HighHopes
| quote: Originally posted by RicoX:
Example the serial killer Ted Bundy had a great affable personality. But it was to late for many women who met Bundy to realize oh wait this guy isn't really a nice person after all.
At first I thought you were supporting what I've been saying, that personality is meaningless and it's the person's actions that count. Then I said, that can't be right. Reading it again I see what you are getting at. Obama is probably a serial killer. I like it! That's just the sort of originality I was talking about. You didn't need to go to some bloviating blowhard pundit to come up with that. And you know, you're right. He does kinda look like one of those serial killers. After they nab one of those pricks there is always the gathering of neighbors saying, "He was such a nice quiet man. So polite!" That's Obama! I'll never look at him the same again. |
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THALO.net divinity
| quote: Originally posted by Markle: quote: I haven’t seen either you or Markle try to convince me regarding Obama and Pastor Wright.
What in the world makes you think I give a flying fuck about anything some loudmouth preacher says? .
Your joking right? You didn't just post that like no body would notice. When haven't you ever not said something about religious preachers and the magical power of control they possess that the nation is run by what is that highfalutin word you use theocracy. How doesn't how you rail against those preachers define your ideology. All of a sudden you don't care what preachers say? |
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HighHopes
| quote: Originally posted by thalo:
As much as I'd prefer a candidate with conservative secular principles, what I'm going to get as my president is a liberal Democrat.
Don't be so sure. The latest poll shows McCain leading Clinton by 7 points and McCain leading Obama by 6 points. It surely must be all up in the air at this point. Nobody even knows who the Democratic nominee is going to be. Haven't you noticed the last few elections have all been 50/50 splits? The populous has been rather permanently split 50/50 so now a small group or a bit of hanky-panky can tip any of these elections either way. Just look what's happening on this forum. People are permanently taking sides and just waiting to get the official word from "team" leaders on who their enemy is. Nothing else matters. Amazing when you think of it because you know for dead certain that we are more like each other and have very much more in common with each other than we do with any of these multimillionaire political elites. Our democracy is broken. We still have democratic forms, elections and such, but the democracy is empty and doesn't work any more. |
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Thalo.net Skeptic
| quote: How doesn't how you rail against those preachers define your ideology.
Does anyone here speak Rico so they can translate this into English? . |
| | | Posts: 3205 | Location: Agoura Hills, California | Registered: Sun June 08 2003 | 
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THALO.net divinity
| Precisely Double H.
Senator Husseins Bundy syndrome is blatantly reflected in his foreign policy. He wants to pull immediately from Iraq within 16 months or less if he is elected President. This undoubtedly will cause the deaths of countless Iraqi's. Only someone with Bundy syndrome would be so inhumane. |
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Thalo.net Skeptic
| quote: But, truth be told, if Obama went to that church for forty years and...
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...I would vote for him.
And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon. All he has to be is someone else...and you'd vote for him. Good one, Brad. I'm not going to try to move posts to the new Right-Wing Nutjob Thread, but I encourage you to use it. . |
| | | Posts: 3205 | Location: Agoura Hills, California | Registered: Sun June 08 2003 |
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THALO.net divinity
| quote: Originally posted by Markle: quote: How doesn't how you rail against those preachers define your ideology.
Does anyone here speak Rico so they can translate this into English? .
Oh you know exactly what I mean to the point. |
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Mockerator
| Here's a terrific article by George Neumayr that I think outlines the situation exactly: Wrighting Dirtyquote: The videos of Barack Obama's pastor of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, surpass Saturday Night Live parodies. As his congregants are hopping up and down like hyperactive children and fellow pastors are clapping him on the back, a sashaying Wright allows himself a range of rancid and conspiratorial musings that might even give Cynthia McKinney pause. The feverish racism reaches its high point of buffoonishness when Wright accuses the so-called first black president, Bill Clinton, of "riding dirty," exploiting the black community as he exploited Monica Lewinsky.
