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riends whom i love are anti abortion but have no qualms about killing our enemies even those who are pregnant thus killing their unborn babies as well we don t even spend a lot of time lamenting the destruction we just sigh and shrug it off as collateral damage and part of the price of war bull shrugging it off is hypocrisy such killings are tragic and if we took it seriously we d put a stop to it but they re our enemies and despite jesus command to love them we believe it s ok to kill them including their unborn babies that my friends is indeed hypocrisy again i m pro life period but i also value the lives of those would be mothers who are faced with tremendously difficult choices yes i want them to take those choices seriously and not casually but i also want anti abortionists to take those choices seriously unfortunately most of the anti abortionist folk are anti abortion but also anti involvement they want to pass a law against abortion but don t want to do much to help these women face the consequences of carrying this child i think if we re going to do away with abortion we need involvement the children produced have to be cared for and raised and in quality homes if we re not willing to do that by means of personal involvement it seems rather calloused and indeed casual to be screaming that we need to outlaw abortion further i don t think we would eliminate abortion by passing laws against it abortions occurred even before they were legal and oftentimes they were fatal or severely injurious to the women we do not want to have the black market abortions revived but besides that the abortions would continue why because so many americans have value systems that allow for it so the solution is not legislation but to seek to change the value system but folks it seems to me impossible to teach the value of life when we so easily take it and justify it in so many other areas of our civil existence the truth is that very few even of the republicans who rail against abortion are really pro life want to end abortion stop the wars stop invading countries as a preemptive strike against something we fear they might do in the future stop capital punishment pass stricter gun laws and actually enforce them pull the plug on the weapons industry start putting all that weapons money we spend as a nation each year into anti poverty programs that result in real living wage jobs for people and the list could go on and on only by valuing life as a society can we convey that valuing life means we should do away with abortion go figure see being pro life means much more than simply being anti abortion the equation of those two is a major logic flaw in the conservative position posted by chip at 10 24 am no comments tuesday december 06 2011 top 10 liberal hypocrisies considered 1b definitions of liberal and conservative one quick final comment about the labels liberal and conservative they are useless utterly worthless they really say nothing about the one being labeled except he she is to the right left of the one labeling in other words all they do is point out that the labeler believes that the one being labeled conservative seems to be to the right of the labeler or that the one being labeled liberal is to the left of the labeler they say more about the labeler than the labeled and as pointed out above the labels can be very misleading and since they are typically used polemically their function is mostly to stir up prejudice rather than to clarify arguments or positions here s why i added this note i ve asserted my conservatism before and some of my politically conservative friends have ignored it and simply responded by saying that they see nothing conservative in my positions go figure of course i don t care i really don t i don t care where i fall on the political spectrum or whether i m to someone else s right or left it s meaningless why because i m a christian that is my one allegiance both in my life and in my political moral or philosophical arguments not to mention theological so when politicians tout their conservative credentials i just have to laugh it s nothing more than a marketing ploy an emotional appeal that they hope will garner support from people who actually vote it s philosophically untenable and in fact dead wrong if one cares to examine the claim posted by chip at 8 04 am 6 comments sunday december 04 2011 top 10 liberal hypocrisies considered 1 definitions of liberal and conservative i m sometimes told that i m a lightning rod i do seem to be able to create discussion ex nihilo more or less i ve posted bible verses that started arguments for crying out loud so i do have my critics and now and then some of them like to send me pieces that they think will convert me from my evil liberal ways to good christian conservatism i read these and i think about them the one i m going to consider here in a series of posts was actually sent to me by my wife who over the years has started to consider me a little less crazy than she used to do or so i think the truth is that i ve become more lefty over the years she saw this posted on fb a few times so for some strange reason decided i should see it now i don t know the author but the piece is posted on a site called the patriot update a free press for the conservative revolution you can read it all in one piece there if you like i m going to post it in smaller chunks as i consider each of its alleged discoveries of hypocrisy in order this is the first installment some initial clarification is in order first i don t consider myself a liberal at all i know a lot of people see me as one but i ve written about this before philosophically i m a conservative i m going to attempt a brief explanation here what does it mean to be a conservative it means to conserve something to believe that conserving this thing is important and to work to do so when we use the term conservative we re usually talking about certain traditional values that we think are important like marriage life honesty etc conservative values why do we think these things are important can we prove that they are somehow better than their opposites can we prove that honesty for instance is better than dishonesty how would we do that well we would likely try to show all the trouble that dishonesty can get one into and that makes sense to me except that our world often rewards dishonesty and those who are impeccably honest sometimes get well shafted while it would be nice to think that honesty always gets rewarded and that dishonest folks always get theirs in the end we know it just doesn t happen that way in our world some dishonest folks right this moment are living lives of great luxury and laughing at all us honest suckers if you re smart enough and ruthless enough you can as nietzsche said we should create your own moral standards and leave the honesty to those stupid enough to buy into it and of course we can all think of situations in which we would lie situations like in wwii era holland when some of the dutch were hiding their jewish neighbors if the nazis came and knocked on your door and asked you are you hiding jews in your house would you lie or tell the truth i ll tell you if i had been hiding jews in my house i would have lied to protect them no doubt so why do we continue to think that honesty is better than its opposite we might simply claim that everyone just knows that it is along with the philosopher immanuel