CLRV

Ridiculous. The concept of human rights has always been based in scripture. The people most active in its development were men of faith. Martin Luthur King used the scriptures regularly as part and parcel of his conceptualization of human rights. Ghandi dervied his conceptualization of human rights from the works of his Hindu faith. Secularism has had to have human rights thrust upon it and it did so only grudgingly. King and Ghandi fought against secular political forces and, like Christ, were eventually murdered for their efforts.

The man who actually called the shots, then as now, on that issue in 1994.

Oh, thanks for reminding me. By now I should have mentioned that I see someone who scoffs aloofly about spiritual matters and someone who says God hates fags as two sides of the same close-minded coin.

I haven't ignored it. I've considered it. Discussed it with you. Slept on it and now I've rejected it.

Simple. Any scriptural quote that justifies your disapproval of another person is adhered to with doctrincal strictness. Any that invalidate your disapproval or expose it as mere bigotry shall be rigorously ignored.

And all I ask is why you think it's necessary for you to do so. But there has indeed been focus on homosexuality. This thread's founder listed Demands for "gay rights"; AIDS; Herpes, and made it clear he thought the "dangerous" gay practices were to blame. He then went on to list Heroin and then a whole new section on Islam, which is weird if you remember that Islam has a fine record of crushing both homosexual rights and the heroin trade. Afghanistan didn't have either under the Taliban.

Now-now... sarcasm is the lowest form of wit...

Sophistry. God's Law. God's to judge. God's to enforce. But if sin is the problem, why focus on sodomy? Surely we are awash in sin. The greatest is Pride and surely that's all around us. Why the focus on homsexuality and MALE homosexuality at that. As I said, the recourse to scripture would be more convincing if it was more universally applied.

You are, of course, correct. It was Lot. I was thinking of Ham covering Noah's drunken nakedness a few chapters earlier. That Lot sure was a spunky guy though, eh? A real Judeo-Christian icon.

The apostles were men. St. Peter didn't think much of women either. Christ showed no such antipathy. I'd just prefer to stick to the actual words of Christ. Since we have two sources for the Beatitudes; Mathew and Luke, it's fairly safe to say these words were a central part of His teachings. As opposed to additions made individually by *some* of his pupils after the fact. The Old Testament is just that; the Old Testament. It also contains slavery, concubines, incest, rape and torture. Noah's daughters get their father drunk and lay with him. Lot offers his own daughters sexually to a group of men in the streets of Sodom (fortunately they were gay and refused his sick offer). Christ is extolling us to leave that behind. The Sermon on the Mount was clearly His amendment of the Ten Commandments. That's not "softening" anything. What He's asking is much harder. And by the way, the Beatitudes would fit just fine on a courthouse wall. There's only eight of them. Well first of all, in this thread I wasn't equating belief in sin with hate-mongering. I pointed out the hypocrisy of hiding that hate within scripture when one does not truly believe or adhere to that scripture. "Judeo-Christian" in this thread has been reduced to a cheap buffet selection of whatever words justify pre-existing attitudes and a total disregard for passages which disagree or disqualify. There's a lot of that going around and such people might just as well throw Islamic values onto their tray too. There are plenty of bad things in the Koran about ass-banditry. I'm sure there are many such commanalities, if you're really so fascinated with anal sex. I think it's kinda creepy, but who am I to judge? Which brings me to: Christ told us it wasn't for us to judge sin. That's God's job. You think you should have the "freedom" to go around identifying the sinners, a self-professed sinner yourself? Why should anybody be interested in that? Other people do not require your approval. Of course, nobody can stop you from doing it in your mind, but don't kid yourself that it's following Christ.

Or as a matter of religious ethics you do not possess.

No, you're not a believer in Christ, are you? So it's pretty laughable telling the rest of us that we don't measure up to Christian ethics. That's addressing your "unarguable points" in the most direct manner. Your last sentence exemplifies unhealthy sexual fascination too, doesn't it?

