Living in a city of 3+million, I would think collapse of civilization would kind of lead to an everybody for themselves mentality. Not owning any firepower, I would be at a disadvantage.
Gay Marriage Argument in the Supreme Court
- Thread starter Tecumsehsbones
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Living in a city of 3+million, I would think collapse of civilization would kind of lead to an everybody for themselves mentality. Not owning any firepower, I would be at a disadvantage.
My mom died before the term "netiquette" was coined, so it ain't on her.
There is no substance to your argument. You do not present evidence, you do not engage in logic. You state your emotional certainties, and you don't even try to backfill. You simply repeat your emotional certainties.
The Thomas Paine quote is relevant:
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead"
:lol:
Right, there is so much 'reason' and 'humanity' in the legitimization of sodomy.. and the designation of a social class of sodomites, those who failed to progress from adolescent fantasy to sexual maturity.. to the ultimate status of victim in the post structural culture.
I think your idea of 'reason' is really just ideology and sophistry. And sadly for those caught up in a lie, to a life of misery, confusion and self destruction.
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I've told you before Cliffy.. that i have noted that the last resort of people supporting homosexual legitimization, is to call its opponents 'gay'.
Now if i was a homosexual.. i would be thinking if the worst insult you can come up with is to call someone 'gay'.. then with friends like these.. who needs enemies. :roll:
At least i am willing to view it as a treatable social and moral pathology. A condition of choice and will, rather than inherited trait.. and a prison from which no escape will be permitted. One which will be viciously reinforced if anyone has the temerity to try to extricate himself.
Look to the persecution of institutions or agencies offering alternatives and cures to the homosexual lifestyle. They are subjected to ridicule and professional sanctions.
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There is no "cure" for gayness. It is not a lifestyle choice. I wasn't saying you were gay. I was asking because your definition of homosexuality seems to fit your world view.
Precisely. You present these conclusions as if they were facts, laced with a liberal dose of preconception and negatively connotated word choices.
You aren't making an argument. You're making a polemic. And your further stretch that this will somehow destroy what you are pleased to call western civilization is an even greater, and equally unsupported, stretch. There is no point in responding with reason.
That sounds quite polemical itself, bones. What do you mean by polemical. The dictionary defines is as presenting one side of a controversial issue.That it is associated with politics.. well what else could it be.
You're telling that you are some how 'free' of political ideology, and feel you can pontificate on others motives by way of some self assumed absolutely infallible objectivity. Don't make me laugh. You just call any point of view that you don't agree with as 'polemical'.
My point remains. In the last 45 years we have redefined the entire moral structure of the West. We have replaced intersections of faith and civil society.. in institutions like marriage, a foundation stone of any civilization.. with radical, inchoate and absurd new forms, solely on the basis of some insipid sentiment.
We have completely overturned any founding respect of life, procreation, civil and familial responsibility. Our economies are in a shambles as a result of the economic manifestation of this type of relativism, in Global Free Markets. There are no absolutes anymore, no sustaining structure, which hold us together.
It's all crashing down around us. Most people just don't see it. And don't tell me that you're not polemical bones, and don't resort to canned slogans. You're as polemical as they come.. when your not distracting the debate to issues of style or personal aspersion..
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We have? I thought we've been redefining it pretty much all along. What is "the West?" Where did it start? Rome or Greece? Or even Egypt?
Most historians date the start of "the West" at about a half a millennium B.C. in what is now Greece. You know, buffed-out warriors in red cloaks and Speedos, Periclean Athens, the beginnings of democracy (however limited), all that stuff.
Given your religious bent, you might prefer fourth-century A.D. Rome, when Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire.
Or is it some other period? I can't possibly evaluate your assertion that we have been "redefining" the entire moral structure of the West in the last 45 years until you give me some idea of what you mean by "the moral structure of the West." Is chattel slavery included? How about the unapologetic genocide of any non-Europeans who had the misfortune of being somewhere Europeans wanted? Y'know, White Man's Burden and all that. How about institutional racism and anti-Semitism? Heck, for that matter how about absolute monarchy? It has prevailed in "the West" far longer than even the most limited democracy.
