bluey

It might be "odd" but in the first place it was her journal (it seems likely the question had been raised to her and she was working out an answer for her own information) and in the second place she clearly comes to the conclusion that no, they should not be enslaved, even if it were for their own good. What's authoritarian about that? What would the "liberal tradition" do if there existed non-rational people who were "incapable of rational thinking and of independence, and therefore [needed] an enslaved, controlled, regimented, "protective" society in order to survive"? The opposite of not enslaving them?

I can't say I know too much about this since I'm in Canada and I haven't personally seen anything I'd label as "deification", but my friend (who's into photography) sent me a link to a girl on Flickr who's only 14 and takes cool pictures I guess (they're pretty, I wouldn't know if they're actually good or not). Anyway I was looking through her collection and the caption for one of them around the date of the election said this: I know she's only 14 and being dramatic, and her photos struck me as really mystical so she probably doesn't have a great grasp of reality, but still ... that's a pretty extreme attitude to have about politics as a child. What is this kid learning in school to think that any politician could have this sort of influence on her personally?? Why has someone not explained to her that politics is ... politics?? From what I can see I don't think she's unusual, either. This attitude is not normal, it's not "just excited".

You might feel better about it if you look at what's actually happening and what's actually likely to happen. If you can pinpoint an actual risk that is relevant to *you*, you can do things now to mitigate that. For example - you have technological skills and you're worried that if there's a significant recession they would be obsolete and you'd be screwed. But what are the chances that absolutely all technology is going to be lost within your lifetime? Is there a more basic level of skills you can begin to master now that you could use if you ever had to? Maybe you could learn about electricity, surely you don't think it's possible that the entire United States will be reduced to a pre-electric state in the next 5 - 10 years (and if you are worried about that, you need to take a closer look at reality instead of just being pointlessly pessimistic). I'd also suggest that you practice thinking about yourself as an individual and your problems as they specifically pertain to you. You say "people will have even less money to pay off their debts than they did before". Do you have less money to pay off your debts than before? Can you get rid of your debts before that could become a problem for you? If you don't have debt then it doesn't matter so much whether everyone else in the country does (except to put you in a stronger relative position), and if you do have debt then it wouldn't matter if nobody else did. Consumer debt, despite the language the media uses to frame the problem, is not something we can all be screwed by - other people's debt is not a threat to you. If you're just talking about federal debt then that's not really something you can take action on right now so you shouldn't worry about it, just develop your own skills in rational ways and you'll be able to adjust to whatever happens.

None of those things have ever been part of my "theory". I'm going to go learn the skill of keeping my mouth shut instead of getting caught up in discussions that have no relevance to me anyway.

Not exactly by definition. If it were possible for the fetus to survive without being sustained by the mother (which is the case in very late stages of pregnancy), then it's not impossible "by definition" that it could have rights simply because the mother continues to sustain it. However at this point before birth it still isn't an individual being since it's never existed as an individual; it hasn't come into existence as an individual yet. So it doesn't have rights, but not because it's impossible. That's why at birth it does have rights even though it couldn't actually live without being sustained by the mother (or someone).

