Well, Bush just cited the book of Isiah..

[Coyote]

Kewl, "Death"... when and where were you serving, and what MOS? I'm Army myself, so I'll allow myself this brief off-topic post...

Actually, we were required to salute Clinton ("respect the office he holds, if not the man himself")...

[Darth Wong]

And interesting enough, you have no logical answer, so you seek to simply evade the question by dismissing it as an absurdity. If you can't think of a good response, and this is the best you can do, then fuck YOU, asshole.

Give me a good reason why I have to jump to such an absurdity.

The fact that you have given me the legal right to do it, dumb-fuck. If I was a teacher, I would do it given your interpretation of the law. Now you're faced with the choice of being a hypocrite and penalizing me for it, or allowing it. What do you choose?

Gothic satanists (the ones who say "Hail Satan") are for the vast majority part either physically or mentally rebellious teenagers who have no concept of adult responsibility, let alone enough to be put into a position to instill knowledge and responsibility into children.

Ah, hasty generalization. Good for you. Would you like to make any more of an idiot of yourself?

There is no actual religion that worships Satan, organized or disorganized.

You get to decide what is and isn't a valid religion? Who gave you that power? I can be a fucking religion of one if I want to, asshole.

There might be a few scattered around who have that level of maturity, but I really doubt it. Give me a situation that's likely to actually show up in the real world.

If I were a teacher, I would do it. Now answer the fucking original question.

Jumping from "I wouldn't want a teacher to say 'hail Satan' in front of my kids" to "I only support freedom of religion when it's convenient to me" is a fuck of a leap.

No it isn't. Do you know what a leap in logic is? You said that it should be OK for teachers to introduce their religious beliefs in the classroom as long as they aren't forcing the students to accept them. I said that a DIRECT APPLICATION of that argument leads to the conclusion that a Satanist should be able to do the same thing. There is no leap in logic required, and your pathetic response (that Satanism doesn't count) simply makes you look ridiculous.

This is EXACTLY what Johnny-Boy did when I asked him if he would kill babies at God's command: evade the question by simply saying that it would never happen.

(BTW, I did, in fact, consider what kind of a land mine I was looking at before I went and stomped on it)

TOo bad you were too fucking stupid to recognize the hypocrisy in your position before doing so.

Show me first a teacher who's an actual Satanist, Mike, then we'll talk. I'm not going to waste my time justifying myself in the face of an eventuality that probably doesn't even exist.

As I said, you don't seem to recognize that ethical and legal issues have to be judged on the question of whether the principle works, not whether someone has already pushed it. Evade, evade, evade, eh?

Satan in the Bible does not preach personal enrichment. You are talking about the organized movement that had very little to do with Satan in the Bible. Satan in the Bible stood for freedom of thought and liberty from oppression. And you are still trying to evade the point, asshole.

No, you're evading the point by trying to make me fight something that doesn't even exist.

You think it's "evading" your point to show how it produces results you don't want if applied equally to all religions? You greatly overestimate the strength of your own argument.

A good law makes sense, and part of "making sense" is showing that it makes sense in any theoretical situation. I reiterate that:

1. Your position that a religion must be widesprea and popularly recognized in order to exist is bullshit.
2. Your position that ethical arguments need not be tested in hypothetical situations unless you can show that they have already occurred is also bullshit. Virtually all ethicists spend a great deal of time on hypothetical situations; unless you can show that the scenario is IMPOSSIBLE (which you can't), you must be able to deal with it. "Not very likely" isn't good enough.

In short, your whole "rebuttal" is to simply say that Satanism doesn't count. Pathetic.

Gothic satanism ("classical" Satanism as you're trying to define it) is a joke, Mike. If there's a thousand Gothic satanists in the US over the age of 19, I'd be really surprised.

Appeal to popularity now? Keep on digging that hole deeper, idiot. You are still trying to say that Satanism "doesn't count" because it either isn't popular enough or doesn't fit some idiotic definition of religious validity in your head, as if one religion is intrinsically better than another.

