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Topic: Respect my ass (Read 45787 times)
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Shiver
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But this only means "power" in the sense of influencing a handful of issues that the majority of citizens and lobby forces really do not care about one way or the other.
You're greatly understating the seriousness of abortion to a point of absurdity. Stating that most people don't care about it is just flat out incorrect. You can ask pretty much any woman in the country about it; women tend to take abortion very seriously regardless of their stance on it. However, I only brought that up as an example of something the American religious right has sway over so I don't feel much inclined to argue over it any further.
Somewhat unrelated, but maybe the issue is more that the Supreme Court is overpowered? They are not elected by the people, they can stay as long as they want and they can "interpret" legislation to mean whatever they want or simply openly overwrite it as O'Connor did with that Affirmative Action Vs the 14 Ammendment case. It is like both a judicial and legislative branch in one.
So then anyone who managed to take the supreme court would own perhaps the most "powerful" branch of government. That does not make the religious right really that big of an issue on its own, it is just that whoever controls the SC would hold the cards in this area.
This is also a tangent, but since we seem to agree here I will wrap it up nicely. A Supreme Court Justice needs only 50 senators supporting them to pass. If the requirement was 60 or even 55, Samuel Alito would not be sitting on the bench right now. I suppose you could call that "imbalanced" because it seems a little too easy to set these guys up. I don't know about SCOTUS being the most powerful branch of government -- Bush has done a hell of a job making the Legislative branch look irrelevant over his term and has pretty much gotten away with every crazy thing he could come up with. Then again, the Supreme Court hasn't really picked too many fights with him except for that one time they looked in his general direction and said "hey guy, that torture crap you're doing is illegal".
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« Last Edit: May 10, 2007, 09:32:13 pm by Shiver »
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Deus Siddis
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Shiver
You're greatly understating the seriousness of abortion to a point of absurdity.
Oops sorry, that was a typo(s). I meant to say that there is no one way current concerning abortion. Even if you really are very pro choice, there is at least one person who is very pro life. So your effect is neutralized.
However since most people don't vote, they obviously don't care about the issue enough to go and spend an hour out of every two years on it. So I guess maybe the majority really doesn't care about abortion after all.
So what I am saying is I do not think the RR needs much power to push this issue back into the courts and reverse it to some degree, which they have not even been able to do over a number of decades now.
However, I only brought that up as an example of something the American religious right has sway over so I don't feel much inclined to argue over it any further.
You are making Abortion out to be a religious issue. You forget that there is a secular humanitarianism side (or whatever you would call it) to this. You could be mixing up a growing trend based on ancient middle eastern mythology with a growing trend based on people who rationally and/or emotionally believe abortion is murderous.
Now look at gay marriage. This was more of a religious issue, probably far fewer seculars were against this. And it succeeded. The RR was completely run over by this. This seems like a much clearer measure of their power or perhaps more accurately, lack thereof.
Then again, the Supreme Court hasn't really picked too many fights with him except for that one time they looked in his general direction and said "hey guy, that torture crap you're doing is illegal".
And yet this Supreme Court has not picked fights with him even before there were fewer "conservative" judges on the bench. Obviously they could have if they wanted to. Perhaps the Court has not changed as much as you feared? Perhaps further changes will not make radical differences as well?
I am not trying to start another tangent with this, it just ties into my thoughts that the liberal/conservative conflict does not go too much beyond the fringe citizens who bother to vote and the politicians who pay them lip service either through announcements or small/temporary legislative changes.
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Deus Siddis
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This is a very silly thing to say. The Supreme Court is only deliberating about emotionally charged, headline-making issues like abortion *maybe* 1% of their time on the bench. Care to guess what they do for that other 99%? That's right; they interpret "boring" stuff like tax laws and other economic legislation. Thus, whether they realize it or not (and regardless of whether they bother to vote or not), *everyone* who lives and/or works in the US tends to find the decisions that the Supreme Court makes important, at least on April 15th of every year.
