A few thoughts about freedom of religion and health insurance.

[quinn14]

Kind of a stretch don't you think?

Do we ignore the Declaration of Independence because Jefferson owned slaves?
Do we ignore Truman, Harding and Robert Byrd because he joined the KKK?
Should I take my Volkswagen bug to junkyard because it developed under Nazi German leadership?
Should we not have used Einstein's ideas about fission because he was educated in a system that created a much more brutal regime of eugenics than even Sanger?

Ideas can be used and transformed and elaborated on in very creative ways. Locke spawned both Jefferson and Marx. social Darwinism spawned both modern Republicanism and Nazism. Listening to ideas is not a bad thing, employing them gets a little tricky.

Jefferson's main goal was not to keep blacks enslaved. He was against it before it was cool. I didn't know Truman was in the KKK. But, I would not say he was a great man if he was, same with Harding and Byrd. The KKK is an institution that people of like minds voluntarily join. If someone is of the same mind as those racists or Black Panthers or skin heads, then I don't care what good they do. It is only done to disguise what they really want done. It's a slight of hand type thing that I can not respect. As long as people keep giving them a pass, people like that will always be in positions of power.

I don't see a problem with the Volkswagon. The people building it weren't necessarily Nazi. They just did what they had to do to survive because others looked the other way at the real evils of Hitler and called him a great man because of a few things he did with the sole intention of garnering false respect. People gotta be strong enough to not fall for that. Same with Sanger.

[FloggingSully]

Critics say the narrowness of the recent federal ruling would block religious groups from taking any of these avenues.

Did these critics say this before or after the 'update' or whatever that the administration announced a week or so ago based on the model used by some states?

[NYGriffin]

Hey, we are getting to agreement. I do not condemn ideas in the D of I, because a slave holder wrote it. I take those ideas and let them live on in new ways, independent of anything else in his life (I am also not big on his calling most of the Bible a pile of crap either.)

Truman and Byrd I can give a pass to because I believe in redemption and those two did it earlier in their careers. Sanger and Harding, less of a pass because they did it later in their careers. But that is judgement about them as characters. It has no bearing on the quality of the ideas produced at different times in their lives and careers, or what some one else can do with the ideas. Once you unleash an idea, it exists on its own and lives on or dies because of what other people do with it.

Ideas can have merit on their own, regardless of where the originator might have gotten them or where they may take them.

[quinn14]

Did these critics say this before or after the 'update' or whatever that the administration announced a week or so ago based on the model used by some states?

I don't understand the question. Is the update you are asking about the thing where Obama said the insurance companies would provide this service for free so it isn't on the church? If so, I'm sure you realize how ridiculous that is. The church will still have to pay for an insurance company who will them provide something that they don't believe in. It really is no different. It's like saying that if you knowingly give a buddy money to buy heroine that will be given to children, you are somehow not wrong. I will never ever understand why people so freely give away the gift of freedom. It doesn't even register on my mind's radar.

[WhippetGrappler]

Hey, we are getting to agreement. I do not condemn ideas in the D of I, because a slave holder wrote it. I take those ideas and let them live on in new ways, independent of anything else in his life (I am also not big on his calling most of the Bible a pile of crap either.)

??? Where did you get this information from?

[NYGriffin]

??? Where did you get this information from?

Jefferson speaks about his views of the bible often, but the pile of crap bit I get from a letter to William Short, Oct. 31, 1819:

“[T]he greatest of all the Reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by it’s lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dung hill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man…”

He felt the Bible was mostly mythology and dross, and therefore as he calls it: mostly "dung hill," and the moral teaching of the human known as Jesus was a "diamond." He did not believe that Christ was divine, but rather a great moral teacher along the likes of Socrates, Solon, or Confucius, but better.
He later did pull the diamond out for us by re writing the Bible. He cut out the whole Old Testament and every mystical and miraculous part of the New Testament as "dung." You can find it online at Thomas Jefferson's Bible | The Jefferson Bible, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

The version I read was less than fifty pages after he shoveled off the dung...
Sometimes I think if people actually read what Jefferson, and even Lincoln (who had some socialist leanings) wrote, we would have some people blow their faces right off of Rushmore.