It is frustrating, but I'm going to try to make my position understood here because that's a skill that I need to improve. What I'm saying here is that even if a fetus had the same right as everyone else, it still wouldn't have a right to real estate in the mother's uterus, because even if it had a right to continue living unimpeded it wouldn't have a right to be kept alive (for the same reasons that nobody else does). Therefore abortion would not be a violation of its rights for the same reason that my refusal to feed you isn't a violation of your rights. David's argument against this appears to be that if the fetus had a right to remain alive then abortion would necessarily constitute an act of murder. I disagree. Perhaps, if a fetus had rights, then certain means of abortion would be murder (like partial birth abortions), but there would be no basis for a blanket ban on any method of terminating a pregnancy. Chemical abortions (like PlanB or RU-486) work by making the uterus inhospitable to the fetus. They don't take any action on the fetus itself and would not be murder, even if a fetus had the right not to be murdered. It is important to recognize this distinction. Of course the fact is that a fetus isn't an independent being and doesn't have rights, and it follows from that that the mother can do whatever she wants to it, and so any form of abortion is legal. But without even knowing that you can go from "the right to life" to "the right to an abortion". It's important because it's not obvious why a fetus doesn't have rights at 38 weeks gestation, when it would survive on its own, but does have rights an hour after birth when it has the same level of need. I say it's not obvious; it's still true and I do understand why. However it is still possible to validly defend a mother's right to terminate a pregnancy (by some means at some point after conception) to someone who understands the proper basis for a right to life even if they don't understand the proper basis of how a fetus is different from a baby. If you don't think it's important to be able to do that then just be glad you'll never be a confused, pregnant 14-year-old girl. Yes, I agree. Hopefully the above makes clear that "abortion", as a general category of action, wouldn't be a violation of any rights. Even if a fetus had the same rights as an infant, the woman would still "retain control of her body" and would have a right to an abortion on that basis. Yes, if a fetus had rights then there would be an issue in the later stages of a pregnancy, when it would be able to survive outside of the uterus. Since a fetus doesn't have rights there is no issue. If it did then the issue would be the fact that it could physically survive outside of the womb and possibly should be given a chance to do so rather than killed. Then perhaps a woman would be responsible for a the resulting baby since she let it go far enough to develop into an individual (which is NOT my argument; it just shows that the woman's right is sufficient to show that there is a right to abortion, if not a right to abortion by any means whatsoever.) Before this point there is no way for it to survive without leeching off the mother, which she has a right to refuse to let it do, so there is no conflict of rights. Look, there's no conflict of rights! Nobody has a right to force (or have the government force in their favour) someone else to sacrifice for them. The only right anyone has is to be left alone so long as they're not violating anyone else's right to the same thing. The mother wouldn't be violating the fetus' right to be left alone so long as it's not violating her rights, because if she's forced to use her body to develop an embryo into a baby then her rights are being violated, which the embryo wouldn't have a right to do even if it had a right to remain alive. That would be a contradiction. Yes, I agree completely and have said so several times in this thread. You can't accidentally have a baby; you can only have a baby either by choice or by force. Developing a fetus into a baby is a 9-month-long process of action and if you undertake that process then you are making a choice. It is, however, possible (though very unlikely if you're being conscientious in the first place) to get pregnant accidentally. You can't then be forced to go through all the actions of creating a child or, if you are, you haven't accepted responsibility for it.

