I Don’t know how to put the video itself here, otherwise I would have. [I did it for you, Joe. On YouTube, you’ll see a link that says, “Embed.” On BMG, just copy and paste that into your post and voila! – Bob]
Please share widely!
Reality-based commentary on politics.
i loved what he said. however, he actually does try to impose his religious beliefs on others. for example, he doesn’t give fact-based reasons for his stances on choice and LGBT civil rights. instead he use religious claptrap to describe why he wants to control my womb, delegitimize my personal relationship and imperil my job security.
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p>joeTS, in Ryan’s favorite lingo, you’re drinking the koolaid on this one, man.
Massachusetts voters were all that when Mitt ran for US Senate and governor. Nobody made a big deal about Mitt being a Mormon, just as we don’t want to stick our noses into things like other people’s bedrooms.
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p>It was the same goodwill that made us the first state to legalize same-sex marriage that made it no big deal when we elected a Mormon to the corner office, or an African-American four years later.
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p>Too bad Mitt can’t or won’t celebrate Massachusetts as the exemplar of the American ideal of judging people on their personal merits, not something like religion, gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference.
I disagree with him on fair tax, dont ask dont tell, gay marriage…kool aid? Nah. I just think he’s the best for the job. As far as the religious claptrap, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him invoke God as justification for his policy stances, and I’ve seen a lot of video…if he has, it’s not his resort.
If you haven’t heard him invoke god, you haven’t been paying attention. Like most pols, he uses code. And you still haven’t provided any sound factual reasons he has, if any, for his social policies.
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p>Did you know that he claims that God is directly responsible for his current increases in the polls? Look at this and tell me that this guy isn’t running on religion. When a person runs on religion, do you honestly expect that religion will not heavily influence policy?
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p>Yep, sorry to inform you – you’re taking deep draughts of the Koolaid.
JoeTS, what do you think of this kind of rhetoric? Has God endorsed Huckabee, or does Huckabee just have the biggest, most sacrilegious ego in the race?
is a miracle? Sounds like a pretty reasonable deduction.
tells me that you have no legit response. get back to me when you think up something worth debating.
Self avowed atheist, you have no ability to grasp what it is to have faith just as much as i can tell you what it’s like to be a lesbian. How about this, I wont tell you how creepy it is to have sex with people of the same gender and you dont try tell me that someone of obviously great faith is creepy with their beliefs.
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p>Legit response that.
i cant fathom what its like to be homosexual, i can obviously fathom being a lesbian, because, I too have a thing for sexy ladies.
tell me JoeTS, what is the basis of Huckabee’s womb-control and anti-LGBT policies if not his version of Christianity? Spell out for me please his logical reasons for marginalizing LGBT citizens. I don’t have to understand religious faith to recognize a conservative religionist approach to social policy when I see one. And you’re ducking the question. You say he doesn’t give god/religion as the reason for his social policies, fine. What are the reasons then?
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p>And btw, you’re absolutely wrong when you say I have no understanding of faith. True I have no faith in a supernatural being. But I have deep faith in my loving and mutually respectful relationships with my spouse, family and friends.
so I wonder what I’m redirecting?
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p>And just like that you prove my point. The fact you draw similarity between faith in God and faith in an interpersonal relationship shows you have no comprehension of what faith in God is. Faith in God is hard to explain to a person who doesn’t have any, and I’m not sure how to put it. What I can tell you is that what Mike Huckabee displays when he was talking about God in that “creepy statement” is a vehement faith, an unwavering faith that he believes in the clockwork world God has made, he believes that the purpose God gave him is being fulfilled by his actions and spurred on by divine interdiction. I’ve been there. I’ve been in situations where the only explanation I can come to as to how I came out was divinity on my side. You can dodge the bullet, laurel, and chock it up to luck and leave it at that, and I do the same thing, but sometimes I have to admit that God is active in our lives. That’s faith. And right now you’re probably laughing at me, or disgusted, or thinking I’m misguided or just staring wondering how in the hello kitty I could possibly have that going on in my head and my heart, and THAT’S what I mean when I say you couldn’t understand.
First, it’s an arrogant stance to think that Laurel or any person who doesn’t believe in the monotheistic God (or like Buddhists who do not believe in God) cannot comprehend what faith in God is like. You only know what it is like for you. There are many varieties of religious experience. So you don’t know what it is like for Laurel or Mike Huckabee.
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p>Also, ignoring your appeal to personal experience and addressing Huckabee’s claim, we can see that Huckabee’s surge hardly counts as a miracle. The dictionary definition of miracle is “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency”. David Hume says of miracles in his essay “Of Miracles” (highly recommended) that miracles are “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”
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p>Huckabee’s surge does not violate any natural or scientific laws. Mike and his people worked hard to get him where he is. Even if God did choose Huckabee himself, there are no inexplicable happenings that would give testimony to some outer-worldly intervention. If we take Huckabee’s surge as a miracle, then any improbable event is a miracle (the Pats going 19-0 is improbable, but clearly not a miracle). And if the only qualification for a miracle is improbability, then millions of miracles occur each day – if that’s the case, what the hell is so special about miracles? Calling Huckabee’s surge miraculous makes the whole notion of a miracle ridiculous.
