cuchulain

I happen to agree that most of what I have seen of Muslim/Islam/Arab world views are extremist and terroristic in nature. I will admit fully to not having seen much positive about the groups, and not having researched it very well, so my view is somewhat limited. I do not treat others differently because of what I have viewed about Islam, etc... nor do I harbor deep-seated biases on the subject, nor do I blanket the entire populace discussed here as terrorists. As far as kindness goes, and knowing those of the Muslim persuasion on a personal level, I seem to recall interviews with the neighbors of terrorists apprehended in the U.S. after boston, and the neighbors talking about how friendly they were, and helpful, and how they could never have imagined this happening, so I would say caution with everybody is warranted. You never know who is going to turn out to be a radical. the phillipines, southeast asia, according to Wikipedia, about 4% of the muslim population of the world is located in southeast asia, so this seems like a poor sample to me, because the phillipines doesn't make up the entirety of southeast asia, so must have an even smaller percentage. 25% in south asia, 20% in the middle east...so 45% muslim population located in the middle east and south asia, that seems a much better demographic. If you want to debate the merits of the religion and the population of that religion, you should probably pick a region with a larger demographic, koki. Its kind of like when Fox news says a poll of their viewers(who are mostly republican), or CNN says a poll of their viewers(who are mostly democrat); slanted polls by any standard. According to Wikipedia, those are the largest demographics. So, how much terrorism in islam is rooted in the largest demographics(the middle east)? seems like this is a good time to agree to disagree to me. one side has presented their argument, the other side has presented theirs, and now it looks to be degenerating rapidly toward name-calling (ostrich?). youch, I don't think you can honestly say that wasn't meant negatively, and if you are honest about saying that negatively, you should realize this debate has deteriorated. Not saying it is anyone's fault particularly, and hopefully it doesn't come off that way. Just seems like in order to be civil, we have to at this point realize it doesn't matter what information is presented anymore by either side, both sides seem pretty set that the other is quoting biased opinions and so is not going to listen anymore, and only present information that is slanted on their own view.

Grant, Oh Gods and Goddesses, thy protection And in protection, Strength And in strength, Understanding And in understanding, Knowledge And in knowledge, the Knowledge of Justice And in the knowledge of justice, the Love of it And in the Love of it, the Love of All Existences And in the love of all existences, the Love of All Gods and Goddesses and all Goodness.

if it is a government of the people, by the people and for the people...and a majority wins in a democratic election, and we all elected these people to make these laws all along the way, then it seems logical to conclude that a majority of Americans want the government that they have. Even if at some point we were misled, we elected the politicians, who ran on platforms that apparently a majority of Americans wanted. Therefore, the laws are the laws that were supported by our democratic election process, and are the laws of the people, including welfare programs. Does the average American voter actually get educated about the platforms, candidates, etc...? Probably not. Does the average American voter actually pay attention to what the guy they helped get in office does after he gets there? Again, probably not. So in essence, we have the government, laws and welfare system we deserve for having a majority of Americans vote for it.

my wife got a ba and works at kfc she got a ba in mass communications because the high school guidance councilor told her it was the up and coming thing, the last job she had that had anything to do with her degree she didn't even need the degree for, they hired people off the street and trained them just the same. I know what you mean about too much school, its one of those hot button issues come election time that just about any politician can claim they are for, and if you say you disagree with throwing more money at the problem, watch out.

quite right Atwater. I apologize for my part of taking this overboard, and bow out at this point. Thanks for the discussion, everybody, and hopefully I didn't offend anyone too badly.