Huh? That doesn't even make sense and is not what I said. A parent can't kill their child. No one can kill anyone unless they're in danger of being killed themselves. Which happens to be the case with pregnancy. Rights can't conflict, I just said that. What rights are conflicting? Interests can conflict, you surely wouldn't argue against that? No, it can't. That's why a fetus doesn't have a right to exist regardless of the destruction and total abrogation of the rights of the mother. That's false. The fetus (even if it had rights) doesn't have a right to the resources of the mother. There's no contradiction. If someone wants to protect the fetus then it's up to them to come up with a way to do it. My entire point is that it doesn't matter because abortion wouldn't be a violation of any rights anyway. But yes, I can defend the claim that a fetus has no rights on the basis that it's not an individual, it's part of the mother's body, it doesn't have any means of pursuing life and therefor no right have someone do so for it, etc. Regardless of whether a fetus at the point of viability would hypothetically have rights, there is indisputably a time at the beginning of a pregnancy where it is a clump of cells and obviously isn't human any more than any other clump of cells in a body is human. How could an abortion qualify as a violation of rights at this point? The government has a responsibility to the woman to protect her from being forced into a non-voluntary obligation of sacrifice to another being. Which is what's happening when a woman is deprived of access to medical technology, just as it would be if she were prevented access to any other method of birth control. A screaming toddler is analogous to an annoying neighbour. A fetus is analogous to a neighbour invading your body and forcing you to surrender yourself to his demands. Maybe you opened the front door, maybe your security system failed, maybe the neighbour can't be held responsible for his actions - but you are facing a real sacrifice and the only option is to neutralize the threat. Regardless of whether a fetus had rights, a woman could not morally be forced into an obligation of sacrifice for it. I don't claim that, and I do have a position on that question; however it's a secondary question that overshadows the real issue. Clearly. Which wouldn't include the right to force another being to sacrifice in its favour, as men don't have that right. There is only the right to life, from which all other rights are derived. The right to life entails protection from imposed obligations to provide for anyone else's life. What else do you need besides the right not to be leeched off of? The woman has a right not to be leeched off of. The only way for a government to "protect" a fetus' supposed rights would be to initiate force against the mother. I get that you think that's a minor thing compared to keeping another individual alive, and yes it's helpful that a fetus isn't an individual and doesn't have rights and therefor abortion is moral because a woman can't initiate force against her own body. Sure, that's good too. BUT the fact that the fetus is a rightless object so anyone can do anything they want to it is not the basis of a woman's right to have an abortion. The basis is that the right to life entails the idea that you can't have an involuntary obligation to sacrifice yourself for any reason. If you look at it from this perspective then the only aspect of abortion that should be an issue at all is abortion in the third trimester, when viability is a negotiable topic and the argument that the fetus has rights derived from its viability is arguable. Allowing that if a fetus had rights then the woman could be forced to sacrifice herself for it, which is what you are saying when you even consider at what point a clump of cells morphs into a human (and at some point it clearly does), gives the pro-life argument undue support and is also wrong. The right to life is not the same as the right to be kept alive at someone else's expense.

I think we're heading towards more self-management (freelancing, etc.) and self-employment. There are so many new resources available to enable anyone to connect with a market for anything, independently gain necessary skills and avoid wasting resources on unnecessary skills, pay for help by the project or hour rather than by annual salary and conduct business on any scale. It's really exciting, actually. Not sure that's what you were getting at in your question but it's getting easier and easier to find ways to monetize esoteric skills or skill sets that would be too eclectic to put to use in a traditional corporate environment. The internet rocks

So on a desert island you could morally kill your child, since it wouldn't be illegal? Lame. The obligation doesn't come from the law either; it comes from willingly accepting an obligation and voluntarily bringing a child into the world. Maybe it isn't a contract; it's still a moral obligation on the parent that stems from the parent's voluntary creation of that obligation. If it's not a contract because the infant can't consent to it, then is it an act of force on the child by the parent? After all the parent is forcing the child to do something (exist) without the child's understanding or consent (and in many cases, especially those involving a question of abortion, against what would be the child's rational self-interest). The "identifiable new obligation" is that a person exists now who can't take care of itself, and there wouldn't be a problem if you didn't decide to bring it into existence. Basically you're deciding that a human being (whose means of survival is reason) should exist without recourse to its only means of survival. You therefore have an obligation to use your own reason for its benefit until it is capable of doing so itself. That's my point exactly. That's why a mother has a right to conserve her resources rather than sacrifice them for another person, even if it's a rational human being with rights. Right to exist?? What right to exist? Individuals have a right to life, not a blanket guarantee on existence. From the Ayn Rand Lexicon under "Right to Life": So if a woman is pregnant and wishes to terminate the pregnancy rather than accept the obligation for carrying the embryo to term or caring for the child thereafter, and you wish to protect the embryo's right to support its own life (or, absurdly, if the embryo wishes to exercise its right to support its own life), then it's your (or the government's, or the embryo's, I guess) obligation to find a way to make that happen without forcing the mother to sacrifice in order to provide the other individual (the embryo) with the necessities of life. Who's going to take care of it? Of course no one needs to do anything because it doesn't have any rights. But my point is that even if it did, that doesn't force any obligation on the mother. If the government decides that an embryo is human and shouldn't be killed, then it would have to find a way to get it out of there without killing it. It's not the mother's problem at that point. What if your neighbour forces you to stay in bed for weeks, wreaks havoc on your body, demands a constant sacrifice of your finances and time for more than a decade, and forces you to stay off of work for months (perhaps permanently impairing your own ability to support your own life)? Possibly even puts you in danger of losing your own life or quality of life to the various (unchosen!) risks of pregnancy and childbirth? Seriously. We're not just talking about trespassing here and it's not comparable to the requirements of a newborn, infant or child. If a fetus were an individual with rights then it would be more comparable to self-defense. An infant very quickly begins to learn to pursue life in the limited ways that it is able to do so. Its senses function and it begins to develop them and learn from them almost immediately after birth. It takes tiny but positive actions like suckling and even breathing (it has to keep its face turned to the air rather than pressed into a crib mattress, for example) in pursuit of life rather than indifference towards it. An embryo can't pursue life because it doesn't do anything. It doesn't take any action to breathe or eat or to continue breathing or eating, not even as small as the actions a newborn takes. It develops passively until it is born, after which it is immediately in danger of dying if it remains passive. The most fundamental right isn't to exist, it's to live, which entails action. A mother's right to her body doesn't conflict with her fetus' right to her body. The fetus doesn't have a right to her body. If it had any means of living it would have a right to live, but that still wouldn't be a conflict of rights any more than my right not to feed you conflicts with your right to eat.