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p>One is hard pressed to find any so-called miracle in which a natural or scientific explanation cannot be found. In other words, almost nothing ever happens where no alternative natural/scientific explanation can be found or at least imagined. So in almost all cases in which the term miracle is invoked, there is one or more rational naturalistic explanations that are far more supportable and probable. David Hume would argue that in all cases the natural or more usual explanation is to always be preferred, and I agree.
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p>Any rational human being, whether a person of faith or not, can see that it is millions of times more likely that Huckabee is surging in the polls because of normal, naturally explainable reasons. There is no good reason to think of this as a miracle; any one who thinks so is completely irrational or ignorant of reality.
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p>And we don’t need another leader who thinks God pre-ordained him to be President. Someone thinking God wants them to be president? Yes, that could qualify as creepy. Pre-destiny is a dangerous idea – look at the rapture ready Christians United for Israel crowd.
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However, in Christianity it’s much more simple. A miracle is when God interdicts in the natural order he created to do something. It happens every week at Mass during the transubstantiation of the Eucharist.
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p>Now, to be clear, and I can see how I was misconstrued, I don’t believe that it was a miracle. Mike Huckabee is a man of great faith, and something that he probably saw as so improbable and against all odds, he would account the fact that he is winning in Iowa to an act, however minor or major, of divine intervention. To a person of great faith, this isn’t such a ridiculous notion.
…even though I don’t gamble, that
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p>It happens every week at Mass during the transubstantiation of the Eucharist.
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p>if a chemical analysis were to be performed on the cracker and the wine that the results would be that the cracker was nothing more than wheat flour (the water having been baked away) and the wine grape juice (fermented of course). So much for transubstantiation.
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p>A “miracle” is nothing more than something that has not been explained. That does not mean that it cannot be explained. There is a rather substantial difference.
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p>Mike Huckabee is an affable personality, but so was the serpent in the garden of eden. I neither know nor care about his faith. What I care about are his policies.
Thats a loaded statement, I would argue that a pro-life position is in accordance with liberal values of freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all human beings regardless of their stage of development. Obviously its a point we disagree on but its definitely not always a point driven home by religion, the Bible rarely discusses abortion but noted liberals like Jesse Jackson who once likened it to slavery, George McGovern who ran on the last pro-life Democratic platform in 1972, or classical liberals like John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant all opposed it for the same reasons Christian conservatives oppose it. One group uses biblical justification “thou shalt not kill” and the other uses enlightment ideals of human rights.
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p>The most eloquent pro-life essay I ever read was written by an atheist who considered himself a social democrat on most issues, so to simplify pro-lifers as anti-women bible thumpers is a gross oversimplification akin to calling all feminists radicals who want to eliminate masculinity.
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p>To be fair I must agree with you on LGBT issues and that I know of no reason to oppose gay marriage in the civil sphere, while I do oppose my church marrying gays I see no reason why a civil marriage is a sacred institution worth protecting considering it is an institution merely designed to protect joint property rights and there is nothing sacred about that.
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p>There are two explanations for Huck on LGBT rights, the first is plain and simple and that is politically its popular to oppose them on the right. The second is that it is a natural reaction against the supposed secularization of society and the collapse of the nuclear family. Personally I think allowing gays to form nuclear families will have a lot of long term benefits from abortion reduction (through adoption), forging monogamy as an institution in that community, etc. But tragically plenty of people feel that the family is under assault by government and want to stop that assault. Also Huck is the only GOP candidate who has not engaged in wanton gay bashing either and the only one (except maybe McCain) to support hate crime legislation.
And now a word from Jesus’ General about examining a candidate’s religion:
Underlining added for speed readers.
Huckabee is at his best in this video, talking about the one subject in the world he understands thoroughly. The great value of his campaign to the country is the extent to which he calls attention to the differences between traditional Baptist Christianity and Bushism. Baptists traditionally believe in individual conscience (rather than a church hierarchy) to decide doctrinal questions, the autonomy of local congregations from both denomination and state, and the importance of those parts of the Gospels referring to the poor that GWB appears to never have read. He has the most honest and sincere treatment of religion of any of the GOP candidates.
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p>Where I differ from JoeTS is that Huckabee would be anything but a disaster as an actual President. As pointed out above, he doesn’t separate his cultural prejudices and his religious beliefs from his policy recommendations when it comes to gay rights and other issues. More importantly, I think, he is just ignorant and incurious about many public policy issues, as evidenced by his embrace of an insane tax plan and his not knowing about the latest NIE report two days after it came out. He may be right that it’s not so important for policy reasons that he’s a creationist, but to me his being a creationist is symptomatic of the same lack of intellectual curiosity that we have suffered through with GWB.
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p>I have not looked at the Dumond case in detail, but it suggests that he might be the same kind of hypocrite and opportunist that we have seen with other politically oriented preachers.
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p>As much as I despise Romney, he might be the GOP candidate who would damage the country least if elected. Maybe McCain.