Achilleez

cubbingcarol,

Common, the world isn't run on parental philosophy. Terrorism is a very real and very dangerous threat. Terrorist operations occur all over the world and they don't worry over what Joe-Westerner thinks about them being in a country that isn't theirs. So in order to effectively counteract it, one must be equally ruthless and brutal and smart and pre-emptive and not be controlled by the fact that fuzzy-hearted people don't think they should be invading the privacy of others. America cannot confine its anti-terrorist efforts to within its own borders when most terrorist operations occur outside of it. But its too big to handle alone by a long shot. There simply isn't enough military power in any one country to make an effective defence against it.

"They must face these ugly truths: 1) the terrorist threat is real, 2) it is a long-term problem, and 3) Europe is as much a target as America. "

That is exactly correct and exactly the point. America needs to work with Europe and Asia against terrorism, not separately from.

"The power of the U.S. military will not dissolve that threat."

Yet the power of the U.S. military has already successfully dissolved, much of the power and influence of terrorist operatives in Afghanistan. I beleive the entire point of Bush's campaign against terrorism IS to use the U.S. military in exactly that fashion. It's not opportunistic to ally yourself against a common enemy and have military influence in as wide an area as possible, it's merely good strategy.

"Bush is simply being smart about how we distribute our military resources."

What percentage of the U.S. military occupies the Middle East do you think?

Rooster7,

I would have thought that you of all people might be able to see past the political mud to the real issue, that is, the reduction of the U.S.'s capability to counteract terrorist operations. What does it matter whether it was Republicans, Democrats, or the Communist Party of America who does it? You can forget all the people who still like to say the U.S. is imperialistic and trying to force assimillation because it's all political bull****.

OGE,

I have seen plenty of TV coverage about Punta Gorda not to mention it covering the front page of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record for several days. I don't know how much aid was sent by Parliament itself, but I do know several people who volunteered to attend a MCC (Mennonite Church Canada)service trip down there and I contributed personally to a releif fund being held by my church. ($50)

Canadian peacekeeping troops have been present in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Yugoslovia, Germany, France, Israel, North Korea and many more still have been the recipient of our foriegn aid. But what does that have to do with anything? You all seem to want to turn this into another foreign political insult to America when I am stating a strategic falacy in your foreign relations plan. How will the war of terror benefit from it?

OldGreyEagle,

It isn't a popularity contest. If you are aiming to effectively counteract terrorism then a global network of allies and military presence is necessary. Should the unpopularity of the war in Iraq force a decision on a matter like this?

By Ronald D. Asmus

Harry Truman must be turning over in his grave. The planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe and Asia that U.S. President George W. Bush announced last week, if allowed to stand, could lead to the demise of the United States' key allieances across the globe, including the one that Truman considered his greatest foreign accomplishment: NATO.

Bush proposes something that generations of U.S. diplomats and soldiers fought to prevent and that its adversaries sought and unsuccessfully to achieve: radical reduction of U.S. political and military influence on the European and Asian continents.

The Bush message, delivered at a campaign rally, also smells of politial opportunism. Under pressure but unable to withdraw troops from Iraq, the president has instead reached for what his advisers hope is the next best thing politically - a pledge to bring the boys home from Europe and Asia.

Whether this is good or bad politics remains to be seen. But there is little doubt that it is bad strategy and bad diplomacy, for which the United States is likely to pay a heavy price.

The reasons are fairly simple. In Europe after the Cold War, the United States decided to significantly reduce its former troop levels but to leave sufficient military forces on the ground to accomplish three objectives: help ensure that peace and stability on the continent would endure; have the capacity to support NATO and European Union expansion and project the communities of the democracies eastward; and provide the political and military glue to enable U.S. allies to reorient themselves militarily and prepare, together with the United States, to address new conflicts beyond the continents borders.

Each of these remains important. Each will be undercut by the president's plan.

With transatlantic relations badly frayed, Russia turning away from democracy and the United States facing the challenge of projecting stability from the Balkans to the Black Sea, Washington should be putting forward a plan to repair the transatlantic alliance, not ruin it.

In Asia, the stakes are just as high and the challenges perhaps greater. There the United States facecs the long-term challenge of managing the rise of China as a great power. North Korea's eventual collapse and the unification of Korea will raise the question of that country's future geopolitical orientation. Such seismic events will undoubtedly have a considerable impact on the evolution of Japan's role and orientation as well.

