No artificial distinctions

Mad Love -

I don't mind the flow of conversation. I don't even mind when things eventually drift off the topic. My point dealt more with agendas. Here and in the comments left for other panelists are many who come to state only what they have stated many times over. Often, it seems they may not have even read the question or panelist response. Instead, it appears they immediately go to the comments section to enter their disapproval of the panelist or religious affiliation.

So very refreshing are the comments left by those truly moved (in whatever direction) by the question or response. Rational, thought out responses to comments are also very interesting to read. Yet, I struggle to make it through the constant bickering and defaming.

I have very strong religious convictions. I gravely disagree with some of the panelists and patrons of this site. On occasion, I leave comments. Never do I attack or otherwise disparage anybody, even those who may be exactly opposite me in their point of view.

I do not understand the motivation of those who take the time to spread hate and disrespect. If you disagree with a point, then say so. Please, elaborate on your thought process. Share your opinions. Why do so many have to deride and stoop to playground name-calling while attempting to make a point?

Casey-

Conversation is a virus. You never know what direction it will go as it mutates. You can’t change it, so you might as well embrace it.

Anonymous, by the way
if you can read as well as you write,
you will have noted that i said

i have no particular criticisms of the Mormon Church on the level of help they give to the poor or in the level of their real estate investments.

Did you realize that? Your question seems to indicate otherwise, that you think i was castigating the church on this one.

Anon

If you count the alimony and child support i pay to my poor and needy ex-wife, about 85%. oh, and i have a child in college on top of that.

Beyond that I'm average in my donations, and i work in the sub-par non profit world trying to make the world more educated and economically equal rather than being a Hedge Fund manager, and serve on boards for a library and a child welfare organization.

I continue to be amazed at the total inability of so many who patronize this site to stay on topic. I believe the question referred to religions' role in social problems in the world? I'm pretty sure the response had at least something to do with compassionate service and charity? Mr. Otterson did not mention Mormonism. Yet, 1/3 to 1/2 of the response comments center on attacking a religion.

I applaud any group who gives willingly of itself to better the lives of anybody less fortunate, whether they are part of the same group or not. The LDS church along with many other religious organizations work hard to improve living conditions the world over. Go to the worst hell-hole you can possibly find and you will most likely find a christian man or woman there sharing their time, talent, labor and knowledge to help those around them.

Dear "Henry James",

"I am know to be forthrightly critical of all churches, including the Mormons, when I think they deserve it."

What percentage of your income do you donate to helping the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the needy?

Nick,

It is a feature of political debate to demonize the intentions of the opposing viewpoint, to mis-state them, to exaggerate them, to make them sound like nothing they ever were. For instance, if one politician doesn't support a child healthcare bill, his opponent will say he wants sick kids to die.

This is referred to as a cognitive distortion, the belief that you know the motives of other people.

I think that basically all people would like to see the world be a safe, peaceful place, with enough food on everyone's table. The difference is about HOW we get there.

It may seem on the surface that conservative voters don't care about poor people, but nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatives just believe that liberal policies don't work, that their policies create more poor people, not less.

When it comes to taxing the rich to help the poor, well, conservatives don't think that will work. We all know of the lottery winners who end up broke a few years later. Just handing over money does not mean that the recipient will know how to budget and invest.

Punishing rich people has never been a solution to the woes of poverty. The tax system, once voluntary, where the rich volunarily financed the military, etc, gradually turned into a tool whereby the lower incomes could punish the rich and reward themselves. But rich people are usually not stupid people and find other ways to hold onto their resources. This leaves the tax burden more and more on those who tried to punish the rich. That means more taxes for lower incomes.

So, I think the solution here is to honestly look at the reasons why conservatives vote the way they do. Do conservatives really want everyone (including themselves) to drink polluted water, breathe poisoned air, and to let little children go hungry? No, but is the solution proposed by liberals going to actually work?

Nick,

It is a feature of political debate to demonize the intentions of the opposing viewpoint, to mis-state them, to exaggerate them, to make them sound like nothing they ever were. For instance, if one politician doesn't support a child healthcare bill, his opponent will say he wants sick kids to die.

This is referred to as a cognitive distortion, the belief that you know the motives of other people.

I think that basically all people would like to see the world be a safe, peaceful place, with enough food on everyone's table. The difference is about HOW we get there.

It may seem on the surface that conservative voters don't care about poor people, but nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatives just believe that liberal policies don't work, that their policies create more poor people, not less.

