blevkog

As a regular church goer, I am all for the separation of Church and State! History is full of examples of where the church and state were intertwined and only bad things came of it. The fractionation of the Catholic Church into the many protestant churches was a direct result of church/state corruption.

Unfortunately, christianity is continually pushing more and more people away, by creating more and more wedge issues (Thanks Kev for enlightening me with this term - see Republican tactics) and inferring it as a "war/battle". All this does is piss people off.

The state, one could argue, is a festering pool of corruption and when the church is in there it inevitable will be corrupted,too.

I believe that we as a society still need the church as a source to feed the spiritual part of one's life. I believe the church is also still very important and very significant in helping the improverished both locally and around the world. Is it perfect? Not really, because it is run by human beings and we are simply fallible. I continually wish that the church
would simply stick with the things it is good at.

Oh, thanks for linking to that.

Now I'm gonna have nightmares.

Sorry, dog. ;)

Paul, as you well know, we differ on our views of the role, purpose, and need for a church.

When you say 'festering pool of corruption' what 'state' are you referring to? Government? If so, then we have work to do. I don't want it to be a festering pool of anything - I want it to represent our collective ideas and house the mechanism by which we tie ourselves together. It is through the state that we create good things as well as corruption - we enshrine individual liberties, we protect ourselves and each other, we share the fruits of our labour.

I won't argue that there is corruption in the system, but it is only human. Are you waxing poetic like our Operation Save America friends?

;)

Kev,
"State" - I was refering to government and it's present and past state. Yes, we do have a lot of work to do to bring our government up to the level of what a government should be.

Waxing poetic like OSA?? Oooh that hurt. ;) Use a bit of colourful descriptive language and you get painted to that group? Ugh.

;)

As a regular stoned drunk straight male at Toronto's gay pride festivities I say fuck religious extremists everywhere in the world. They will be their own undoing.
America is voting itself back in to the stoneage. Idiots.

Sorry- that was me!

As a regular stoned drunk straight male at Toronto's gay pride festivities I say fuck religious extremists everywhere in the world. They will be their own undoing.
America is voting itself back in to the stoneage. Idiots.

The sooner they are out of the missile age the happier I'll be.

Backward hick politics is a particular pet peeve of this site, by the way, K-Dough. You should see Dan get going on creationists!

kevvyd: I 'd love to. Do you get hits from right whingers calling you communists for it? Jesus Christ (excuse the pun). Seriously man- did all the smart peope in America die in the past couple of years? How else could those backwoods goobers have acsended to the top of soapbox?

We do get some, but mostly not too bad. I think most of the righties come at us after I go baiting them on their own sites. It's pretty easy to get them going.

What troubles me more is how many of us are uneducated in some of these issues. If you go back through some of the evolution/creationism stuff you'll see that I totally flew off the handle at a buddy of mine for saying some really dumb stuff about it. I did it because I know that he has a science background and is a school teacher, so I felt it was important.

As for whether the smart people died, no, I'm sure they are there. The problem is that the smart people are not as easy to organize over this stuff because they are not religious issues for them. No one is losing their soul to eternity for believing we evolved from stuff as far I'm concerned, but I'm not going to waive a placard in front of a school board meeting. Some idiot under the influence of a dickhead waving a bible *is* however going to do just that - and they get heard.