Religion has nothing to do with the creation of contracts. Business/Trade was before Jesus.

You base that statement on the fact that the Asian world doesn’t have contract enforcement, nor did they have roots in the same religious background as the western world.

Is this the, “Bananna’s are fruit, Bananna’s are yellow, therefor all fruit is yellow.” argument?

I won’t deny that there is a chance you are right, but I will say there are probably more factors involved than western vs eastern religion, and you having lived there with first hand knowledge probably gives you more of a right to speculate than me.

Its just anytime someone tells me I’m true to my word because of religion, I scoff at it. I’m not an atheist, so much as I just hate religion.

I think it’s perfectly valid to attempt to draw a bright line between the domain of religion and the domain of the state, which is essentially what the Enlightenment brought about. Keep in mind also that many of the US founders were agnostics, unitarians, or atheists. A lot of early American political thought is obviously influenced by Hume, a noted atheist. Locke’s influence is also quite obvious, he believed that we could know with certainty that God exist, and also believed that the church and the state should be separate realms.

That the US Constitutional system was influenced by Judeo-Christian religion is undeniable, to say that it is wholly the result of said influence, I think, is pretty hyperbolic.

I’m not saying you can’t point to “In God We Trust” printed on every piece of currency America has made in the last 100 years as proof that “religion permeates every facet of life,” I’m just saying shut up Scott.

It was an interesting event. Flynn seemed like a fairly rational and level-headed guy, hardly what I expected. I agreed with most of the points that he made, although I don’t feel that he adequately explained the answer to the title of his book. Probably the most telling example of “the lefts” anti-Americanism that he gave was the self-defeating nature of the anti-war protestors. Flynn pointed out that the venom many protesters had against American troops really hurt the true anti-war cause, a cause he actually supported. Another great example to support his argument manifested itself repeatedly during his speech. Hecklers interrupted him at numerous times, usually by spouting idiotic smart-ass comments with absolutely no substance. As Flynn aptly pointed out, allowing people with opposing views to speak freely is hardly the far-lefts brand of tolerance.

Flynns other good points are far too numerous to list here, so allow me to delve into what I disagreed with.

He began the speech by trying to make it clear that when he talked about the left, he was not talking about most Democrats and American welfare liberals. Instead, he was talking about that moonbat far-left, a clarification which I suppose would have hurt sales of his book. The problem, however, is that henceforth his characterizations were far too broad, as if hed forgotten his original statement. His excuse for this graying of the American left was that they embraces their crazy elements while the American right denounces its own. Theres a great deal of truth to this, but when he uses the examples of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, it just goes to show that there isnt enough repudiation of far-right elements.

Perhaps the largest gap in his arguments was in the answer to the question posed by the title of his book. His only explanation for why the left hates America is simply that Americas success disproves the far-lefts political and economic theories. Hes absolutely right on this point, but thats not a full enough explanation. Americas success also disproves paleo-conservative theories about sex before marriage, separation of church and state, immigration, and racial integration, all of which have been prevalent in this country during its period of highest economic growth. Yet you dont see people claiming that Jerry Falwell hates America, only that he was once repudiated.

But those were the substantive problems with his argument. His stylistic problems were far more glaring.

In a time when this country is at war, what is needed is unity or at least efforts towards unity. As a questioner brought up, Flynns speech and book are divisive rather than unifying. The very wording of his books title means that right-wingers will be drawn in while left-wingers will be turned off. Liberal readers who might otherwise be convinced by the substance of Flynns arguments will instead further entrench themselves.

This problem was also evident in his speech and during the Q&A session. While I can understand why he probably felt that he was in a hostile environment, there was no reason to give assholish answers to most of the questioners (although a few of them, particularly the hecklers, deserved it.) The first questioner, for instance, is a guy who I know. He, like me, was unsatisfied with Flynns answer to the question posed by the books title. Flynns answer to the question was prefaced by a put down of the questioner hardly a civil way to respond and hardly a good way to convince a dubious audience of his arguments merits.

Flynn would have done a far greater service to this country and his own cause by writing a book and giving a speech with a liberal rather than conservative audience in mind. Conservatives already think the far-left is crazy. They dont need this belief reinforced; publications like the Eugene Weekly and Insurgent do a good enough job of this on their own. Preaching to the choir may give him better book sales, but it will do little to help unify this country in a time of war.

My role there was, quite simply, to prevent Mr. Flynn from getting a pie. And I was hoping someone would do it, cause I was in the mood to tackle someone and read them the riot act.

But, things went as well as they could have considering that it was nearly a full house (some people just didn’t want to sit by themselves). I am actually surprised that more people were not there heckling him…even though there was that irrelevant Native American guy who was in the military trying to goad Flynn into discussing. (This guy obviously didn’t know that about 80% of the Native Americans in the northern part of the USA in the mid-late 1700s were Algonquin or Mohegan, aka primarily Canadian.)

All in all, it went well.