It was your argument that "No my argument is that a society grounded in God is necessary to maintain the vital dynamism necessary to preserve liberty ", then your brought up the liberty and democracy into the fold.

So now you are backtracking it because the Bible does not support it?

I think we just went a full circle.

Moral improvement cannot be achieved using the Bible because the Bible does not CHANGE.

Progressive moral improvements are made by secularists.  Religious folks constantly OPPOSE ALL progressive changes.

You lost on both counts:

1. God is not required to run or to sustain a democracy.  (God did not know that democracy was a thing, LOL)
2. God opposes any moral improvements.  "My way or the highway" - God.

And you are still avoiding answering my question:

Where in the Bible God talks about the preservation of democracy?

This 'solution' assumes the society that is already 100% religious.

What do you do with a society that is only 75% religious?  You apply the 'religious liberty' and make them religious anyway so that they can be saved from themselves by themselves, not the rule of law of the secular government?  How?  By setting up religious conversion camps?

The point he is making assumes we don't have empathy for one another and need divine (aka fearsome) moral rules, or else we would be killing our neighbors.  Is he that insane?  Maybe he is speaking from his personal experience as a sociopath or psychopath.  I am not sure.

I never understood this line of thinking.  If you take any religion, and I mean any, you will find that the divine moral rules are reprehensible.

How can he stand there and talk about religious liberty is required to be moral to one another?  He is a pretentious, ignorant fool preaching to the choir.

And you my friend did not answer my question.

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Where in the Bible God talks about the preservation of democracy?  More like a dictatorship, with him at the helm.

God and democracy?  You are a funny guy.

So your argument is that we need religion as the proverbial stick to keep everyone in line otherwise we would fall into anarchy, communism, nazism or some other form of dictatorship?  Have you really thought this through?

Since you agree that secular, democratic society might be good in the short-term to advance humanity, how about we try it and see what happens in the long-term. LOL.

If you stick with democracy you will never descent into dictatorship, religious or secular.

My point was that the religious world view is regressive.  

It not only does not help but impedes our scientific progress.

I am curious how do you get from a non-religious, scientific world view to economic or racial dictatorships.

Your every argument brings up the evils of communism or nazism.  Are you saying that non-religious people are communists or nazists?  

You don't want to go to "the greater good" thingy.

How many people were killed IN THE NAME of science vs religion?  Violence, fear or intimidation is all religions know.

Religion is insane because people believe in irrational ideas and objects which leads them to make insane decisions.

If you cannot understand that, you are clearly insane.

In the future, the religious people will be the Amish of today.

How many Amish are working at IBM or Apple?  How many are professors at universities and colleges?  How many are politicians working in Washington?  How many Amish people work at NASA?

Religious people might continue to subsist in some small, closed communities.  Religions, however, will lose all the influence they have today as more people actually read the holy scriptures after they graduate from high-school.

Secular education will eradicate religions.   Religions will be studied in Anthropology, Psychology, or History classes.

Nobody will be doing anything by force.  Why would anyone want to do it?  These people need help, not to be prosecuted.

Mental illness is a serious issue.  When someone sees or hears things (God), or thinks the universe was created in 6 days by an invisible spirit they need immediate medical attention.

Why are you trivializing this?  

We will progress despite religion slowing us down.

Religions will be completely obsolete in 100 years, and people who will still suffer from these delusions will be diagnosed and properly treated.

Fallacy, scientists not knowing enough about radioactivity doesn't automatically mean, true randomness doesn't exist. As far as we can tell, it does, right now.

Science will progress.  Religion will not.

Christianity in the United States is declining at an unprecedented rate, a new study by the Pew Research Council revealed Thursday, and the percentage of Christians in the country has hit an all-time low.

In just ten years the percentage of U.S. adults that identify as Christians dropped by a remarkable 12 percent, Pew found, from to 77 percent to just 65 percent, the lowest point in the nation’s 243-year history.

Protestantism and Catholicism have both suffered significant losses, with the number of Protestants dropping from 51 percent in 2009 to just 43 percent today, while the number of Catholics has fallen from nearly a quarter of the population (23 percent) to just one-in-five (20 percent) since 2009.