There are some *definite* problems arising from a lack of Christian values. Particularly these central commandments of the Christian faith: You don't see anybody trying to get *these* Commandments put up in any court or schoolhouse, do you? No. Because if we did, our glorious, illustrious, morally smug Judeo-Christian society would fall apart at the seams. I see precious few "Christians" even attempting to live up to these commandments and the sorry state of the world reflects that paucity of genuine Christian ethos. You don't see it on the street. Certainly I do not see it in this place. Advocating war. Forcing Christ into your voyeuristic fascination with the sex lives others, when Christ never uttered ONE WORD about homosexuals one way or the other. Utterly failing to even *try* understanding your "enemy"; to the point of actually stating, apparently with a straight face, that "muslim culture" somehow values family less than ours does. They're just not like us, you see. Jesus Wept...

The guys who have all the money, of course. The ones securing a larger and larger section of the pie for themselves with each passing year. The ones controlling a larger and larger share of the media that keeps you "informed". The ones currently using that wealth to taint our political system and ensure it keeps doing what THEY want it to do. The ones who continue to accept tax cut after tax cut even in the face of an ongoing war effort. Common Sense? Accountability?

every day's a new day, that's what i've been told try to hold your head high, the world runs hot and cold it's hard to follow footprints in the shifting sand another thirsty rider behind the caravan you had no idea just what was waiting out there you never thought you'd carry the weight of the world on your pretty blond hair this ain't no shangri-la to you, no shangri-la this ain't no shangri-la nobody knows no shangri-la hey! there's a whole lotta people wonderin' who you are they think you walk without a care in the world but they've been wrong so far this ain't no shangri-la to you, no shangri-la this ain't no shangri-la nobody knows no shangri-la no one can decide what we all must outrun we're gonna carry the weight of the world until we learn to STOP and do what must be done... Don Henley

If children are in fact growing up without their parents, it is because the parents are out working at their low-paying, zero-benefit jobs trying to keep their houses. They are handing their babies to be raised by strangers in daycare when they aren't a year old so they can return to those jobs. Any attempt at remedying these painful realities directly (increased pay, more vacation, longer parental leave), or indirectly (investment in daycare, community programs for youth, paying teachers more for extra-curricular mentoring) is surely to be dismissed by the commonly sensible as "socialist dogma". Worship the "Free Market" as a godhead, then decry the inevitable consequences of its amoral, anti-family philosophies. Amusing irony that conservatives, who sold us this bill of goods called the "free market" in the first place, are always the first to complain. Accountability begins at the top. When George W. Bush is pardoning and committing the sentences of cronies lawfully convicted of state crimes in a court of law, while the adults stand around and blink, does anyone expect the young to take some sort of lesson about personal responsibility and accountability from them? Again, where are the conservatives speaking out against this? A recent study has shown that children are fooled into thinking things taste better when wrapped in a McDonalds wrapper. Essentially, proof that they have been brainwashed to the point of actually altering their perception of reality. What is this right-wing media outlet's moral interpretation? "I don't think you can necessarily hold this against McDonald's, he said, since the goal of marketing is to build familiarity and sell products" There's your moral relativism, folks. We live in a consumer-based, business-driven society. If it makes money, it's good. If it costs money, it's bad. These are the principles our youth are cutting their teeth on. These are not socialist principles. They are the opposite of socialist principles.

