You can't have it both ways either. Both are arguably freedom of speech issues. I hate what the leaders of that mosque are doing in New York, but if you research my previous posts on the subject in another thread, you'll see that I also acknowledge their
constitutional right to do what they are doing.
You, on the other hand, don't seem to agree with the First Amendment - particularly those parts of it which say:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The interesting thing about it, to me anyway, is that atheism is simply a belief system which cannot be empirically proven any more than can theist religious faiths. But, the First Amendment also protects the right of an atheist to practice atheism just like any other religion. And yet, practitioners of the atheism religion seem to be bent on doing whatever they can to prevent others from being able to practice
their religions in the public square - kind of like the more militant aspects of Sharia law - under the misguided notion that they have some kind of constitutional right to not be offended by the religious practices of others.... again, much like militant Sharia.
Another thing that I've observed is that atheists simply cannot understand how millions of people see the existence of a God to be
just as self-evident as an atheist sees the absence of any God.
The type of constitutional government we have cannot survive in a predominantly atheist world,
unless the atheists are uniquely tolerant of people who hold competing religious faiths. The reason is this: All of our rights as envisioned by the Founders were thought to be
God-given. Even when they spoke of
natural rights, it was in the context of what they termed "Nature's God." However, if you profess atheism, then you don't believe that our rights are sourced from something bigger than ourselves, and thus our rights must source from the mind of man. If you believe that they source from the mind of man then you believe that they are not inviolable, because truth is all relative, and we are free to refuse to recognize one another's God-given rights (which find their source in Nature's God), and hence free to abuse one another in any way we choose.... because it's all good.
The problem of course is that, since atheists do not see the existence of a deity as self-evident, and in fact place their faith in the believe that the absence of any deity is self-evident, they tend to see people of theist faith as being somehow duped, subject to some variation of foolishness, blindness, and bondage. Conversely, they see themselves as free-thinkers who are intellectually more vigorous than their counterparts. And one of the problems with people who think they are intellectually more vigorous than anyone else (my mother is a prime example of this) is that they feel their intellectual superiority entitles them to condescend to those whom they believe to be their intellectual inferiors.
In support of this, I offer your previous post, #2 at the top of this thread:
SmoothFox wrote:Just another nitwit pushing the envelope.
I thought these kind of threads are against forum rules.
Arrogance on display, and it ain't pretty.