it is crap, you said, word for word, that EVERYBODY could get a job, so now you are saying there are differences? Is it the first, or second, because you don't seem to be able to communicate effectively. If you really believe that anyone who wants a job can get one, then you are WRONG. If you don't really believe that, then you WERE WRONG when you said exactly that. in a side note, what the heck does butt hurt mean??? never heard that one

assassin, you said WORD FOR WORD (the stuff I call crap) "really in todays economy and the way the hiring process is set up it doesn't matter if you disabled or any other excuse you can think of you can find a job". Go back a few posts and read the CRAP you wrote. I was responding that NOT ALL DISABLED PEOPLE CAN WORK. That is crap. And so, in response to your request that I list some of the untruths, there you go. It is simply untrue that everyone can work no matter what. Deal with it.

my mom has copd. She can walk about fifteen feet before her pulse ox drops to about 80. She worked for over 20 ears as an RN, but it came to a point that SHE COULDN'T WORK. you can make broad, generalized statements very well, but the fact is this. There are indeed people who cannot work. period. My mom is one of those. You can get upset about that if you want to, its your right to spew out whatever crap you want, but when you flat out say something that isn't true, someone might point it out, and guess what? arrogance doesn't equal correct.

think that's lucky, I knew someone who had an extra property and put it up for rent. Someone my mom worked with at the va who happens to be in a wheelchair looked at the place, and the guy told her he was sorry he just couldn't afford to make it handicapped accessible. she sued, and the long and short of it was he sold the property to pay what he owed her from the court case. my mom worked with the lady and said she is a lawsuit happy kind of person, couldn't even do the job she was hired for at the va, but they wouldn't fire her because she threatened legal action.

the answer is simply put yes. who does it hurt to consider it a religion? who does it oppress? on the other hand, if you refuse to consider it a religion, and someone truly believes in it, then that someone is being oppressed. so, by standards of eliminating the choice that oppresses anyone, you are left with accepting they have a right to believe as they wish and calling it a religion. That being said, I don't believe in the flying spaghetti man or whatever it is, and I agree with you that it seems silly.

if I judge it as childish, does that make it so? In further depth, if you are allowed to judge one thing as childish and not really a religion, who is to stop the next guy from judging what you believe as childish and not allowing that as a religion? freedom of religion has to include everything or it isn't really freedom of religion

a strong satire was often used as a weapon by the bards

actually, I have a good news for us update, as of yesterday the city condemned his house and he has relocated a couple of towns away...so this situation seems to have resolved itself. As far as renters go, I know how much of a hassle that can be...when I was a child my mom rented property to someone who didn't pay and got pregnant so they couldn't be evicted, long story short on this one...she moved in with them, they moved out the next day.

