You Say You Want to Get Along--I don't believe You, Any of You

If you want the world on the same page, all of us pulling in the same direction, all of us heading for the same goal and getting along, then you want evidence to be the only authority and the source of all facts, so we all get closer to a universal truth, on the same--page so to speak.

The barrier to this is ideologies: baseless claims proffered as foundational truths. Religion and politics are full to over flowing with these, in fact, religion and conservatism are anthologies of these baseless ideologies.

A Confutation of Creationism

An irrefutable confutation of creationism and its modernized mockup, with the serial number filed off, intelligent [sic] design.

Name one thing that isn't evolving before your eyes this very instant. Everything is evolving all the time. Everything around you is changing, either developing or deteriorating. Every new cell, seed, and egg is slightly different from the host. Evolution is not only an observable fact; it is an inescapable fact. And, what is more important, we can see it working over near time, through the fossil record, and over extended time, through telescopes that pick up light cast many billions of years ago. Some would argue from stubborn ignorance that this has little to do with the evolution eliminating the validity of their primitive dogma and demonstrating the insanity of their beliefs. Their biblically fictionalized description of life. The narrative with mud-man and rib-woman even evolved into a scenario where seeds in the male were sewn in the fertile soil of a female. 

What is life? Creationists claim that their god-fraud created life without even knowing what life is, so what is life? Anti-choice activists falsely claim life begins at conception when both the male and female components are alive during their respective stages long beforehand. In fact, life has been continuous for more than four billion years. So, what is life? By any definition of life that I can think of, viruses, like many forms of cells, are alive. Some may want to believe the difference between alive and mere autonomous growth can be exemplified by the distinctive characteristics of viruses and quasicrystals, respectively. But can it? What quasicrystals, RNA, DNA, viruses, and cells as the basic units of life shows us is that these distinctions are arbitrarily delineated in this respect, which generates numerous inconsistencies, pseudo-paradoxes, and irrationally rationalized exceptions. Furthermore, note the similarities between viruses, which need the media within a cell to reproduce whereas humans need the media within this planetary system's atmosphere for the same reason. So, what is life? What is the distinction, if there is one, between our Earth's ecosystem (as an organism in symbiotic stasis), the balance of our solar system, the galaxy, and our body as a system of cells and organs in symbiotic balance? At the scale of microbiological entities, there is no distinction between biotic chemistry and abiotic chemistry except for the proliferation of carbon compounds in the former.

Life is an autonomous system generated by replicating, organizing, and reproducing complex constructs with simple biotic and abiotic material constructs in symbiotic balance. Furthermore, because the god-fraud would, if true, insinuate the authoritarian imposition of structure upon the natural balance of everything in the universe, one would find discontinuity and imbalance, at least, but chaos definitely, across the microbial universe if anything could exist at all. This is because the imposition of structure by any entity would have that entity's perspective, designs, goals, and available resources with all the limitations inherent in such a system wrecking the balanced development through reiterating perpetual feedback loops of mutually beneficial and eventually balanced interaction. And in an existing system, further creation of something new would require the destruction of the existing material system with pollution, excess, and waste adding to the chaos and imbalance. Therefore, since balance exists and the imposition of any form of control would destroy the mutual beneficence of perpetually balancing interactions, gods not only cannot and do not exist according to previous proofs, they could not interfere and by extension creationism cannot be true.

A demonstration of these points is as simple as witnessing the desolation caused by civilization and the healing facilitated by the pause in civilization's capitalistic exploitation of the environment. 

INGERSOLL'S VOW

Few have expressed their feelings of freedom from that dungeon, which is "revealed" religion, better than Robert G. Ingersoll. I only ask that while you read this courageous vow, you remember that Col. Ingersoll lived in the Free Thought era that would produce another great thinker who would evince the comparatively superior importance of imagination as a trail blazer for those pursuing knowledge, actual knowledge, based on objective facts; and this individual was concerned with actual science "the effort to get to the truth has to precede all other efforts", not the epistemological pretentiousness of faith, not the beliefs, traditions, or fictions inculcated from youth, when he stated:


"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited; imagination encircles the world."—Albert Einstein

INGERSOLL'S VOW

Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) was a famous attorney, served as attorney  general of Illinois, and orator whose brilliant lectures drew thousands. As a political figure, he came close to achieving the Republican party's nomination for governor of Illinois, but prejudice and intolerance denied him the opportunity because he was ostracized as an atheist by religious revivalists driven by capitalists and the bigoted reaction of Confederates to Reconstruction.

