It would shut down the argument, if they were arguing in good faith.
Conservatives don’t care about facts, reality, or hypocrisy. They want to win because they are good.
This is critical, you aren’t arguing with a Conservative’s ideas, because they don’t believe in ideas or values or causes. Conservatives believe in themselves and therefore whatever they say, whatever they do, whatever they want, it’s all righteous. If they have facts wrong, fuck the facts. If they commit crimes, the laws are wrong. Existence is the only justification they need to support whatever is most beneficial to themselves at any given moment in time. I am, therefore I am right.
And we got six of these motherfuckers on the SCOTUS.
If they commit crimes, the laws are wrong.
To be fair, this reasoning actually holds up for a very large proportion of our laws.
While true, if someone they didn’t like did the exact thing they did and received the same punishment, they would still see their own selves as unjustly punished and the other person justly punished.
See: The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion
Perfectly stated! Incredibly frustrating to read, but you’re 100% right.
The alt right playbook is worth a watch, but you have fully summed it up in a concise way that is an easy tl;dr.
“In not interested in reality” really sums up their entire position, doesn’t it?
We have to use their own weapon against them: We go all in on Originalism! Make Originalism Good Again!
I’m a former dipshit extreme conservative and I can tell you I used to argue against this point specifically. I even wrote a long blog post against it once. Mind you, they weren’t very good arguments, but I’m reiterating what @themeatbridge said: you’re assuming good faith. That’s a very bad assumption. Presume instead you’re dealing with a virulent narcissist who will never admit to being wrong about anything.
What shook you out of that mindset?
It was a long, gradual process, but psilocybin was what made it all click, seemingly all at once, a few years back during a trip to Amsterdam. Cliche, I know.
In that it made you feel differently and made you recognize that you care about people differently, or in that it made you face all of the cognitive dissonance that came from your previous views?
I was raised extremely religious (considered becoming a pastor like many other family members), but also loved science, reading, learning. So I had a ton of doubts, but “deconstruction” is extremely difficult and involves losing…well…everything in a sense. Family, friends, your understanding of the world, much of your internal monologue, even my career in this particular instance. I probably would’ve gotten there in a few years without psilocybin. But after taking mushrooms, I realized all my doubts were correct. It all just clicked. All the years of loose threads tied together in an, “Oh, SHIT.” moment.
Ugh, I’m sorry you has to go through that. Was it at least freeing, in a way?
Thank you, it’s kind. Absolutely. I feel fully myself now the past five years or so. Lost 85 pounds, found better partners, changed my career path, etc. It sucks that my family is still in it, but they’re trying, at least, which isn’t nothing.
Fellow “deconstructed” here. Everything you described in terms of losing everything matches what happened to me. I’m a Bible scholar, to boot 😅 Now working on a data science education, while working as a full stack developer.
Atheopaganism really helped me rebuild my “spirituality” (generally defined as the self-work of inner experience, a form of positive mental health) along naturalistic lines, without needing to appeal to supernature or lose any impulse for scientific exploration (quite the opposite).
“I’m a Christian. But I’m not going to be a dick about it”
-George Washington
I can’t stand it when religious zealots say “we’re a christian nation!” No, no we’re not, the very first line of the first law to be written in the US was that we can’t have a state-religion
Who would have thought that a willingness to pick and choose which lines of your guiding text you’ll follow could have a downside? Easy enough to say god had his fingers crossed when saying all the bad stuff in the (King James Version (edition of 1769)) Bible and that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights only applies to the wrong ones.
They’ve seen this argument. It gets brought up regularly by people who advocate church-state separation. They don’t care, because it doesn’t fit their worldview.
I think the standard apologetic is to just ignore the argument for a few days, and then repeat it in the next thread. The other standard one is, I think, to say this was just something they said in order to get the treaty signed, but that they didn’t believe.
Many of the founders were religiously indifferent, at least when it comes to the many flavors of Protestantism that were going around. Most were ardent anti-Catholics and favored religion that reflected a rough understanding of their Biblical values, considering it to be one of the ways to establish a moral people, something necessary for a free government. Personally, many of the founders preferred a watch-setter god, holding higher truth to be supported by natural law, with scripture being a support for the natural law. With so many different versions of Christianity floating around, it was easy for them to skirt the idea of being a Christian nation. After all, what does that mean when most Christians do not agree among themselves about what is Christianity? It was much easier to consider themselves Christian people under a liberal system of government.
What is funny is that this never even came up in negotiations. It got added to the treaty as it was being voted on by the Senate.
It’s hard to imagine the power the church had at that time. These days, churches wield their flocks as voting blocks and still affect politics, but they have to do it through the same political process as anyone else. In the time of the founders, the church was a standalone moral authority who could approve / ban anyone or anything with a wave of the hand. They’re still scary, but not as scary anymore THANK GOD ;D
I can’t stand it when religious zealots say “we’re a christian nation!” No, no we’re not, the very first line of the first law to be written in the US was that we can’t have a state-religion
The fact us hairless apes can howl into the wind at absolute bullshit just cements the fact that WE are the clueless motherfuckers on the planet.
While this statement is true, I would guess those very same men would look abhorrently at any atheist and declare they don’t belong in the country. Up until the 1960s it was widely held that the 1st Amendment gave you freedom OF religion, you still had to pick one.
I’m pretty sure Jefferson, Madison, and Adams would not fit this bill. They often praised atheists.
Jefferson tried to rewrite the Bible to make it make sense. I don’t think he was a big believer.
He didn’t rewrite it. He got two copies of the Bible and a straight razor, and cut out all the parts he couldn’t believe (things like Jesus’ miracles).
It is more important to look at the context in which the Founding Fathers dealt with religion compared to today.
There were several very bloody wars in recent European memory that centered on religion, including the Thirty Years War. These weren’t wars between Christianity and other religions, but within Christianity.
Also, at this time, several American states maintained official state churches; the First Amendment only applied to the Federal Government. Even if you were religious at the time, a secular federal government was seen as necessary to secure the republic; it would not be politically feasible to push all state churches into one church just like it would not be politically feasible to merge different states together as one unitary political unit.
Politically, an atheist would be less of a political danger to a Quaker than a Catholic would be, and everyone understood that.