When it comes to taxing the rich to help the poor, well, conservatives don't think that will work. We all know of the lottery winners who end up broke a few years later. Just handing over money does not mean that the recipient will know how to budget and invest.

Punishing rich people has never been a solution to the woes of poverty. The tax system, once voluntary, where the rich volunarily financed the military, etc, gradually turned into a tool whereby the lower incomes could punish the rich and reward themselves. But rich people are usually not stupid people and find other ways to hold onto their resources. This leaves the tax burden more and more on those who tried to punish the rich. That means more taxes for lower incomes.

So, I think the solution here is to honestly look at the reasons why conservatives vote the way they do. Do conservatives really want everyone (including themselves) to drink polluted water, breathe poisoned air, and to let little children go hungry? No, but is the solution proposed by liberals going to actually work?

Hey Otterson--Chicago Tribune body slammed your boy Romney. Better get on the phone and start spinning. By the time this election is over, you'll be spinning fast enough to generate electricity.

Romney flunks a religious test

Steve Chapman December 9, 2007


Mitt Romney is worried about religious intolerance. He fears religious and nonreligious people will unite to punish him because of his Mormon faith. He thinks it would be much more in keeping with America's noblest traditions if Mormons and other believers joined together to punish people of no faith.

On Thursday, Romney showed up at the George H.W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas, to announce that even if it costs him the White House, his Mormonism is non-negotiable. That came as a relief to those who suspected he would defuse the issue by undergoing a Methodist baptism.

Like John F. Kennedy, who said in 1960 that the presidency should not be "tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group," Romney said there should be no religious test for this office. "A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith," he said.

Rejected because of his faith, no. But rejected for his lack of faith? That's another question. Romney evinces a powerful aversion to skeptics. "We need to have a person of faith lead the country," he said in February, which sounds like a religious test to me.

In case anyone doubts his inhospitable stance toward freethinkers, scoffers and Sunday-morning lay-a-beds, his speech confirmed it. Nowhere did he make the slightest effort to suggest that anyone unsure of the existence of God has anything to contribute to our democratic dialogue. In fact, he went out of his way to denounce decadent European societies "too busy or too 'enlightened' to . . . kneel in prayer."

When he said "we do not insist on a single strain of religion—rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith," he drew a line that excludes those professing no creed. Zoroastrians and Taoists in, agnostics out.

As he sees it, any American who doesn't worship at least one god is eating away at our democratic structure like a hungry termite. He quoted John Adams: "Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people." Romney went further: "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. . . . Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

He ignores evidence that the framers thought otherwise. The Constitution they so painstakingly drafted contains not a single mention of the Almighty—unlike the Articles of Confederation, which it replaced. A 1796 treaty, ratified by the Senate and signed by that very same John Adams, stipulated that the U.S. government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

If the founders thought religion was indispensable to a free republic, why does the national charter say "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office"? Wouldn't it have made more sense to include a religious test?

Romney's theory that faith is essential to liberty suggests he has yet to visit the modern world. He doesn't try to explain countries like Germany, France and Norway—free democracies where most people no longer believe in God. Religion is not exactly synonymous with personal freedom in, say, the Muslim world. Organized Christianity once coexisted comfortably with, and often sponsored, oppression in Europe and elsewhere.

The former Massachusetts governor makes equally imaginative claims about those who champion church-state separation. He believes they "are intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism." Oh? You would look long and hard to find any secularist or civil libertarian who thinks the government should officially espouse atheism or encourage Americans to abandon religion.

Believers insist on keeping "In God We Trust" on our currency. Where are the non-believers who want to replace it with "There Is No God"? Secularists don't expect the government to take their side—only to practice neutrality. They think 1) all Americans should be free to practice the religion they choose and 2) none should have the active assistance of the government.

But neutrality between belief and non-belief is something Romney can't abide. He thinks the government must be firmly and vocally on the side of religion. Only when it comes to Mormonism versus other religions does he recognize the value of neutrality as a principle. Isn't that convenient?

In the end, though, Romney accomplished what he set out to do in this speech. Henceforth, no one can possibly justify voting against him because he's a Mormon. Not when he's provided so many other good reasons.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ouch.