YOU might be talking about Satan in the Bible (as you see and interpret him, at any rate), I'M talking about Satanism as a 20th/21st century religious movement, because THAT'S the kind of Satanism that any one of us is the most likely to come into practical contact with.

Doesn't matter. Even if it's a religion of one, it's still a religion. Answer the fucking question.

And, Mike, for all the times that Satan promises the goods, does he ever ONCE deliver? I can promise you fifty million dollars in gold right now, but I have absolutely no ability to deliver on that promise.

What part of religious equality do you not understand?

Remember that when Satan promises Jesus great and wonderful things, he always puts on his promises a condition: worship (the same condition as his rival, for promises that admittedly aren't fulfilled all that much more often than Satan's).

Really! So when Satan encouraged Adam and Even to throw off the shackles of ignorance, he put a condition on them? I don't recall it. And when did he ask Jesus to worship him? He only asked him to reject God, as I recall.

That ain't liberty. That's trading one master for another. Empty promises of freedom "if you'll do as I say" qualify as rabble-rousing, not liberation.

Show me where Satan promises to horribly torture people if they won't worship him.

I'm not going to go around saying that God (at least WRT the Old Testament - the Big Guy seemed a bit less aggressive in NT times: still cranky, but FAR less likely to smite whole populations because He was having an off day) was a nifty-keen guy, so please don't insult my intelligence.

I don't have to. By evading the question and trying to pretend that Satanism isn't a valid religion (as if there's a such thing as a religion any more valid than any other), you are doing a fine job of that all on your own.

[Iceberg]

And interesting enough, you have no logical answer, so you seek to simply evade the question by dismissing it as an absurdity. If you can't think of a good response, and this is the best you can do, then fuck YOU, asshole.

Give me a good reason why I have to jump to such an absurdity.

The fact that you have given me the legal right to do it, dumb-fuck. If I was a teacher, I would do it given your interpretation of the law. Now you're faced with the choice of being a hypocrite and penalizing me for it, or allowing it. What do you choose?

I wouldn't lodge a legal protest because you're exercising your right to freedom of religion, Mike. I'd lodge a legal protest (or punch you in the face) because you're abusing a position of authority to shock and harm my kids, and I don't want some fucktard hurting my kids - or anybody else's kids.

Actually, I'd probably prefer a simple fistfight to a day in court (and the two of us are probably at a position of physical parity or near parity), but that's because at least with a physical brawl there's closure at the end. Somebody's beaten, and somebody's victorious - there isn't the endless cycle of appeals to higher courts if the loser isn't happy.

Gothic satanists (the ones who say "Hail Satan") are for the vast majority part either physically or mentally rebellious teenagers who have no concept of adult responsibility, let alone enough to be put into a position to instill knowledge and responsibility into children.

Ah, hasty generalization. Good for you. Would you like to make any more of an idiot of yourself?

Again, you're the one making the positive assertion. You wouldn't let somebody positively assert something this ridiculous about Star Trek without showing a shitload of evidence, why should I hold you to a lesser standard over something far more consequential? I'm not talking about the Satanists whose existence is verifiable; I'm talking about an extremely hypothetical boogieman created for the purpose of raising and proving a spurious point.

There is no actual religion that worships Satan, organized or disorganized.

You get to decide what is and isn't a valid religion? Who gave you that power? I can be a fucking religion of one if I want to, asshole.

Actually, you can't. In order for a religion to exist, its existence has to be statistically verifiable - otherwise you're nothing but a lone kook. Solitary pagans are individually statistically unverifiable, but enough people identify as pagans that collectively they are verifiable, and so pagans are a recognized religion, even though they have all the organization of a bathtub of drunken cats.

There might be a few scattered around who have that level of maturity, but I really doubt it. Give me a situation that's likely to actually show up in the real world.

If I were a teacher, I would do it. Now answer the fucking original question.

So if you were a teacher, you'd do something which you HAVE to know would only shock and hurt your students? What a surprise. I expected better of you, Mike. I expected some maturity out of somebody who is a parent of two and should have some working-level understanding of child psychology. I probably shouldn't have, but I did.

