ABSTRACT: 15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance By Dennis Rahkonen, The Smirking Chimp.
The political instrument of moneyed elites, and a retrograde societal force, the GOP today is more negative than ever. Its agenda, if fully implemented, would prove catastrophic. Here’s what an unfettered Republican Party would do “for” America:
1) Greatly reduce or entirely eliminate taxes on the rich, forcing working families to make up revenue shortfalls.
2) Bust labor unions, and prevent collective bargaining for wages and benefits.
3) Stubbornly deny the climate change while pumping more pollutants into the environment from dirty industries and practices.
4) Remove regulations on investment banks and credit card companies eroding consumer protections.
5) Continue to criticize and under fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, to dumb workers down.
6) Outlaw abortion, under a moral guise, impelling thousands of functioning females to perish because of sexist denials of their basic rights.
7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while harrassing homosexual citizens.
8) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a host of Patriot Act sins against the U. S. Constitution in the name of “national security.”
9) Bully the world with US aggressions on foreign soil, kill countless thousands of innocents, waste billions of badly-needed dollars, and make us hated around the planet.
10) Generally drive down the income levels of America’s working-class majority, as a cost-saving corporate measure, dooming society to economic ruin!
11) Lie about affordable health care for all, creating a national security threat by fooling some Americans into thinking that public health care is a godless socialist attack on basic American freedoms.
12) Unleash de facto ethnic cleansing against 12 million immigrant men, women, and children, blaming them for hardships experienced due to capitalist excess.
13) Shamefully try to lend credence to their avarice and social irresponsibility by revising the Bible to obscure passages that place human need before abject greed as one conservative group is really trying to do!
14) Support intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals.
15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.
While there are certainly Democrats who’ve yet to show spine in furtherance of vital change, let’s be absolutely clear about the unmitigated disaster that would follow if Republicans, in their present ultra-rightist incarnation, ruled our country exactly as they wickedly wished. READ MORE:
http://www.alternet.org/story/143917/15_awful_things_republicans_would_do_if_they_had_the_chance
The Top One Reason Religion Is Harmful By Greta Christina, AlterNet.
Religion is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality and extreme, grotesque immorality.
So what is it about religion — exactly — that’s so harmful?
I’ve argued many times that religion is not only mistaken, but does more harm than good. But why do I think that is?
Sure, I can make a list of specific harms religion has done, from here to Texas. I’ve done exactly that. But that’s not enough to make my case. I could make long lists of harms done by plenty of human institutions: medicine, education, democracy. That doesn’t make them inherently malevolent.
Why is religion special — and specially troubling? What makes religion different from any other ideology, community, system of morality, hypothesis about how the world works? And why does that difference make it uniquely prone to cause damage?
The debates about religion usually come in two types: “is religion accurate or mistaken,” and “is religion helpful or harmful.” And ever since I put together my best “mistaken” arguments, my Top Ten Reasons I Don’t Believe in God, I’ve been trying to wrap up my “harmful” arguments in a similar nutshell.
But I’m realizing that I don’t have ten arguments for why religion is harmful. I don’t even have 57,842 arguments.
I have one.
I’m realizing that everything I’ve ever written about religion’s harm boils down to one thing.
It’s this: Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die.
It therefore has no reality check. READ MORE:
http://www.alternet.org/belief/143912/the_top_one_reason_religion_is_harmful_
- Freedom from Religion Foundation
Tags: free thinkers believe in human rights, religion is harmful, Republican greed is destroying America, Republicans are against liberty and justice for all, Republicans attack affordable health care, Republicans attack labor unions, Republicans deny climate change, Republicans engage in McCarthyite witch hunts, Republicans start wars of greed, Republicans support patriot act abuses
