Watson Wrote:That is because you don't have it.... and I am eternally greatful that I'm not that blind.
Watson Wrote:Define self-determination.Self determination defines the ability to choose one's own path.
Nations can choose their own sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or external interference or people to make their own choices and act on them.
Watson Wrote:It's one of those things you take on faith...when you have faith you can see the bigger picture for what it is. You can see God's path, at least here and there. And when you see it, you follow it...or not. But that doesn't usually lead anywhere good.When you have faith without reason, all you're doing is painting a picture of reality instead of living a reality. It's living a lie based on fantasy.
I have no reason to believe that these "paths", as you call them, only exist through total and unquestioning devotion to some supernatural uberbeing that obfuscates his own existance.
Watson Wrote:Without faith, it would seem that way to you.Without faith, I see the same picture as all those without a religious faith. Those with religious faith see whatever their own minds paint for them, which can be different from those of other faiths, such as hinduism and the untold number of variations of christianity, or Islam, or whatever.
I have the exact same view on the world as all those whose sole duty in life is to pursue the truth.
Watson Wrote:I think it's a little bit of both.I'm sure you see it that way.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
