There's a building right down the street where they preached hatred for people like me not that long ago. I had something to hide (came out a year ago), and it was effectively a felony as recently as 2003.
If the US ever plunges into theocracy, I'm as good as dead. I don't hide it since I live in a relatively liberal and progressive part of a socially conservative region. I'm a little concerned about backlash from a favorable SCOTUS ruling, but it's too late to go back. Maybe the Presbyterian church next door will send someone over to help them adjust.
I wonder if Brenden Eich would go back and hide his Prop 8 contribution. Mozilla (and hence the rest of the technological world) would be better off if either it was hidden or the backlash was less unreasonable.
It's not just governments and corporations that misuse information but even society.
Brendan Eich has the right to support laws which correspond to his political views, even when others find those views morally reprehensible. And he exercised that right, and our society is all the better for it.
However, neither he, nor you (nor I) have the right to insist that the outrage of those who find his political views reprehensible meet some standard of 'reasonableness' just because he runs a tech company. Nobody dragged him out into the street with torches and pitchforks, they just insisted that a company they supported not be run by someone they considered a bigot.
Right or wrong, this wasn't 'misuse' of information, it was just activism.
I don't think it's a fluke of history, theocracies have been increasingly hard to come by in the past 1000 years (especially in the Western world). The US has never been a theocracy.
Religious organisations are not growing in power.
Even if the US were to become a theocracy, that =/= you're as good as dead.
So there are a few reasons why you shouldn't feel threatened. Not saying it can't happen, but as I said it's extremely unlikely. Thankfully(!).
> Even if the US were to become a theocracy, that =/= you're as good as dead.
All it takes is someone like Scott Lively getting a little power. His views are not as rare as you probably think. Like I said, I'm surrounded by people who think I'm an abomination. They're deadly serious about it.
You're either naive or a Christian doing a "no true Scotsman". And don't confuse my comments regarding abuse and misapplication of religion as demonizing people of faith, because that's not what I said.
I was given a helpful bit of honesty from a former Facebook friend. I told him I'd never vote against his freedom of religion. He flat out said he couldn't say the same. I don't know how far he'd go to deny rights to people unlike himself, but it's probably more common a view than people like to admit. We're always one bad year from a new and worse way of life.
Yeah, nice isn't it? For all of my dislike of organized religion I completely support people's right to practice how they see fit, even knowing that their faith thinks I should be killed for not believing in it.
And if zombies rise from the dead to eat our brains, it would suck if they were able to track me via a GPS tag built into my skull, but even that invasive loss of privacy is obviously not the real problem.
Some might take that as hyperbole, but I'm convinced that is indeed the case. I'm sure that if it was legal there's plenty of Good Christians who would be thrilled to hunt Liberal Atheists for sport.
The directed & stereotypical bash of Christians is unwarranted (not the least of which is that the whole point of "Christian" is proselytizing, not killing). Goes in every direction; if you're going to bash like that, try the recent Greenpeace activist calling for beheading "climate change deniers" http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/01/25/greenpeace-activi...
When I was growing up, "Irish Catholic" was synonymous with "terrorist." Only in those days we had more words for terorists: "Libyan hijackers," "IRA members," and so forth.
I challenge your implication that "proselytising" is harmless. "Proselytising" in my experience has been nothing less than psychological torture and sustained verbal abuse.
You can have your religion, but please keep it to yourself. If I am curious, I will ask.
What the fuck? I said "plenty of Good Christians". Maybe I should have quoted the "Good Christians" part.
I have family and friends who are Christian and I have no problem with it. A person's relationship between themselves and God is their business.
Are you prepared to state that there are no Americans who consider themselves "god fearing folk" who would have no trouble with harming those "not like themselves"?
After all, we've never seen any sort of violence against blacks by "Good Christians", have we?
Or violence against gays, when there are plenty of preachers expounding upon how evil and sick they are, and what a threat they are to society? No, of course not. No Good Christian would do that.
And how many people have been beheaded by Greenpeace activists?
Really sorry to have offended you with my blasphemy /s
I'm Christian and I don't think anything pstuart said about "plenty of Good Christians" was either inaccurate or imputed a propensity toward religious violence to Christians generally, merely indicated that the human propensity for such things was not especially lacking in the Christian community, and which could be expected to erupt from some segments of that community were it sanctioned by law.
Which any honest Christian would have to admit is well-grounded factually.
Are you trolling or stupid? I never said all Christians are violent. I said that there are plenty (that's a number that means "enough to matter") that are.
Time to own up: are you a Christian? Is that why you are butthurt and making up lies about my intent?
You didn't say "all", but you did say "plenty" when there aren't any. When implying mass murder, that is indeed a sore point - when there IS another [sub]group which IS, today, beheading Christians and pushing homosexuals off buildings for their views.
Ok. You're a Christian. So you're completely biased which comes through in the way you distort what I say, e.g.
> You didn't say "all", but you did say "plenty" when there aren't any. When implying mass murder[...]
Aren't any? You have no proof and history suggests otherwise. And it wasn't mass murder that I was suggesting, it was targeted attacks.
By your username I'm betting that you're Irish Catholic. You've been conditioned to never question the faith and demonstrate that by attacking everything I've said. We all know the Church has never done anything wrong at all. Ever!
But if it makes you feel better, I think your new Pope is great -- he walks the talk and espouses the "good stuff" about Jesus. His only failing to date has been to condemn blasphemy, which is a horrible mistake.
Lastly, I offer this thought experiment: do you think any of the islamic terrorists we read about consider themselves "Good Muslims"? Can people be devout and do horrible things colored by that way of mind?
I'm not so certain that public lynchings for homosexuality wouldn't occur. On the other hand, there's plenty of people on the other side of the fence who'd see conservatives jailed and beaten (They'd not sully their hands themselves, just require the increasingly large nanny-state to do it) for disagreeing with their concept of 'progress'.
Maybe we just need to open the floodgates and let these factions kill each other off.
People are being pushed off buildings or beheaded precisely because of their beliefs. Today. Oh, sure, it's some war-torn region and done by extremists...but they weren't doing it more than a few months ago, and now the for-that-reason dead are numbering well into 5-6 digits and rising fast. It's real, it's growing, and there's many people who would "hunt you because of your beliefs" if not for the normalcy of rule & law.
Here you completely agree with my original point. But you're only willing to point fingers at the other dominant religion and take umbrage that your own flavor of Abrahamism could ever inspire bad behavior.
If the US ever plunges into theocracy, I'm as good as dead. I don't hide it since I live in a relatively liberal and progressive part of a socially conservative region. I'm a little concerned about backlash from a favorable SCOTUS ruling, but it's too late to go back. Maybe the Presbyterian church next door will send someone over to help them adjust.