Your choice. Darwin, as he always does, will have the last laugh. Maybe they can become Republican politicians. Personally, I think playing the piano in a brothel would be more honest.

buddy – the 18th Amendment wasn’t that long ago. How much bluer can noses get? Yes, they are in a minority, and a very small one. The trouble is that they want to tell the majority what to do.

(Rarely does the one sound more dense and ignorant than when he lists all the unconnected [frequently non-existent] eco-disasters which have befallen Gaia, and are supposedly connected to the great warming)
As do you.
Rising Sea Levels, Australian Fires, Melting Ice… ad nauseum.

FC, I’ll teach my children whatever I want. You don’t like it, too damned bad for you. You current lot of Brits are certainly no example to follow.

Your country is going down the tubes faster and faster. It was at its greatest and most productive when your people worshipped God and had decent morals. Now it worships football hooligans and lives for cheap booze and meaningless sex. You’ve got not the slightest justification for telling Americans how to do ANYTHING.

Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple’s real name) nailed you lot solid in his books. I lived in the UK for some considerable time and the longer I was there, the more I felt like I was aboard a rudderless ship washing up on the breakers of Clockwork Orange land.

Your country is all but lost to the Muslims and the socialists are bankrupting you. You know it, but you don’t have the balls to stand up and fight back against it. Instead, those of you who don’t emigrate sit in the corners of your locals and mutter into your pint. As long as you’ve got your pint, it’s “I’m all right, Jack,” even though you know damned well things aren’t “all right” and they’re getting worse by the moment. You’re back to where you were under Callaghan, except this time there’s no North Sea oil and no Margaret Thatcher to rescue you.

The men who held Lucknow, overcame 40:1 odds against the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift, and saw off the Germans in the Battle of Britain would have despised you current British. They wouldn’t deem you worth of the name–and they’d be right. “Londonistaners” is far more appropriate.

Nirad Chaudhuri was right when he said Britain wasn’t worthy of a Margaret Thatcher. You weren’t then and you’re an even more degenerate shower now. Watching the Royal Navy and Her Majesty’s Government grovelling to the contemptuous Iranians only clinched what those of us who had been watching your sorry decline from afar already knew.

Now go have some Victory Gin to forget it all.

It just ain’t so.

Maybe it was when we were your colonies with the far different exigencies and thus reactive, defensive, norms –but lawsey mercy man –that was the 18th century. Nowadays, the bluenoses are in such a tiny minority (alas, actually, IMHO!) that your American vision is just wrong, that’s all.

And as far as me, i’m pretty secular –as are my kids and extended family for the most part –except for several RCs and one Jew, all of whose faith I envy.

However we lapsed Protestants do recognize that people who try to live spiritually healthy lives are the people who don’t seem to be suffering some sort of existential angst. IOW, lots of faith people make others feel good to be around them. And vice versa. Who argues with success?

Maybe the higher power is just brain chemistry –and maybe brain chemistry is just how the higher power works. But there is some sort of conscience and altruism, some sort of positive feedback loop, and to energize and feed that virtuous circle is almost always the only way to be one’s best self.

For headline example –if Steve McNair and Michael Jackson had been spiritually healthy, they’d be happy, rich, leading the young by example, and of course still alive. But they worshipped idols, and died.

The wages of sin is not metaphorical death, tho it is that too, but, in this day of STDs HIV, lethal urban violence, drug and sex addictions stemming from parents with the same pathologies and who usually broke the family to pieces as soon as the kids were born, that old canard from the good book means exactly what it says. Means, de minimus, that none of our problems are new, and to avoid misery, they need to be fixed the same way as always –by a committment to do right, and to lead an exemplary life.

What gives someone the right to tell me what to do, because of his or her choice of Sunday (or Saturday, or Friday) recreation? You don’t believe in drinking alcohol, don’t drink it. You don’t believe in working on Sunday, don’t work. You don’t believe in contraception, don’t use it.

But as long as I’m not harming you or yours, you have NO RIGHT AT ALL to tell me what to do – or what not to do. And you also have no right to fill your kids’ heads with mystical BS in lieu of real knowledge, hard-won by generations of workers.

“When the first knave met the first fool, then was born the first priest.”

Yeah, but I’m a lovable curmudgeon .

FC

There’s hope for you!

FWIW, I’m a scientist by training, and I’m irritated by science ignorance whenever I see it, regardless of its source.

Response to the numbered post:

1: AGW. Dunno, but the proponents of it are at least attempting to justify their stuff scientifically. Bear in mind that essentially all we have to work with is models here. The experiment to confirm the models could have rather serious side effects.

2. I agree entirely.

3. Alternative medicine: Disagree. There are now in the USA more NDs than MDs. Why? Because it works as well or better with much less side effects – as long as one sticks to the sensible stuff such as nutrition and herbs, and probably osteopathy. Wild and wooly, yes the Left loves it.

4. Genemod crops are always inadequately tested and just about always made sterile after the first generation. Hybridisation, fine – but many of these crops use naturally impossible hybrids.

5. The MMR vaccine in particular has some unanswered questions around it. In addition, injecting young children with toxic heavy metals seems less than sensible.

6. Agree. However, when the price of LEDs comes down a bit more…

7. Agree.

8. Agree.

9. Agree.

I am nobody’s leftist – I voted UKIP last time in our elections, for example. However, the nonsense proposed by the fundamentalist section of the Right needs fighting. Fiscally conservative and morally libertarian – that’s me.