When I became convinced that the universe is natural—that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world—not even in infinite space.

I was free—free to think, to express my thoughts—free to live to my own ideal—free to use all my faculties, all my senses—free to spread imagination's wings—free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope—free to judge and determine for myself—free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past—free from popes and priests—free from all the "called" and "set apart"—free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies—free from the fear of eternal pain—free from the winged monsters of the night—free from devils, ghosts, and gods.

For the first time, I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought—no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings—no chains for my limbs—no lashes for my back—no fires for my flesh—no master's frown or threat—no following another's steps—no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain—for the freedom of labor and thought—to those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs—to those whose flesh was scarred and torn—to those by fire consumed—to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll—so much for that lie about atheists in foxholes—here expresses better than most, the feeling of shedding those shackles, or should I say mind vice (vise works well, too), but it is a memetic virus, a cultural meme that spreads like an STD, debilitates and deranges the thinking, and is as addictive as the worst of drugs. And, like all addictive substances, it serves only the purposes of the pusher while sapping the life from the user. From a time long before I realized just how different I was from most others, for I have always been an atheist, I know the tragedy that is the change in once bright minds that comes from inculcation into these superstitions. From almost the day the addiction takes hold, that all too familiar dishonesty predominates. 

Imagine what humanity could have achieved, the suffering that could have been eliminated, if only our thoughts were free to soar without the shackles of superstition, without the limits of tradition, and without the retrogressive reaction of conservatism anchoring our institutions, or dragging us all back, to some primitive past.

Reject religion. Reject tradition. Reject conservatism. Reject any and every attempt by authority to impose structure upon society. Our society can only grow to attain and maintain balance and stability when our social structure is built through mutually supportive interests, cooperative and collaborative interactions, and global beneficence. 

In a country quickly sinking into the depths of Nazism, becoming a failed democracy,  with nationalistic vultures circling overhead and quickening the country's demise where they can, the facts were never more important. So, why do so many in this country reject facts? Why do so many follow fascist frauds like lost sheep? Besides being a white supremacist, neo-nazi, narcissist, fascist, capitalist, corporatist, themselves, perhaps religious conservatives fear freedom. To understand this psychological state try reading Escape from Freedom, by Erich Fromm. I found it helpful.

Thanks for reading.

Sailing Into the Future Requires Weighing Anchors to the Past

If you want human progress toward world peace, then you must stop thinking like the establishment wants you to think. First, and this should be obvious, the establishment wants war and conflict to the degree humanity tolerates it because they are the ones who profit from it. Do not tolerate it at all and it will not exist at all. But, ignore it, and it will never go away. Apathy is the friend of the establishment. Second, it is the current thinking that is war and conflict-centric. Patriotism, nationalism, statism, and the means of manipulation through enforced subjection and peer pressure to genuflect before symbols like a flag and icons like some national anthem is how a mindless majority tyrannizes a minority of thinkers. Forcing respect for symbols of ideologies is only one step from forcing respect for the ideology and the ideologue, so no one should submit to it. Forcing respect for symbols of authority like flags of countries and governments, iconolatry, or patriotism is worse. Never forget that we are seldom the people the Exploiter Class is talking about when they are discussing benefits but we are almost always the people who must give to preserve the "rights we hold so dear," which is, of course, a sham.

What is loyalty but subservience? What is obedience but servility? What is conformity but compliance, and what is complacency but surrender?

A country is a tool of oppression and respect for the flag is the symbol of your compliance when neither should be idolized. Government is something we should be moving away from as our intellect and individuality develop. But any government of the people by the people needs to emphasize the power of the people who should be strong in the face of iconolatry and manipulation by power hoarders until we eliminate ideological loyalty and oligarchical power.

If you want to progress toward a better society, you will have to give up old world views that have kept us fighting and supporting oppressive regimes for security's sake. As soon as you give up security concepts, you will find that authoritarians are rarely anything but self-serving, what you think you own actually owns you, that community and sometimes family exist to force conformity that will repress innovation, retard all progress, and insist on the status quo until retrogressive acts are used to reestablish obsolete old world orders that serve the self-serving. Then one day you awake to realize that security concepts like strong leadership, consumer-centric ideas, and community are a trap and that death looks like your only escape until it hits you that even religious constructs are nothing more than a collection of security concepts.

