Originally posted by kevcvs57
If you address my second post I will take it back, or you could carry on being a disingenuous wind up whose game is getting tired.
Seeing as how I already own two dogs, and am not interested in acquiring a third, I fail to see why investing effort that would be rewarded by you "taking it back" (whatever you were planning on recovering) is in my immediate interests.
EDIT: But I've never been called a "wind-up" before. I'm not sure what that is, but it sounds vaguely industrial. Which I like. So here goes. I think that people have te right to self-determination. That includes, if quality of life is deteriorating, the decision over when to end one's life with dignity and in comfort.
Now with regard to the proper place of religion in society, my country teaches that people have the right to practice their religion without fear of persecution. We have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. I find regrettable the fervor of the social conservatives in my country, and some of their more extreme beliefs. However, I also find them to be a necessary counterbalance to the atheist crowd that worships man and the power of the state.
A trip to Hungary and East Berlin helped inform my views on socialism, communism, and atheism. Budapest has districts that were built during the era of Soviet rule, and the differences between those parts of the city and the parts that had been built when God was worshipped could not be more different. The Soviet-era Budapest had squat, featureless, barely functional buildings. The absence (or more accurately, the rejection) of God was tangible. So too it was in East Berlin; but nowhere on earth have I felt a more thorough rejection of God than Dachau.
Religion gives us fits, certainly, and has caused its fair share of wars, suffering, and death. But at its best, religion also gives us reverence for life. It is the Godless policy that is the topic of this thread, not the abstraction of religion, that stains society.