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Choosing Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential running mate was?

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RE: The usual hypocritical religious load of junk

Comment comment by scottb on 11 December 2007

Actually, I think there really is a middle road, there. The one candidate I know who's taken a stance on religion of which I can approve is Obama, who said in his biography:

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God's will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Democracy isn't supposed to be dividing up into factions and seeing who can muster enough votes. It's supposed to be reasoned debate, in which we convince each other of the merits of one stance over the other. The religious stance - where one invokes scripture or dogma and refuses to budge - subverts the goals of democracy.

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