The Hiddenness Argument

The Hiddenness Argument, for the nonexistence of God, as quoted from John L. Schellenberg's 1993 book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason.

 

The Hiddenness Argument

1. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationships with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God are in a position to participate in such a relationship, that is, able to do so just by trying to.
2. No one can be in a position to participate in such relationship without believing that God exists.
3. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationships with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists (from 1 and 2).
4. It is not the case that all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationships with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists: there is non-resistant nonbelief; "God is Hidden."
5. It is not the case that there is a perfectly loving God (from 3 and 4).
6. If God exists, God is perfectly loving.
7. It is not the case that God exists (from 5 and 6).

Beachbum's Mountain View

My Response to a Theist's Six Questions for Atheists

I ran across this ministry blog and attempted to answer these six questions they asked of us atheistic types but it seems the comments were disabled. So, I'll answer them here. From: Six Questions to Ask an Atheist (Questions are inset and italicized.)

1.    If there is no God, “the big questions” remain unanswered, so how do we answer the following questions: Why is there something rather than nothing?  This question was asked by Aristotle and Leibniz alike – albeit with differing answers.  But it is an historic concern.  Why is there conscious, intelligent life on this planet, and is there any meaning to this life?  If there is meaning, what kind of meaning and how is it found?  Does human history lead anywhere, or is it all in vain since death is merely the end?  How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier?  If these concepts are merely social constructions, or human opinions, whose opinion does one trust in determining what is good or bad, right or wrong?  If you are content within atheism, what circumstances would serve to make you open to other answers?

My response to 1. Why do you assume nothing ever existed? What makes you think nothing is the default state? The sum total of energies (mass+energy+(-energies)) in the universe still equals zero. The question presumes a theistic creation narrative which is false. But the answer comes with our understanding that from simpler forms comes complexity. Evolution is the development of current states from an accumulation of less complex forms in, for instance, the physical and biological realms. Human history progresses away from the dictatorial, the primitive, and we become more intelligent and humane as our collective understanding develops. It is this societal comprehension of well-being, of justice, of what it is to suffer that gives our morality a foundation. This consensus is what progresses and is the property that transcends the individual life which must end so new life can come into existence and continue the progression.

2.    If we reject the existence of God, we are left with a crisis of meaning, so why don’t we see more atheists like Jean Paul Sartre, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or Michel Foucault?  These three philosophers, who also embraced atheism, recognized that in the absence of God, there was no transcendent meaning beyond one’s own self-interests, pleasures, or tastes.  The crisis of atheistic meaninglessness is depicted in Sartre’s book Nausea.  Without God, there is a crisis of meaning, and these three thinkers, among others, show us a world of just stuff, thrown out into space and time, going nowhere, meaning nothing.

My response A2: Crisis of meaning? This mantra, repeated by the religiose ad nauseam, is actually a misdirection, a diversion. With a deity your life has no meaning. You are a drone manipulated for its plan. You are a pawn. With only this life, one's life has immeasurable value, meaning is one's family, friends, purpose is procreation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Morality is what propagates well-being. With a deity this is all arbitrary and meaningless.

3.    When people have embraced atheism, the historical results can be horrific, as in the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it?  In other words, what set of actions are consistent with particular belief commitments?  It could be argued, that these behaviors – of the regimes in question - are more consistent with the implications of atheism.  Though, I'm thankful that many of the atheists I know do not live the implications of these beliefs out for themselves like others did!  It could be argued that the socio-political ideologies could very well be the outworking of a particular set of beliefs – beliefs that posited the ideal state as an atheistic one.

My response A3: Again, this oft repeated falsehood is religious propaganda. Stalin was educated in seminary school. They never mention that Mother Teresa was also an atheist according to her own correspondence. Stalin's problem with the Russian Orthodox Church was political as it backed the Czars in both the revolution and counter revolution. Beliefs were irrelevant. Stalin re-opened the churches during WW2 even though he saw religion as a means of manipulation of the masses for ill effect. Marx wrote that religion would fall under the weight of its own dogma. So, it wouldn't need to be abolished. Mao had his country's traditional belief system Christianity was seen as an outside intrusion. The same goes for Pol Pot. None of these tyrants killed in the name of atheism. In fact, in Stalin's case most of the death was caused by two Christian sources,a) Hitler was a Catholic fundamentalist who invaded in WW2, and b) the Lysinko Famine was caused by a creationist's view of biology, a Lamarckian evolution by acquired traits; that is, pseudo-science, not science. 