U.S. diplomats will have their hands full over the next decade or two trying to win the war on terrorism and help manage the multiple strategic transitions - and will need every ounce of U.S. political and military leverage and muscle if they are to get it right.

In an act of diplomatic hara-kiri, the president proposes to destroy one of the key pillars of U.S. influence just when this kind of leverage is likely to be needed the most.

The president's plan is, unfortunately, further evidence of the strategic myopia that has afflices this administration and is undercutting the United States' standing in the world.

At a time when the U.S. should be mobilizing and reinvigorating its alliances in Europe and Asia, it is dismantling them.

Instead of creating multilateral structures to mobilize the world in a common struggle agains terrorism and new anti-Western ideologies and movements, the U.S. opts for a unilateral course that leaves it with fewer friends.

As opposed to balancing the political and military requirements of a new era and coming up with a new troop deployment plan that meets both needs, the administration allows the Pentagon to ride roughshod over broader U.S. strategy and diplomacy and destroy the work of generations of diplomats and soldiers.

-Washington Post(This message has been edited by Achilleez)

Jason,

Please cry me a lake and then drown in it

Sitting in the seat of God entails only that you talk alot like you know what your talking about. Anything past that becomes irrelevant.

How someone can respect a religion while simultaneously thinking that every single person in it is fundamentally wrong and is going to hell is something I may never understand.

"Maybe the atheist can do better than much of the hypocritical behavior of many true believers, but this is irrelevant. BSA requires duty to God and reverence which still excludes the atheist."

That is the exact issue Hunt was questioning when the thread began.

I never attempted to make an argument against God's existence. The knowledge of right and wrong is something I think that EVERY human possesses. And that beleif is not upheld by religious or scientific criteria, I just believe it. There are however other variables than can change what people see as right.

Your argument also runs in circles around itself. You claim that athiests have nothing to guide them, no sense of morals or ethics and that they act entirely out of self-interest. Yet you also claim that human decency and common sense are traits instilled by God onto ALL humans.

"Without God, what moral imperative demands that I even care about a collective community? Why shouldnt I focus all of my attention on myself and myself alone? If there is no God demanding that my heart comfort to His and tend to the needs of others, why would I?"

Helping others is right. Selfishness is wrong. A world where people help eachother makes a better place for everyone. Do you need further proof?

"They have no foundation for anything else."

They have the belief in humanity and what is right and wrong and what will help everyone's life to be better.

"Can an atheist show love for another? I believe he can. But without God, I think that love has little hope of being sustained and/or without the overcast of ones self-interest."

My love for my wife, my son, my brothers and parents in unshakable. To say that it has little hope of being sustained is ignorant not to mention quite rude.

Rooster, you continually make large and innaccurate assumptions about what all athiests are and do based either on your experiences with a small number of them (not good) or simply what you have heard about them (even worse).

"Possibly, but lets clarify something. An atheist has a belief about God. He is not someone who is undecided on faith as a whole. An atheist denies the existence of God. And in my experience, they usually do so just as confidently as I proclaim His existence."

Not all athiests would fit into that boat. True, some are as concrete in their beleif that no supernatural power exists similarily to the way you are sure one does. However, me and my ilk form what I have grown to know as the much larger pool of what are often labelled athiests. I guess you could call me "Man who doesn't have faith in specific religious dogmas and is unsure about 'Gods' existence at all and thus refuses to commit himself to any one religion due to skepticism", but athiest just makes it shorter. To call me an agnostic is untrue as well because I have found most agnostics to be the ones who put no thought into it at all and just get blown around by the winds of society and social pressure. Perhaps you can come up with a more fitting term.

"If his morals are not rooted in a creed and/or an example given by God what stable (unchanging/unyielding) force sustains the moral values of an atheist?"

First off I could throw that exact same argument back at you due to incredibly differing values of Christianity over the centuries, but I think NJ says it pretty well. In answer to your question, I would say that common sense, human decency and the knowledge of right and wrong that every human possesses would be the force of which you speak. Experience has taught me that it is the creeds of specific doctrines themselves and the conclusions people often draw from them that throw people off their own moral guages. (ie, God wants Americans to die, God wants us to hate blacks / homosexuals / athiests)

My conclusion has been that if there is a God and he does want us doing specific things, than he hasn't done a very good job of making those things clear to humanity, due to the observable evidence of varying interpretations on his word.