Under pressure, Obama is crying uncle, literally. He is casting Wright as the unhinged relative with which most American families are saddled. But how many Americans have their bonkers uncle preside at their wedding, baptize their children, and give them a title to a book? This is like finding out that, say, David Duke had served as best man at John McCain's wedding.
Obama now says he would have walked out of the church had he heard Wright's "God damn America" sermons. But look at the videos: none of Obama's fellow congregants look appalled or ready to walk out; they are practically doing somersaults of joy down the aisles. Wright's raise-the-roof racism was his customary style and an immense crowd-pleaser. Obama never saw this in his 20 years of attending his sermons? That's not plausible.
Even as Obama claimed ignorance of the sermons in media interviews last Friday, he contradicted this denial by describing Wright as a man of "anger and frustration" whose time had passed. How did he know? Did he just learn that in the last few days?
A SYMPATHETIC MEDIA, eager to change the subject, quickly notes that Obama has a new pastor, Otis Moss. Well, that's reassuring. Moss was rooting Wright on and shares many of his radical views, having apprenticed under him.
Notice also that the media (the oh-so-irenic-and-thoughtful David Gergen, for example, dusted this one off on CNN) is recycling a tired multiculturalist rationalization in Obama's defense: that the "black church" experience deserves a generous interpretation from whites and that pastors who have suffered discrimination deserve a rhetorical mulligan or two.
Creeping into the news coverage was even a note of admiration for Obama's loyalty to Wright -- that he didn't "repudiate" the man, but only his views. This from a media that egged McCain into calling Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance."
While the media worked hard to try and find a conservative Christian equivalent to Wright in McCain's life, they couldn't come up with one, and since McCain's interest in religion is wan no one really cares anyways.
THE WRIGHT CONTROVERSY threatens to cement Obama's reputation as a stealth radical, cooler in his temperament than overt radicals but equally committed to their goals. It is not surprising to hear Obama casually talk on the campaign trail about confiscating the profits of oil companies given that Wright's "liberation theology," which is Marxist in its premises, has shaped his worldview for over a generation.
And why would Americans want to turn their country over to a candidate who attends a straightforwardly separatist church that views America with suspicion if not contempt? Look at the church's official literature: it is openly separatist, mirroring the white racism of "separate but equal" almost perfectly. A pressed Wright even used the separate but equal defense in an interview on Fox News, saying that separate does not mean superior. The church's literature touts a "Black Value System" and states, "We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land.'"
Shoehorning racial separatism into Christianity destroys it, as St. Paul admonished when he wrote that in Christ there is "neither Jew nor Greek," and a hyphenated Americanism that prizes the African while holding the American in contempt is also destructive. If this is the "audacity of hope," which is Wright's phrase, America is in trouble.
One reason to doubt Obama's sudden displeasure with his pastor's comments is that his wife makes similar ones and he doesn't seem to care. "As a black man Barack can get shot going to the gas station," she said, before more recently commenting that she is finally "proud" of her country. Perhaps before this is all over Obama will enlist that old explanation for male church attendance: my wife made me go.
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| | | Posts: 17097 | Location: The Left Coast | Registered: Sun May 04 2003 |
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HighHopes
| quote: Originally posted by BN:
What would be good medicine for this country would be to point a few more cameras into some black churches.
Have you lost your mind entirely? To what end do you want to set up cameras to record and monitor people giving sermons or speeches? You must have some end result in mind. What is it that you want to accomplish? Do you think these places should be interfered with in some way? Intimidated? Shut down? Is that it? Or are you just wistfully dreaming and you want no result at all? There is a very elementary side to the principle of freedom of speech: either we defend it in the case of opinions we find hateful, or we do not defend it at all. Even Hitler and Stalin acknowledged the right to freedom of speech for those who were defending their point of view. It is distressing to me to even have to defend such issues here at thalo.net, of all places, two centuries after Voltaire said: "I shall defend my opinions till I die, but I will give up my life so that you may defend yours." It would be a great disservice to the memory of the millions of victims of WWII to adopt one of the basic doctrines of their murderers. George Orwell summed it up succinctly by saying: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."Through blindness and a self-inflicted ignorance you have become an enemy of liberty. |
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Master Baiter
| Yeah, the cameras in churches idea is an extraordinarily bad one if you're talking any kind of mandatory or government thing. Although many churches video their OWN services--that's OK, their choice--it'd be pretty un-american to roll into some black church and say to some pastor: we're going to be filming you to show everyone what you're about.