4.    If there is no God, the problems of evil and suffering are in no way solved, so where is the hope of redemption, or meaning for those who suffer?  Suffering is just as tragic, if not more so, without God because there is no hope of ultimate justice, or of the suffering being rendered meaningful or transcendent, redemptive or redeemable.  It might be true that there is no God to blame now, but neither is there a God to reach out to for strength, transcendent meaning, or comfort.  Why would we seek the alleviation of suffering without objective morality grounded in a God of justice?

My response A4: Another diversion, another misdirected view as suffering of all life forms would make any omniscient deity complicit in the premeditated act of causing the suffering in the first place. After the fact, the religionist's view turns life into a long wait for revenge which makes no sense. Suffering, as horrible as it is, for all life forms, at least makes sense in the natural view. Also, in the naturalist's view it is up to us to relieve, even remove, suffering which is why we have medicine, ethics that evolve as we come to understand what causes suffering, civil and animal rights, and the whole concept of humanitarian aid. It was the ubiquitous suffering that caused Mother Teresa to be an atheist.

5.    If there is no God, we lose the very standard by which we critique religions and religious people, so whose opinion matters most?  Whose voice will be heard?  Whose tastes or preferences will be honored?  In the long run, human tastes and opinions have no more weight than we give them, and who are we to give them meaning anyway?  Who is to say that lying, or cheating or adultery or child molestation are wrong –really wrong?  Where do those standards come from?  Sure, our societies might make these things “illegal” and impose penalties or consequences for things that are not socially acceptable, but human cultures have at various times legally or socially disapproved of everything from believing in God to believing the world revolves around the sun; from slavery, to interracial marriage, from polygamy to monogamy.  Human taste, opinion law and culture are hardly dependable arbiters of Truth.

My response A5: We have no god. We merely have those who claim to represent, and be in contact with, a supernatural absolute authority. There is never any evidence provided to support this claim, but they continue to make it, laughably.

Our morality progresses with our intellect; that is, our ethics evolve in parallel with our understanding of suffering, well-being, justice, and what propagates these in the pursuit of life's betterment. Never again will slavery be promoted, as it was by Popes Alexander VI and Nicholas V, as good because the indigenous peoples are "ungodly," or not under the command of the Christian deity. In short, we have much better metrics for morality than those stagnated in the Bronze Age and dictated by misogynistic, desert dwelling goat herders who claimed their deity mandated everything from forced abortion (NU 5:11-31) to burning one's daughter for fornicating (LE 21:9), from human sacrifice (LE 27:29, NU 31:1-40, JG 12:31-39) to cannibalism (LE 26:29). Society has progressed beyond these atrocious dictates which show that this claimed absolute authority is no more than the command to submit to the imaginings of egotistical patriarchs and primitive tribesmen.

6.    If there is no God, we don’t make sense, so how do we explain human longings and desire for the transcendent?  How do we even explain human questions for meaning and purpose, or inner thoughts like, why do I feel unfulfilled or empty?  Why do we hunger for the spiritual, and how do we explain these longings if nothing can exist beyond the material world?

My response A6: Another meaningless mantra that evinces an evidentiarily vacuous falsehood. Humans have a desire to know, and when they can't know they will speculate. It's called curiosity. When we don't know some humans replace their ignorance with words like supernatural, spiritual, or miracle; they replace confusion with a longing for a father figure who has all the answers; they replace the fear of dying with concepts like the transcendent which only works with the cognizant (i.e. ideas, logic, etc.), thereby making their God, their existence; and their dream of an afterlife an idealized concept originating as a function of some mind. This both defers responsibility to an intelligent agency and puts that agency deep into an Orphic Abyss out of the reach of science and naturalism; only, this isn't the deity of the Bible which is written to have needed time (GE 1) to build the world (not the universe, but reality) while moving across the face of the waters, had sons that mated with human daughters (GE 6:1-4), and ate lunch with Abram (GE 18). We give our life meaning. Our families give our life meaning. Defending our life, liberties, and well-being against tyrannical oppressors claiming irreproachable absolute authority from divined knowledge of some supernatural entity gives our lives meaning when submitting to their imagined authority would turn us all into subjugated automatons.

