Steer Clear Of The U S Message Board

[MooseTrax]

I've been a member there for more than a year and their mods are bible thumping right wing assholes. I wasn't banned...I resigned

[BlueToTheBone]

1. Welcome to DU

We are left leaning liberals who want a better and more just society for all.

[patrice]

2. DU's pretty tolerant. Everything from centeri-ish to full-on far Left here, with most in

the left-leaning spectrum.

Personally, I think the determining difference is the personal value one places on freedom and one of the reasons that I personally identify as a center-Left Liberal politically and as a Socialist economically is the priority that I place upon freedom, my own and others'. To me that's what I dislike most about bible-thumpers and their various assorted "Libertarian" associates and other Right -ies: lots and lots of lip-service to freedom, but when it comes down to the truth, they are slavers and will punish you if you don't tow their line.

- And -

Welcome to DU, MooseTrax. Enjoy!

[MooseTrax]

3. Thanks For That

I'm a veteran of this life. I was born in 1934 during the depression on a west TN dirt farm. My Mom was a dyed in the wool Republican and consequently, since my Dad was basically an Independent and seldom even discussed politics I began to vote for one which I cast in 1956 for Ike. I voted Republican for thirty years but must admit that after I cast the one at the beginning of Reagan's second term I wished I hadn't. I saw him and Bush41 quadruple the national debt from less than $1 trillion to more than $4 trillion.

The two terms by Bill Clinton created 22 million new jobs and with the slightly higher tax rates not only balanced the annual budget but generated nearly $400 billion of surplus.

When Bush43 began he cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans twice...in 2001 and again in 2003. Then he started two wars, one totally by choice, funded them by emergency spending bills(off budget) and proceeded to double the national debt from about $5.7 trillion to nearly $12 trillion. The first year of Obama's administration the interest on the Reagan-Bushes debt was about half a trillion dollars, $451 billion. Unlike the debt the interest must be paid or the nation goes into default. In other words about a trillion and a half dollars of the debt which has accumulated under Obama went to pay annual interest on the Reagan-Bushes debt.

I'll never vote Republican again if I live to 100. They used to stand for balanced budgets, small government and individual rights. Today they are in the pockets of corporations and the wealthy.

Now...about the religion:

I read the book of Mormon before I was 20 years old. I have read the bible from cover to cover and have read the new testament no less than ten times. I was baptized in front of nearly 1000 people on a Sunday morning in 1956. I was in church at least three times a week. We tithed our gross, I taught Sunday school for young adults, I went to nearby towns and gave testimony before congregations in several small churches, I worked with the RA boys, I was a member of the Brotherhood, the building committee and went with others for visitation on Tuesdays. I had most of the new testament committed to memory and could quote it chapter and verse. When time came for me to be drafted the preacher called me into his study and offered to help me get ordained and become a minister. The reason...to keep me from having to leave the church. Guess what...I went to the army.

Churches are small businesses. They get everything tax free. I was going to a church of god in my home town when we moved to the lake after I retired. When the preacher there realized we weren't attending church he couldn't find our place so he went to the County Sheriff's office and they told him how to find us. When I told him I had a lot of doubts and wasn't going to do anything for a while he turned us over to a church here and then I had to get rid of them. It's money. That's all it is...money. I think the first dollar one of them takes from some old person's social security check or from some widow with little to her name should make them guilty of a misdemeanor and on the second offense I think they should be sent up.

That load of malarky has been passed down from one generation to the next for thousands of years and the people who wrote the new testament...the Jews don't even believe it themselves. When I was in grammer school we started the day with the pledge and the lord's prayer and the teachers assigned each student a bible verse to memorize on Mondays and we recited them back to the class on Fridays. Talk about brainwashing. I'm not just a little perturbed about it I'm on a mission. I have posted on no less than a dozen religious boards or forums and they dread to see me coming. Main reason...I know what's in the bible and I quote it and tell them it's bullshit. I find it next to impossible that intelligent people still believe that a most powerful, caring god turned the only keys to the kingdom over to ignorant, superstitious sheep herders who believed in witchcraft and thought that the earth was flat and never showed himself again. I think if there is a god and he did that he must have one helluva sense of humor.

The story about virgin birth, son of god, savior of the world, crucifiction, resurrection etc. was told dozens of times in N. Africa and the middle east thousands of years before the Jewish version. Read about Horus the Egyptian sun god. It's a matter of historical record. and was recorded 3500 years before Jesus allegedly roamed around riding his jackass and telling bare faced lies...if he was even really there.

Well...that's about all I care to tell about my 77 years here, at least in this thread and at this time. More later.