No offense, but you obviously didn't read what you quoted or what I have been saying very carefully, because we are basically saying the same thing. As I have already said, these are a few issues, being able to edge out a small victory on them is not what I would call "power". The Supreme Court is annoyingly more powerful than at least the Legislative, but that is just comparing one division of politicians with another.
Also, I think you would find that the mundane CSPAN stuff is what happens in even the executive branch as well. However, those "boring" economic legislation issues that no one cares about are where most of stuff happens that has the greatest governmentally originating effect on common people's lives directly (as in effecting them economically rather than emotionally).
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Neonlare
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Quotation from Wikipedia article - Religion and Science
"Spiritual supplication and improvement of health. Surveys by Gallup, the National Opinion Research Centre and the Pew Organisation conclude that spiritually committed people are twice as likely to report being "very happy" than the least religiously committed people.[24] An analysis of over 200 social studies that "high religiousness predicts a rather lower risk of depression and drug abuse and fewer suicide attempts, and more reports of satisfaction with life and a sense of well-being"[25] and a review of 498 studies published in peer-reviewed journals concluded that a large majority of these studies showed a positive correlation between religious commitment and higher levels of perceived well-being and self-esteem, and lower levels of hypertension, depression and clinical delinquency,[26][27] Surveys suggest a strong link between faith and altruism.[28] Studies by Keith Ward show that overall religion is a positive contributor to mental health.[29] Michael Argyle and others claim that there is little or no evidence that religion ever causes mental disorders.[30]"
Yet before this, it also stated;
"Scientific studies have been done on religiosity as a social or psychological phenomenon. These include studies on the correlation between religiosity and intelligence (often IQ, but also other factors). A recent study on serotonin levels and religiosity[23] suggests a correlation between low serotonin levels and intense religious experiences."
But this brings forth this question too. Prove there isn't a God. No one in this existance can or can not prove what happens after death, if there is a divine being, etc etc. There have been instances where people have seen objects on the roof of a hospital after clinically dying, objects which were out of sight from the ground. It's termed an Out of Body Experience, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_experience and it does baffle science still. There's also the "String Theory" which can't be proven as of yet, but is supposed to govern the behavior of our universe, and other universes aswell (another theory, that there are multiple universes). Theories are just that, theories, they're thoughts on how things may or may not work, and will remain that way until someone can physically prove them, which then it will become Fact, so these (to a certain extent) fit in with the ideas of God and likewise in that they can't be proven yet.
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"would newton's law theory actually work if a Chmmr Avatar did a backwards pelvic thrust towards a planet and would this constitute an X=Y-0 in the part it ran straight into a Supox Blade and lasted long enough to survive?" - Elerium (as Valaggar)
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Neonlare
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If being happy is all what you want your life to be about then living in a fantasy world is the way to go. Using psychotropic drugs, dreaming, escapism through works of fiction, or suffering from a disorder like Down's syndrome can all help you be happy.
Scientific theories aren't used because they are (supposedly) true, but because they work, meaning they make testable predictions. "Some god did it" doesn't fall into that category.
String theory is (or "are", as there are many variants) a work in progress. I might agree that it's not a scientific theory (just yet).
1 Likewise, there's still no evidence that there isn't a God, besides, that's hardly a friendly thing to say about someone you don't actually know, is it?
2 Some God did it doesn't fall into that category, and I agree with that, however, it requires an alternate universe which is theoretical and henceforth have no physical evidence as of yet to make them fact.
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"would newton's law theory actually work if a Chmmr Avatar did a backwards pelvic thrust towards a planet and would this constitute an X=Y-0 in the part it ran straight into a Supox Blade and lasted long enough to survive?" - Elerium (as Valaggar)
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Novus
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But this brings forth this question too. Prove there isn't a God.
Impossible both ways if you define God to be omnipotent: whatever you observe, God could have produced it, so no observation can disprove His existence. Conversely, any sufficiently powerful being (e.g. one that can manipulate your observations arbitrarily) is indistinguishable from God.
