Obama is a politician. Idiots chanting "yes we can" before are now chanting "make America great again". They never learn that a politician is a politician, all the campaign "promises" are only said to get your vote, after that it's business as usual. If you disagree, you're as naive as a child.
Jesus is not vengeful. He teaches about forgiveness of enemies. People tend to misinterpret what he said.
However, many convicted/firm believers of Jesus would still not think the same today! Q https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Andrews Andrews is a self-described devout and practising Roman Catholic. As Health Minister during the passing of the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008, Andrews sought counsel from senior church clergy who advised him that the Act was contrary to Church teaching. Andrews replied that he "... [did] not intend to be a Catholic health minister ... [rather], it is my intention to be the Victorian health minister".[1] UQ
What the Church's teaching on this subject is irrelevant. That is the politicians red herring here. He is kidding himself. He may believe he is a devout Catholic..in that he goes to Church every week or something similar. But he is really not hearing the Word. Just as some prominent Democrats like Biden, Pelosi and Cuomo claim in this country as well... They are really lying to themselves about their faith in Jesus. (by the way... yes.. I feel a bit on the first one below as well for the way I treat some people I consider trolls here as well.) "And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me. Children are a gift from the LORD; they are a reward from him. (pslams) It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones." --- Hey you don't believe in God or an afterlife and or you think women should be able to kill their babies. fine. Its allowed in our society. But, if you are a poltician and that is what you vote for... shut the hell up about your belief in Jesus.
Q Nothing Less Than Official, State-Sanctioned Homophobia. We Are Humbly, Deeply, Sorry And we wonder why gay and lesbian and Bi and trans teenagers are still the target of red-hot hatred. 24/05/2016 Daniel Andrews Premier of Victoria http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/da...-official-state-sanctioned-homophobia-we-are/ It's never too late to put things right. It's never too late to say sorry -- and mean it. That's what brings us all to the heart of our democracy. Here, in this Parliament, where, over the course of decades, a powerful prejudice was written into law. A prejudice that ruined lives. A prejudice that prevails in different ways, even still. That law was written in our name -- as representatives, and as Victorians. And that law was enforced by the very democratic system to which we call ourselves faithful. So it is our responsibility to prove that the Parliament that engineered this prejudice can also be the Parliament that ends it. That starts with acknowledging the offences of the past, admitting the failings of the present, and building a society, for the future, that is strong and fair and just. In doing so, we'll have shown this moment to be no mere gesture. In doing so, we'll have proven that the dignity and bravery of generations of Victorians wasn't simply for nought. And that, I hope, will be the greatest comfort of all. There is no more simple an acknowledgement than this: There was a time in our history when we turned thousands of ordinary young men into criminals. And it was profoundly and unimaginably wrong. That such a thing could have occurred -- once, perhaps a century ago -- would not surprise most Victorians. I hold here an article that reports the random arrest of 15 men. "Police Blitz Catches Homosexuals", the headline reads. And said a police officer: "...we just seem to find homosexuals loitering wherever we go." This was published in Melbourne's biggest-selling weekly newspaper -- in December 1976. A decade earlier, in 1967, a local paper said that a dozen men would soon face court for "morals offences" and urged the public to report homosexuals to the police with a minimum of delay. A generation earlier, in 1937, Judge MacIndoe said John, a man in his 20s, was "not quite sane", and jailed him for three months on a charge of gross indecency. In 1936, Jack, a working man from Sale, faced a Melbourne court on the same charge – and he was jailed for 10 years. This is the society we built. And it would be easy to blame the courts, or the media, or the police, or the public. It is easy for us to condemn their bigotry. But the law required them to be bigoted. And those laws were struck here, where I stand. One of those laws even earned the label abominable. And in 1961 alone, 40 Victorian men were charged with it. In the same year, a minor offence was created that shook just as many lives. The penalty was $600 in today's terms, or one month's imprisonment. The charge? 'Loitering for homosexual purposes.' This was the offence used to justify that random police blitz in '76. A witness said: "Young policemen were sent...to...entrap suspected homosexuals. [Officers] dressed in swimwear...engaging other men in conversation. When the policeman was satisfied the person was homosexual, an arrest was made." When we began this process, I expected to be offering an apology to people persecuted for homosexual acts. But it has become clear to me that the State also persecuted against homosexual thought. Loitering for homosexual purposes is a thought crime. And in one summer in 1976, in one location alone, 100 men were targeted under this violation of thought; something for which there was no possible defence. All in our lifetimes. In our name. Young people. Old people. Thousands and thousands of people. I suppose it's rare when you can't even begin to conceive what was on the minds of our forebears in this Place. But I look back at those statutes and I am dumbfounded. I can't possibly explain why we made these laws, and clung to them, and fought for them. For decades, we were obsessed with the private mysteries of men. And so we jailed them. We harmed them. And, in turn, they harmed themselves. It is the first responsibility of a Government to keep people safe. But the Government didn't keep LGBTI people safe. The Government invalidated their humanity and cast them into a nightmare. And those who live today are the survivors of nothing less than a campaign of destruction, led by the might of the State. .......... Yes, the law was unjust, but it is wrong to think its only victims were those who faced its sanction. The fact is: these laws cast a dark and paralysing pall over everyone who ever felt like they were different. The fact is: these laws represented