No being has a "right" to siphon the resources of another being against its will. An embryo can't pursue life and obviously can't have a right to do something that it can't do, so what right of the embryo would you be violating, if it had rights? I don't have a right to kill my neighbour but I do have a right to decide for myself what my property will be used for (including my body) and if refusing to use my body to keep my neighbour alive results in his death, it's not a violation of his rights. It's the same thing for an embryo since removing it from the womb necessarily entails its death, but that removal wouldn't comprise any violation of its rights even if it did have rights. I do agree that an embryo doesn't have rights. I'm just saying that it's irrelevant to try to pin down the second when it's "human" vs "part of the mother's body" because even if, hypothetically, an embryo did have a right not to be killed, it doesn't follow that the mother can be forced to let it remain in her body. The difference with the screaming infant is that the mother doesn't have a right not to be bothered. She does have a right to decide not to let anyone live in her uterus. The case isn't the embryo's right to live vs. the mother's right to do what she wants with her body, where one right could be "superior" to the other. What the pro-lifers are arguing for is that the embryo has a right to be kept alive through the sacrifice of the mother's resources - which right doesn't exist, even if the embryo were human with other human rights. That's the misconception that has to be corrected. Caring for your child is a lot different from just not killing them, and yes, the reason you can't kill them is because they have rights. But you can refuse to feed your neighbour and you won't be responsible if he dies of hunger. You can't do the same with your own child. They're two separate matters that go beyond the child's rights as an individual and extend to your obligations as a parent. I don't see how it isn't a contract; it's an obligation that the parents voluntarily enter into. Parents enter into lots of contracts on behalf of their children and obviously it's not possible to "voluntarily" be born. Nothing is expected of the child except to exist, but a lot more is expected of the parent because they voluntarily brought about the situation. If, of course, it is voluntary.

Abortion isn't simply killing a fetus though, it's ending a pregnancy. Early term abortions are done by simply making the uterus inhospitable to the fetus, not by directly killing it (late term abortions are another story but like I said before, there's no reason why these are even still an issue). In the process the fetus usually dies (if not, it is usually put up for adoption). That's why it's not OK to kill an infant - because it would just be murder, nothing else is being accomplished, you can put the baby up for adoption if you don't want it, but by allowing it to be born in the first place you are accepting responsibility for it. Legally the only alternative is to force the woman to sacrifice for another being, which is always a violation of her rights. The mother isn't violating the baby's rights by refusing to provide for it (although after birth, she would be violating its rights if she killed it because she has initiated a contract). The death of the fetus is the byproduct, not the goal. If you could remove a 12-week fetus from a womb without killing it, then you would have an issue. Namely, does the fetus now have a right to be taken care of and if so, who's going to do it? If this were an issue then all the more reason to continue improvements in other forms of birth control.