During the same period, the number of religious “nones” — those who self-identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” — has shot up by a stunning 17 percent and this group now makes up more than a quarter of the population (26 percent).

The number of atheists in the country has doubled since 2009, from just 2 percent of the population to the current 4 percent. Agnostics now make up 5 percent of the adult population, up from just 3 percent in 2009, while those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” has leapt from 12 percent to 17 percent in this ten-year period.

In absolute terms, the number of religiously unaffiliated adults in the U.S. has grown by almost 30 million since 2009.

The increase of the religiously unaffiliated has been most acute among young adults, resulting in a markedly less religious generation. Fewer than half of Millennials (49 percent) describe themselves as Christians, while four-in-ten identify as religious “nones” and another ten percent identify with non-Christian faiths.

Along with the trend toward religious disaffiliation, a similar trend away from religious practice has also emerged over the past decade, Pew found. The number of regular worship attenders (who say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month) dropped by 7 percentage points since 2009, offset by a comparable rise in the number who now say they attend religious services less often (if at all).

Whereas in 2009 regular worship attenders outnumbered those who attend services only occasionally (or not at all) by a margin of 52 percent to 47 percent, today those figures are reversed, Pew discovered. Now a majority of Americans say they attend religious services a few times a year or less (54 percent) while 45 percent say they attend at least once a month.

October 16, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – U.S. Attorney General William Barr delivered forceful remarks at the University of Notre Dame on Friday regarding the defense of religious liberty against “militant secularists,” for which a chorus of left-wing media voices have denounced him.

“From the Founding Era onward, there was strong consensus about the centrality of religious liberty in the United States,” Barr said in his speech. “The imperative of protecting religious freedom was not just a nod in the direction of piety. It reflects the Framers’ belief that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government.”

“By and large, the Founding generation’s view of human nature was drawn from the Classical Christian tradition,” he explained. “These practical Statesmen understood that individuals, while having the potential for great good, also had the capacity for great evil. Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large.”

“No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity,” Barr continued, with the Founders’ chosen means being a “social order” whose values “flow from a transcendent Supreme Being,” rather than the “coercive power of government.”

He argued that those values helped America to become an unparalleled force for liberty and human progress, but are now at risk from the “steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square” by “militant secularists.”

“By any honest assessment, the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim,” Barr lamented. “Virtually every measure of social pathology” – out-of-wedlock births, substance abuse, depression and mental illness, suicide, and more – “continues to gain ground.”
The secularization of America “is not decay; it is organized destruction,” Barr charged. “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular orthodoxy, but also drown out and silence opposing voices, and to attack viciously and hold up to ridicule any dissenters.”

This, in turn, has transformed the state from safeguarding liberty to “mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility,” he said. “So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion. The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites. The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the State to set itself up as the ersatz husband for single mothers and the ersatz father to their children.”

Despite this grim picture, Barr told the audience there is “hope for moral renewal in our country,” but it will take challenging work, and concerned Americans “cannot sit back and just hope the pendulum is going to swing back toward sanity.”
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Or, happiness is determined solely by the positive cultural interactions in the society you happen to live.  Not the superstition one adheres to.

Rape, abuse, murder, corporal punishment is prevalent in all cultures, regardless of the details of the corresponding religious cult.  I would venture to say it is more prevalent in societies where such incivilities are sanctioned by the divine powers.

Maren's sententious rhetoric is not only void of any substance, it completely ignores non-Christian, yet happy Americans.

October 8, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – One of the most consistently interesting things about our cultural debates surrounding marriage and sexuality is the resistance that many of those on the secular side of the spectrum exhibit towards the slowly growing mountain of evidence supporting the fact that our Judeo-Christian values are often essential to both social stability as well as personal happiness. While the soft-core porn mags sold at supermarket checkouts urge young men and women to engage in sizzling sexual experiments and public sex education teaches children to believe that anything is on the table, social studies tell us that we are robbing them of the future many of them desire—or will desire in the future.

Let’s take a look at just two recent reports. The New York Times, as The Blaze noted at the time, “caused an avalanche of anger” after they published a report by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institution finding that “the happiest of all American wives consider themselves religious conservatives.” 

