Category: Issues

Our teenage views on issues such as gay marriage and abortion.

Posted in Issues

You’re All I Want

Posted on by Bri

So I’ve been racking my brain for a new Let’s Argue topic, but the only issues that I could come up with were gay marriage (overused), abortion (overused), the presidential election (overused), and religion (I’m not even gonna go there. Too much personal controversy for everyone)

But then finally I came up with a good one. It has to do with the fact that after working for 49 hours in the past two weeks, I earned 398 dollars but am only able to deposit 322 of it. Everything else was taken off for income tax.

This SUCKS. I got gypped out of 76 dollars. That’s 9.5 hours I was not paid for. 9.5 hours of painting nasty, gnarled nails, scraping soggy, half digested food into a bucket, breaking up fights, translating mumbling, getting yelled at, getting run over by wheelchairs, and cheating at a non-violent hangman. That’s almost three days of working that I could have slept in and wrote blogs on. That. Sucks.

So this week’s Let’s Argue topic; how do you feel about income tax? If you don’t like it, what are your suggestions to change it?

Personally, I think it should be eliminated. They can raise sales tax a little to even it out a bit, but I want to keep all the money I earn. ALL OF IT.

Posted in Issues

You’d Think There’d Be Progress

Posted on by Rachel

i have never lived in a cave.
when i visit caves, I don’t feel some uncontrolled, strong pull towards it like it was my home. Caves creep me out. When I see guys with rippling muscles and broad shoulders, I don’t think of his ability to protect the cave and hunt big game. I don’t care about guys being able to wrestle mammoths.
Basically, I don’t have any caveman-ish instincts. but according to popular science, we are all cavemen and of course cavewomen at heart.
Funny how that brief period in human existence is said to dictate human nature. wouldn’t human nature have evolved along with everything else? no, there seems to be some things that just can’t be changed.
Basically, you have no control over your primal instincts because that’s obviously what humans live by…the lives they never had as cavemen.
I think it’s silly to blame everything on cavemen survival tactics, since most people now have never experienced that. Somehow, though, it’s hardwired with genetics. How come life in grand junction doesn’t get passed on? it’s just the caves. I couldn’t care less about life in a cave. The reason humans live is to be able to get OUT of the cave and life better lives than their ancestors or anybody else…
I don’t really believe in the subconscious, and I especially don’t know how cavemen could’ve had such an effect on that. Who knows what cavemen were really like, anyway? I think humans just like to blame their actions on cavemen-ish things.
If the point of survival is to reproduce, I think we’ve grown out of that. why bother getting an education and having laws and government if only to reproduce? We want something more for ourselves than that, so we should forget about “human nature” and start facing the consequences of our own desires and actions. We’re totally capable of controlling our thoughts. We’re not cavemen anymore. Humans are not essentially good or bad. We choose to be what we are, and cavemen were certainly not responsible for that.

Posted in Issues

Abortion: My final view

Posted on by Aardvarki

*This is just a copy of my original blog. I didn’t want to delete the other because it had comments attached to it. You can still view the comments on my original blog, but I just needed to get into the habit of the whole re-orginization thing. If you want to post comments non-related with the ones on the original, you can post them here.*

Okay, there are pobably many people who are going to be unhappy with me bringing up this subject again. “But I thought we were all done with this contraversial crap!” you’ll say. Sorry, but we’re not. At least not for now. And I’m not really saying that you have to leave comments, this is just my view, and if you see a flaw, please comment and I will answer you as best as I can. And, if I cannot prove my point, and you prove your’s instead, well, then you will know that you have changed my mind. But let me remind you: my mind is very hard to change; you will have to make some very good arguments for your cause. So, enough blabber-jabber, here it is: the final, unedited, unrated, unsomethinged view:

I think that abortion should be kept legalized because of several reasons. The most important of these is that when it is made illegal, abortions will not stop. Just like what was seen when cocaine was made illegal, and ecsacy, and LSD, an marajuana, abortion will not just dissapear, instead there will be a pluthera of illegal abortions. And illegal abortions will not be sanitary, they will not be performed correctly, and, just as in many third-world countries like Nepal, they will be fatal. And, just to clear something up, I am against abortion. I think that it is wrong to kill human beings, born or unborn. But I think that legal abortion is the lesser of two evils. And I believe in being pro-active rather than reactive. I also think that women have the right to choose what to do with an unwanted baby; it should not be just decided for them. Isn’t that the meaning of freedom, after all? To have the freedom to choose without fearing for our lives; isn’t that the priciple that this country was founded upon? I think that the best way to fight abortion is to be proactive; discouraging it, supplying a pluthera of choices, and, in the case of teenage pregancies, make sure that there is a nearby clinic that can offer counseling and set up a way to put the child up for adoption or put it into foster care. And, I guess if you wanted to be truly proactive, educate teenagers not to have sex. And you know that there are a lot of kids at your school that have sex; ther’s no turning a blank eye to it. The best way to make abortion obscure is not to have the baby in the first place, athough that probably will never happen. There is something about an hour of sexual pleasure that humans are so willing to risk the rest of their lives over. Bloody stupid, if you ask me.

Posted in Issues

The Pasta Theory

Posted on by Bri

Recently (ok, today), I’ve noticed something. Something strange. Something ground breaking. Something…. well, you get the picture. And here it is:

I have found a direct correlation between God vs No God arguments and pasta preference.

Yes folks, I sure have. I know you’re all probably shaking your heads right now, but hear me out, ok?

Here is our typical religious argument:

Random Arguer 1: “I believe that there is no God.”

Random Arguer 2: “You’re so wrong, there is too a God. How dare you insult my religion?”

Now, let’s replace the bold faced statements:

Random Arguer 1: “I believe that bowtie pasta is the best.”

Random Arguer 2: “You’re so wrong, linguine is the best. How dare you insult my taste in pasta?”

Uncanny, isn’t it? But keep listening. It all comes down to this: It is an OPINION. Here’s the truth; you cannot prove or disprove God, just like you cannot prove or disprove that linguine pasta is the best, because it’s a matter of opinion. Let’s look at another correlation:

You are Christian, and your friend is an Atheist. So you take your friend to church every Sunday, you read them passages from the Bible, and you attack them at every chance you can with religious quotes and wisdom. There are two outcomes to this: either your friend decides that he wants to convert to Christianity, or they decide to stay being an Atheist and get extremely annoyed.

Let’s change this to pasta again.

You love linguine, and your friend loves bowtie pasta. So every time you go out, you order them linguine, you talk about it all the time, and you list the ways linguine could enhance their lives. There are two outcomes to this: either your friend decides that they like linguine as well and agrees that is is the best pasta, or they decide that they still like bowtie pasta better and get extremely annoyed.

Here’s the moral of this story. Well, actually there are two.

MORAL 1: Atheists and Religious People: STOP ARGUING OVER THE EXISTENCE TO GOD. Neither one of you is going to come out on top, because it is a matter of opinion. I know you’re all going to be mad at me, but listen; an opinion is something that can not be proved and is a personal belief. A FACT is something that can be proved and verified. Both atheism and religion are OPINIONS. So again, stop arguing. It’s like arguing over what pasta is better.

MORAL 2: There are plenty of things theists and non-theists argue about; the validity and interpretation of the Bible, religious and non religious propaganda, and a variety of issues like gay marriage and abortion. But because the base of their arguments is their personal opinion, it all boils down to: Does God exist or not? And again, that can not be proved or disproved, therefore basing arguments off of it doesn’t make any sense. So stop using religion to back up an objective argument, and stop using the basis of non-religion to back up an objective argument. Just… stop….arguing. It’s going to get us no where.

*BONUS* MORAL 3: Bow Tie Pasta is totally better.

Posted in Issues

A Grotesque Monster of Hypocrisy

Posted on by Bri

I love that quote. I would post my seminar response, but it’s not that good. So onto the next topic:

 

 Atheism vs Satanism



There is a common misconception going around that atheists are immoral satan-worshipers. I’m here to clear these up.

First off I’d like to point out that if you don’t believe in God (atheist), then you don’t believe in the devil (Christian) either, so how can an atheist be a satanist? Right. It doesn’t make any logical sense.

Now let’s tackle the morality issue. Tell me, what makes a person immoral? The ten commandments:     

ONE: ‘You shall have no other gods before Me.’