It's all the wrong question if you insist on only looking at the issue from the standpoint of what you can or can't do to a fetus. It wouldn't matter if a fetus could get a degree and make pancakes intrauterine, the issue is using force against a mother to prevent her from making her own rational decision about her own life and making use of the resources available to her. Pro-lifers insist on ignoring the mother, thereby dropping the entire context of the situation, which reduces the debate to pure medical speculation. It's like asking when a child is an adult. Aren't some kids reasonable enough to vote before 18? The fact is that the "line" (birth) is more or less arbitrary and that kills your argument if all you have is "a fetus isn't human". Of course without any context at all it's better to err on the side of not murdering babies. However that's completely beside the point.

No, I'm saying the opposite of that. If you have a baby, i.e. bring a baby into the world instead of not bringing a baby into the world (since there are all kinds of ways to prevent that happening, including but far from limited to abortion), then you DO have a responsibility to take care of it. If you abandon your child (adoption isn't abandoning) then you are a bad person and I wouldn't have anything to do with you and you should be prosecuted or something for breaking a very important contract, basically (a special kind of contract, which you enter into both on your behalf and on behalf of your child). If you are prevented by force from exercising your choice not to have a child, then I would say it's the problem of whoever initiated that force against you. That's where the problem lies - a contract entered into by force isn't binding. If you want people to be responsible for their children, they have to be able to choose to have them or not. Doesn't matter. The mother is indisputably a human being and has rights that trump any rights held by another being who demands a sacrifice of her. A severely handicapped person doesn't have the right to force someone to take care of them indefinitely, either. Of course if you agree to take care of them and then just abandon them to the elements, that's wrong, but it's wrong because you had a choice in the first place. Again it's important that only the mother has the right to make a decision about the embryo. How would you defend the initiation of force (by the government or a doctor) against the mother in order to force her body to do something she doesn't want it to do, since the option is legally and safely available to her to make a different choice?

Ick. This was a good argument say, more than 70 years ago when sex & babies did go hand in hand. Back then yeah, if you have sex then babies are a likely and unavoidable consequence of that. But hey, that's not so anymore. The invention of birth control is a material change in the nature of sex (for women, at least). It's reliable enough to have divorced the act from this particular consequence. Like it or not, having sex is NOT asking for babies any more. It's very reasonable to expect that you won't get pregnant from having sex if you're smart about it. If you do all the right things and still end up preggers? I don't see how that commits you to 16 years of service to another being, or even 9 months. It's reversible, and it's even relatively safe now (about as safe as full-term childbirth), so why should a woman pretend it's not an option?

Regardless of whether it's a human or not (and I think that viability is a pretty acceptable line, whether that happens at birth or at, say, 30 weeks or a certain point of neural development or something), the question is really "woman vs. fetus". It's not that the fetus is a totally rightless object. No one else has the right to decide that the fetus should be aborted - only the mother has that right. Why? Because she has the right to decide what happens to her own body. It's not so much a matter of what you can do with a fetus as it is a matter of what you can force a woman to do against her own rational decision. I normally don't like to discuss abortion at all because considering the availability, reliability and relative affordability of all kinds of different methods of birth control, there's no reason to end up pregnant in the first place if you don't want to. I mean, it should really be a non-issue by now just for that reason. If you're taking reasonable precautions and you end up accidentally pregnant (in the very few cases where birth control fails), any responsible person is going to realize what's happened early enough to have a very early term abortion. Early enough that it really would be a cluster of cells, viability wouldn't be a concern or an issue and before she starts to "show" or anything that anyone else could notice - she can make a decision for herself without interference from parents, community, even partner if she wants to leave them out of it. Or rather, that would be the situation if medicine weren't already a socialized industry. So really what's being discussed in these debates is what you can force poor women to do, which opens a whole new can of beans. That's my 2c on the abortion issue: it shouldn't be an issue in the first place and it's also not about the rights of the fetus (no one has a right to be sacrificed for, even if they are adorable or really really need it: if you have a baby then you have a chosen responsibility to care for it, it still doesn't have the intrinsic right to be cared for. If you choose not to have a baby then guess what, you don't have a baby and therefore no responsibility for the baby).