Jumping from "I wouldn't want a teacher to say 'hail Satan' in front of my kids" to "I only support freedom of religion when it's convenient to me" is a fuck of a leap.

No it isn't. Do you know what a leap in logic is? You said that it should be OK for teachers to introduce their religious beliefs in the classroom as long as they aren't forcing the students to accept them. I said that a DIRECT APPLICATION of that argument leads to the conclusion that a Satanist should be able to do the same thing. There is no leap in logic required, and your pathetic response (that Satanism doesn't count) simply makes you look ridiculous.

You're not paying attention, or else you're only seeing the words you want to see. Satanism doesn't count because the FBI spent five years from 1988 to 1993 trying to find evidence of satanism in the United States and came up dry. There is none - at least, no more than a few rebellious teenagers scattered around. There is EVIDENCE that satanism (the actual worship of the Prince of Darkness) is a non-issue before the debate even starts.

Show me first a teacher who's an actual Satanist, Mike, then we'll talk. I'm not going to waste my time justifying myself in the face of an eventuality that probably doesn't even exist.

As I said, you don't seem to recognize that ethical and legal issues have to be judged on the question of whether the principle works, not whether someone has already pushed it. Evade, evade, evade, eh?

Which is an interesting point, because in practice, legal issues are almost universally decided on the question of whether somebody has pressed the issue, and not on whether the principle works in the first place. If your claim was true, the CDA and its successors would never have gotten off the ground because it would be demonstrated that they do not work either in principle or in practice.

Satan in the Bible does not preach personal enrichment. You are talking about the organized movement that had very little to do with Satan in the Bible. Satan in the Bible stood for freedom of thought and liberty from oppression. And you are still trying to evade the point, asshole.

No, you're evading the point by trying to make me fight something that doesn't even exist.

You think it's "evading" your point to show how it produces results you don't want if applied equally to all religions? You greatly overestimate the strength of your own argument.

Satanism isn't a religion. It's something that middle-class teenagers do to bother their parents. You haven't yet proven otherwise, or even given any evidence to the contrary, despite ample opportunity to do so. Again, if a Trekkie were making such a ludicrous assertion, you'd shoot him down in flames before the argument finished passing his lips.

A good law makes sense, and part of "making sense" is showing that it makes sense in any theoretical situation. I reiterate that:
Your position that a religion must be widesprea and popularly recognized in order to exist is bullshit.

That's not my position. My position - consistent with a five-year research project conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation - is that Gothic satanism specifically does not exist, that there is no positive, statistically verifiable evidence for its existence, and therefore I don't have to test my position against it because as an issue, it's a non-starter.

Your position that ethical arguments need not be tested in hypothetical situations unless you can show that they have already occurred is also bullshit. Virtually all ethicists spend a great deal of time on hypothetical situations; unless you can show that the scenario is IMPOSSIBLE (which you can't), you must be able to deal with it. "Not very likely" isn't good enough.

It strikes me as singularly hilarious that you're throwing Creationist reasoning at me here, Mike. That it doesn't matter how unlikely a scenario is shown to be, you still have to be fully prepared to deal with it.

In short, your whole "rebuttal" is to simply say that Satanism doesn't count. Pathetic.

Not that it doesn't count, that it doesn't exist. At least not in a provable form. I'm not an ethicist, Mike. I don't have to deal with ethical scenarios that are so unlikely that I'll probably never encounter them.

Gothic satanism ("classical" Satanism as you're trying to define it) is a joke, Mike. If there's a thousand Gothic satanists in the US over the age of 19, I'd be really surprised.

Appeal to popularity now? Keep on digging that hole deeper, idiot. You are still trying to say that Satanism "doesn't count" because it either isn't popular enough or doesn't fit some idiotic definition of religious validity in your head, as if one religion is intrinsically better than another.

My definition of "religious validity" is being able to find evidence of worshippers that is repeatable, observable and verifiable, Mike (gee, where have I heard that before...). In absence of such, I will continue to believe that Satanism doesn't exist because I have no reason to believe otherwise, other than your say-so and Jack T. Chick's (both instances of the fallacy of appeal to authority). Otherwise, I'd be no better than those idiotic Chicken Littles who ran around in the late 80s screaming that their kids were being secretly sexually abused by a vast underground network of satanists (which prompted the FBI investigation in the first place).