[Whisp]

5. welcome, Moose.

Interesting stuff.
Just in case you got some of that info about religion off of Zeigeist, that doesn't fly here and you may not want to mention that or especially link to it, if so.

If not, sorry, just trying to give you something welcome wagony

W

[MooseTrax]

8. Not Me!

I didn't get that stuff from anywhere except my memory. If I post something which is from a web site I will post the URL.

Like I said...when I was in my 20's I could quote most of the new testament and provide chapter and verse. Most of the bible thumpers don't know ten verses.

[patrice]

6. I see the repetition of that story-pattern throughout history as evidence of its relevance, though

not necessarily in the manner in which that more or less authentic awareness has been exploited by a BIG business known as religion.

Think Jungian archetypes here about all of those similar stories. They're inherited stimulus response patterns that function too explain human experience.

I think The Jesus Seminar has it pretty close to right and I'm quite comfortable rationally speaking with the possibility that an itinerant teacher, who emphasized how freedom is necessary to love, got in trouble with the authorities of the time: his church and his state, who then colluded to kill him, because he was a liberator and both of those organizations need slaves, not people who can CHOOSE to cooperate/obey or choose not to, which is what freedom actually is, i.e. the ability to do both/either/neither or something else entirely, at will, DESPITE the consequences. Dangerous concept, that.

I was raised conservative Catholic, Mass 6 days a week, Catholic grade school & high school, Latin, daily family prayers on our knees, spontaneous rosaries, memorizing the Baltimore Catechism, Gregorian Chant, and despite what a lot of uninformed people say, LOTS of Bible reading.

I still consider myself a Catholic, once Baptized, always Baptized, but I no longer go to church. I miss the Mass, but disagree on a number of issues that you have probably heard in the news and for which to me the whoring of my church after seats on the Supreme Court resulted in its political support for the invasion & occupation of an INNOCENT and sovereign nation known as Iraq, for which I will never forgive them.

I'm still Catholic, because I go to the most universal church of all, the one with no walls.

[MooseTrax]

9. A Long Time Ago

.........they used to say that a priest could produce a catholic forever if he could have a child till he or she was 10 years old.

[patrice]

11. I am named after a fire-breathing labor-populist preaching priest who lead a parish in

south-east Kansas in the late 40s.

My high school was administered by a priest who was a golden-gloves champion in college and of slightly lesser rank in the church because his under-graduate degree was in philosophy instead of divinity, but he was one of my earliest intellectual turn-ons, as were a couple of nuns who taught literature and history. My first husband was schooled by Jesuits and received an excellent education.

Many Catholics like us were from the time of Vatican II in the Catholic Church, high emphasis was placed upon ecumenism. It happens also that we were children of the '60s so our reactions to the Vietnam War were a hallmark of our coming of age. Also the Civil Rights Act and the whole struggle for Civil Rights was part of our education. Ecumenism and the moral conundrums posed by the Vietnam War and by the models of civil disobedience seen in the Civil Rights struggle lead to an emphasis upon individual moral authority and personal responsibility to understand the truth and base one's behaviors upon that understanding and to accept the consequences of your own independent moral authority and behavioral decisions, accept positive or negative consequences, upon yourself. That's freedom, to choose to conform or to choose not to conform and to accept whatever the consequences of your own choices are. That's how I can no longer have that much to do with the organized form of the Catholic Church and still believe some essential aspects of their creed (though I do encounter very seriously and honestly committed Catholics hard at work frequently in social justice actions and peace demonstrations). Compare that understanding of freedom to the cash-and-carry salvation, don't worry be happy, all rewards, no need to understand anything, market model that drives what calls itself "Christianity" now. That's an essential difference.

A lot of us from that period also read the Bhagavad Gita, Lao Tzu, Alan Watts, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and even Ayn Rand, so we weren't limited by our religious roots. I come from a big poor family, but asking questions and understanding were encouraged. It was something that we SHARED. We are just from a time when reading and thinking about things, and knowing stuff wasn't looked down on the way it is now.

[DavidDvorkin]

4. What's the U S Message Board?

[themaguffin]

7. Yeah, I'm confused, what the hell is it???

[MooseTrax]

10. I Love It!!!

Add to all that incarcerating the pricks who took this country down the tubes between 1981 and 2009. Bill Clinton bailed their asses out by the end of his two terms and the nutty bastards didn't have enough sense to stop funding low tax rates for the wealthy and controling their urges to fight unnecessary wars 10,000 miles from home.

[backscatter712]

12. Sounds like they need to be trolled... n/t

[Son of Gob]

13. Seems like a free for all

What exactly do they moderate over there?