kant problem if everyone just knew that why don t they do it clearly some people think there is a better way in the end as christians and this is the point of view from which i operate we might have to fall back on a theological explanation either that god or scripture has told us this is what we should do or that we are told to be imitators of god or of jesus and this is they way god jesus is in other words when other attempts at justification of honesty have failed we re going to fall back on our christian faith and heritage tradition why because we think this is the best way to live why do we think that it depends on how you define best way to live as christians we define that by means of the life of jesus of nazareth the stories of whom have been passed down in our scriptures so we re going to be relying on the christian tradition that produced our scriptures and we have to admit that not everyone accepts our scripture as indeed scripture other religions have their own scriptures and this means that we think that the christian definition of honesty is worth preserving simply because we think it is the best definition available we could ask why here again but pretty soon you realize we re just like a dog chasing its tail and this chase for a final answer can go on interminably if we let it i do think we ll finally come down to comparing jesus to other great religious teachers and i don t think we should be afraid of that but even then we re going to have to argue that jesus life represents the best way of life for human beings and again we re back to trying to define what we mean by that and we have another argument on our hands my solution is to admit that we have a tradition that we think we can argue for but it s still a tradition in reality all thinking takes place within traditions that s a broader point i won t try to demonstrate here so i believe in conserving the christian tradition that means i m a conservative now liberalism the liberal point of view was created in and along with the enlightenment and was indeed a rejection of tradition to be enlightened according to kant in his little book what is enlightenment was to reject traditional morality in favor of thinking for oneself more specifically to think for oneself entailed a rejection of the traditional sources for morality such as family society church and even the bible in fact kant later wrote a book called religion within the bounds of reason alone in which he tried to set christianity on a purely rational basis in my opinion it was a colossal failure so as several contemporary thinkers have pointed out america is by definition a nation of liberals we all with only a few exceptions like myself believe that we have rejected tradition which we haven t but that s another argument in favor of thinking for ourselves we believe that morality can be determined in a purely rational manner but even plato and aristotle believed that you could not have morality without divine input so even people like rush limbaugh and bill o reilly are liberals they do not believe in conserving certain values because they are traditional but they argue for them on what they think is a purely rational basis further they think that anyone who is really rational will see the truth of their positions which is another of the myths of the enlightenment i e that their version of rationality is indeed universal rationality shared by all rational people to be sure there are in america different kinds of liberals there are left leaning liberals like al gore and bill clinton and i really can t put barack obama in this category and right leaning liberals like limbaugh and the gop and the tea partiers etc but they re all liberals and i m a conservative so if you want to argue with me at some point you ll have to dispute my claims that certain positions deserve the label christian in other words you ll have to argue that my positions are not christian rather than that they might be bad economic or foreign policy etc posted by chip at 2 40 pm 4 comments wednesday november 02 2011 the 99 recently i ve seen this pic posted several times on facebook i know those who have posted this believe that they are calling attention to the fact that here in america we are better off at least economically than are many other nations of the world no doubt about that also i think they are probably trying to say quit whining another sentiment with which i can agree at least in part here s the part that bugs me first of all reminding us that there are others in the world who suffer deeply does not change anything about our situation in the united states we ve still been duped cheated and otherwise mugged by the banking industry that created the housing bubble that burst and thus began this crisis and yes it is a crisis for many many of our fellow americans there are indeed many over 9 of us in america who are out of work and don t know how they re going to continue to provide life s basic needs for themselves and or their families is the top part of the photo merely a prophecy of what may become of those pictured in the bottom part second let s not forget that the crisis that began with american banks did not stay in america it quickly spread around the globe every geographical area of our globe except probably for the arctic and antarctic presumably has come under an economic downswing characterized in many places as a recession so if the top photo was taken recently then those folks are also suffering because of the world wide economic downturn in other words the 99 of the bottom photo are not separate from the 99 of the top photo those in the occupy movement are not whining because they don t want to work because they want a free ride or a handout they are protesting an unjust system that has been rigged against everyone who is not an insider to the kind of financial trading pirating that has characterized our banking industry so the starving people at the top and the occupy people at the bottom are all part of the 99 which in fact probably means that 99 needs to be expanded into 99 999999 or something like that as i walked into a pizza place a couple of weeks ago i heard a lady on her cellphone telling the person on the other end of her call that the protesters should quit whining and go get a second job can we please just admit that it s just not that easy for many people that there are real difficulties supporting a family in today s economy that jobs that pay enough to support a family just aren t that readily available that a second job for some is an impossibility until we can get them a decent first job certainly i can t speak for everyone who has turned out for one of the occupy protests but many of them seem to understand that this is not just an american issue that it is indeed global and that they are protesting not just for their own benefit but for the benefit of all those around the world who are suffering from economic disadvantage the system is broken and it needs to be fixed posted by chip at 2 52 pm 1 comment monday june 13 2011 obamacare good stuff from henry chu head of the la times london bureau on british reaction to the health care debate in both america and in great britain http www latimes com health la fg britain health care 20110613 0 1237142 story in short the british don t mind a little tinkering with their national health service but the idea of privatizing it is abhorrent to them and politicians are stumbling all over themselves in the rush ...