Beck is crazy, yes. He doesn't even take his own investment advice. But there is inadequate proof that he is a racist, only insensitive to cultural characteristics identified with black people.

I think you could get an Atheist elected under the right conditions. If there was a time of great peril, with everyone's careers and families on the line, and an Atheist was the only one qualified for the task, I have no doubt they would be elected.

Personal convictions are too expensive in adversity.

I can speak a little German. I still want to choke them for not ridding their language of "Sie" though. They only need "Du." We got rid of "Thy" and "Thou", so why can't they get rid of "Sie?"

Listos,

1. Why are you bringing up the philosophical theory of Idealism when it neither applies to what I am saying, and you have denied that its traditional arch rival, Empiricism, is relevant?

2. Your relativist counter arguments are nonsense. Relativism violates the law of non-contradiction, and is therefore illogical. A and ~A can not both be true or false at the same time. Using relativism to counter my arguments is frankly bordering on territory that denies the possibility of intelligent debate.

The judgments about Hitler's measurable accomplishments and whether he is good or bad are separate types of judgments. One is empirically testable, and the other is a value judgment. It is your choice to be awed by his economic and military accomplishments and ignore the human cost in your value judgments.

However, you are right that tyrants tend to be judged by the results of their actions rather than the justifications for their actions. But the justifications for their actions largely make their actions possible. It took some serious intellectual conditioning to convince people that Jewish people ought to be treated the way they were. If people believe that tyranny is justified, then tyranny can thrive.

3. I think we both agree that claims treating a belief as absolute truth at least deserve great scrutiny. But when it comes to morality, I am a Skeptic and not a Relativist. Moral Skepticism is at least consistent with Logic, and asserts that moral knowledge is impossible. And I dismiss the psychological punishments for engaging in anti social activities present in most of the human population as morality, but rather as evolutionary adaptions of the psyche that improve the reproductive success of the human species. Morals historically have a prerequisite of being transcendental and absolute principles that ought to be obeyed, and the only way to be consistent with reason is to reject morality for being unsubstantiated.

I reject ideology for similar reasons. Though ideologies do not necessarily depend on a religion or moral system, they also treat their beliefs as transcendental and absolute. I will give the pro-choice, "women have a right to choose" version as an example. They believe that women have the right to choose whether they have an abortion or not. The "right" they claim they have is implied as being transcendental, it is beyond experience, and it is absolute.

Getting away from ideology and entering a rational outlook requires us to throw away these beliefs that are commonly taken as absolute and transcendental. In the case of abortion, for example, we have to ask ourselves what our values are. Do we value the economic well being of our country? If so, then permitting abortion to prevent poverty and crime is a sensible idea.

4. As far as my use of self-evident and inalienable, I now realize it was a poor choice of words to convey my point. America's founders no doubt thought they were being rational with their Lockean arguments, but the fact is that self-evident and inalienable rights imply rights that are transcendental and absolute, which are not empirically testable.

> Khaz Modan wrote:

> Yet if it was a church no one would have been offended Justinian.>

Probably not. But that doesn't make building a church there rational.

<Non-existent entity? While the entity of Islam exists and it needs a place to gather worshipers, these American Muslims are paying taxes, no places of worship, many worshipers go abroad, taking their taxes with them plus any companies they run/own.>

Religious institutions are tax exempt in the United Stated of America. The individuals, except for the very wealthy mosque elite you would be creating, would be paying those taxes anyway.

<Why is non western barbarian in your eyes? That shows a narrow minded view point that borders on the scary.>

Japan is civilized and not Western. In the case of the Middle East, they were backward and introduced to a civilized culture. For a while they were making progress, but then a conservative cultural movement set back them back. Though it is possible for them to have created a civilized culture of their own that is not distinctly western, the fact is a great number of them turned their backs on civilized values and re-embraced their savage past. They did it once before when they abandoned the progress they were making in the middle ages.

However, I am mostly speaking about the less developed areas. The Middle East has impressive cities with civilized cultures, but beyond those cities it isn't always so civilized.

Our enemies are those barbarians in the Middle East who have not been enlightened by reason. It is irrational for us to condone the construction of a place of worship for a non-existent entity, and which will yield us less of a return on our investment than a building intended for business.

The US State Department has funded the Imam who plans to build the mosque to travel to the middle east to collect donations. And Obama has angered the public by vaguely supporting it.

A lot of silly Liberals come up with arguments that a fetus or embryo is not human until it is born. Or they argue that it is not a human being until the third trimester, where it looks like a human being. But as for a small cell in a woman's womb, zomg it has no similarity to a human being, so who cares? Such arguments are arbitrary, and a human being should not be defined by his/her similarity to other human beings. That kind of reasoning is barbaric and is a motivating force behind genocide.

When defining a human being, we need something less arbitrary. My opinion is that evolution and genetics is the answer. Among biologists, they don't argue that a pregnant bonobo is not pregnant with a bonobo. Hey kids, it's not a bonobo yet until it pops out! Although there are exceptions, like mules from a donkey and a horse, we can 99% of the time say that the offspring of humans carry the genetic instructions of a homo sapiens sapiens. So lets stop with the arbitrary crap and look at the genotype. And even if something whacko happened, like an alien pregnancy, we could still tell that the offspring was not entirely human with genetic testing.

You're not making any sense, Chris. You make points, but they are stated such that any obvious point you make is contradicted by obvious facts, and the other things you say make what seems to be your point nebulous.

The best I can come up with is that your point is that the powerful include the mafia, and that it is a mistake to simply submit to them. I thought it was obvious, by what I said previously, that there is nothing stopping you or a group of people with common interests from fighting. I never implied "don't fight." Instead, I implied that no solution human beings can come up with is perfect and will result in a moral and just world. Humans are selfish, and humans with power get their way. That is reality.

As a result, it is pointless to argue for a perfect political solution, because it is not perfect. Humans with power do not always have the same interests, and you can not expect to push your solution in without appealing to those interests. Sadly, this is how wars and revolutions start. And hopefully we don't have someone with a monopoly of power who can get their way without opposition.

What I'm saying is that it's setting a dangerous precedent to change the first 10.