So ... at what point do you stop paying taxes or something? "Doomed" is pretty strong language, are you just going to watch it all go down? (not aimed specifically at Maximus, just a general question to those who seem really bummed about Obama and the future)

Pointing out how someone *is* wrong is a good way to encourage thought and growth. If you feel bad when someone notices that you're wrong ... then I guess you should try really hard to *be* right, instead of just focusing on *feeling* right. You said you define God as a creator. It's logically impossible for something which exists to have created existence. If he exists then existence exists, too, and he didn't create it. That's the reason in a nutshell.

Someone else opens up a rehab clinic and they can rationally choose to sign themselves in.

Maybe what you mean is that you have to recognize that after you have made a conclusion, new information could come to light that could change the equation? Because that's true, but it isn't quite the same as always assuming you could be wrong on any point. If someone is schizophrenic and all they do is see cats where there aren't any, then it might be a while before someone realizes what's happening and points it out to them (which is what happened to Nash in the movie - everyone just figured he was an oddball genius and left him alone). But once someone does point it out, then you can evaluate the new information and maybe come to a different conclusion. What Prosperity means (correct me if I'm wrong) is that it's arbitrary to assume that whenever I see a cat it might just be that I have schizophrenia. If there's no evidence of it then you can assume you don't have it. If there's no evidence that you're wrong, then you can assume that you're right. Then when/if new evidence comes to light you can reevaluate - you don't have to assume that it's going to in any given case. In most cases if you're evaluating the truth value of something that actually matters (i.e. is a truth valuation you need to make in order to decide on a course of action), it's going to come to light pretty quickly. But you need some reasonable level of certainty in a conclusion in order to take any action at all, and a level of certainty in which all your knowledge is taken into account and you have no evidence to the contrary is as "certain" as it gets. For example, I am personally in the habit of assuming that most floors are solid and won't break when I walk across them. Suppose someone told me that I was just crazy and in fact there was a gaping hole in the middle of my hall floor which I just couldn't see. I'd have to decide whether to believe them or not - if I just decide to stay off the floor, thinking I can never be really sure one way or the other, then I'd never be able to get from the kitchen to the bathroom, which would be inconvenient. But once I decide how to test whether the floor is solid or not and figure out whether there's really a hole and maybe get myself checked out for any visual or mental issues then I don't need to doubt the floor all over again every time I use it, I can just assume it's OK unless I notice one of those signs that it isn't. If I just assumed every time I crossed the floor that *this time* could be the time I fall through .... then I'd be an idiot because that's a totally arbitrary assumption. Now on the other hand you have the truth or non-truth of the existence of God. Well - the observable fact is that, while people make decisions all the time based on their valuation of this statement, nothing actually changes whether you believe it or not. Lighting won't strike you if you don't, you won't change colour or get cancer, animals won't growl when you touch them ... and if you do decide to believe you won't find your problems magically solved, water won't turn to wine in your fridge, tumours won't shrivel up and disappear, you won't suddenly understand the nature of existence if you didn't already ... doesn't matter one way or the other whether you believe in God or not. All that matters is the same stuff that always mattered: the nature of reality and your (and others') actions. "God exists" is an arbitrary statement because there's no evidence for it, and what's more, it doesn't even matter! So it's not only arbitrary to believe in God ... it's also arbitrary to even entertain the idea or admit it as a "possibility". Which is why it doesn't make sense to refer to a "basis" for atheism. Just because something is possibly wrong doesn't mean it's rational to be skeptical about it. Skepticism is jumping the gun and asking for a certainty that doesn't even really make sense. Sure, you could have schizophrenia. Do you think you have schizophrenia? No? Then why the hell are you even bringing it up ...? I think there's probably a better explanation of that concept out there (I know my use of the term "matters" is a little sloppy but I can't think of another way to phrase it).

