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MAKING SENSE OF 'LUIGI LOGIC'Reader comment on item: Barack Obama and Islam: An Ongoing Saga Submitted by DANIEL REDMOND (United States), Feb 23, 2009 at 18:12 Hello again, Luigi, and sorry about my comment being "so short" but when you've made your point there is no need to be long-winded, as you were in your last collection of irrational pronouncements. You now state that "secular nations promote abortion, gay marriage, contraception and feminism and try to make people feel like their lives mean nothing........" blah, blah, blah. First, what is your definition of a "secular nation" anyway? Would it be the United States perhaps? Because in the United States we have lots of abortion, gay marriage, contraception and, in the past few decades, a notable endorsement of feminism. But, then again, the United States is also known as being an over-whelmingly Christian nation, is it not? So either you consider the United States to be a "secular nation," and therefore not worth preserving, or you consider it to be a bastion of Christian values that happens to have accepted abortion, gay marriage, contraception and feminism. So which is it? [For the record, I happen to be an Atheist who is opposed to abortion. I consider abortion to be a fancy form of infant homicide.] Now, as to contraception, apparently you are opposed to it despite the fact that over-population, particularly in Third World nations, is an enormous problem that gets worse each year and each decade. Should illiterate and impoverished peasants in places like Equador, Zimbabwe or Thailand continue having babies that they can't support? Abortion is the taking of a human life but preventing a pregnancy is quite different and it often means preventing an expanding population of people who are destined to suffer lives of poverty and disease in destitute conditions in impoverished nations. One of the evils of religion has been to completely endorse the profligate expansion of suffering populations around the world. Those not brainwashed by religion consider the consequences of this irresponsible birthrate and try to discourage it from continuing at its rampant pace. Who says that most of Japan's young people are not religious? Have you performed a survey? I think that their control of their population rate is admirable for a small island nation with 100 million people who are literally running out of room to live in. Religious or not, they are doing the right thing through abstinence and/or contraception. Who says that Europeans don't want to have babies? I'm sure the vast majority of Europeans want children, however, as a largely secular population of prudent and rational people they don't want to bring children into the world unless they can support them; unlike the populations of, for instance, most Latin American countries that have been brainwashed by Catholicism. When you make reference to "the secular liberals who are in power" I am wondering who exactly you are referring to? I follow politics pretty closely and to my knowledge there is not a single elected official in Washington, D.C. who has declared himself free of religious affiliation of some sort. Go on, name one single Atheist member of the United States Congress in either the House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate. I'll bet you can't come up with a single name. So who are these "secular" power brokers anyway? "An enemy who believes in something will always defeat an enemy who believes in nothing." Yeah, yeah, 'praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.' Every nation that ever went to war believed they had God on their side and that includes Nazi Germany in World War II. The Germans even had the words "Gott Mitt Uns" (God With Us) etched onto their military-issued belt buckles. Guess what? They lost anyway. And we Americans believed we had God on our side during our fiasco in Vietnam. And guess what? We lost too. Believing that an invisible Man in the Sky is watching over you and siding with your nation in a war is a recipe for disaster. Besides, if you believe that God made everything and everybody, wouldn't that mean he also created your enemy? What do I believe in, you ask? Well, how about the concept of "verifiable reality." You see, I like believing in things that are provable in the real world. Things that stand up to scientific scrutiny, for example. If I can actually see something and understand how it works in a rational way, well, that goes a long way towards allowing me to believe in it. This does not include deities, however, none of whom have ever shown themselves to Mankind or passed any test involving proof of verifiable reality. Reality check, Luigi: Man created gods; gods have not created man. Gods were created during the primitive whining, wailing, impulse-driven, superstitious infancy of our species prior to our knowledge [through science] that we live on a round planet that revolves around a medium-small sized star and when in our darkness and confusion we reached out for any possible explanation for our existence and invented gods. It was a hair-brained explanation of how we got here but it was better than no explanation at all. But for an advanced 21st Century world its usefullness has long-since passed. It is time to throw religion in the dust bin of history before it does any more harm to humankind. Whew! Luigi, I'm becoming as long-winded as you are. Sorry about that. Time to sign-off! - DANIEL REDMOND P.S. Who do I think will shine this century? Probably China, as an emerging major player on the world stage, and the United States as an innovative 'comeback kid' nation after suffering some very turbulent times through economic irresponsibility and socio-political-militarist miscalculations like invading other countries to find imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments". << Previous Comment Next Comment >> Reader comments (220) on this item
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