"If a boy believes in a false god, then we can safely conclude these things:

1) This boy believes in a power and authority greater then humanity.

2) While his faith is not placed in the true God, he understands that our existence goes beyond the physical world.

3) His morals beliefs do not rely on the stability of an individual or an institution.

4) As long as hes examining the world spiritual and physical, there is hope that he will open his heart to the true God."

Ok, lets take a look at number 4) here. I would wager quite a bit (from my own experiences) that a boy who has committed himself fully to a religion or belief in a specific God is much LESS likely to open his heart to a new one than a boy who is yet undecided on faith as a whole. Secondly, I would also safely conclude that all four of your conclusions could also be applied to many many athiests.

ed,

"So you think you can live a life of sin & still go to heaven?"

I never said anything remotely close to that. What I said was that I don't believe it to be fact those who don't repent 'sins' will spend the rest of eternity in hell. I can't tell you what I think happens to people after death because I have absolutely no idea, and neither I think do you. Infact my original quarrel was with the comment about athiests going to hell simply because they were athiests, as if that implied immorality and wickedness.

FOG,

That's correct. I as an individual don't want to due to a lack of the required traits already listed.

evmori,

No it isn't!

Bob White,

It is my understanding that there is still a great deal of debating and defending of beliefs within Scouting (within this forum anyway)regardless of a common value like recognition of God. However, how often do issues like this actually affect real Scouting? When asked, my son told me that religion and beleifs almost never came up. Do Scouts have real concern with the beliefs of other Scouts? Isn't respecting others beliefs a requirement of Scouts as well? You apparently think that no, a non-believer who benefits from Scouting is NOT worth it. In my opinion, positive values are well placed wherever placed they may be.

FOG,

If I had the time, ambition, funds, knowledge and management skills to do so, maybe I would. However no such organization exists, at least none equal to Scouting.

evmori,

No, it's not fact. Boy this could get tedious....

boleta writes:

"I don't get it. Why would an atheist want to belong to an organization that REQUIRES you to do your duty to God?"

Maybe because that very same organization also teaches many other values and attributes desirable to a person, athiest or not. As I said earlier, the BSA is cutting a line between those with faith and those with none. My issue is not the same as Merlyn's, so please don't confuse them. I don't particularily have much interest in the constitutionality of the membership requirements. My issue is with what matters to me and real people, and that is exclusion from an organization of great opportunity. No other organization comes close. But would people who recognize a duty to God suffer in their Scouting practices by not requiring other members to recognize the same thing? If a person who doesn't recognize the presence of God could benefit from what Scouting offers, is that not worth more than keeping them out?

That is truly disgusting FOG. I take no comfort whatsoever in the idea that people are damned to hell for all eternity. It is that exact sort of mentality that made me leave the church a long time ago.

What Hunt is asking is WHY the BSA values persons who are reverent towards God, in whatever form they perceive God to be in. Is this beleif a conscience decision? Are some people born with faith and others with none. It may be a comparable situation to the debate over whether homosexuality is a choice or not. Does the BSA believe faith is a choice, and that people without it (ie athiests) are immoral, self-centered and misguided in their beleifs? But don't we look at Muslim terrorists who hijack airplanes to murder people because God wants Americans to die as misguided in their beleifs? Many people certainly do. Is the BSA cutting a line between person A with faith and person B with none and saying that person A is better? (or fulfills the character and moral requirements) If so, then that really burns person B who has now been told that his beleif preference isn't good enough for Scouting.

On a side note Bob, you said that:

"We are valuing diversity. The BSA values Duty to God and understand that there are many different roads to the same destination."

Now there are definitely many people who would strongly disagree with that. I don't think that you can comfortably speak for the entire BSA with that beleif. Many Christians DO see other faiths as false (I'm using Christianity because its the one I am familiar with and can speak from experience with) and wouldn't say at all that the BSA thinks otherwise.

Bob White,

You seem to have flip-flopped on the issue of respect for athiesm...

Anyway, you said that you didn't agree with the athiests lack of faith. You said that anyone of any religion that recognizes and worships a God fulfulls the membership requirements of the BSA. For me, religion begins with one fundamental beleif. It's shared by most, if not all religions. The beleif that a force or power greater than our comprehensions of physics is existent and in control. This is the exact beleif that I lack, or at least do not understand, and how can I trust what I don't understand? It has long since seemed like a time-endured theory developed and grown before the knowledge of science. Off on a tangent here, but my point is that you are disagreeing with and to some extent discriminating against (however unintentionally it may be) athiests because they do not share that beleif with you. Are you saying that it is their specific fault that they do not believe it? I do not say that I specifically deny the existence of this power, I merely feel reluctant to commit myself to a religion (and therefore a specific way of life) on the premises of something I don't understand and definitely don't have any faith in.