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Now, I have a question for you. Why hasn't, in the more than 2 millennia of the Abrahamic faiths dominating mankind, the subject of these beliefs brought heaven to Earth, eliminated suffering among life forms, or even performed anything, at all, unless one counts the most absolutely heinous atrocities ever committed against humankind at the hands of those claiming its divine authority?

Christianity, in particular, has an atrocious history, with Islam coming up hard and fast. It wasn't until the advent of this monotheistic belief system that beliefs could be considered wrong as pagan beliefs in many gods were inclusive, not exclusionary. It also wasn't until Theodosius I mandated Christ belief throughout the Roman Empire and killed off millions who didn't convert from pagan beliefs that the concept of a holy war was born. I don't think I want anything to do with your meaning of ...well, actually, your view only has meaning after death now that I think about it — I want nothing to do with that.

Beachbum's Mountain View

The Continuing Battle Against Christian Supremacist Propaganda

In the only two places in the Constitution where religion is discussed (first line in the First Amendment and Para.3 of Article VI), the first eliminates the validation (establishment) religion receives from the Government and the second then removes religion's influence over authority imbued upon the Offices of Government.

Article VI Paragraph 3:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

First line of the First Amendment:

Amendment 1 - Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment [in the sense of validation] of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

In the Declaration of Independence which is not a governing document but an announcement, a declaration, to foreign nations of this nation's proclaimed sovereignty. A deity is mentioned twice. Both of which are in reference to the deistic deity prevalent in the Enlightenment era. The first equates Natures God to and parallels this deity's "Laws" with the Laws of Nature. Definitely not the Christian Old Testament deity of the Protestant English which was an important point for the Founding Fathers to make. As is apparent in the following:

"...and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,..."

Giving top billing to the Laws of Nature is definitely a stroke of genius, but calling this deity "Natures God" as opposed to the author's God, or Europe's God, or Almighty God, or even the Lord God is rock solid evidence that it isn't the Christian God, but more closely related to Aristotle's Prime Mover or some Deistic Creator force. Which brings us to the second mention of a deity.

"...that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,..."

Recalling that nowhere in the Christian Bible are unalienable Rights mentioned, let alone elucidated, I would conclude that this Creator is none other than Nature's God from the opening paragraph. And, considering that Thomas Jefferson had been the key attorney in the court ruling holding that England's Common Law was not derived from scripture, it is obvious that this scripture is not the origin of the Rights he, as the author, had in mind. Again, showing that this Nation is in no way a Christian Nation.

But, their are two key phrases in the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution that more than make this quite clear, yet they are seldom discussed, and the first, from the Declaration of Independence, is: 

"That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,..."

Governments as institutions of men, meaning not divinely ordained, but deriving their powers of authority from the consent of the people is in stark contrast to that garnered from the absolute divine authority of the Christian deity. The same deity which had ordained, sanctioned, so many despots of Europe. 

Then the last phrase is from the Preamble of The Constitution and it is the clearest of all:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

"We the People ...to... secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves ... do ordain and establish..."

Nowhere in this document is the idea of a Christian deity in evidence. In fact, the word God is never used in the whole of the Constitution. It is, We the People who possess the authority from which our Government derives its power. It is We the People who "ordain and establish" the authority of the Constitution to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves. It is not ordained by some deity. This concept is a crowning achievement of the Enlightenment Era. And the reason our Founding Fathers are considered Giants of the Age of Enlightenment.

Which makes Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli 1797:  

"As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion..."

as unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams, seem almost redundant. This does show conclusively that these United States owe no quarter to those claiming the sanctity of religions are to be in any sense respected as part of our secular legislation. For they are in effect attempting to take the authority of We the People away from the US.

Beachbum's Mountain View

Debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument of William Lane Craig

I found this video at the great site known as ExChristian.net (please give them a visit), then with my usual vigor I investigated all its claims and links I possibly could to my own delight. I found much of the documentation accessible, and I am still finding interesting connections.


Kodos to SkydivePhil

This video shows, with dramatic clarity, the gaping holes in the Kalam Cosmological Argument. By evidencing and evincing the contradictions, theistic claims contradicted by the evidence, and apologetic claims contradicted by the scientists themselves this argument is laid to rest.