Chapman does a hell of a job of pointing out the hypocracy of Romney lecturing the American public about tollerance for religion, especially his religion, while at the same time attempting to unite Christians against their common foe, the millions of fellow American secularists, who are the true patriots in this country, who he attempts to put in the same category as "radical Islamists", completely mischaracterizing the fact that the greatest patriots this country has ever known, and the framers of the US constitution were also secularists and carefully and consciously crafted the US constitution to remove any reference to the Allmighty, specifically because they were intentionally conducting an experiment in secularism, which has been an amazing success up until this point an experiment in secularism that is being repeatedly proven to be a success around the world. The most socially healthy countries are those democracies that are the most secular, Japan, Norway, Sweeden, France, England, Germany.

The US, which is now almost the least secular of industrialized democracies, on the other hand, continues to rapidly decline in terms of social health by almost every measure.

Now Mitt and the NeoCons he is trying to join forces with, could threaten to take what was once the most powerful democracy in the world, back to the Dark Ages where religious faith trumps reason and the appocolypse is a self fullfilling prophecy and an inevitability just waiting to be realized by those who are suffering under delusion of belief in the invisible, vengefull, genocidal God of Christianity.

You know what was a real eye opener for me as a Mormon? Teaching 16 and 17 year old, extreamly intelligent students, trying to pretend like I actually believed the whole fairy tale of creationism, which I never did.

I've always had a real problem accepting the whole "curse of cain" myth as doctrine. I'd met with numerous bishops, stake presidents and mission presidents and exhausted every prescribed "official" source in search of some kind of a real answer to the question, "How could a Prophet of God teach such a hatefull doctrine that completely confounds the whole mission of Jesus Christ?"

One day I was plowing through the correlated lesson material on Genesis and we got to the part about Noah, which I've always thought was so absurd I've never bought into it as anything more than a metaphore, which was the way I taught it, just because I had to get through it.

In the middle of the lesson, this kid raises his hand and asks me, "So if the only people who survived the flood were Noah and his family, then how did the Curse of Cain survive the flood?"

I was shocked that this question was coming from this kid, who was an extreamly intelligent young man, who apparently still actually believed this naieve racist myth.

I looked around the room at the other young adults in the room, half of whom had full ride academic scholarships to major universities to look forward to and every face was looking to me for an answer.

Not one kid in that room displayed the shocked look that must have been on my face. Everyone of them had a questioning look on their faces as if they really wanted to know the answer to that question. Here it was 2002 and apparently every one of these kids literally believed the bogus 19th Century racist myth that they'd inheirited from their parents, which was commonly used in the 19th Century to justify enslaving Africans, and had long since been debunked and would be completely inappropriate to even ask in mixed company.

Every one of my intelligent students believed in an anachronistic a morally repugnant myth.

I told them I really didn't know the answer to that question but that I'd look into it and get back to them. I was sincere. I decided to really find an answer for them. Not just for them, but for my own children who were younger, but I felt morally compelled to make sure that whatever I taught them, they didn't end up believing bogus myths represented reality.

So I did. I looked into it and the answer is even more absurd than the question. According to the elaborate Myth of Mormon racism, the Curse of Cain was preserved through Ham who married Egyptus, who was a descendant of Cain, violating the "law" which made it a sin for the "chosen people" (master race) to mix your seed with the cursed Seed of Cain. So God kills all the innoncent women and children and unborn fetuses, yet Ham gets off the hook after breaking God's law which forbid him to mix his seed with the seed of Cain, under punishment of death by stoning?

I really wanted to get back to my students with an answer but the questions I was coming up with were even more disturbing than the questions they asked me. The real question was how did the curse of cain survive the attonement? Wasn't the whole purpose of the Attonement to atone for the sins of all mankind, including Cain? Didn't the attonement absolve all of us from having to suffer a curse for the sins of our fathers? Apparently not according to Mormon doctrine, which was becoming more and more nonsensical to me the more I looked into it.

Finally the only way I could make any sense out of it was to conclude that it was all just a bogus myth, which answered a whole litany of questions I'd left unresolved for many years, partitioned off in the back of my mind. Suddenly they all came rushing rushing forward and one by one, the answers became clear to me, fraud, fraud, fraud, pious fraud, fraud. Every one of my doubts could be answered. For the first time I felt that I could answer my children's questions honestly, but I couldn't exactly go back and teach my students the real answers.

I finally resigned myself to the fact that I'd never be able to change the faith I'd inherited from the inside as long as the leaders of the church arrogantly refused to denounce the bogus racist myths that were alive and well in Mormonism, thanks to ignorant parents indoctrinating their children with anachronistic bogus bigoted myths.

For me it was time to emerge out of the 19th Century and into the 21st Century and take the next generation with me.