My wife had a high risk pregnancy, and gave birth to our son at 6 months along instead of full term. He passed, and a short time later we had another high risk pregnancy. This little one is doing wonderfully now, but was born with water on the lung, had to have a couple surgeries, a feeding tube, and a pack of medical care and constant attention. We don't begrudge this in the slightest, it is wonderful to have her with us, but it has left us financially broke. Two years ago, we move into the housing in a small town in southern Illinois. Not much happens here, and for the most part it is a nice place to live. The neighbors are usually polite, or they just ignore us, and its the kind of town where you can take walks and not worry about it, or so we thought. Our daughter, who was 1.5 when we moved here, loves to take long walks, like 2 mile walks, which when you think about it is very long for a 1 year old. We started off walking around the neighborhood, and the walks progressively got longer. Most people see us walking and smile and wave, or say hi, nice little small talk. One person, an older guy, lives about two blocks from us and was always very pleasant. He looked like an ex hippie, I know I'm not supposed to judge by looks, but I do sometimes. It's a failing, I suppose. He always made sure to say hi, how are you, and chit chat here and there, talked about how wonderful it was to see people still walked and had family time. Well, time goes by, about a year, and he asks me to come sit with him and have a beer on his porch, hang out. I figure, there's not much wrong with that, and so we start visiting, hanging out, chatting, becoming friendly. A couple weeks after this, david, his name, comes down to our apartment and asks for a ride into town. He gives us gas money, so I don't see anything wrong with that, and we are friendly, so I take him to town. This happens about four or five times, and he always pays gas, and is always very friendly, so I don't mind so much, but he starts coming off a little weird. He repeats himself a lot, like he forgot that he just talked about something, and the conversations are more along the lines of paranoia that people are trying to get him arrested and turn him into a criminal. At this point, I start pulling back a little. I don't go to his house as much, but I am still friendly with him, still talk to him and give him rides occasionally. He needs a ride a little further for a doctors appointment, but as always pays gas. He tells me he was hit by a car in his 20's and suffered some brain trauma at the time, and wasn't expected to live, and this explains to me his odd behavior. I give him another ride to his doctor's office later on. Well, it comes to a point that inevitably, he asks for a ride one night about 7 oclock, and I am busy with something else and can't. Our daughter is now almost 3, for time scale. He comes back to our apartment at 8, then at 9 and 10, and we are getting tired of being bothered about it. I tell him its too late at night. He comes back at 6 am, 7 am, then 8 am, at which point he has worn his welcome out, and I tell him I am not giving him rides anymore. He is back at 3 and 4 that day. he comes back the next morning at 10am. I tell him to stop coming around, we can't have the headache and stress of someone who can't take no for an answer. The next couple of days are quiet. We take our daughter for a walk and avoid his house, but when we get back to our apartment he is sitting on the porch, wanting a ride. I tell him we can't have him coming back, enough is enough and we have told him not to come around anymore. He leaves mad. We don't hear from him for a month, and figure he finally got the clue, when he's back on our porch for a ride. We call housing security, who tells us he has done this before with lots of other people and he is notorious around town, but he says he will talk to david and get him to leave us alone. the next day, david is back again, so I go to the porch and tell him he can't come around anymore, he's been warned and needs to leave us alone. he gets mad, gets up and takes a swing at me, so I strike him once in the head and he leaves. I call the cops immediately, my daughter see's all this out the window, and is crying, my wife is scared out of her mind. The cops come, and ask if we want to press charges, and of course we say yes. a short time later they come back, and say they found him passed out in his yard and took him to the hospital, and ask how many times I hit him, and start giving me the third degree, and without saying so outright threaten to arrest me if I don't drop charges. They said he will definitely not pester us any more. the next day I call housing security to let them know what happened and everything up to that point. I call my mom and tell her about it, and she gets a background check on him. He has previous arrests for assault(3), an arrest for assaulting a cop, an arrest for assaulting a firefighter, several trespassing charges, and two indecent exposure charges. All convictions, all plea bargains, with about a month in jail. also the next day, david is back on our porch. I call the cops, but he is gone before they get here. I call the states attorneys office and tell them about the incident, and tell them I want to push charges after all. They have him arrested, and he takes a plea bargain in this case, as well as a couple of other pending charges, for 1 year in prison and a no contact order with us. 5 months go by, and he is released on parole. We don't get proper notification, so we don't know he has been released until we walk by his house and he starts screaming and yelling at us and jumps off his porch and swings a golf club at me. I call the cops. They give him a warning. Another couple of days goes by, and we encounter him on the streets about a mile from his house, and he starts cussing and yelling, so we leave quickly and call the cops. They give him a warning. a week goes by, and he is on housing property, even though he has a no trespass order and a no contact order within 500 feet. I call security, who comes but doesn't catch him on our property, so they give him a warning. The next day, someone else in the housing who had issues with him sees him on housing property, again, and calls security, who catches him this time. The cops come, and give him a warning. Two days later, david is arrested somewhere else for trespassing, and takes a plea bargain, serves one month and is out. All of this while on parole, and parole is never revoked. The cops tell me repeatedly that they could have arrested me for defending myself, and use that as leverage to keep me from pressing charges, all the while telling us they hate having to deal with him and have to go to his house on a nearly daily basis from somebody complaining. The states attorneys office says they have nothing to do with his parole, but will talk to the proper people. Yet nothing gets done, and he gets warning after warning after warning, and things happen in the news like this all the time. People always are on the tv saying, we didn't have any idea this guy was like that. Well, it seems to me the county knows plenty about this guy being crazy, and just doesn't want to do anything about it. We even found out there was a petition around the town with more than 1000 signatures to the states attorneys office to give this guy a bigger sentence next time, and there are only 5000 people in the town. So, when this guy hurts somebody, I am going to contact them and tell them this story, and tell them they need to sue this county for every penny they can get.

