elevated it to being a belief system. Welcome to the world of religion.
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