President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Well said. "I am the way, the truth and the life" really bugs me. It mitigates the value of the many statements attributed to Jesus that resonate well.
My dad once said, "The god I believe in is not the membership director of a country club."
And as to the state senator from Michigan, she's brilliant.

 

As I heard it put recently, "Your church is not one of the three branches of government." If your religious beliefs are so strong that you put them above the oath you swore to the Constitution, then you should resign your position.

 

Slopnik has deader eyes than Miller.

All that debasement to be a conference chair.

 

I agree on Mallory McMorrow. Speaking of the Michigan Senate, I happen to know personally (we were summer camp counselors together), the Republican chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, a dairy farmer from the UP (/threadjack) who got a lengthy feature on Politico or the Atlantic or one of these things for refusing to say the election in Michigan was corrupt. Ed is very conservative and very religious (this was a Methodist camp and he was evangelical, and during the communion service would always volunteer to play piano [he was actually a music education major] rather than take communion). Even now, he often responds (calmly and in great detail) to questions and complaints on social media from people. I haven't lived in Michigan now for eight years so I can't break down vote by vote the relationship between his faith and policy, but I think his heart is mostly in the right place even if I agree with him on very little.

I think that's a great position, and there are numerous religious sects that prohibit involvement in politics. But I really think what we're seeing is the ground shifting underneath evangelicals in a way that they feel compelled to fight back. I really think that if Obergefell had not happened, the religious right would not have tolerated Donald Trump's bullshit and that 2023 would be a very different situation. But once that happened, I think the religious right saw the world eroding around them. It was one thing in the 1980s for the Moral Majority and their ilk to play defense on their traditional topics, but I think in that moment they realized persuasion wasn't enough and that they needed attack dogs who were willing to force their beliefs into public policy and law or else it would become a permanent part of the culture. One of the few ways in which Trump and his ilk have been consistent and disciplined is their willingness to punish and enrage their enemies, which is why he's still a problem today. What the aftermath of Dobbs has shown, and which I don't think the right has been capable of accepting to their own demise, is that the horses have bolted from that barn years ago.

 

They're only just beginning to see that. They're eventually going to follow Nikki Haley's lead on abortion, I think, and try to dig out a little. That's controversial and not universally accepted yet, of course, and there are plenty of hardcores who will keep pushing for 6 weeks. That mobilizes the young and women like nothing else.

 

Look at what happened in Florida after the felony disenfranchisement reform passed with 65% of the vote. The governor and gerrymandered legislature found their way around it by saying that felons had to pay their court costs and basically overturned the will of the people. With no consequences.

 

That's different than asking for personal religious beliefs out of politics. Blue laws were based on religious dogma but were constitutional. If a majority of people said murder should be a crime because it violates a Commandment, would that be an improper influence of religion on politics? People vote for welfare measures based on their religiously influenced beliefs.

The idea that religion can or should be eliminated from people's political participation is absurd and unworkable.

I'm not agreeing with the Christian nationalism, but reject an absolute statement that religion can have no role in people's political beliefs

 

The trick to understanding the McMorrow speech is to know she’s sharing her own religious beliefs in it and, further, telling everyone else how to think and act about the parts of just-five-minutes-ago Christianity she doesn’t like.

I think that’s probably the place I’d start. It isn’t “this person is religious and that person is operating from their ‘higher mind.’” It’s that each person brings their own set of moral claims to the table. McMorrow is, generally speaking, secular humanist who picks and chooses from the spiritual buffet, and says “here is my ecumenical meal for today.” Until it changes. And changes. And changes. Until it’s really nothing more than a set of ideological rim shots designed to work a crowd.

 

Worth asking, I suppose, if our ethics and morality arise from religion.

Or does religion arise from our ethics and morality?

 

The whining about foreign billionaires is hysterical. The Republicans were the ones screaming for decades about how money is free speech.

 

What does it matter at the political level? It's an interesting philosophical question but doesn't change the question about politics.

The source of a political opinion is hard to pin down. That it comes from a religious belief is difficult to ascertain and not relevant.

Two people oppose abortion. One because the Church says so. The other believes a fertilized egg is a unique human being and should be respected as a fellow human. The person with the religious belief should not be able to participate in politics because religion influences political choices?

People oppose capital punishment based on religious beliefs. They can't say anything?

 

Upthread I was called out by @Alma on my admittedly hotheaded crack on him. Right or wrong, I think I resent the dour, smug gatekeeping stance where you carry yourself as the Shell Answer Man of the faith. I think of how many friends have been driven away from the faith by the Almas of the world cosplaying as Pharisees and it pisses me off a little.

And probably some of that is guilt for all the years I spent trying to be a spiritual bouncer because I thought that’s what God expected of me.