I'm guessing you meant maybe something like people of their own accord sitting in church, hearing something outrageous and pointing the video cam in their phone at the pulpit to try and capture it, then posting it on YouTube or something. That's kind of where the culture is heading. Everyone is a potential paparazzo, and everyone has the power to put people on the record, just by whipping out a phone.
But the problem with that, is that "the record" is state... and church is, um, "church" and there's supposed to be a clear separation there between the two. |
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Mockerator
| I'm guessing you meant maybe something like people of their own accord sitting in church, hearing something outrageous and pointing the video cam in their phone at the pulpit to try and capture it, then posting it on YouTube or something.
Hmm. I don't remember mentioning making it a government program. You people have heard of the press, haven't you? I think journalists ought to take a look at some of the stuff being taught inside some of the churches and mosques. Call it a documentary or just a good news story.
HH, when has scrutiny ever been equated with impinging on free speech? What I'm talking about is a free press poking their noses around like they always do...be it in the government, a corporation, or wherever they think something newsworthy is happening and when the public interest might be relevant. And some pastor or Imam preaching paranoia and hate is a good news story and relevant to the public interest. And it would probably do some good. I don't think it does much good, for example, when the press gives an almost total free ride to the hate being taught to Palestinians and portraying the Israelis as the bad guys. Playing this game of make-believe has not helped to bring peace to the Middle East. Perhaps truth would, and truth starts with a free press actually reporting what's going on.
Yes, free speech indeed. But free speech also includes the free speech of looking at others who are free speeching. the Orwellian nightmare comes when certain ideas are considered so sacrosanct that they can't be questioned, let alone looked at. |
| | | Posts: 17097 | Location: The Left Coast | Registered: Sun May 04 2003 |
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THALO.net divinity
| Markle for the last two weeks you have made demands such as You will not post if so and so name is not framed this way or that. That the tone of the debate needs to be slanted more to the left wing liberals and now you start a finger pointing thread.
Let me put it in layman's terms for you. Fuck you asshole. If you come lick my balls as a liberal whore then maybe I might consider your demands. Until then if you want to be a whiny little puss then you are going to be getting it back in spades.
When you make disingenuous hypocritical post's like you don't care what preachers say you will be called on your bullshit. |
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Thalo.net Skeptic
| quote: Let me put it in layman's terms for you. Fuck you asshole. If you come lick my balls as a liberal whore then maybe I might consider your demands.
So that's your price? I suppose I should be flattered, but sorry, Rico, I can't match your intellectual rigor or your fantasies. . |
| | | Posts: 3205 | Location: Agoura Hills, California | Registered: Sun June 08 2003 |
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HighHopes
| Brad, I think I know pretty much know what you meant with your call to place cameras in black churches to record and document what's going on. Don't think I don't.
After this "scrutiny," then what? Anything? Do you have anything in mind? What should people do after that? |
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HighHopes
| You seem pretty adamant that this scrutiny of black churches needs to be done. I have a suggestion: Why don't you do it? I'm not trying to make a point here. I think it would be interesting for you. You could get away from your computer for a while. Best of all you could see for yourself what's going on and not need to rely on second or third hand reports or edits from people who may have an agenda. Seeing for yourself is always best. And it's easy to do. You'll meet some of the folks you are talking about. Might be fun.
There are a number of black churches in your area. Choose one or two and attend. There are always a smattering or more of whites so you will be just one more smatter. Avoid the Catholic and Episcopal black churches. Just a suggestion. I find attending Mass boring. Maybe there is a predominately black United Church of Christ church like Wright's in your area.
Let us know what you find. You have an interest in this topic so you can become the authority on the subject, at least in this forum if not in a wider venue. You'll be able to write from a strong position of first-hand experience. |
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