Change the Consitution...

[Kane]

[eynon81]

did we chase Spider off? I hope not I was actually trying to make a good point for once.

[Kane]

Nah, Spider's just rubbing his gut in a circular pattern. Busy hands.

[Spider]

Didn't chase me off, I just feel like a dickhead arguing against christmas lights.

As to the founders, well...that was better than two centuries ago. I don't think we should be modeling many facets of the 21st on the 18th. I agree with a lot of the thinking of the time, but I don't agree that religion is the proper place to derive morality, at least not anymore. Lots of things happen to line up by default, but on the other hand religion has proven to be quite the sea anchor when it comes to the evolution of social justice, and I don't find my own morals lining up with those espoused by religion as often as I'd demand if I were to accept using religion as an educational and ethical compass for youngsters.

Religion is a human construct, and as such it is just as fallible or possibly immoral as anything else. As I like to say, we should be using our morals to challenge religion, to the end of keeping it moral, rather than deriving morals from something that may be itself immoral, at least in particular ways. Religion has provided too much of a shield to hide our petty hatreds and intolerances behind by virtue of a couple of obscure lines of verse. Its just too open to really, really, nasty interpretation, and it just takes too long to change religion to suit the times.











Damn you, Kane.

[The Dharma Bum]

[eynon81]

[exploited]

Religion as belief in God is undesirable, IMO, and can safely be done away with.

Religion as a set of rules based upon a particular ethical point of view? Absolutely crucial to our future.

[Eclectic]

I'm not sure changing it is actually necessary.

Regardless, the first thing we must do is establish how to read it. In the current political environment, we have a situation where people can stretch or twist the text to mean whatever the emotional majority deems as worthy at the moment.

I think term limits, among some of your other suggestions, would be clear enough to reduce interpretation to a reasonable result in those areas. However, that wouldn't change the real problem we have with people ignoring the literal text.

Often people will talk about how the Constitution is "outdated" and cannot address the technological issues we deal with in modern society. Personally, I disagree. Nonetheless, the usual suggestion is not to actually follow the Constitutional process to amend the text. Instead, people prefer to just have it reinterpreted to achieve a desired result.

Frankly, I think the only solution is to read the Constitution is the sense that everything is literal, and an omission means the right is reserved by the people. If we do not force and grammatical and literal reading of the text, and bound the government to the limitations of granted power and authority, we truly have no measure or reference of the law, and no guard against tyranny. If we continue to accept a traditional judicial revision and reinterpretation of the law in the form of precedent (shepardizing), the spirit and existence of a constitution is meaningless. I agree, if it is imperfect and does not coherently address the issues of our times, we should revisit the title of this thread and perhaps "change the constitution". Your biggest hurdle is that few seem to care what it says in the first place.

[Professor]

[The Dude]

Those are not faith. You can argue those things in classroom with actual evidence. Whether it's convincing enough is one thing, but it can be. There is zero evidence of creationism and it is the antithesis to science. Evolution is scientific fact.

And your example of marijuana is flawed. Science says if we taught that it would be correct. And it is taught that way (I know because I was one to be taught it). The Fed doesn't care what the science says, they just do what they want to do.

Just because marijuana is illegal doesn't mean it should take precedence over science. To the contrary, actually. Don't get confused because some laws are dumb that means our position says it should be taught simply because the Fed does it.

Fed guidelines should simply require scientific evidence for providing such curriculum.