TWO: ‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image–any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’

THREE: ‘You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.’

FOUR: ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.’

FIVE: ‘Honor your father and your mother.’

SIX: ‘You shall not murder.’

SEVEN: ‘You shall not commit adultery.’

EIGHT: ‘You shall not steal.’

NINE: ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.’

TEN: ‘You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.’

Have you never heard of an atheist who didn’t lie, steal, covet, commit adultery, murder, refuse to honor their parents, say “God” in vain, or bear false witness against their neighbor? And since they don’t believe in any gods, the first two he mentioned aren’t relevant. Religion doesn’t determine morality. Sure, religion has a lot of good messages concerning this issue, but it doesn’t directly make someone moral. In fact, I might go as far as say that sometimes non-religious folk can be more moral than theists, because no one is telling them to be moral. They do it because they want to, not because they’re afraid of being damned to eternal sunburns.

Posted in Issues

Mooveryishnessiee

Posted on by Bri

(Moo-v-er-ee-ish-ness-ee) (noun) : Bri’s Giant Nose

 

Anyways. Since MoMo beat me to the punch (which is ironic becuse I had written up a little piece of the seperation of church and state yesterday but hadn’t posted it), I guess I’m the second person to put something up at that topic. But Kudos to MoMo for thinking in the same frame of mind.

 

“…the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction”

– George Washingon.

Seperation of Church and State. I don’t think it exists anymore. Religion has no place in politics, and yet it is becoming the biggest part. I’ve head in the halls many things relating to this issue. People hate Romney because he’s Mormon and Obama because they think he’s Muslim. (For the record, he isn’t, but does it matter anyways?)And people support Huckabee many times on just the grounds that he is, in fact, a Christian. How are these justifications for presidential candidates?

I, for one, don’t care what religion a candidate is, and no one else should either. But they do. Religion is a personal thing, it has no place in politics, like I mentioned before. The religion of a candidate shouldn’t have an effect, since that’s not the important part of a campaign. The important part is the issues. How are they going to make the country better? How are they going to improve the economy? What are their thoughts on improving foreign policy? But no, what the American public wants to know is how spiritual the candidate is. How is knowing what the religion of your candidate going to improve the country?

Posted in Issues

Environmentalists my…

Posted on by Bri

Well, last night we were watching the Daily Show on Comedy Central, and he was doing a bit about that awareness concert Al Gore held a month ago. As soon as they started talking about it, I had my brother pause it (it was on DVR).

"Did they use solar energy?" I inquired, seeing as the concert was for environmental awareness to, you know, stop the global warming that Al Gore makes bigger than it is.

"Psh, no," Says my dear father.

"WHAT? But doesn't that completely defeat the purpose of an environmental awareness concert??"

"Yes," He went on to elaborate that one of the singers required five rooms for her and her entourage, and had to have a specific beluga whale caviar, which, as you know, is an endangered species. What is wrong with these people??

I went on to research it a bit more.

"For an event that is designed to raise the awareness necessary to curb global warming and other environmental problems, why would you put on a massive, multi-continent concert where tremendous amounts of electricity and oil were needed to both transport stars to all the locations and then allow them to perform their lavish acts. "- Opey's Oratory (internet blog)

""In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to reach billions of people,” Al Gore said in a statement. “The climate crisis will only be stopped by an unprecedented and sustained global movement.”"-Al Gore

Yeah, more like "In order to solve the climate crisis, we're going to use up so much electricity that no one else can. What a great solution! I'm a genius! Let's go have some beluga whale caviar in my hypocritical Hummer!"

This concert was a sad loss of message. If Al Gore really wanted to raise awareness, why not set a good example? You know, like practice what you preach. Don't tell us that we need to worry about the effect humans have on global warming because of their extensive use of oil and electricity when you can organize a world wide concert that uses so much energy itself.

London had it right, they used 100% biodiesel fuel to run their concert. New York used a nearby wind farm to fuel it, but a couple of good things doesn't wash out the bad. This concert was a waste of time and resources.

Sorry. I needed to rant about that. I should probably go eat breakfast, but nothing sounds good. Stupid Joys Of Womanhood… keeping me up all night…