What is it you object to, coldstream? Racial equality before law? Women having legal rights separate from their fathers or husbands? Prohibitions on child labor? Prohibitions on taking any damn drug you feel like? Prosecuting child molesters?
When did we have respect for the lives of non-Europeans, coldstream? As for procreation, seems to me we're doing more to ensure that children are born healthy than we ever have in history. I know, what you're actually talking about is abortion, but if you insist on elevating it to some High Principle of Western Civilization, you're going to have to convince me that western civilizaiton ever gave a damn about life in the first place. In mid-19th century England there were over 200 death-penalty offenses, including theft of property above the value of sixpence. So there's your respect for life. Children in the most developed countries in the world routinely starved to death. The British government spent more money rehabilitating Battersea Park in London than it spent on relief for the entire Irish potato famine. In 1847, the worst year of the Famine, Ireland EXPORTED more food than any other country in Europe. Respect for life, my red butt.
I would also say that civil responsibility is at an all-time high. It's finally actually illegal to kill people. Throughout the vast majority of Western Civilization, the code duello ruled in most western countries. And the odds of actually facing charges for killing a child, a non-white, your wife, or a poor person were very low. Racial violence, economic riots, and exploiting workers to death was the norm. So precisely what civil responsibility are you talking about?
As for global free markets, I don't even know what you're talking about. Trade is a moral issue?
It is true that the absolutes have changed, and may even be true that there are fewer of them. But I think I can live without absolutes like "Jews, non-whites, and women are inherently inferior to white Protestant men, and the laws shall be written to give them second- or third-class citizenship, if that." And if you deny that that was the primary defining absolute of the vast majority of western civilization, you are either a liar or delusional.
Or maybe you're just a terrified white man who cannot handle the world without built-in, legislated, legally enforced superior status for 1/4 or less of the population.
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I don't know what historians you are referring to. The Western Civilization in incipient form began at the full collapse of the Western Roman Empire, about 500 A.D. As an indentifiable and discrete cultural entity it started in the resurgence of the Latin church and its institutions in Europe (around 750), turning back the imminent incursion of Islam, and into full bloom in the High Middle Ages or Gothic period about 1000. The West is DEFINED by Christianity. ALL Civilizations are founded in religious fervour, and by their defining moral structure.
Civilizations cannot be defined by their worst attributes and failures, but by their best. And the West, in terms of its culture, arts, sciences, technologies, democratic institutions, idealism and governance has outshone all others.
Like all civilizations it has countervailing internal forces. In the West that has traditionally been paganism... the rigid pessimism, fatalism, materialism and reductive rationalism that we see in radical environmetalism, in free market capitalism, in all aspects of the culture of death such as abortion, homosexuality, collapse of the family and euthenasia of our day... all those find their roots in the the life denying gnostic, arian, cathar heresies as revolts against true Christian society.
They have for the first time in the history of the West gained ascendancy, in law, over the founding values.. and will inevitably proceed to violent persecution and repression of the faith.
Tearing children limb from limb in the womb, and describing that as a 'human right' is the sign of a society in a state of insanity, that has lost all confidence in its future and founding principles. It's supposed interest in the lives of the 'living' is just babble to hide the fatal contradictions in its logic. It exists in self annihilating, absurd state of sentiment and sophistry absent any core integrity.
Trade and the economy are absolutely moral issues. As are poverty and war, the direct result of the greed infested system of free market capitalism and its oligarchs that now rules the world, over all other goverments.. and have spawned an era of vicious rationalization.. that saw its start in the Malthusian philosophies fo classical 19th C. British Liberalism (the real Liberalism).. which led directly to the fascism and social Darwinism of the 20th C.
Enslaving most of the world in maquilladora Free Trade Zones, with murderous undermining of worker rights to organize and live more than subsistence existences.. all in interests of an ever diminishing number of 'haves', traders and financiers, by way of ruthlessly exploited 'have nots'... is a profoundly moral issue.. and one the will tear at underbelly of our society.