YOU might be talking about Satan in the Bible (as you see and interpret him, at any rate), I'M talking about Satanism as a 20th/21st century religious movement, because THAT'S the kind of Satanism that any one of us is the most likely to come into practical contact with.

Doesn't matter. Even if it's a religion of one, it's still a religion. Answer the fucking question.

You first. Show me an actual Satanist, by your own definition. Then show me enough others that if I ask the same guy in six months, he's not going to tell me "Oh, I was just joking back then." A religion has to have enough members to show up on a statistical survey.

And, Mike, for all the times that Satan promises the goods, does he ever ONCE deliver? I can promise you fifty million dollars in gold right now, but I have absolutely no ability to deliver on that promise.

What part of religious equality do you not understand?

The part that forces me to answer a strictly hypothetical question asked for the sole purpose of getting a rise out of somebody.

Remember that when Satan promises Jesus great and wonderful things, he always puts on his promises a condition: worship (the same condition as his rival, for promises that admittedly aren't fulfilled all that much more often than Satan's).

Really! So when Satan encouraged Adam and Even to throw off the shackles of ignorance, he put a condition on them? I don't recall it. And when did he ask Jesus to worship him? He only asked him to reject God, as I recall.

Wrong. Satan told Jesus he would give him:

• bread and water (actually, he told Jesus to make bread and water),
• protection from harm (again, actually in this case he told Jesus to throw himself from the temple and that God's angels would protect him from dying on the streets below),
• dominion over the entire world (which God had promised in the Scriptures)

If he would turn from God and worship him. In other words, empty promises in exchange for worship (note that combination - it frequently appears with respect to Satan). Your recall is altered by your mental bias. As for Adam and Eve, wait a paragraph.

That ain't liberty. That's trading one master for another. Empty promises of freedom "if you'll do as I say" qualify as rabble-rousing, not liberation.

Show me where Satan promises to horribly torture people if they won't worship him.

Evasion, Mike. We're talking about Satan here, not YHWH. Satan is the deceiver, the maker of empty promises. You can promise anybody anything if you have no intention of delivering. The only person he ever delivered on for any promise was Eve, and even there he left out critical conditions that may have impacted on the decision-making process (namely, that the power of Knowledge would entail responsibility for the human condition). The serpent in the Garden is also not necessarily even Satan - it's never actually identified as Satan, and at the end of the Creation narrative, God transforms the serpent into the legless, armless snake, so it's highly unlikely that the serpent is Satan, who is identified as an anthropomorphic figure which at times in the Old Testament is on an equal plane with YHWH (a remnant of the pre-Yahwist Hebrew religion) and at times is YHWH's servant! It isn't until the New Testament that Satan is consistently identified as a being separate from and in rebellion against God.

At any rate, I'm quite comfortable in the position of treating the entire Book of Genesis allegorically (indeed, present-day Catholic theology assumes that Genesis is an allegorical creation narrative and not a literal description of events that actually happened), so you're treading on mighty thin ice if that's your only instance of Satan offering freedom.

[Frank Hipper]

Please to forgive the nitpickish intrusion, but what about Anton LaVey's Church of Satan and what's his name's Temple of Set?

[Darth Wong]

I wouldn't lodge a legal protest because you're exercising your right to freedom of religion, Mike. I'd lodge a legal protest (or punch you in the face) because you're abusing a position of authority to shock and harm my kids, and I don't want some fucktard hurting my kids - or anybody else's kids.

Oh, I see. So praising Satan is "hurting your kids", but praising God isn't? Does the term "double-standard" mean anything to you?

Actually, I'd probably prefer a simple fistfight to a day in court (and the two of us are probably at a position of physical parity or near parity), but that's because at least with a physical brawl there's closure at the end. Somebody's beaten, and somebody's victorious - there isn't the endless cycle of appeals to higher courts if the loser isn't happy.

