Favorite recent post by the previous poster

[Torie]

When I was in school, someone could punch you in the face and you would be playing Playstation 2 with each other four days later.

[Torie]

I can't judge the accuracy because I am butt ignorant on such matters, but this is a thoughtful and informative post:

The silly thing is the notion that evangelicals are anything resembling a homogeneous group.

A group that includes both me and Mike Pence and a hell of a lot in between is obviously one where broad brush generalizations are almost always going to be nonsensical.

This.  There's also a big rift within the Southern Baptist Convention - the biggest Evangelical organization in the USA - on Trump and related issues (immigration, racial reconciliation, etc.) with folks like Russell Moore and Albert Mohler on one side vs. Robert Jeffress and Richard Land, among others.  Nuance tends to be lost when discussing these groups.

It could just be that I’ve coincidentally met an unusual number of moderate/more independent-minded evangelicals, but from my (obviously limited) experience there do seem to be some real divides in the community.  Another one is over how to handle the fact that many evangelical churches are losing their younger members pretty rapidly.

As an insider so to speak, I think there are multiple factors at play.  It's not purely an age issue - for instance, the staff at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the SBC's Ethical and Religious Liberty Commission, along with The Gospel Coalition are all pretty strongly anti-Trump, many of whom are older.   These are 3 pretty major Evangelical institutions, so I think it's definitely an important part of the picture. Most prominent Evangelical pastors within the Reformed community were against him - such as Kevin DeYoung, John Piper, Albert Mohler, James White, Matt Chandler, Tim Keller, etc., with the notable exception of John MacArthur - it seems the non-Calvinist contingent of Evangelicalism was warmer to Trump on average, but perhaps that's biased by the prominence of Falwell Jr and Jeffress.  Also, the polling I've seen shows that pastors of Evangelical churches were significantly less likely to have voted for Trump than laypeople. 

So it's a much more complicated dynamic than seen in the media - I'm sure in other religious communities there is a similar story where simple narratives don't capture the full picture.

[Torie]

It is not hard to find good posts from RFayette, and the below is one of them:

I'm not part of the Trump cult, but I have said numerous times that there is no conceivable scandal that could get me to vote for a Democrat.  Obviously, that action would be awful and warrant a vote against him in the primaries, but, as long as he continued to support pro-life policies in office, I would vote for him in the general.  What one person does in their personal life is not nearly as important as the public policies they support.  Personal morality of the candidates is not something I even consider in a general election.

Because, after all, the legitimization of immorality in the public sphere won’t harm the Republic at all.

No, it would, but it would be lesser than a president who wants it to be legal to kill babies.  I take a very utilitarian approach towards ending abortion ("the ends justify the means, as long as you aren't killing another person").  In that case, whether he wins or loses, the other person already would have been killed, so the election would just be whether another million people a year are killed on top of that one or whether that one is the last one (simplified analogy, but it still works).

While I think a social conservative case for Trump can be made and I do tend to focus primarily on issues, I think your position is pretty extreme.  Let's assume for sake of argument that President Trump appoints the justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, only for the next Democratic President to appoint justices that causes Roe v. Wade to become reinstated.  In the grand scheme of things, little is accomplished.  There simply isn't the public consensus on the issue to criminalize abortion right now, and culture is what has to be engaged first.

[Torie]

This post gets to the nub of the matter with precision using an economy of words. Well done for the "elegance" of it all.

[Torie]

He might never prove that god exists, but he did prove that geniuses don't have to be very wise.

Mmmmk.

Is "I want to be an astrophysicist to prove God is real using science" wise? I mean, I don't really blame him- he might be a genius but he's still just a child who was indoctorinated into a religion by his parents.

(just realized days later that my previous comment was incomplete )

Fair enough, but while I agree that 'proof' really isn't the right term for what we're working with here, it is true that various theistic arguments are based on research into cosmology and quantum mechanics (regarding origin of universe and free will/determinism), so it doesn't seem that far-fetched for someone to go into physics in part to look for evidence for their faith.

Going into a scientific investigation with the intent of proving something you already believe, rather than finding the truth, is how you get terrible science.

That's what the scientific method is for.

But as long as someone is doing their work honestly, what is wrong with hoping that their results turn out a certain way?  Scientists of all persuasions have wanted certain results to be true (whether they like the mathematical elegance of their hypothesis, or for some other reason).  While not perfect, the forces of peer review should act as a counterbalance to this.