If you follow along with Alan Guth's dialog you will here mention "pocket universes" and if his writing is consistent with my understanding of what he is saying here (which I have no doubt it will be) I will show documented agreement with my accumulation of expansion concept caused by multiple black hole bursts as each one releases the matter as it becomes too weak to hold the singularity of compressed matter due to Hawking Radiation, the dissipation of the energy needed to contain matter in that state of compression. Have you ever asked yourself why the cosmos has Black Holes? Could it be that it is merely the balance of matter and energy that necessitates their existence? That is, too much matter in too close a proximity and gravity does the rest, well that is until the energy (gravity in this case) equals the atomic energy of the accumulation of electrons in  the singularity that are being pulled around the nucleus of the atom much like the stator windings being pulled around the anchored armature of a electric motor. This is the point where distance between the electron and the nucleus is proportional  to the energy of the orbit and bang massive instantaneous expansion. Oh, this also works in consideration of string theory as the vibrating strings unfold the membrane in a similar massive expansion; I would think.

I will be updating this post as I read the documentation and books that I have discovered in this video.

A Note to Self-Proclaimed Pro-Life Proponents

Only in America can one be pro-draft, pro-war, pro-drone strikes, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-guns, pro-torture, pro-landmines, pro-death-penalty, and still call yourself pro-life.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are some of the inalienable rights which the Founding Fathers decided we were all entitled. So, there is a balance to be attained with life and happiness in the elimination of suffering. Suffering in the form of pain, poverty, starvation, serfdom, and slavery. And if one honestly stood with limited government, they would vote to keep government out of the private decisions of a mother trying to make a very difficult choice concerning her baby's well-being at a point of no suffering: 1st trimester of embryonic development. They, would vote to enable the government to defend against corporatists practices and policy manipulation that produces an overpopulation of unprotected consumers wherein competition for a living wage would be usurped by self preservation and the immediate need to survive. Why else would one think killers (see above) like Conservative Republicans give a crap about abortion; a flooded consumer and labor market suits their needs and goals. Might those professing to be pro-life actually be anti-choice?

Now even a limited government still needs to be strong enough to ensure that someone's rights and views stop where another's rights start. Since "We the People" are our government many prefer a stronger government that protects our rights from strong greed motivated capitalist interests, strong international oligarchies like churches, and strong national & international corporate interests, etc. —these are all the enemies within. The afore mentioned Inalienable Rights are why regulations that protect the populace from the poisonous profit driven shortcuts regarding safety, environmental protection, financial gaming, etc. are in place.

Yes, if you're thinking this would make Social Conservatives, the Religiose, T-Partiers, and Libertarians mindless tools of corporate ambitions to install their own servitude (not to mention poisoning), you're getting warm. Opinion manipulation through rhetorical ploys that are emotionally charged appeals to the baser reactions to xenophobia and mob mentality is the oldest form of politics known to man.

Further, many would suspect most cultural conservatives don't even know what life is, if, as we also suspect, they have a clergy's eye view of it. The time table resulting from Roe v. Wade is tied to consciousness, that is, the ability to suffer.

Lastly, some seem to think that liberals don't defend the free market, when in fact, we do. The free market of ideas that Thomas Jefferson idealized and the free market competition that improves the qualities of commerce. But, the free market that libertarians and capitalists rale on about is subordinate to the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that We the People are entitled.

Now, I have a question for you dear reader: Does anyone think the German people thought for a minute that the fascist they were putting into power, the man supported by the Catholic, Protestant (and eventually the Central) churches, a man that hated all the same people they hated (ie. homosexuals, Gypsies, Jews, outsiders, etc.), was the Hitler we know today, or do you think they thought he was just a good Christian, and a patriotic German?

The reason I ask is because we have a portion of the population that idealizes Austrian economics (Hitler's home country and an economic foundation of fascism), a party (Republicans, & same portion of the population) that uses religio-political concepts as evinced by the Nazi state thinker, Carl Schmitt, and that same party is obviously protective (if not outright sock-puppets) of the same international corporatists (the political foundation of fascism). Then, as the judicial practitioners of Nazi Germany later found out, it is the lack of protection of a fellow citizen's civil rights that permits, and not only through compounding, the atrocities that we now know decimated Europe. Maybe, conservatives should think harder about imposing their opinion on the the very people who's fate they will share.