No, because you launched an unprovoked assault upon me, so I charge you with assault. And when you give your ridiculous reason, the judge laughs and sends you to jail.

Again, you're the one making the positive assertion. You wouldn't let somebody positively assert something this ridiculous about Star Trek without showing a shitload of evidence, why should I hold you to a lesser standard over something far more consequential? I'm not talking about the Satanists whose existence is verifiable; I'm talking about an extremely hypothetical boogieman created for the purpose of raising and proving a spurious point.

It is hardly a "spurious point" to say that if you allow a teacher to bring one religion into a classroom, you MUST allow them all. The fact that you wish to dismiss religions that don't fit your criteria for acceptability merely proves the inherent hypocrisy of your position.

Actually, you can't. In order for a religion to exist, its existence has to be statistically verifiable - otherwise you're nothing but a lone kook.

Bullshit. That is only for a government to recognize a religion in its statistics. For the purpose of religious freedom, you can indeed have a religion of one.

So if you were a teacher, you'd do something which you HAVE to know would only shock and hurt your students? What a surprise. I expected better of you, Mike. I expected some maturity out of somebody who is a parent of two and should have some working-level understanding of child psychology. I probably shouldn't have, but I did.

I do have a working-level understanding of child psychology, asshole. Satan is easily the best and most intriguing character in the Bible. You still refuse to admit that anyone could say that and not be lying. You still insist that I must be just bullshitting for the purpose of shock value. FUCKING DEAL WITH IT, ASSHOLE. I am telling the truth: Satan, in my estimation, is the best character in the Bible.

You're not paying attention, or else you're only seeing the words you want to see. Satanism doesn't count because the FBI spent five years from 1988 to 1993 trying to find evidence of satanism in the United States and came up dry. There is none - at least, no more than a few rebellious teenagers scattered around. There is EVIDENCE that satanism (the actual worship of the Prince of Darkness) is a non-issue before the debate even starts.

Irrelevant. You are still trying to say that a religion must be large and organized for someone to have the freedom to practice it. If you can find this stipulation in the Constitution, then show it to me.

Which is an interesting point, because in practice, legal issues are almost universally decided on the question of whether somebody has pressed the issue, and not on whether the principle works in the first place. If your claim was true, the CDA and its successors would never have gotten off the ground because it would be demonstrated that they do not work either in principle or in practice.

And they didn't get off the ground, moron. Those laws invariably get struck down when they hit the Supreme Court because they evaluate them based on how they MIGHT be applied, not how they HAVE ALREADY been applied.

Satanism isn't a religion <snip>. It's something that middle-class teenagers do to bother their parents. You haven't yet proven otherwise, or even given any evidence to the contrary, despite ample opportunity to do so. Again, if a Trekkie were making such a ludicrous assertion, you'd shoot him down in flames before the argument finished passing his lips.

Bullshit.

From Merriam-Webster:

Religion:
1 a : the state of a religious <a nun in her 20th year of religion> b (1) : the service and worship of God or the supernatural (2) : commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith

The relevant definition is #2: a PERSONAL OR INSTITUTIONALIZED SYSTEM. A religion does not have to be large, recognized, or institutionalized to exist. So shut the fuck up with your idiotic claim that Satanism is not a religion. I can invent my own fucking personal worship of Satan and it would be a perfectly valid religion.

That's not my position. My position - consistent with a five-year research project conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation - is that Gothic satanism specifically does not exist, that there is no positive, statistically verifiable evidence for its existence, and therefore I don't have to test my position against it because as an issue, it's a non-starter.

See previous point.

It strikes me as singularly hilarious that you're throwing Creationist reasoning at me here, Mike. That it doesn't matter how unlikely a scenario is shown to be, you still have to be fully prepared to deal with it.

And how is that "creationist reasoning?" Could it be you're just desperately trying to pin labels on an argument that you can't deal with? Please show me how the insistence upon universal applicability of a law somehow makes me a creationist.

Not that it doesn't count, that it doesn't exist. At least not in a provable form. I'm not an ethicist, Mike. I don't have to deal with ethical scenarios that are so unlikely that I'll probably never encounter them.