nothing less than official, state-sanctioned homophobia... And we wonder why gay and lesbian and Bi and Trans teenagers are still the target of a red, hot hatred. We wonder why hundreds of thousands of Australians are still formally excluded from something as basic and decent as a formal celebration of love. And we wonder why so many people are still forced to drape their lives in shame. ----- Don't tell me that these laws were simply a suppression of sex. This was a suppression of spirit. A denial of love. And it lives on, today. While the laws were terminated in the 1980s, they still remain next to the names of so many men -- most of them dead -- a criminal conviction engraved upon their place in history. Six men have now successfully applied to expunge these convictions from their record. Many more have commenced the process. This won't erase the injustice, but it is an accurate statement of what I believe today: That these convictions should never have happened, that the charges will be deleted, as if they never existed, and that their subjects can call themselves, once again, law-abiding men. Expungement is one thing, but these victims won't find their salvation in this alone. They are each owed hope. ------------ These people we speak about -- they weren't just fighting for the right to be equal. They were fighting for the right to be different. And I want everyone in this state, young or old, to know that you, too, have that right. You were born with that right. And being who you are is good enough for me -- good enough for all of us. Here in Victoria, equality is not negotiable. Here, you can be different from everybody else, but still be treated the same as everybody else. Because we believe in fairness. We believe in honesty, too -- so we have to acknowledge this: For the time being, we can't promise things will be easy. Tomorrow, a young bloke will get hurt. Tomorrow, a parent will turn their back on their child. Tomorrow, a loving couple and their beautiful baby will be met with a stare of contempt. Tomorrow, a Trans woman will be turned away from a job interview. And tomorrow, a gay teenager will think about ending his own life. That's the truth. There is so much more we need to do to make things right. Until then, we can't promise things will be easy. We can't guarantee that everyone in your life will respect the way you want to live it. And we can't expect you to make what must be a terrifying plunge until you know the time is right. But just know that whenever that time comes, you have a Government that's on your side. You have a Government that is trying to make the state a safer place -- in the classroom, in the workplace. You have a Government that is trying to eradicate a culture of bullying and harassment so that the next generation of children are never old enough to experience it. You have a Government that sees these indisputable statistics --of LGBTI self-harm, of suicide -- and commits to their complete upheaval. You have a Government that believes you're free to be who you are, and to marry the person you love. And you have a Government that knows just one life saved is worth all the effort. As part of this process, I learnt that two women were convicted for offensive behaviour in the 1970s for holding hands -- on a tram. So let me finish by saying this. If you are a member of the LGBTI community, and there's someone in your life that you love -- a partner or a friend -- then do me a favour: Next time you're on a tram in Melbourne, hold their hand. Do it with pride and defiance. Because you have that freedom. And here in the progressive capital, I can think of nothing more Victorian than that. It's been a life of struggle for generations of Victorians. As representatives, we take full responsibility. We criminalised homosexual thoughts and deeds. We validated homophobic words and acts. And we set the tone for a society that ruthlessly punished the different -- with a short sentence in prison, and a life sentence of shame. From now on, that shame is ours. This Parliament and this Government are to be formally held to account for designing a culture of darkness and shame. And those who faced its sanction, and lived in fear, are to be formally recognised for their relentless pursuit of freedom and love. It all started here. It will end here, too. To our knowledge, no jurisdiction in the world has ever offered a full and formal apology for laws like these. So please, let these words rest forever in our records: On behalf of the Parliament, the Government and the people of Victoria... For the laws we passed. And the lives we ruined. And the standards we set. ...we are so sorry...humbly, deeply, sorry. _______________ This is an edited version of Daniel Andrew's apology speech in the Victorian State Parliament on Tuesday, May 24, 2016 UQ
^Now if we can only get Islam to move forward. You know, the people we need to try an understand according to the left. Getting them to 17th century Puritanism would be an improvement. The western world ain't the real threat here when we're talking about respecting sexual preferences.
thought crimes... should be despised. Its Ironic... that this is a prime example of why thought crimes (today known as hate crimes) should not be used to discriminate against anyone... minorities or those discriminating against minorities. Its gives the state too much power to pick and choose who to prosecute and punish.
Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent design, anyone? ENLARGE CORBIS By ERIC METAXAS Dec. 25, 2014 4:56 p.m. ET 2771 COMMENTS In 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete—that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumors of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place—science itself. Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 21 zeros—planets capable of supporting life. With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis—0 followed by nothing. What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting. Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest . . . . We should quietly admit that the early estimates . . . may no longer be tenable.” As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here. Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing. Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being? There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp. Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really? Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.” The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something—or Someone—beyond itself. Mr. Metaxas is the author, most recently, of “Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life” ( Dutton Adult, 2014).