A tweet sent out by New York Times Opinion was apparently particularly galling: “It turns out that the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives, followed by their religious progressive counterparts.”

In the report, researchers detailed the fact that women who report having “above-average satisfaction with their marriages” are often both religious and conservative, and the New York Times op-ed on the findings noted that “Fully 73 percent of wives who hold conservative gender values and attend religious services regularly with their husbands have high-quality marriages. When it comes to relationship quality, there is a J-curve in women’s marital happiness, with women on the left and the right enjoying higher quality marriages than those in the middle—but especially wives on the right.”

This should not be particularly surprising. Those who believe that marriage is a sacred institution constituting a life-long, monogamous commitment to one person are, generally (and statistically) speaking, going to enter marriage with a radically different perspective than those who believe the whole thing can be called off with less difficulty than a cell phone contract. 

If, as many religious people believe, marriage is a covenant rather than a contract, this has obvious implications for both entering marriage and exiting one. If divorce is not seen as the exercise of the opt-out clause in a civil arrangement but rather, as Peter Kreeft once put it, “the murder of the one flesh” union, then the severing of the marital bond is obviously far more significant than our current social norms would have us believe.

The same is true for sexual activity prior to marriage. I recall one older fellow I worked with years ago asking me, with disbelief, how I could conceive of entering a marriage without first sleeping with my partner. After all, he explained, you wouldn’t purchase a car without test-driving it first. Side-stepping the offensiveness of his comparison of a spouse to a car and marriage to the purchase of one (the unspoken and perhaps unrecognized implication that a “newer model” might be preferable down the road did not come up), the evidence simply does not bear out the idea that multiple sexual partners prior to marriage is beneficial to committing to one person for a lifetime. In fact, it is rather bewildering that so many seem to believe that promiscuity is good practice for monogamy.

This, too, was once again proven by sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger of the University of Utah over at the Institute for Family Studies. He found, unsurprisingly, that Americans who had only ever slept with their spouses were by far the most likely to report that their marriage was “very happy.” Conversely, women who had between six and ten sexual partners in their lives reported the lowest odds of marital happiness (thirteen percentage points lower than women who had only reported one partner.) The same proved true for men, who also reported lower marital satisfaction after one partner, although their satisfaction did not dip as low as it does for women.

According to The Atlantic’s report on the study:

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, when it comes to sex, less experience is better, at least for the marriage,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. In an earlier analysis, Wolfinger found that women with zero or one previous sex partners before marriage were also least likely to divorce, while those with 10 or more were most likely. These divorce-proof brides are an exclusive crew: By the 2010s, he writes, just 5 percent of new brides were virgins. And just 6 percent of their marriages dissolved within five years, compared with 20 percent for most people.

Other studies’ findings have also supported the surprising durability of marriages between people who have only ever had sex with one another. In this latest study, women who have had one partner instead of two are about 5 percentage points happier in their marriages, about on a par, Wolfinger says, with the boost that possessing a four-year degree, attending religious services, or having an income over $78,000 a year has for a happy marriage. (In his analysis, he controlled for education, income, and age at marriage.)

If our governments were genuinely interested in promoting personal happiness and social stability, public sex education would be conveying the findings of these reports and many, many others that concur. 

The ideologues running our education system are not committed to doing what is best for those in their charge, but instead promoting their own set of beliefs—beliefs, it must be pointed out, that have led to a polarized culture with rates of family breakdown unheard of in human history outside of war or natural disaster. Many young people in our society today are searching for answers, and those answers will not be found in what the secular establishment is offering. They can be found in the beautiful traditions we cast aside.

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I just realized that I might be talking to a real schizophrenic.  So please excuse me, I have to leave this ward.

You see, this is one example of how people believe what they want to believe. To me this is more like proof that only he killed himself if there's no other CCTV to say otherwise. Did some government assassin walk into the prison, kill Epstein, then walk out? IF the other prisoner had been kept in the cell then people would have just been saying he carried out the hit and this is why whatever happens people will just believe whatever they want to believe.

Not dead, look at his left hand, fake to get him out of prison.

If he was dead his left arm would slide down the left of the thing.

He is defying gravity in death. He is on Bill Clinton`s ranch, fucking premature children atm with Osama.