50 years ago, blacks filing suit for job discrimination would have been considered so unlikely that it would never be encountered, asshole.

My definition of "religious validity" is being able to find evidence of worshippers that is repeatable, observable and verifiable, Mike (gee, where have I heard that before...).

You've found one. Satan is the hero of the Bible. Now deal with the fucking point.

Oh, and by the way, stop using objective terminology to describe subjective states such as religious beliefs. A person's personal beliefs are not independently verifiable under any circumstances. Yet again, you try to parrot the sort of language I use to excoriate creationists but you're obviously too fucking stupid to use it correctly.

In absence of such, I will continue to believe that Satanism doesn't exist because I have no reason to believe otherwise, other than your say-so and Jack T. Chick's (both instances of the fallacy of appeal to authority). Otherwise, I'd be no better than those idiotic Chicken Littles who ran around in the late 80s screaming that their kids were being secretly sexually abused by a vast underground network of satanists (which prompted the FBI investigation in the first place).

You're an idiot. Satanism exists because I tell you that I think Satan is the hero of the Bible. Now deal with the point; if I were a teacher, and I praised Satan in the classroom because of the way he stands for freedom of thought and rebellion against oppressive tyrants, you have stated that you would have a problem with that. Yet you would NOT have a problem with someone praising the Biblical God (an unrepentant baby-killer, I might add) in that same classroom. You are a class-A hypocrite.

You first. Show me an actual Satanist, by your own definition.

Me.

Then show me enough others that if I ask the same guy in six months, he's not going to tell me "Oh, I was just joking back then." A religion has to have enough members to show up on a statistical survey.

I'm not joking, asshole.

The part that forces me to answer a strictly hypothetical question asked for the sole purpose of getting a rise out of somebody.

If you think I do not sincerely think Satan is the best character in the Bible, you should check yourself into an asylum, because you're fucking deluded.

Wrong. Satan told Jesus he would give him:

• bread and water (actually, he told Jesus to make bread and water),
• protection from harm (again, actually in this case he told Jesus to throw himself from the temple and that God's angels would protect him from dying on the streets below),
• dominion over the entire world (which God had promised in the Scriptures)

If he would turn from God and worship him.

Nothing was said about Adam and Eve, I notice. And you still haven't provided the quote where Satan says it's necessary for him to worship him, even though it's irrelevant since no such quote exists for Adam and Eve. Moreover, no punishment was threatened if he refused to worship Satan. Offering a reward for worship is hardly the same thing as threatening horrible eternal torture for failure to worship.

In other words, empty promises in exchange for worship (note that combination - it frequently appears with respect to Satan). Your recall is altered by your mental bias. As for Adam and Eve, wait a paragraph.

Either that, or you are too fucking stupid to recognize the difference between the carrot and the stick. Offering a reward is hardly the same thing as threatening horrible torture.

Show me where Satan promises to horribly torture people if they won't worship him.

Evasion, Mike. We're talking about Satan here, not YHWH.

How is it evasion? The fact is that God threatens horrible torture for failure to worship, and Satan does not. If I offered you a million dollars to worship me, would you consider that a horrible thing? If, on the other hand, I threatened to murder your children if you didn't worship me, would you consider that a horrible thing? Satan is the hero of the Bible. And you have demonstrated that you are a hypocrite.

Satan is the deceiver, the maker of empty promises. You can promise anybody anything if you have no intention of delivering. The only person he ever delivered on for any promise was Eve, and even there he left out critical conditions that may have impacted on the decision-making process (namely, that the power of Knowledge would entail responsibility for the human condition).

Which would not be a problem if God didn't decide to be an asshole about it.

The serpent in the Garden is also not necessarily even Satan - it's never actually identified as Satan, and at the end of the Creation narrative, God transforms the serpent into the legless, armless snake, so it's highly unlikely that the serpent is Satan, who is identified as an anthropomorphic figure which at times in the Old Testament is on an equal plane with YHWH (a remnant of the pre-Yahwist Hebrew religion) and at times is YHWH's servant! It isn't until the New Testament that Satan is consistently identified as a being separate from and in rebellion against God.

