DigitalShadow

Seriously though, I was mostly talking about my co-workers who seem to think Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh are prophets. It's rather scary.

The comment was tongue-in-cheek based on my observations of living in Utah (yes, not every sarcastic post I make is referring to you :)).

Apparently they obey if the authority figures have a conservative viewpoint, otherwise they look for every fault they can find and question everything.

1. I doubt this is true, it's just another urban legend / email forward that has been around for ages. 2. That is a stupid thing for a professor to do, and no professor other than the caricature of a professor in this joke would do such a thing. I've never met an "avowed atheist" and apparently they threw in the ACLU part to further establish him as the villain to conservatives. 3. The marine should be arrested for assault. Was he on a mission from God, or just a jerk? How can you tell? Backing up commands from what you believe to be God with violence is usually frowned on. At least we don't usually take too kindly to it when it happens to us in the form of terrorism.

2. Next Generation and 2. Wrath of Khan

Yes, you're absolutely right. My opinions must be meaningless and not even worth addressing because I am not LDS. Carry on, sorry to have bothered you.

I must confess... after seeing the title, my first thought was "I doubt it." But I'm glad I was wrong :)

You didn't say "Maybe they could move to the UK and be happy", you said "Maybe we could send them all to you" which implies against their will just so you don't have to put up with them here. It shows. That's all well and good that your church leaders told you it is wrong, and you are completely free to not personally engage in a same sex marriage since you find it wrong, but last I checked, the majority of Maine is not LDS and really couldn't care less what your church leaders have to say about it. As you can probably tell by now, I am not LDS and do not plan to have a temple interview. I respect your right to believe whatever you want is right or wrong for you based on what your church leaders say, but you are trying to extend your version of morality to people who don't share your beliefs and prevent them from doing things that don't even affect you just because you find it wrong. They don't find it sinful and they are not harming anyone. If you really want to deny them any compassion because they are continuing with a "sin" that they don't even think is wrong then go ahead, but it hardly sounds Christ-like to me.

I do believe you are correct, MOE.

Yes, it essentially would be a different person in my opinion. I also don't really believe we have a soul (as nice of a thought as it would be) primarily because of things like this.

It's not as if Obama canceled the whole day all together as the title of this thread appears to imply. From what I can tell, he simply isn't holding a public ceremony at the white house like his predecessor did.

I think it's interesting the things you find interesting.

The implication I got was that Churchmouse was wondering if he was praying to Satan.

You've already made up your mind so there's not much point in discussing it. You can believe what you want as well and I'll leave it at that.

There have been disturbed people since the beginning of mankind, we just get to hear about them from all over the world now because of communication technology.

If there is a God and a day of judgment, I think people would be judged on how close they were to what they believed in their heart to be right (which could be different from what they justified to themselves was right at the time). I don't think it would be fair or logical to judge everyone based on the strict standards of any one religion though because no matter what religion you look at it, there are hundred of millions of people who have not even heard of it. It seems rather arbitrary to judge people based on rules they've never heard of and I can't imagine a fair or loving God doing that, and certainly not a God I would want to worship if that were the case.

I definitely think that the scaring of citizens was far worse than the spending, but the shifting of blame is just politics and human nature. I see crap like that every day at my workplace. People are out for blood right now and want to jump on any little mistake, it would be political suicide for someone to take full responsibility and no one is willing to fall on their sword. Not that it's an excuse for not doing the right thing, but it's just not surprising to me.

I think it was a stupid stunt and a waste of money. But in the grand scheme of stupid stunts and wastes of money by political figures, I don't think it particularly stands out or is even noteworthy other than the fact that it scared the crap out of a bunch of New Yorkers thinking it was another attack.

I can't imagine how tough your situation is right now, but I will say that any guy shallow enough to think of you as "damaged goods" because of your past, probably wouldn't make a very good husband anyway. I think if anything this would help filter out the unworthy candidates that wouldn't stick with you through thick and thin.

Maybe it's just a rise in apathy?

I find it funny that so many people look down on the "occult" but have no problem accepting supernatural events as long as they are a part of their own religion. Anything supernatural outside of their religious beliefs is obviously ridiculous though

Probably one of the few things I agree with you completely about is that hate crime laws are stupid. I have nothing against gay people though, I think this is equally stupid as any hate crime law against any minority group.

My dad worked as a government scientist for years and while there weren't official quotas, he had seen female scientists hired instead of better qualified men simply to keep people from accusing them of discrimination.

Maybe this strain has been around for a long time in the US, we just dismissed it as a really bad case of the flu since not many people would even go to the doctor over the flu and most doctors would just tell you to get some rest if you had flu symptoms, so how would we even know? I think the only reason there are any "confirmed" cases is because of all this paranoia about the swine flu and now anyone with flu symptoms wants to get tested.

Perhaps the government has mandated minimum female/male ratio quotas so people don't cry discrimination?