Romney Just Lost the Nomination

This dog won't hunt with the Republican base:

Republican Mitt Romney, confronting voters' skepticism about his Mormon faith, declared Thursday that as president he would "serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause," and said calls for him to explain and justify his religious beliefs go against the profound wishes of the nation's founders.

At the same time, he decried those who would remove from public life "any acknowledgment of God," and he said that "during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places."

U.S. Constitution, Article VI:

no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States

Too bad for us being a Republican means never having to say you're sorry. Now where'd I leave my flag? I need to go wrap myself in it.

The [fill in the blank] Made Me Do It

God:

Richard Roberts told students at Oral Roberts University Wednesday that he did not want to resign as president of the scandal-plagued evangelical school, but that he did so because God insisted.

God told him on Thanksgiving that he should resign the next day, Roberts told students in the university's chapel.

"Every ounce of my flesh said 'no'" to the idea, Roberts said, but he prayed over the decision with his wife and his father, Oral Roberts, and decided to step down.

Roberts said he wanted to "strike out" against the people who were persecuting him, and considered countersuing, but "the Lord said, 'don't do that,'" he said.

Works every time! Almost as good as prayer!

Easter/Passover/Spring Festival Reading

An argument on faith between Sam Harris and Rick Warren. My favorite bit:

Well, I don't think that the religious books are the source. We go to the Bible and we are the judge of what is good. We see the golden rule as the great distillation of ethical impulses, but the golden rule is not unique to the Bible or to Jesus; you see it in many, many cultures—and you see some form of it among nonhuman primates. I'm not at all a moral relativist. I think it's quite common among religious people to believe that atheism entails moral relativism. I think there is an absolute right and wrong. I think honor killing, for example, is unambiguously wrong—you can use the word evil. A society that kills women and girls for sexual indiscretion, even the indiscretion of being raped, is a society that has killed compassion, that has failed to teach men to value women and has eradicated empathy. Empathy and compassion are our most basic moral impulses, and we can even teach the golden rule without lying to ourselves or our children about the origin of certain books or the virgin birth of certain people.

There is a lot of wisdom in that paragraph, some of which relates to politics. Empathy is the most important value anyone can have and on many levels the golden rule is a reflection of that value. We should all take the time to reflect on our actions as they measure up to these values. Similarly, other people can also be evaluated in this regard. People who have no empathy should be vilified and cast down.

In a way politics is how we try to work out our differences and live together. Policy and law are derived from those imperatives and therefore should be imbued with empathy. To do otherwise would be wrong.

A large part of my dislike for the Bush administration and its conservative cohorts in Congress is engendered by their lack of empathy, which harms many people. These people are psychopaths and must be stopped.