can anyone recommend good reading materials about Pelagius? Just recently became curious about his ideas and thought I would look here first. thanks

just curious if it was just my pc, but i posted a topic in off topic section, and for the past few days that is the only section of the forum I haven't been able to access. I click on it, and it just keeps cycling like its loading. the other forum sections are perfectly accessable, and i was just curious why this might be so and what i can do to fix it. Thanks.

I like being told I am not a druid because they were all wiped out.

honor their wishes, absolutely, but of course there is nothing wrong with giving this person all the available information, such as the child trying to find out about their health, wanting to see them, etc... Informed consent? not quite, informed consent, but something similar I suppose.

I found it highly amusing that when I first met my wife she professed to be a Christian, yet when asked had to admit she had never read any of the bible. She still hasn't, she has always listened to her father, whom I consider a devout Christian. He has read it thoroughly, studied it, and lived his life in what I would deem a Christian manner. That being said, she still hasn't read the book herself, and I don't know how accurate secondhand knowledge can be in this area. As to the statement that those who haven't read it themselves usually don't care, that is typically my experience as well, with the exception of my wife who does indeed care. Always there are anomalies in what our general observations would tell us is the truth.

I was in county jail once, and got extremely sick. I asked for medical care, and a guard gave me a form. three days later, a nurse looked into the small slot of the cell block at me, said your fine, and walked away. when i got out, my aunt complained about tax money going to all that great medical care for prisoners, because it had been in the news that prisoners cost x amount per year. I would suggest that perhaps the free education isn't as good as it sounds, or perhaps the media may be misrepresenting the facts.

death is the simplest of things, but liberty is much harder for people to agree on.

a lot of things can happen to people for bad decisions in life, but also for seemingly good decisions at the time. My wife has an associates in art and a bachelors in mass communications. She chose that route because she trusted the advisor of the university when he said it was an up and coming field. In our area of the country, she has not been able to find work with this degree. A good choice at the time, seemingly, to listen to a university advisor, but the results were not what he implied. Now she works minimum wage, and we receive food stamps and live in public housing because I am unable to work and she can't find better. On the other hand, it is extremely irksome to be at the food stamp office and see someone pull up in a brand new BMW, wearing platinum jewelry, with gold teeth, Nike shoes, and a Rolex and here them complain that their cash assistance got cut from over 900 a month to 800 a month.

yeah, I probably came off as attacking now that i re-read that, and I apologize as well. I was intending to simply point out why I didn't personally believe in christianity, and I kind of overstepped it. Sorry. A person should never attack someone else for believing something that doesn't hurt anybody, in my opinion, and I can completely respect the arguments provided.

if god knows everything, then he knew way back before he said let there be light that I would be a sinner for the few short years he had me here, and thus end up in hell for all eternity to suffer forever. Him being all powerful, why wouldn't he create it so that I wouldn't end up in hell? I have heard the freewill argument, but inevitably am led back to: he is all powerful and all knowing, so he should be able to figure out a way for it to work like i say and not create a bunch of people that he supposedly loves, that he knows will be sinners and end up in hell, and he knows he will torture for all eternity. a lot of people liken him to a good father. If I did that to my kids, what do you think they would say?

people can do "wrong" and suffer the consequences. That is the larger picture that people usually don't consider, that all actions have intended and unintended consequences. If the government thinks that what you did was wrong, that doesn't prevent you from doing it.