Wow.

After 10 years of trying to find a way to finish my personal history, I just stumbled accross it.

I'm done.

And he was.

Good post, Otterson!

Thank you for the definition.

"PWTFFT" is a "Pretty, Wingie, Talking, Flying, Fictional Thingie" aka Angel aka Tinkerbell aka Fairie as opposed to an "Ugly, Wingie, Talking, Flying, Fictional Thingie" aka the devil aka "the Demon of the Demented" e.g. Moroni, Gabriel, Michael the AA, Satan.

I find it ironic that the Mormons, along with those of other Christian faiths, believe so much in charity, but when it comes to voting for politicians, they tend to vote for politicians who would sooner cut benefits for poor people than give up a tax cut for the wealthy, or who would rather vote for an expanded Pentagon budget than more foreign aid. People who belong to conservative religions will cut their own throats rather than vote for a politician who declares that abortion is not a decision society should make for an individual, but will vote for a politician who says he is against abortion but for cutting taxes for corporations already making record profits, while the federal budget deficit ballons, reducing our ability to pay for even essential government service. In my mind, conservatives and their religions work at cross-purposes, causing great problems for our society, endangering our democracy, and limiting our ability to solve the problems confronting us.

Please forgive my ignorance, but what is a "pwtfft"?

Mr Otterson,

Since I have been quick to criticise you in the past when I disagreed (and of course, I was always right)

let me applaud you for a humane, eminently sensible column here.

Now that you have picked yourself up off the floor...

i must truly say, I hope without blasphemy, I find no fault in your column. In fact, i find wisdom and common sense.

Peace and love
Henry

As with most contemporary religions, the members are typically very charitable as is the IRS in allowing taxpayers sizeable tax deductions for said charitable contributions to include in many cases a lowering in their tax bracket So is it charity or good/greedy economics???? Hmmm, I wonder if charitable contributions were not tax deductible how charitable the "religious" would be.

And donating money and time in honor of the hallucinating founders of said religions??? Odd, very odd!!!! but it provides yet another title for a book i.e. The Influence of "PWTFFT"s on Charitable Contributions"

Steven

Thanks for filling out the picture. I agree that what you describe is typical.

And again I agree with you that it seems crazy to criticize a church for being wise in investing their resources.

For those interested in what the LDS Church does in the way of humanitarian aid, please check this website:

http://www.lds.org/ldsfoundation/welfare/0,7133,1325-1-9--cWELFAREPOSTER,00.html

This will not outline what is being done on a ward basis (individual congragations). In my ward the Relief Society has ALWAYS got some project going, like purchasing backpacks and school supplies for the children on a nearby Indian reservation, or sending Sea Bags of supplies off to the wounded in Iraq -- who are air-lifted out without a thing. The Youth are also constantly involved in a service project. Right now they are scheduled for flood clean-up in Washington State.

As far as real estate goes, it is my opinion that being wise with your resources in such a way that they GROW instead of just deplete -- is what gives you the ability to keep serving the destitute of this world.

Praise the HOLY NO-MAN Lord/GOD Eponymous ECLAT + "i" = PHOTONS/LIFE "New-Song"!

Hallaluja! PTL! Not Tammy & Jimmy Boy Bakaar'ss the Televangelicals et al.

Please see the JESSICA Hahn's "Evangelical GANG RAPE" via them Word Merchants of Everything!

Ya Ya.

Bud and Spud

I am know to be forthrightly critical of all churches, including the Mormons, when I think they deserve it.

But on this one I agree with Bud rather than Spud.

While every Church and every individual could do MORE to help the poor and unfortunate, the Mormon Church does a reasonable job in encouraging its members to be compassionate and in dealing with world wide problems.

I don't blame them for holding real estate as well. There is no moral precept that says any church has to be financially incompetent or restricted in its shoring up the financial support of its organization.

Spud,

This is from the LDS Church website regarding humanitarian aid:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints conducts humanitarian activities worldwide. From 1985 to 2006 Humanitarian Services provided more than $900 million in total assistance to needy individuals in 163 countries.

Also:

Humanitarian projects are funded by donations from Church members and others. One-hundred percent of these donations go directly to help the poor and needy.

Hopefully, sir, this will disabuse you of the notion that the LDS church and its membership do not work to alleviate suffering throughout the world.

Sir, your church could help alleviate suffering if they made more funds available for charity work instead of real estate investments.

Something is better than nothing, but your church could do so much more.