@sladejr thank you 🌷
I was polite and I didn't say anything rude.

@helenS 🌹

@LeopoldBloom I believe that the reason people are going crazy about religion in this country today is all about the legality of abortion

@missyann Since there is a general correlation between the availability of contraception and abortion in a given country, and the degree of liberty and prosperity, I'd say there is a connection. The observed drop in violent crime starting in the early 1990s corresponds to the age that people who were aborted starting in the late 1960s would otherwise have started reaching their prime criminal years. Instead, those unwanted children weren't here to menace the rest of us.

You said abortion "destroys society" but couldn't give any examples, and just dismissed my examples of the exact opposite by saying that none of that had anything to do with abortion. So basically, your argument is that you personally find abortion abhorrent and want to impose your values onto the rest of us, even if that causes harm to both individuals and society as a whole.

Nobody is "going crazy about religion;" people are leaving religion in droves. The fastest-growing "religion" in America is "none." This drop is seen across all religions and denominations. More than half of Americans attend church less than once a month. Among the reasons people give for leaving religion is the mixture of religion and politics. Opposition to abortion is almost synonymous with Evangelical Christianity and conservative Catholicism. Considering that two-thirds of Americans support abortion rights, if churches keep pushing an anti-abortion and anti-gay agenda, they're not going to appeal to as many people.

And you can stop with the victim act. Christians are still a majority and no one is preventing you from invoking God. The Supreme Court just gave their blessing in the Kennedy decision for a coach to basically conduct worship services on the football field. If he'd been anything other than Christian, they wouldn't have tolerated that.

@LeopoldBloom [quote]And you can stop with the victim act. Christians are still a majority and no one is preventing you from invoking God. The Supreme Court just gave their blessing in the Kennedy decision for a coach to basically conduct worship services on the football field. If he'd been anything other than Christian, they wouldn't have tolerated that.[/quote]

The secret of dealing with the dummies on the SCOTUS on social issues is to take advantage of their rulings. So, if the coach can conduct worship services on the field before the crowd, all of the players should also dress-up in weird costumes and conduct their own series of religious services. Chances are the coach will zip his lip after that.

@missyann Abortion is a form of health care where a woman's pregnancy is terminated.

The coach who won the lawsuit about praying at school was basically leading religious services after football games. He was not praying quietly, he was creating a disruptive spectacle. Any players who didn't want to participate felt pressured to do so as they were concerned if they didn't, the coach would cut their playing time. Gorsuch misrepresented what was happening in his decision, forcing Sotomayor to include videos of the spectacle in her dissent to correct the record. If the coach was a Muslim, you wouldn't be cheering this as an example of religious freedom - of course, the court would have said he had no right to conduct religious services after games if he hadn't been a Christian. And you would have agreed, because Muslims have no right to shove their religion down other people's throats. However, neither do Christians.

Peoples' lives in the US have improved since religion has become less important. You can say that's a coincidence, but it proves that religion isn't required for the crime rate to drop or civil rights to become more widespread.

I think morality should be based on promoting thriving and reducing suffering. Those are, or could be, objective standards. That's a lot better than getting morality out of an old book whose followers can't even agree on what it says.

@LeopoldBloom How do they terminate her pregnancy?

I don’t think the coach said if they didn’t participate they would be penalized. That was the defense they used. I wouldn’t have a problem if a Muslim coach would have prayed as long as he didn’t force players to be a part of it

Morality is what says something is right and wrong and that’s what improves people’s lives. We have civil rights in America

@missyann Early pregnancies are terminated with medication. Later ones use surgical methods.

Of course the coach didn't say that players who didn't participate wouldn't be penalized, but that was the impression he gave. This is why "voluntary" teacher-led school prayer isn't allowed. It intimidates students who don't want to be involved. There was no reason for the coach to create a religious circus where he led what amounted to worship services, including a sermon. He also lied about wanting to return to the school, as he resigned after coaching one game when he got his job back. The whole travesty was nothing more than a vehicle for the court to give special consideration to Christian worship.

I'm aware of what the definition of morality is. I thought you were asking about a moral standard. Obviously, people don't agree on right and wrong since there is no universally agreed-upon objective moral standard. I think my standard of encouraging thriving and reducing suffering is pretty good, but I'm sure many people would disagree.

If your standard is that morality is what improves peoples' lives, that would generally correspond to encouraging thriving. I think we should also try to reduce suffering.

@sladejr Understandably. A $billion is a lot of money still.

Just curious, but what's the tuition for a Jesuit high school now? Last I was aware was years ago, about $11K per year.

@Heartlander HS I don't know but I think much higher

@sladejr we are multigenerational Catholic ed. Our daughter went to a great high school, in 1987 tuition was about $4K a year then.

@Diotrephes Absolutely right

@TrashCat [quote]Absolutely right[/quote]

It seems strange that they will believe everything else in the Bible but willfully ignore all of the passages that forbid idols.