Talk about nonsense. Iraq's infrastructure was utterly decimated by the "shock and awe" bombings. Or do you have an alternative explanation why Bagdad and the other main cities have gone without water and power for so long? Wait, don't tell me. Saddam switched off the lights and taps before going down the spider hole, right? Same goes for the first Gulf War. Thousands of Iraqui children died of rampant cholera epidemics following that war (in which a record amount of TNT was dumped on them) because they had no clean drinking water and pitifully limited medical treatment for years afterwards. It had been been bombed out of existence. That qualifies as "going to great lengths" to avoid destroying infrastructure and preserve civilian life to you, was it? Do go on. I see. So the prisoners in GITMO and all the other freely admitted secret prisons around the world have all been either freed or have had valid charges laid and convictions reached in fair, legally recognized trials? Must have missed that news. Thanks for taking a load off my mind on that one. A few low level grunts were charged and convicted of the prisoner abuse. Those *responsible* (ie. those who ordered the abuse and then attempted unsuccessfully to cover it up) are still free and unmolested. Your historical revisionism is so ridiculous it would be laughable if it were not so contemptable. Ridiculous conspiracy theories. The only arguably Islamic character in Robert Ludlum's 1990 novel "The Bourne Ultimatum" was Carlos the Jackal, who has been serving a life sentence in a French prison since 1997. Don't you think it would be a bit boring to have the main Bad Guy in a contemporary action film languishing in a prison cell? They held demonstrations, yes. I did see that. Big deal. There were massive demonstrations around the world against invading Iraq too. That sure held a lot of weight in the long run, didn't it? Whether you like it or not, demonstration is part of free expression. The Danish newspaper deliberately provoked muslims and, what a surprise, they allowed themselves to be provoked; something Christians never would have done in a similar situation. If somebody had drawn a cartoon of Jesus dropping bunker-busters on children, the Christian right in America would have just chuckled and moved on to the sports page, right? I guess you missed Bush's stacking of the SCOTUS and other courts with "pro-life" judges. Guess you missed the activities in the Republican controlled Congress over the past few years regarding a womans right to choose. Well maybe you'd better start watching. There are going to be some changes coming and no mistake. People rant against Israel because that nation abuses people regularly. They have been the number one recipient of US military aid in the region for decades, despite the fact they engage in torture and other human rights abuses -- something that's supposed to be illegal under US law. Check out their human rights record sometime.

Kuzadd is absolutely spot-on. We bomb their cities flat, round up their men and women and incarcerate them for years without trial or charges laid. Stack them in nude pyramids. Shove light sticks up their asses. Screw them over for their natural resources. Install brutal puppet dictatorships like Saddam's and the Taliban's, then use that self-same brutality as an excuse for another bombing mission. But somehow at the same time we try to make it look like we live in fearful deference of them. You talk about doublethink? Nobody is afraid of criticizing muslims. Nobody. Look at how they are portrayed in any Hollywood movie. Dirty, greasy, chanting, snaggle-toothed savages clad in rags and dirt. Go out and rent "Rules of Engagement" some time. It might be very instructive. And Christopher Hitchens has completely blown his own credibility by being one of the major cheerleaders who helped get America into the Iraq quagmire by parrotting the lies and disinformation, known to be false at the time and since proven so. Anybody who listens to anything he says at this point deserves what they get. As for other religions. Tell me the Christian Right has no power in America, or that anybody can say anything they want against Christianity without drawing their fire. Tell me it's possible to criticize Israeli policy without the extremely powerful Jewish lobby slamming you as an anti-semite.

This non-issue is a classic example of the rationalization of hate, fear and intolerance. Of course, there have been quite a few reasonable responses. The third post on the very first page should have been enough to put this to bed. Anyone who wishes to hide the sordid nature of their real motivations behind a guise of reasoned secularism; who wishes to assert that no educational facility should be abetting religion, must first attend to the beam in their own eye by seeing to the elimination of every Christian student association conducting prayer and bible study within every major post-secondary institution in North America. They must fire and remove every campus chaplain providing spiritual guidance on campus. They must remove all religious texts, especially the Bible, from every school library because you never know when somebody is going to derive a spiritual reaction devoid of cold academicism. Then and only then will there be any credibility at all left over for those objecting to this minor act of lavatory renovation. The same goes for the misplaced comparison to the issue of the Ten Commandments within a court house; a building clearly defined as housing one of the three branches of government. Such Constitutional ignorance cannot be taken seriously. Neither is a university a public school. It may receive public funding, but it is primarily funded by private donation and tuition. Last time I checked, muslim students were paying the same tuition fees as everyone else. The difference between a teacher leading an entire class of children in prayer and making small accommodations which allow young adults to practice their faith without impediment should be self-evident to a reasonable mind. Then there is the shameless dishonesty of portraying a completely unrelated educational program, designed to get students to see from someone else's p.o.v. for a few days, as a forced conversion. There are some educational programs that get men to see a pregnant woman's p.o.v. by having them wear a weight belt around their middle for a few days. No doubt this should be seen as forcing them to get a sex change operation. Such nonsense certainly didn't deserve the reasoned, researched response given by A.W. and the stream of vitriolic abuse that ensued was entirely what one would expect from someone drawing such insane, conspiracy-minded conclusions. As for the question of whether an analogous program would be tolerated in Saudi Arabia, dear me, yes. Let's guide all our public policy based upon what the government of Saudi Arabia would do. Let's throw away all such educational experiences because you wouldn't catch the House of Saud trying it. Otherwise it's a "double standard". Absolute madness. The "double standard" going on before our eyes is using the Saudis as an example of muslim evil even while Bush and Condi arm them to the teeth. What this boils down to is that certain people hate muslims and are going to get upset when even the slightest attempt is made to be nice to any muslim anywhere. For such people, the only good muslim is a dead muslim and the only good money spent on muslims is to drop high explosives on them. These are the same people who will then turn around and rhetorically wonder aloud why muslims hate us. They are no better than the hate-spewing fundamentalist mullahs who goad a minority of muslims into joining the terrorist cause and they are just as dangerous to the majority of geniuinely Christian souls in the west. With any luck, the University of Michigan will have no more trouble dismissing their ridiculous bleating than I have.