No one in this existance can or can not prove what happens after death, if there is a divine being, etc etc. There have been instances where people have seen objects on the roof of a hospital after clinically dying, objects which were out of sight from the ground. It's termed an Out of Body Experience, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_experience and it does baffle science still.
There's also the "String Theory" which can't be proven as of yet, but is supposed to govern the behavior of our universe, and other universes aswell (another theory, that there are multiple universes).
Theories are just that, theories, they're thoughts on how things may or may not work, and will remain that way until someone can physically prove them, which then it will become Fact, so these (to a certain extent) fit in with the ideas of God and likewise in that they can't be proven yet.
Strictly speaking, science never proves anything; a theory is simply a model of how something works that has been tested, tells you something you didn't know (predicts) and has not been found to be wrong (yet). The closest you can get to the "Fact" you describe is an undisputed observation or theory, and someone may find something new that contradicts this. Within the realm of maths and logic, of course, absolute proofs are the norm.
String theory, however, is definitely a mess. The basic problem is that quantum mechanics works in some contexts (a lot of subatomic weirdness actually becomes predictable) and is blatantly wrong in others (big stuff like orbital mechanics), while general relativity works well in more or less the opposite contexts. In other words, both these theories are known to be wrong but complement each other pretty well. String theory is an attempt to produce a theory that pretty much reduces to the old two in the contexts where they work but works under more general circumstances (i.e. you can set up experiments where the old theories break down but string theory work). Unfortunately, there are dozens of ideas of how string theory should look like and, as you mention, no good ways to test it (i.e. at best, it doesn't predict anything the old theories didn't). Worst case: string theory turns out to be a dead end. Best case (and I'm not very optimistic about this especially in the short term): someone sorts out the mathematical stuff, puts together a nice and simple theory, shows how the old ones approximate the shiny new one and then find something happening that the new theory predicts and the old ones don't.
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Neonlare
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1 Likewise, there's still no evidence that there isn't a God, I'm not claiming that there definitely isn't a god. I can't prove that anymore than you can prove that there is one. But I will claim that it makes no sense to pick one unprovable, unfalsifiable theory and let that determine how you lead your life. besides, that's hardly a friendly thing to say about someone you don't actually know, is it? What are you refering to? What am I saying about whom? 2 Some God did it doesn't fall into that category, and I agree with that, however, it requires an alternate universe which is theoretical and henceforth have no physical evidence as of yet to make them fact. What is your point?
1, I agree that we shouldn't 100% govern our actions based on the ideas of Religion. Because it's written by Man, it's not some bearded man on a cloud recording his own views, but an author who has written down a story which is supposed to carry a message throughout, I personally govern my life by goodwill, not what books tell me.
For 2, "If being happy is all what you want your life to be about then living in a fantasy world is the way to go. Using psychotropic drugs, dreaming, escapism through works of fiction, or suffering from a disorder like Down's syndrome can all helpyou be happy."
You're implying that I am looking for a way out, despite the fact you don't know my beliefs, who I am, etc. Also, don't ever use a Mental Disability as something that can make you "Happy." My mother works at a special needs school as a teaching assistant, and it is not true happiness, what you have just said there is sans politeness to people who do suffer from such disabilities, yes it does make them seem "optimistic" but let me tell you, they can also be wraught with sadness aswell. Also, there are a fair few high functioning Down's Syndrome sufferers, and if they were to read that, they would be very insulted (As I know a fair few as friends).
3 My point is that to have faith in a theory that can't be proven can be seen as much folly as being religious, because neither can be proved hence forth neither should be followed without taking it with a pinch of salt.
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"would newton's law theory actually work if a Chmmr Avatar did a backwards pelvic thrust towards a planet and would this constitute an X=Y-0 in the part it ran straight into a Supox Blade and lasted long enough to survive?" - Elerium (as Valaggar)
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