LDS, Christians, and Politics

[eolesen]

 

Sending too few troops? We wiped out Saddam's Army in the blink of an eye!

 

Yah, and then the enemy wiped out Iraq's oil and electrical infrastructure which was part of our mission to preserve. So much so that oil production I don't think has yet recovered from pre-war levels.

 

 

I don't blame this on either party -- I blame it on all of Washington, by trying to play nice for the cameras.

 

Had FDR and Truman allowed the military to be as micromanaged as it has been since Korea, Israel wouldn't exist and the only people speaking French would be in Quebec... Likewise, had the mainstream media been given less access in Vietnam, the outcome could have been a lot different. That war wasn't lost on the battlefield. It was lost here. The same thing could have been said about Iraq if the Dems would have had their way after the mid-term elections. Now, they're having to face the fact that allowing soldiers to be soldiers actually works...

 

 

 

Personally, the politicians need to let the military do the job they're paid to do, and focus less on things like twice daily press briefings and escorted access for the media in-country.

[packsaddle]

Yeah, I know the thread got bogged down figuring out which strategic geniuses get the credit for our great triumphs in Iraq. But I was sidetracked, enjoying reading some of Mencken and I found this. I thought it would fit this thread nicely and milder than a lot of his stuff:

 

"I am one of the few Goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other Goyim. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish. If, at its highest, it is genuinely worth reading, then at its lowest it is on all fours with the Koran, 'Science and Health' and the Book of Mormon."

 

Heh, heh, to paraphrase the baby dinosaur, 'Gotta love 'im!'

Think I'll read some more, maybe find some more gems.

 

Edited part: In case anyone thought he went too lightly on Christians, here's one for them:

"The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event. So far as I am aware even the most liberal theologian of today still gags at scientific concepts that were already commonplaces in my schooldays.

 

Thus such a thing as a truly enlightened Christian is hard to imagine. Either he is enlightened or he is Christian, and the louder he protests that he is for former the more apparent it becomes that he is really the latter. A Catholic priest who devotes himself to seismology or some other such safe science may become a competent technician and hence a useful man, but it is ridiculous to call him a scientist so long as he still believes in the virgin birth, the atonement or transubstantiation. It is, to be sure, possible to imagine any of these dogmas being true, but only at the cost of heaving all science overboard as rubbish. The priest's reasons for believing in them is not only not scientific; it is violently anti-scientific. Here he is exactly on all fours with a believer in fortune-telling, Christian Science or chiropractic."

(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

[Hiromi]

In response to packsaddle who made the interesting assertion that beleif in the supernatural disqualifies one from wearing the mantle of science.

 

Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20, 1822[1] January 6, 1884) was an Augustinian priest and scientist often called the "father of genetics" for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, which were later named after him. The significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century. Its rediscovery prompted the foundation of genetics.

 

But we'll need to disqualify Father Mendel from being called a scientist in spite of his accomplishments, because evidently he wasn't informed that believing that eating Chrisit's body and drinking Chrisit's blood disqualifies one from discovering the governing principles of the natural world.

 

And PackSaddle, you must not have been refering to Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph duard Lematre (July 17, 1894 June 20, 1966) who was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, professor of physics and astronomer.

 

Fr. (later Msgr.) Lematre proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, although he called it his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'.

 

Monsignor Lematre was a pioneer in applying Einstein's theory of general relativity to cosmology: suggesting a pre-cursor of Hubble's law in 1927, and then publishing his primeval atom theory in the pages of Nature in 1931. At the time Einstein believed in an eternal universe and had previously expressed his skepticism about Lematre's original 1927 paper. A similar solution to Einstein's equations, suggesting a changing radius to the size of the universe, had been proposed in 1922 by Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman, as Einstein informed Lematre when he approached him with the theory at the 1927 Solvay Conference (Friedman had also been criticized by Einstein), but it is Lematre, with his proposed mechanism, that made the theory famous for several reasons according to historians. First, Friedman was a mathematician who was not working with astronomical data or concerned with the math as a description of physical reality. Secondly, Friedman died young and could not further work on his ideas. Thirdly, Lematre worked with astronomers and made his theory in accord with observations and had consequences which could be tested. Fourth, Arthur Eddington made sure that Lematre got a hearing in the scientific community.

 

Monsignor Lematre also proposed the theory at an opportune time since Edwin Hubble would soon release his velocity-distance relation that strongly supported an expanding universe and, consequently, the Big Bang theory. In fact, Lematre derived what became known as Hubble's Law in his 1927 paper, two years before Hubble. However, since Lematre spent his entire productive life in Europe rather than emigrating to America, American publicity machines have preferred to stress the contributions of scientists such as Hubble or Einstein who can be claimed to have a US connection.[citation needed]

 

Both Friedman and Lematre had found that the universe must be expanding. Lematre went further than Friedman, since he concluded that an initial "creation-like" event must have occurred. This is the Big Bang theory as we know it today, and this is why he is credited with its discovery.