None of those professions has the life/death responsibility of a doctor. Doctors must decide at what point life ends and lifesaving efforts cease. They decide which parts of a body should be removed to save other parts. They decide which drugs are appropriate and which are not. Even so, I think I'd want the cop and the firefighter guiding themselves by ethical standards, but a the moment a doctor stops listening to inner ethical considerations when making the kinds of decisions a doctor has to make is the moment he/she ceases to be a doctor in any valid sense. I wasn't equating the to. I was merely pointing out an example of the awful results which ensue when a doctor acts without resort to standards of responsibility. Of course the present situation is much more serious. A drug which is powerful enough to induce a spontaneous miscarriage should be dispensed with care. In most of the hospitals I've been in, they have this device called a telephone, which allows them to speak almost instantaneously to people all over the place; womens' centres and pharmacies included. Again, if the hospital administration didn't pick up this case and do the necessary work, they are the ones to blame for the problem. I'm sorry, those seem rather inflammatory hypotheticals to me. The doctor in question was not refusing life-saving technique. Just the opposite; he was refusing to terminate a life. Again, I don't believe we should be compelling doctors to do that. At the point a patient's life is in danger, of course. That's in the Oath. In your examples, the doctor would be obligated by to treat the patient regardless of his feelings, in the same way a field doctor is required to work on enemy soldiers.

I don't think I would want a doctor working on me who didn't base his treatment on personal beliefs and ethics. A doctor is not a teacher; not a postal worker; not even a cop. A doctor is a special class of individual because they have the power of life and death. That's not their job. It's not their business. It's their *duty* and it's a heavy one. Those doctors who do not take that seriously are valueless as physicians and possibly dangerous as well. Take, for example, the overpaid butcher who mutilated Michael Jackson, albeit at his own request. Does anybody think he has any personal beliefs, religious or otherwise? If a certain doctor's interpretation of the Oath's primary admonition to "Do No Harm" includes hours-old zygotes, that has to be the doctor's right. Nor must he/she be compelled to give a referral for such a procedure, since that would still be participation in the act. At such a point, confronted with a rape victim, it becomes the hospital administation's responsibility to provide the referral. In the unlikely event that a public hospital doesn't have any other physicians on hand willing to perform the procedure, even the smallest of towns has a women's centre or clinic where honest and dedicated people work very hard from *their* personal beliefs to provide just such a referral. In fact, dealing with such an agency would undoubtedly be less traumatic for the rape victim than any emergency ward full of male doctors. I don't know the end of the story that's been told here, but I doubt the victim was denied her treatment in the end. I'm afraid this is one of those freedoms that has to be absolute to be worth anything. Any talk of compelling physicians to perform procedures against their personal beliefs is dangerous talk and has huge ramifications. It's not a precedent we want to set. And don't anybody be dissing Jehovah's Witness docs, either. I actually had one and he was the best physician I have ever had. I've never before or since found a doctor that treats the mind, body and spirit the way he did. I once asked him about the transfusion thing and he told me that was largely a stereotype. He promised me he wouldn't let me die of blood loss.

