The GOP Has Been HIJACKED!

[radind]

(05-23-2016, 11:02 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-23-2016, 03:22 PM)radind Wrote:

(05-23-2016, 09:05 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: I think the problem here is that in calling all secular people "the secular camp" you are ultimately setting yourself up for failure.  The simple fact is that there isn't this monolithic structure called "the secular camp".  In order to be secular one merely needs to desire everyone to have religious freedom--which is a cultural libertarian perspective anyway.

In order to achieve that religious freedom the state MUST be secular, if the state is not, let us say the First Amendment was tossed out today and Congress made Catholicism the state religion that would go against the freedoms of all Protestants, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Christians, Jews of all stripes, Muslims of all stripes and any other person of religions not Catholicism or completely lacking a religion (such as myself).

Conversely let us say that the First Amendment was tossed out today and Congress prohibited all religions...That impinges on the liberty of everyone who chooses to have a religion.

No one who is secular wants to abolish first amendment except the Regressive Left.  They also have problems with people saying whatever they want too.  Are they secular?  I'd argue no.  They wish to impose their ideology on everyone else which is against the core tenant of being secular--namely that in order for everyone to have freedom of religious consciousness the state cannot have a role in religious consciousness.  

They are in fact the opposite of Cultural Libertarianism (it is also called Classical Liberalism--what passes for liberalism these days is really democratic socialism [an oxymoron I know] or some bastardized version of Marxism).  As it is that Classical Liberalism which is the very foundation of the Republic, a Republic they seek to destroy.

They have converted the Democratic Party into a party of authoritarianism and must therefore be destroyed for the good of the Republic.  As such the milquetoast, quasi-conservatism of the GOP Establishment had to be broken and Trump has managed that.  Now it is time to take that cultural war to the voting booth because I am starting to believe that once he is elected they will try to destroy the country, much like the South tried to destroy the country following Lincoln's election.

 
I don't see any option since the 'secular group' is now the majority( most Democrats plus some Republicans), and acting  no differently from another religion.
We still need separation of church and state, but the state has been taken over by a 'religion'. The 'secular group' can and will deny this, but the operational effect is the same.
If the majority still favored true religious freedom, I would be less concerned. In my opinion , there are ~ 10% with a Biblical worldview. I don't think that all of  the remaining 90% are in the 'secular camp', but I do think that there is a working majority in the 'secular camp'.

More like 40% in the Biblical worldview camp; mostly evangelicals but also active Catholics. Others include more liberal protestant Christians or inactive Christians. Secularists as you define it is more like the 10% you claim for Biblical believers; maybe less. But the Enlightenment and Darwinian types of "secularists" have influence beyond their numbers, because the modern default scientific worldview among educated people is basically their "creation." So they do influence the views of the 60% that are not the extreme Bible believers.

Some opinion polls today also show high levels of support for what I would call more new age or middle-ground views, such as a combination of evolution and creation or something in between; etc.

I confess it continues to baffle me that you consider today's "secularists" to be "against religious liberty." Permission for abortion disagrees with the views of many strict Christians, but that is not stifling religious liberty. Prohibitions on discrimination based on religion (such as refusing to serve gay people) is also not "against religious liberty," despite the slogans of deceivers like Ted Cruz.

I have not seen any polls on how the secular group breaks down. My assessment is based on the operational effects that appears to be a working majority. The 10% with a Biblical worldview is based on the barna.org polls. ( I would have guessed this to be ~ 20%).

This very long article addresses some of the issues that have been bothering me.
 

Quote:http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/...ristianity

HOW THE PUBLIC SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRISTIANITY IS CHANGING

… "All notions of justice presuppose ontology and anthropology, and so a revolution in fundamental anthropology will invariably transform the meaning and content of justice and bring about its own morality. We are beginning to feel the force of this transformation in civil society and the political order. Court decisions invalidating traditional marriage law fall from the sky like rain. The regulatory state and ubiquitous new global media throw their ever increasing weight behind the new understanding of marriage and its implicit anthropology, which treats our bodies as raw material to be used as we see fit. Today a rigorous new public morality inverts and supplants the residuum of our Christian moral inheritance.”…

… "This compels us to reconsider the civic project of American Christianity that has for the most part guided our participation in the liberal public order for at least a century. Encompassing the Social Gospel movement of the early twentieth century and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops at the beginning of the twenty-first, this project has transcended the historical and theological division between Catholics and Protestants. This has been particularly the case as Protestant adherence to divisive confessional commitments has declined and Evangelicals, filling the void left by the decline of mainline Protestantism, have found common ground with Catholics on moral and social issues in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade. Though popular imagination identifies this project in its latter stages with political conservatism, it also transcends the division between the Christian left and the Christian right, which ­partly explains why their opposing arguments so often appear as mirror images of one another.”…

… "The line between negative rights and positive entitlements is thus inherently blurry. If I am to have a right to free speech, for example, then I must be empowered to speak and be heard, which means using the power of the state to give me the resources I need and to suppress anything that might disempower me.”…

… "For example, virtually absent from our lament over the threats to religious freedom in the juridical sense is any mention of that deeper freedom opened up by the transcendent horizon of Christ’s resurrection, though this was a frequent theme of Pope Benedict’s papacy. If we cannot see beyond the juridical meaning of religious freedom to the freedom that the truth itself gives, how then can we expect to exercise this more fundamental freedom when our juridical freedom is denied? Too often we are content to accept the absolutism of liberal order, which consists in its capacity to establish itself as the ultimate horizon, to remake everything within that horizon in its own image, and to establish itself as the highest good and the condition of possibility for the pursuit of all other goods—including religious freedom.”…

… "For in its enforcement of the sexual revolution, the state is effectively codifying ontological and anthropological presuppositions. In redefining marriage and the family, the state not only embarks on an unprecedented expansion of its powers into realms heretofore considered prior to or outside its reach, and not only does it usurp functions and prerogatives once performed by intermediary associations within civil society, it also exercises these powers by tacitly redefining what the human being is and committing the nation to a decidedly post-Christian (and ultimately post-human) anthropology and philosophy of nature.”…

… “  Yet something greater than liberal freedom is at stake. There seems to be a prevailing sense that this moment is something of a kairos for American Christianity, a moment of deep change in the public significance of Christianity and a moment of decision in the life of the Church.”…

… “This is the freedom that the truth itself gives and that the Church in our society will increasingly be called to exercise as the revolution overseen by liberal absolutism proceeds along its present course: the freedom to suffer for the truth of the Gospel.”…