The fact that you don't agree with this conclusion of indeciciveness is perfectly OK, as any society will have conflicts of agreement. But excluding these people from organizations and general attitudes of resentment at worst and ignorance at best can make athiests feel discriminated against just because they haven't come to beleive the same things about the world. Your comment about athiests walking one path and the BSA walking the other only further polarizes the situation.

What I'm saying is that athiesm doesn't just automatically reject values that Scouting teaches. The beleif in whether or not a controlling force is existent shouldn't gap the two the way they do.

Anyway, that was my athiest defense speech for the month.

To my knowledge, liberals were never opposed to the war in Afghanistan.

Amen willysjeep.

I agree acco40,

A President who lets 10 soldiers die and does not care is arguably preferable over a President who lets 1000 soldiers die and breaks down in tears over it. I don't think that any average citizen can judge the quality of a President, or any politician for that matter, based on the personal emotions/feelings that they express to the media. How do we know which are calculated publicity stunts and how many are sincere? No, the only possible judge of a leader's quality are their actions and the consequences following them. Does a Presedential sex scandal reflect weak moral character? Yes. Does it reflect on how well they can run a world superpower? Arguably yes, arguably no. In any case, if my Prime Minister could improve economic prosperity, negotiate peace in a hostile area, and work for civil rights, I wouldn't much care if he was a transvestite, a martian or a talking pig. I would still vote for him.(This message has been edited by Achilleez)

Rooster,

Why do you make the assumption that since I do not beleive the universe is controlled by a singular conscience force that I have no sense of ethics, morals or right and wrong? How do the two connect together? I understand how you could think that since I don't beleive in what you think is the ultimate source of good and love, that I am not capable of understanding or applying those things, but this is simply not the case. To make blanket-statements about a group like they have no guilt for their actions, based entirely on whether-or-not they beleive a supernatural being is present in the world makes no sense. Knowing the difference between good and evil is something all beings possess, and it is up to them to choose for themselves. For example, I know that murder, rape, theft and prejudice are all wrong not just because of their immorality, but because a healty society of beings cannot function with such things. So it becomes necessary to penalize those found guilty of such things to discourage similar behaviour from others.I do not consider myself an agnostic because in my opinion agnostics are fence-sitters who try not to think about theology because they are either undecided or don't consider important enough. I am not a agnostic in that I put a great deal of thought into it. Rooster, how many true atheists do you personally know? How many of them do you consider immoral or without conscience? I beleive that if you were to look at the matter with more depth, you would find that almost all of these unethical, immoral people are actually agnostics, who give no thought to theology and thus are more compelled to not be guilty or conscienceous of their actions. In theory, an immoral atheist is not a true atheist in the same way an immoral Christian is not a true Christian. Because to abondon ethics and morals is to succumb to chaos and evil, and atheism embraces a beleif in order and natural structure. Please remember, atheism does not mean nihilism, not to me.

On a side note, when did it become OK to insult atheists to savagely as FOG does? As Christians, you must beleive that all other tenents of faith like Judaesm and Islaam are fundamentally wrong because they don't recognize Christ, right? Yet if someone were to talk about Jews or Muslims the way FOG talks about atheists, they would meet harsh retribution, not? If you beleive both are wrong, why do you pick on atheism? In fact, you should be condemning other religions even worse, since they actually replace your god with another, which would logically be worse than just not beleiving that yours exists.

"They are much like the flat Earth folks, working very hard not to believe the evidence so they can cling to their erroneous beliefs."

I don't know how things run where you are from, but to me the phrase "cling to their erroneous beliefs" when refering to spiritual beleifs (or 'value system' for those who won't recognize true atheism as a beleif structure) is astonishingly arrogant, offensive and downright ignorant. Especially coming from a Scout.

"After all, if they were still on the air, more people would realize the foolishness of their reasoning (or lack thereof). "

"That's the trouble with conservative radio listeners, they just make up stuff and pretend it's true."

I hope no one ever votes for anyone like you two.(This message has been edited by Achilleez)