(11-11-2016 10:06 AM)H.U.S.T.L.E. Wrote: I think this thread is already a microcosm of the biggest issue we're facing in our country right now - it's telling that neither side of the debate can do much besides insult the other side.
Civil discourse is basically nonexistent on the Internet and in most of the media from both sides, and this thread isn't doing anything to change that perception.
As someone who voted for Hillary, I'd be more than willing to engage in a healthy debate, but the little time I've been thumbing through this board doesn't fill me with confidence that we'd get very far.
The way to help the poor and downtrodden is just
not to get more government involved and less personal responsibility. You have to have the individual be more responsible and get the government out of their way. There is nothing wrong with charity, for the donor or the recipient. But when government tries to take over the job of charity and change voluntary redistribution and giving into involuntary redistribution and taking, you will always, always make problems worse and build resentments on both sides that lead to violence and destruction, as we have been and are now seeing again.
Please help me understand why the left sees more and bigger government as the solution when the New Deal, Great Society and Obamacare, to just start with a few, have been such utter and total failures? Why can't they even open their minds a little and admit that maybe personal and family responsibility is a good thing and does not need to be constantly assaulted and destroyed by the government?
If atheist and altrernative philosophies are so superior at helping the poor and downtrodden, then why are there no Atheist leper colonies staffed by atheist volunteers? Why no wikken leper colonies staffed by witches and warlocks to help the most poor and vulnerable? Why no atheist or wikken (or muslim, for that matter) food banks, meals on wheels, Leper colonies, etc... You know, all the evil things those ignorant and uncaring greedy Christians do? You know who runs the leper colonies in musilim lands? Christians. Why is that? Make fun of them all you want, yes some are extreme and take the bible literally and not as an allegorical, poetic, hyperbolic and sometimes historical text, but even those actually are the ones doing a lot of the good in the world, in the very places the left should be helping out the most.
If everyone is supposed to be equal, and everyone is supposed to be treated fairly and get a place at the table for their voice to be heard,l. then like it or not, that includes the Christians, all of them, from all different denominations and backgrounds and varying degrees of understanding and sophistication, who are mainly the actual ones who founded this country and are responsible for the privileges you now enjoy, take for granted and abuse.
The harsh reality and truth is that there could be no America without some understanding of God, however you wish to describe Him. The government the left worships does not, never has, and never will derive its power from itself.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator (not by the government itself and not by the people themselves, or the culture, or the media, or the PC left, or sharia law) with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit (but never the guarantee) of happiness." --Thomas Jefferson
This is the fundamental and underlying disconnect between those on the left and the right. Ironic it was Jefferson who wrote those words. Apparently, Ben Franklin wrote much of the Declaration first, based upon other trendy-at-the-time ideas he'd been studying, and Jefferson heavily edited and organized Franklin's earlier draftworks.
