Why conservative christians can, should, and will dump the republicans this year

Christians in this country have been voting mostly for republicans for as long as I can remember, since the 1980's at least. Why? Republicans are perceived to be supporting "biblical" principles, namely: Stop abortion, prevent gay marriage, be fiscally responsible (i.e. get rid of the national debt), and so on. Many people I know vote or have voted republican on the first one alone. (And obviously I know that there are arguments pro and con for these social issues, from both Christian and non-christian stances; whether these are good things or not is irrelevant to the point I'm making here.)

Since 1980 we've had 20 years of Republicans in the white house and only 8 years of Democrats. And the Republicans have not done any of the things those Christians wanted them to. Abortion is still legal, the national debt is bigger than ever, etc.

With the current Republican administration being one of the worst administrations this country has ever had, Christians are going to do some math. What does 20 years of inaction = ? It = Republicans aren't going to do anything on the issue and probably never will, either (for good reason; it would remove one of their main issues, not to mention pissing off everyone else that voted for them). Voting for the democrats is no more a vote to keep killing babies than any other vote would be, based on the last 28 years, anyway.

It is objectively clear that the republicans, as a group, have spurned the will of one of their largest blocks of support. Why would that block keep voting them in? I don't think they will.

With that said, I'm very happy that Obama is going to get the dem nomination and not Clinton. We've already had a round 2 of a recent president. Let's not do that again.

I just realized that most people don't know this

OK, pop quiz time.

Which of these activities is the most harmful to your health?

1. Smoking Tobacco.
2. Smoking Basil.
3. Smoking Coffee. (I don't know if this would deliver caffeine effectively...)
4. Smoking Marijuana.
5. Smoking any other non-poisonous plant.

If you answered 1, you're wrong. According to the articles I've seen on New Scientist, #4 is slightly worse for you (mainly, my guess is, because Marijuana is not grown in controlled conditions and is more likely to have other dangerous things in it). But these activities all do approximately the same amount of harm to your body.

Here's the scoop. SMOKING ANYTHING IS BAD FOR YOU. And, guess what? IT'S THE SMOKE ITSELF THAT DOES THE HARM. Nicotine is not the main culprit behind lung cancer, though it certainly does your body no good. It's the burned plant matter that does the damage!

Breathing in burning things is bad for you, big surprise. So, if you smoke and don't want to quit, consider switching to another form of nicotine delivery. Still bad for you, but nowhere near AS bad for you. (for more reading...)

And switch to brownies if you're doing the other stuff...

Breaking news

I just ate something out of the vending machine which carried the following warning:

Allergy Information: This product is manufactured in a facility that processes milk, peanuts, and other nuts.

I always thought milk came from the underside of cows. Silly me.

Worth reading

Short and to the point:

New Scientist's 24 myths about evolution

Don't bother reading the one on the bible not being inerrant, it's the biggest load of intellectual crap I've seen in a while (and they wonder why evangelical christians don't bother to consider the rest of what they have to say). I'm sure it raised my blood pressure. You owe it to yourself to ignore that one, as the rest are pretty much spot-on and certainly worth reading.

I didn't think it was possible...

...But it is. I've finally been offended by "art."

For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse

UPDATE: I'm having trouble believing this is actually true. Herbal teas? She was pregnant 9 times in 9 months? I don't buy it.

On the off chance that it's actually true:

Seriously, if she did this to puppies we'd lock her up. WTF?

Modern poetry gets a bad rap, or, Christians who do not like this should check their pulse

Descending Theology: The Resurrection

by Mary Karr

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in—black ice and squid ink—
till the hung flesh was empty.
Lonely in that void even for pain,
he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist
of his heart began to bang
on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled
back into that battered shape. Now

it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.

Why do people do the things they do?

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
--Nietzsche

What does it take to change a long-held viewpoint? A number of years ago I would have gladly called myself a creationist. Today, I would call myself a theistic evolutionist, were I unable to avoid a label. What made the difference? Why did I change my mind?

I do not have space or time to recount, nor can I remember, all the innumerable little details that cropped up in favor of what was then the other side. "If one does the homework, it comes out in our favor," was the universal reassurance. Well, I'm curious, so I did the homework anyway. Creationism (which, in case you've not heard, is the belief that god created the earth [some would say universe but I was not able to believe that for very long] and all its inhabitants in 6 24-hour periods about 7,000-10,000 years ago) moved from the "certainty" column in my mind to the "unlikely but possible" column. What was the final straw?

My favorite argument for a young Earth (a requirement for this view) was the fact that moon is slowly receding from the Earth. At something like an inch a century (I don't remember the numbers exactly), if you rewind time the moon runs into the earth a long time before the 4 billion years that the Earth is supposed to have existed for. The only problem with this argument is that the math is wrong: the closer the moon is, the slower it recedes, meaning that it could easily have been orbiting the earth for 4 billion years.

So, big deal, you may think. The creationists got their math wrong, but so what? Just because the common scientific time-line is possible doesn't make it fact. The problem is this: I heard this line of reasoning in the '90's (as a teenager). It was 2000 something when I found the answer to it. But guess when the refutation to this argument was available? Go on, guess.

1970's. Yes, that's right. Creationists were repeating an argument in the 1990's that had been refuted 20 years prior. That's what got me. It was clear to me that the Creationists I had been trusting cared more about winning the argument than about finding the truth out. It would not have hurt them in the slightest to stop repeating the argument, to put out a correction; as I noted above, having a thing be possible doesn't make it so. 20 years is plenty of time for them to do so. When I discovered this, all the bits and pieces of information that made up my opinion on the subject changed in importance, and the result was that it became impossible to continue to honestly hold the Creationists' beliefs. The world is so much easier to explain now-- but that is a topic for another post.

I do not think, as the Nietzsche quote at the top might imply, that they are secret evolutionists deliberately harming the creationist movement by arguing for it with bad arguments (though the effect may be much the same). I think they genuinely believe what they claim to. I also think that the environments which the creationist beliefs come from make it very difficult for creationists to honestly look at the facts. Creationists have a lot invested in the truth or falsity of the Creation story; most of them feel that, were it false, the entire Christian religion would collapse. And, indeed, their faith is structured such that this would be true for many of them; therefore, for them, admitting the truth of the age of the earth or of the cosmos is only a hair away from denying Christianity. Why that is so is a topic for another day. As for me, somehow I have remained a Christian.

This is my appeal for intellectual honesty, from both sides.