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Good. Now we're narrowing down the "Western Civilization" you think was wonderful. On one hand, you've brought up the earliest date to roughly 500 A.D., and on the other end, by your condemnation of the 20th century, we've moved the end date of Western Perfection to 1900 A.D.
If you recollect, your earlier statement was that things been going to heck in a handcart since 1970. So apparently "Western Civilization" was static between 1900 and 1970. And before that there wasn't no "redefining." You apparently don't consider the Magna Carta, the Renaissance, the spread of republicanism, the end of chattel slavery, or the suffrage of women as "redefining."
Or do you?
I'm honestly trying to figure out your argument here. As I've just demonstrated, "Western Civilization" has redefined itself in massive, overwhelming ways between 500 A.D. and 1900 A.D. But you ignore that, claiming that the "redefinition" has all occurred since 1970.
So, once again, what is your definition of pre-"redefinition" "Western Civilization?" Anglo-Saxon England? Renaissance Italy? 17th-century Germany? 19th-century Russia? Because your argument, as stated, presupposes that there was little or no "redefinition" of "Western Civilization" prior to 1970.
Actually i don't think i ever said Western Civilization was redefined in 1970. Just the contrary, the founding ethos of the West was established at its conception. It is integrally Christian and developed soon after the Christian Church and its beliefs was fully formalized, especially during the Nicene and Chalcedon Church Councils (300 - 500). It retained that character throughout its history.
What i did say was that there have always been countervailing forces in the West.. that were manifested in heretical movements. What has happened in 1970 is that the roles were reversed, the vast New Age movement has become the dominant cultural force, built upon the social framework of the West, but denying absolutely its moral tenets. Christianity is increasingly becoming a persecuted minority.
Western Civilization was built on the Latin Church. Once it came into full development the Oriental Churches broke off (about 1000), into Orthodox Christianity. Subsequently the West split into Protestant and Catholic expressions but both were fundamentally 'Western' in perspective.
The 'East', in fact the 'South' has not bought into the moral chaos that has ensued as the West has become post structural New Age entity. Which leaves Western Europe and North America in the clutches of cultural and economic death spiral... the rest of the world in some kind of stasis for now, waiting to pick at the corpse.
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I didn't say "in 1970," I said "since 1970." Reading comp much?
And how did I get 1970? You said "the last 45 years." 2015-45=1970. Arithmetic much?
And you still can't say what that "founding ethos" is. You babble about faith, science, law, literacy, democracy, blah blah blah. Well, your faith murdered scientists, or threatened to do so, for more of "Western Civilization" than not, literacy was rare and little pursued for most of it, law in the sense of the Anglo-Canadian common law has existed for only about half of it, and democracy and equality are pretty much brand-new, from the point of view of 500 A.D.
OK, so what you mean is you want a de facto right-wing Catholic theocracy. At least that's what I'm reading, since you seem constitutionally incapable of simply saying something flat out.
Read this, its somewhat difficult to condense into a single paragraph for forum brevity.
Amazon.com: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Second Series (14 volume set) (9781565631168): Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, Philip Schaff, Henry Wace: Books
SCOTUS will rule that SSM will be legal. States will not have any right to discriminate nor make laws denying SSM.
Roberts, the so called swing vote- he ruled in favor of ObamaCare under commerce - will rule on SSM as discrimination based upon sex.
News at 11.
Roberts, the so called swing vote- he ruled in favor of ObamaCare under commerce - will rule on SSM as discrimination based upon sex.
News at 11.
I don't think Roberts is the swing vote. The Chief Justice is a practicing Catholic as is expected to rule that marriage is an institution defined by state legislatures.. and comprises no inalienable 'right' by way of tradition or reason. It is Kennedy who is the swing vote, but has some history of supporting States rights.
All that said, i'm of the opinion that same sex marriage is an inevitability in the zeitgeist of the times. The whole New Age Cult that controls it is so riddled with absurdity and contradiction (of which homosexal legitimization is only one aspect)... that it will collapse of its own accord, taking Western civilization along with it.
We're in a state where the total failure of the civilizing impulse of the West is imminent.. in fact, upon us.
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