Ms. Shtein postulates: “The fact that atheism and agnosticism are automatic losing cards in an election further proves that Americans have trouble dissociating religion from values.”

Or average Americans merely recognize atheism and agnosticism as belief systems (on par with religion)— and quite rationally REJECT the condescension inherent in these atheistic presumptions of majesterial objectivity.

Your church and state “divorce” merely legitimates the illegitimate— an illicit affair of the state with the cult of Marxist-atheism. History is repleat with the bastard children of that amoral intercourse— from the bloody French Revolution to the North Korean gulags.

These neo-Gramscian conceits put so much emphasis on the failings of Christianity (being the current “hegemonic” order) that they fail to recognize the problems with the alternative systems they’re proposing.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Religion and morality should be separated… ok, now I’ve heard everything.

This begs the question, then why do you need religion? There are plenty of good charities, so why donate to one week after week?

Real evil requires religion as it’s justification.

Overall, I agree with the sentiments of this article, but there are key points that are incorrect, and key points that are missing.

For instance, the author writes, “it exhibits how black-and-white our approach is to the inherently gray nature of morality.” Morality is not inherently a “gray” subject. A particular act is either morally correct or it’s not, regardless of what we may think about the subject. In other words, there is no such thing as a valid disagreement in morality. When there are disagreements about morality, one side is correct, and any other side is incorrect.

Where some might mistakenly view morality as “gray” is when the idea of “exceptions to a rule” is applied. There aren’t any “exceptions to rules” in morality, since it would no longer be a rule if there were valid exceptions.

So, with regard to the conclusions this editorial suggests: If a person believes that to be morally correct he/she must look to religious “truths,” then he/she MUST NOT and CANNOT separate the notions of religious moral correctness and political moral correctness, since a valid disagreement is logically impossible.

I think the correct conclusion here is that a person ought not use religion as a litmus test for moral correctness. This applies to everyone, but is especially important for a president, wherein moral judgements have much larger and greater impact.

7:45

perhaps their “rejection of condescension” is indeed “rational,” as you say, but their completely blind adherence to whatever cultish beliefs their parents passed down is most certainly not!

how convenient that you only mention North Korean gulags! After all, had you chosen the more famous Russian variety you would’ve had to deal with the fact that many Russians were Orthodox Christians back in the day and revealed your little atheism=tyranny non sequitir for what it is! Just like the rest of the faithful - truth is not the aim, it is an obstacle. And regardless of the regrettable and excessive bloodletting, I think many would argue that the French Revolution was a good thing.

I know who you are. You’re the raging ideologue who thinks 100 million people were killed by communism and rants incessantly about a “bloody measuring stick!” I feel that I’ve refuted, or at least shown egregious inconsistencies in your arguments several times now. Do you just keep going, or do you ever step back, think about what other people say, and wonder, “is it possible that I am a raging, ideological lunatic?”

Atheist n A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others. It is difficult, none the less, for the ordinary man to cast off orthodox beliefs, for he is seldom allowed to hear the other side…. Whereas the Christian view is pressed on him day in and day out. — Margaret Knight,

Idiotarian @ 3:38pm drooled: “how convenient that you only mention North Korean gulags! After all, had you chosen the more famous Russian variety you would’ve had to deal with the fact that many Russians were Orthodox Christians back in the day”

I could have cited the gulags of any number of atheistic Marxists from Stalin, Mao, il Sung, Castro, etc. ad nauseum… but I wanted to see if you’d take the bait.

As literate folks know from Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”, the SOVIET gulags were the monstrous creation of Stalin’s atheistic Marxism, not Orthodox Christianity.

If this is what Leftists call “refuting”, then someone should up your meds.

/quod erat demonstrandum

Marxist @ 3:38pm rejoiced: “regardless of the regrettable and excessive bloodletting, I think many would argue that the French Revolution was a good thing.”

The French Revolution has been presented here in a typically naive and idealistic light. The real French Revolution was an overture to European revolutionary terror to come— guillotines, gallows, Gestapo, gas chambers, gulags and genocide.

The horrors of the first French Revolution* were undertaken in broad daylight before frantically applauding mobs. La Terreur held no mysteries: it was openly intended to spread paralyzing fear. It would be difficult to explain these horrors any other way. There was the ghoulish slaughtering of the Princesse de Lamballe, an intimate friend of the Queen. This frivolous lady had courageously refused to give the oath on the constitution, whereupon she was brutally killed, eviscerated like an animal, and her private parts made into an “arrangement” which was carried in triumph to the Tuileries to be shown to Marie-Antoinette.

This crime opened the series of September Massacres instigated by th “moderate” republican Danton. The avowed purpose of those massacres was to dispose of political prisoners; but in fact, prostitutes and juvenile delinquents, some of them mere children, were also dragged out and sacrificed to the “republican virtues.” In the same year the Tuileries, too, were stormed, although the Swiss Guards, faithful to their oath, fought to the last man. (The magnificent dying lion carved in stone in the city of Lucerne is dedicated to their memory.) Whichever of these “mercenaries” fell into the hands of the mob alive was tortured to death. A young cook’s apprentice who had tried to defend his king was coated in butter and roasted alive.

The beheadings became a favorite amusement for the crowds. But not only the nobility was brought to “notre chere mere, la guillotine”-soon wealth alone sufficed as a reason. Actually only 8 per cent of those formally condemned to the guillotine belonged to the nobility; more than 30 per cent were farmers. Lyon, Toulon, Toulouse, and Bordeaux-cities that had revolted against the radical Jacobins-were laid waste. (Napoleon, at that time a Jacobin and close friend of Robespierre’s brother Augustin, was “the slaughterer of Toulon.”)