 

Einstein at first dismissed Friedman and then (privately) Lematre out of hand, saying that not all mathematics leads to correct theories. After Hubble's discovery was published, Einstein quickly and publicly endorsed Lematre's theory, helping both the theory and priest get fast recognition. [4]

 

In 1933 he found an important inhomogeneous solution of Einstein's field equations describing a spherical dust cloud, the Lemaitre-Tolman metric.

 

And Packsaddle, your ability to progosticate who will and won't become a scientist must not have gotten to Louis Pasteur (died 28 September, 1895), the father of preventive medicine, who was probably the most gifted and influential biologist of the nineteenth century. His discoveries, which are inscribed on his tomb, in the Institut Pasteur, at Paris, extend from 1848 to 1885, and relate to the nature of fermentations, to the minutest organisms and the question of abiogenesis, to the diseases of silkworms, to the propagation of diseases by microbes, and above all to the supremely important principle of experimental immunity to pathogenic bacteria. Pasteur was a model Catholic, the most ideal scientist known in the history of biology.

 

But packsaddle wouldn't agree that he was a scientist because Pasteur received Holy Communion and beleived it to be what his saviour sad he must eat and drink.

 

Good Lord Packsaddle. The list of beleivers who were brilliant and successful scintists is very long. THere is absolutiely no evidence to support the notion that a scientific mind must be agnostic or atheisitic.

 

My priest tells us that we honestly have no idea how often miracles are occuring. Even you, Packsaddle, may have had a cancer today that God cured because he has earthly plans for you still. Just becasue you haven't seen a miracle, or believe in the miraculous, doesn't give you the right to be the arbiter as to who is and who is not qualified to be called a scientist.

 

It's God's Universe. He made it, and the Laws that govern it. THere is no contradiction in accepting that some things are mysteries that can be solved and that some things are beyond mortal comprehension.

 

I would hazard the guess that even Mormons would make very good scientists.

 

God Bless you friend and fellow Scouters!

 

 

Pappy

 

(Info from Wikepedia and NewAdvent)

 

 

 

 

[Hiromi]

Mea Culpa Packsaddle,

Upon rereading your post I now realize that you were quoting H.L Mencken. A great antidote to H.L. Mencken is A.K. Chesterton.

 

But the criticism stands. You can believe in God and the tenants of Christian Faith and still practice science.

 

Salute!

 

Pappy

[Merlyn_LeRoy]

Are you sure you don't mean his cousin G.K. Chesterton? A.K. joined Mosley's fascists before WWII, and later was a founder of Britain's racist National Front party. Seems to be an antidote much worse than the disease.

[Hiromi]

YIKES!!

I meant G.K. Didn't even know he had a brother!!

 

Sorry!Thanks for the Correction

 

Pappy

[packsaddle]

Heh, heh, Pappy, no problem. I have a special place in my heart for Mencken. But I was indeed aware of all those excellent examples you recounted. While I am sympathetic to the thoughts of scientists such as Dawkins, if an individual can reconcile science and religion then good for them. I have long maintained that the conflict, in as much as it exists at all, is mainly in the minds of the religious...although Dawkins is a counter-example.

I don't know what Mencken really thought about things but I suspect that a lot of what he wrote was with the intent to provoke...and he certainly was successful in that.

 

Bringing this back to topic now, I see that Obama is being quite visible about his Christianity in order to try to counter the ignoramuses circulating those emails with bogus claims about his religious background.

And Romney won big in an LDS state, ho hum.

Huckabee didn't quite make it in SC in spite of prominently attending many churches and giving sermons. I wonder if Thompson's wooing of the gun fanatics cost Huckabee SC - that's probably the last gasp of Thompson's campaign. But it does seem that all of them are trying to play the 'Christianity card' in some form or other.

It will be interesting to watch their antics around GA leading up to Super Tuesday. I wonder if Huckabee would consider giving a sermon in Plains? The suspense is terrible.....I hope it will last.

[Lisabob]

Well there packsaddle, if Thompson's only lasting contribution to this campaign is that he drew the gun crowd away from Huckabee in SC, thus causing Huckabee to lose the state and possibly the nomination to McCain, then I would like to shake Thompson's hand and thank him for running. As somebody else said elsewhere, we're electing a president here, not a preacher, and I don't think you can take the preacher out of Huckabee.

[GernBlansten]

But Lisa, Huck's son is an Eagle Scout. You'd think we'd all join hands in support of a fellow scouter!