I interpret it to be Satan, which is good enough for my Satanist religion. I don't even have to believe he was real; the definition of religion is satisfied as long as I strongly believe that he was the hero of the Bible for ethical purposes. Even an ethical system can be defined as a religion for our purposes (after all, that's how Einstein defined it).

At any rate, I'm quite comfortable in the position of treating the entire Book of Genesis allegorically (indeed, present-day Catholic theology assumes that Genesis is an allegorical creation narrative and not a literal description of events that actually happened), so you're treading on mighty thin ice if that's your only instance of Satan offering freedom.

Doesn't matter; offering a bribe to turn Jesus away from his mass-murdering baby-killer father is hardly the sort of thing which makes Satan a bad guy. And you have clearly demonstrated that you are an unbelievable hypocrite.

KEY POINT

You clearly stated that you consider it "harm" for me to praise Satan in front of schoolkids. Yet you consider it "freedom" for you to praise God in front of schoolkids. The blatant hypocrisy of this position is crystal clear to anyone who isn't as fucked in the head as you are.

[Darth Wong]

By the way, the FBI study you repeatedly cite was made for the purpose of seeing whether prosecutable criminal activities were occurring. You are taking it grossly out of context to conclude that there is no such thing as Satanism from their results.

[ArthurDent]

The rest of us are expected not to allow our personal lives to interfere with our professional activities. This is normal for all employers across the land.

But for some reason, the man elected to the highest office in the land is not held to the same standard as a high school teacher. And people defend this double-standard

Show me in the First Amendment where the exceptions to the free exercise clause are and you might have a case, otherwise you don't.

[Darth Wong]

The rest of us are expected not to allow our personal lives to interfere with our professional activities. This is normal for all employers across the land.

But for some reason, the man elected to the highest office in the land is not held to the same standard as a high school teacher. And people defend this double-standard

Show me in the First Amendment where the exceptions to the free exercise clause are and you might have a case, otherwise you don't.

Free exercise is inherently universal; when one man's free exercise inhibits another man's free exercise, it is no longer permissible. That's why schoolteachers aren't allowed to preach in the classroom even though their religion may demand it, dumb-ass. Try harder next time.

And while we're at it, I'll ask YOU: would you be perfectly content with a schoolteacher teaching kids about what a great guy Satan was?

[ArthurDent]

Free exercise is inherently universal;

Excepting when one holds political office, apparently.

when one man's free exercise inhibits another man's free exercise, it is no longer permissible.

Please explain how a president quoting Isaiah inhibits another man's free exercise.

That's why schoolteachers aren't allowed to preach in the classroom even though their religion may demand it,

In public schools, sure.

dumb-ass. Try harder next time.

Ah, the ever present name-calling of those you disagree with.

And while we're at it, I'll ask YOU: would you be perfectly content with a schoolteacher teaching kids about what a great guy Satan was?

No, I wouldn't, just as you don't want any mention of religion. For that reason religion isn't taught in public schools. But please tell me how that has anything to do the President. And I also love how you completely dodge the point that there are no exceptions listed with the free exercise clause.

[Darth Wong]

[<snip smarmy one-line sentence-by-sentence jabs typical of whiners>

No, I wouldn't, just as you don't want any mention of religion. For that reason religion isn't taught in public schools. But please tell me how that has anything to do the President.[/quote]
Ah, so the President has lower standards of conduct than a typical school teacher? Then we simply return to the point I made earlier, and which you obviously did not notice.

And I also love how you completely dodge the point that there are no exceptions listed with the free exercise clause.

How did I dodge the point, asshole? I already pointed out that your free exercise cannot inhibit another person's free exercise. When the government appears to endorse one religion, it inherently limits free exercise because part of free exercise is free choice, and part of free choice is not having to worry about your children being publicly pressured to join a religion other than your own. Do I really need to spell this out for you, even though the same point has been made a million times before in a million other venues?

Can you explain WHY a schoolteacher is not allowed to preach in the classroom? Because according to your interpretation of limitless free exercise, he should be.