The chouannerie, the revolt in the Vendee and Bretagne, was a genuine peasant revolt which the nobility and the clergy joined only later. But it was brutally crushed. Robespierre demanded quick, severe, and inflexible justice as a dictate of virtue and a consequence of the democratic principle. In the Vendee, whose name was officially changed to “Vengee” (avenged), the furor of the republicans was directed indiscriminately against the entire population. Even dyed-in-the-wool blue-white-red patriots were not spared. Saint-Just’s declaration (October 10, 1793) that not only “traitors,” bu “indifferents” too, should be done away with was a driving factor, and Danton declared that aristocrats and priests, by their very existence, constituted a threat to a better future.

What was done there and what the Jacobins wanted to achieve can be gleaned from the report of General Westermann to the Committee of Public Safety: “The Vendee is no more, my republican comrades! With her women and children she died under our sabers. I have just buried them in the swamps and forests. As you ordered, the children were trampled to death by our horses, the women butchered so that they no longer can give birth to little brigands. The streets are littered with corpses which sometimes are stacked in pyramids. Mass shootings are taking place in Savenay because there brigands keep turning up to surrender. We do not take any prisoners because they would have to be fed the bread of freedom, but pity is incompatible with the spirit of revolution.” Westermann soon got his just reward; he and the infamous Carrier were guillotined together with their good friend Danton.

The ghastly events in the Vendee prove Dostoyevsky’s words: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” The massacres, once committed, seemed to remove the final human restraints, and the Revolution turned into a colossal sadistic sex orgy. In Arras the Jacobin Lebon and his wife were seen watching the guillotine at work, rejoicing with the raving crowd at the sight of naked, headless corpses arranged in obscene positions, the so-called batteries nationales. Equally hideous were the noyades, the drownings in the Loire (overseen by Carrier) of naked men and women coupled and fettered in pairs.

But eventually the Revolution, like all leftist revolutions, devoured its parents. Andre Chdnier, the great liberal poet, was beheaded shortly before Robespierre fell. The Marquis de Condorcet, whose philosophy the moderates had adopted, committed suicide in order to evade the “national razor,” and Madame Roland de la Platiere shouted from the scaffold: “O liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name.”

The philosophies of continental European revolutions— the French, the Russian, and the German— all showed certain parallels with the course of syphilis. As with the physical disease, we can distinguish three phases, a primary, a secondary, and a tertiary. After the slow development through the first two phases, we inevitably reach the madness of the bloody tertiary phase: the Vendee and the noyade of Nantes, the enforced starvation of the Ukrainian peasantry and the Armenian massacres, Auschwitz and Belsen.

*see “Reflections on the Terror - French Revolution” http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mim1282/isn13v41/ai7722283

Stalin just had a different religion where he was the god.

What then, can you base morality off of, if not religion? If you go along with self-realization of morals, it follows that everyone will have a different set of morals. What’s to stop someone, then from having morals that demands them beating you for something so shallowly thought out? We can no longer have laws that apply to everyone, because not everyone will agree with them. The type of thinking that says morality can be seperate from religion is anarchy and selfishness.

bravo, 5:21pm

and for final proof of the inherent evil of quasi-socialist, quasi-atheistic societies, let us turn now to…you guessed it…Scandinavia! A veritable hell on earth, burning in the eternal, phantasmagorical fire of stable governance, wonderful public services, and the highest quality of life on earth.

again-it’s not about the ideology, it’s whether it’s abused for ulterior purposes.

I made a foolish gaffe on gulags, I was thinking of pogroms. Too bad, that would’ve served my argument just as well.

I also stand by my statement on the French Revolution-i don’t think I necessarily attempted to portray it in any “light,” as you claim. Just as one with the benefit of a historical perspective can argue that, for example, the creation of the American state was a success although a high percentage of citizens were enslaved (of which i am sure there are stories matching those you provided in horror) the French revolution was important in that it was the first large-scale democratic experiment, and inspired subsequent democratic revolutions the world over, many of which were far more successful.

Idiotarian @ 11:07pm drooled: “quasi-socialist, quasi-atheistic societies, let us turn now to…you guessed it…Scandinavia!”

Absent Hitler’s occupation, Scandanavian nations haven’t expressed ATHEISTIC Marxism in their governance. Indeed, their brands of CHRISTIAN Democratic socialism works quite well for many EU countries.

Apparently, idiotarians have a hard time with the English language. I’ve consistently maintained, it is atheism mated with Marxism that inspires the fascist impulse to mass murder (witness Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Honneker, Mussolini, Caeucescu, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi, il Sung, Mugabe, Mengistu, Castro, Che, PFLP, PKK, FMLN, FARC, IRA, ETA, Red Army faction, Shining Path, Rachel Carson, etc., ad nauseum). Own it, beeyotch.

I’m sorry, but either take off your StarTrek underoos and give readers a real parallel where atheistic Marxist governance hasn’t piled up innocent corpses… or just STFU.

idiotarian @ 11:07pm drooled: “the French revolution was important in that it was the first large-scale democratic experiment”

Other than the Greek city-states, Roman Republics and Iroquois Confederacy, you mean?

Bald-faced IGNORANT is no way to go through life.

Lightweight.

In regards to 10:26pm: “What then, can you base morality off of, if not religion? If you go along with self-realization of morals, it follows that everyone will have a different set of morals.”

Take a class on morality, then you’ll realize just how idiotic this statement is. If you really do think that we humans have absolutely no idea what is right and wrong unless we are told from God, then you are a sad little puppy.