It's not a question of being "observed". It is a question of being recorded, photographed and monitored. That is an entirely different affair. We can all "observe" each other out on the street. We are on equal footing in that. But people who can secretly record the movements of other people exercise an advantage over them. There is a reason George Orwell included such monitoring in his ultimate authoritarian society of "1984". The man knew his history and his politics. He knew very well that the more unfree a society is, the more it becomes necessary to keep a close eye on that society's citizens. If a bunch of people followed you around all day, videotaping and snapping pictures, it wouldn't take very long for you to realize what an invasion of your rights and freedoms it was. It wouldn't take long for you to start wondering what use was being made of all that footage. But because CCTV cameras are mostly hidden and the people watching you are out of sight/out of mind in dark little rooms somewhere, you think that somehow makes it more benign. It doesn't. You think because this monitoring of mostly innocent people provides the illusion of security, it can't possibly be a threat to. It can. It's called the thin end of the wedge, people. While we're at it, why don't we make our television sets broadcast both ways? Think of the wonderful things that could be achieved in preventing domestic violence and fire bylaw violation. Surely that would be worth giving away another little piece of our liberty?

Oh, just as an afterthought. I wonder how many free market conservatives know that it was the WTO that *forced* the USA rewrite their own environmental regulation in order to accommodate Venezuela's dirtier oil, which did not meet the standards set by the Clean Air Act? America didn't WANT to buy that oil in the first place, but now they are (what's the standard rhetoric? oh yeah) supporting a tinpot dictator and his ignorant rabble. So this is all a big socialist plot, is it?

So over 60% of the Venezuelan electorate are "ignorant rabble". What a typically North American thing to say; full of arrogance, elitism and disinformation. Boo f*cking hoo for PetroCan and all the other oil companies on this. Amazing how Chavez continues to be villified for making his country's wealth work for his country's people, especially considering how many vicious dictators there are worldwide grinding their people underfoot for the *benefit* of those same agencies while receiving virtually no press coverage (or notice for that matter) from the "first" world. Profiteers posing as bleeding hearts. What a self-serving spectacle. Speaking of which, the publicizing of pension fund information is nothing but a cheap shot launched by ideologues intent on union-busting. The OTPP's "significant investment" of 2.2 corporate shares per unit over $100 million should probably be seen in context against 285.5 for toll road giant Macquarie Infrastructure Group, 10.5 for WestJet and a whopping 42.7 for those evil wiener pushers Maple Leaf Foods Inc. How do these teachers sleep at night. Because only teachers should have clean hands when it comes to pension funds. How many other people keep track of every individual investment made in their name, let alone have it published regularly for political points? Do you question your bank on it's investment policies before you accept that interest payment on your savings account? This is why we have money managers in the first place. Most of us would not make a profit on such financial speculation, so we leave it to the experts. This leaves aside the obvious claptrap about "the political views of their contributors". Believe it or not, there are plenty of conservative teachers out there. It is by no means a foregone conclusion that a majority of the membership would disapprove of this list.

Did anybody else notice this part of the story? Does this sound like a particularly well-hidden bomb to you? They did everything to make it noticable short of placing a large "CAR BOMB INSIDE" sign on the windshield. How "observant" did those emergency workers really have to be? I also note that that the other car was discovered after it was towed away. This means the "bombers" parked the damned thing in a loading zone or something similar; a place very likely posted with signs warning that vehicles left there for any length of time would be towed. Is this the world's stupidest terrorist attack ever, or is something else going on here? Certainly, if we realize that the goal of terrorism is not to kill per se but to instill terror, this would have to be recorded as another successful attack. London is certainly terrified (see the Daily Mail's "Where's the Next Bomb?'') But really. Would an organization like Al Quaeda, which has managed to stay ahead of the world's best intelligence agencies, be so apparently inept?