@AbbySvenz What has what you say got to do with the OP?

Judge-y Christian is judge-y? @sree251

@missyann I'm opposed to electronic voting machines that don't produce a printed record. Glad we agree on that.

Plenty of people get by with expired licenses. It's not easy to renew them if you have to miss work, travel to some distant location that's only open for a few hours, and bring your birth certificate which you have to get from some other inconvenient location. If you're going to require a current ID for voting, you need to make sure that every eligible voter gets one free of charge, otherwise all you've done is institute a poll tax.

Illegal aliens don't vote. The idea that millions of them are voting is Fox News garbage. Dead people don't vote either unless it's a situation where someone fills out their ballot, mails it, and dies before the election. A few people have been caught voting twice, mostly Republicans.

The 2020 election was probably the most accurate and secure in our nation's history, but Trump and his minions managed to create enough chaos to where many people feel that the results were invalid. I won't be surprised if some Trump followers attack urban polling places in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit in an effort to interfere with the vote in those states. It wouldn't be as easy to do that if we got rid of the obsolete, slave-era Electoral College and just elected the president by popular vote.

@LeopoldBloom I agree that the government needs to pay for IDs. I don’t see a problem with an ID being expired as long as it has a picture. ID. I also believe that people should receive pay from their job when they go vote..

I am free there was a lot of they said, and they said in the 2020 election but there were the incidence of suitcases trucks. I can’t blame the Trump party questioning it and maybe there was a stealing but we need to let that go Trump and his supporters need to let that go to 2024 is a new election, let it go

Maybe those of us who believe that we need paper and electron l machines H to help make everyone else feel secure. But yes for chrissake let it go it’s over.

@missyann I haven't heard a single proposal for a free national ID card from any of the Republicans pushing for voter ID laws. Whether someone can vote with an expired ID probably depends on whether the poll worker notices it. It might even be illegal in some areas.

The whole suitcase trucks, drop box fraud, votes sent electronically to Italy so the ghost of Hugo Chavez could switch them from Trump to Biden has all been discredited. The Trump campaign brought over 60 lawsuits related to the election, and all of them but one were dismissed, often by judges Trump had appointed. The one successful one had to do with how close monitors could stand to people counting the ballots. Interestingly, none of the lawsuits alleged fraud, because lawyers know that they can get in trouble making false statements in court. The entire "stolen election" narrative was ginned up by Trump, starting even before the election, and included slates of fake electors, hacked voting machines, intimidation of poll workers, and the Jan. 6 riot. 100% of the fraud was on the Republican side.

I personally experienced voter suppression here in Georgia. My wife always votes absentee. She got her primary ballot, no problem, but didn't get the general election ballot on time. I checked into it (I had to go to the registrar in person) and it turned out that in between the primary and the general, someone had changed her address to one we hadn't used for several years. I was able to correct it so she could vote, but if they did that to enough people, that could swing an election. I'm convinced that Biden's margin would have been a lot higher without crap like that. And this was on top of Gov. Kemp overseeing his own election in 2018 as Secretary of State, where he purged voters for reasons like discrepancies between a letter "i" not being dotted or a hyphen missing in someone's name.

Trump is already setting the stage for claiming the 2024 election was "rigged" if he loses. Fortunately, he's not the president and there is a lot Biden can do to make sure MAGA cult members don't get away with stochastic violence or other interference with the voting process.

@onewithshoes According to a recent survey, people are leaving religion in large numbers due to lack of belief in religious dogma, the disgusting treatment of LGBTQ by religious organizations, and the overt politicization found in many churches.

@jshm2 Why is that? And what's is it to you?

@ImperialAerosolKidFromEP I did wonder about that🤔

@sladejr How am I being a drama queen? Catholic doctrine has always taught that we are to protect all life. The pope saying out loud, that someone who is committing a moral sin, can call themselves a devout Catholic and receive the holy Eucharist goes against everything I’ve been taught

Pope Francis is liberal that is why there is talk of breaking the church up. A lot of pro-life Catholics want to go back to the original Vatican II conservative churches, teaching. I am ready for that.

This was supposed to be sent to jshm2

@missyann Ah OK. I was wondering.

As I said before, this pope is atrocious. A total 5th column for the socialists and deviates

Jhsm2 is a first class POS. Had him blocked ages ago

@TrashCat if you were taught to worship idols then I believe it was the wrong Catholic dogma

@missyann you can turn blue in the face all you want, but catholiciamis is monotheistic. I said what I said

@TrashCat Whatever

@TrashCat You are talking about for female athletes, not monitoring every woman’s menstrual cycle for anti-abortion rights. And that is pure propaganda.. one or two my have brought it up but no Republicans don’t want that

@missyann Nope. Republicans want to monitor womens reproductive cycles so they can't get abortions.

Donald Trump said that if states want to do that then that's their right to do so. That leads to a federal mandate.

This is why the GOP is wrong for America and anyone who wants to be free