It's not really a matter of leaving everything I love ... it's a matter of shutting up & putting up or else there isn't going to be much love left to cook brunch for. There would be no fear of me being mad at them. And I'm definitely not going to do anything because anyone online tells me to! I just needed a little perspective in sorting out the issues. I've got all the willpower and conviction I need to do what I have to do, once I decide I need to do it ... and that's not leaving everything I love, it's just being a little more upfront and a little less of a doormat to my family and a few of my friends (who happen to be all my oldest friends) and being ready to accept the consequences of that.

They kind of do "need" to in a weird, twisted way ... yanno, to save my soul from eternal hellfire Unfortunately it doesn't make any of us very happy, really. Anyway it's true ... I probably do need to back off some, get a life and let them worry about how to take it. Thanks to everyone to replied - I think it's a little clearer to me now what my actual responsibilities are in this situation (to stand up for my own beliefs, not help anyone else keep up theirs) and what I'm not responsible for (anyone else's reaction to my decisions).

I've been in Halifax for about 5 years now but I'll soon be headed to BC for work. I grew up in St. John's and it's time to see the west coast! I have a good friend in Ottawa and I've been there to visit a couple of times, it's a great city but I'm hoping for a place with less snow/cold ...

Moi aussi! Why the heck are Canada and Mexico sharing an option?? The Canadian in me wants to find a silly American to point and laugh at for that one ... [edit] ... and then I put two seconds' worth of thought into it and it makes sense. Heh.

I'd make it more like: You have two cows. You build it into a successful business. Then you invite in every homeless bum you can find and offer them some milk and meat if they agree to listen to 4 hours of sermons every night. When the homeless bums pretend to convert and then just try to steal all your cows, you use all your bureaucratic pull to have them rounded up and imprisoned, Cause God gave you those cows. Then you visit the prisoners ceaselessly and pummel them with forgiveness until they agree that God really is the bee's knees, And when they get out of prison for good behaviour you get them good jobs at some Catholic dairy farm.

Yeah, that's basically what it's like. They don't push the subject but they have and will reacted strongly if I begin to. I think as time goes on they're starting to realize that it's not likely to happen ... or maybe they just think that if I'm still doing well and not obviously rebelling against anything I'll eventually see the light, I don't know. It's been 7 years since I left Bible college and I explained my position at the time and have done the same since, so any day now ... It's my friend's sermon that really brought this on, because I know that the things he said are the things my family thinks even though they're pretty obviously untrue. I'm not too worried about him, he lives pretty far away and I don't see him often, plus I know that he must have been pretty bothered by the things I said if he had to work it into a totally unrelated sermon three days later (which I only heard because his mom posted the video to Facebook and tagged him, haha), and to misrepresent me so blatantly. He's pretty reasonable overall, he's even stopped believing in hell because he can see that it doesn't make sense. But he's a pastor - I know that he knows better, and I also know that my family takes in and agrees with every other pastor who preaches the same stuff and they really do believe everything he said (i.e. they think I must have some sort of grudge against god ... evangelicals don't believe in atheists). Edit: And I think I can pretty honestly say that at least a big part of it is respect. My dad has the kind of story that Rand would love - he grew up in terrible circumstances, decided that his life would be different, and followed Christianity as the only path he'd ever seen out of it. If only he'd take it a step further now that he's accomplished that goal .. I don't mean better than spending two hours at crummy church, haha. I mean better than spending three hours defending myself afterwards, every single time ...