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Jan. 4, 2006 Two U-K articles caught my eye today. Both were typical specimens from their authors’ frequent contributions. Dr. Micks provided wonderful and succinct thoughts for consideration by our President in his State of the Union speech this month. Robert Reyes provided more of the small-minded paranoid hysteria he seems incapable of escaping. My comments on both, first for Dr. Micks: I believe there is one solution for our government’s problems that rises miles above any other possible improvement in its potential for benefits. I would like to add it to the good Doctor’s fine suggestions to our President. Tax reform, pork barrel spending, partisan quagmires, and most other government ills result from self-centered power lust on the part of politicians. These egoists don’t legislate from a perspective of their constituents’ benefit; they wheel and deal with only the legislation’s impact on their re-election in mind. In this age of multi-million dollar campaign costs, re-election requires cash and only ideologues and lobbyists are motivated to donate. Government is about those people and not the average citizen. The answer to this corruption is term limits. We already have term limits on the Presidency; we desperately need them for Congress and the State Legislatures (those that don’t have them now). With the temptation of re-election removed from reach, the power-mad politician would be relegated to the bureaucracy, within the oversight of a now honorable legislature. With today’s information technology, legislators do not require the political skills that were necessary in the past. Those politicians could not monitor the pulse of their constituents as can be instantly done today. Their constituency could not make its feelings known as virtual voting could accomplish today – if the politicians wanted their disregard for the constituents’ feelings so blatantly obvious. With today’s technology, we only need an honest and eloquent spokesperson to represent what should be the constituents’ very visible an easily ascertained opinions to the legislatures. Of course, like substantive tax reform, it’ll never happen if left solely to the politicians to enact. Sure, they foisted it on the Presidency but conveniently excluded themselves – because they are of the power-mad ilk and could care less about the citizenry. In my opinion, that should be reversed – the Presidency should have no term limit, but he should be elected by popular vote instead of the Electoral College. And this segues into Mr. Reyes’ shallow deduction that it is religion that is responsible for most of the world’s evil. No, Mr. Reyes, religion is but the tool of history’s evildoers. It is the selfsame power madness that’s running amok in our legislatures that commands the greatest evil in our world. Some call it money, but it’s not. Money is but another tool, or a measuring stick of power. True evil, on the scale of Mr. Reyes’ complaints, wants control of mankind, not our money. With that control, they simply take whatever they want, money included. In fact, if Mr. Reyes’ and the rest of our site’s atheists were to step back a moment, they’d realize that their non-beliefs are but beliefs couched in new terms. All of those deities he cites, in their representations of the Bible, Koran, the Veda, etc., are not just foolish prattle, as he’d have you believe. It is not coincidence that disparate cultures separated in ancient times by mountains and oceans still individually and universally came to believe in a deity. It is an inherent human trait to believe in something; it is a necessity for our mental stability. Even the belief that no deity exists is a belief for this purpose. Without any belief system, a person becomes a sociopath and any psychologist can testify on the rarity of that human condition. Most power-mad evildoers are sociopaths – do you get the connection? So, Mr. Reyes’, it is not religion that should worry you, it is those who seek to deny religions to their believers. Or worse, those who, in their megalomaniac power lust, manipulate religious believers. If you don’t believe me, I am willing to wager that I can be placed alone in a room with any religious person in the world – and he/she won’t kill me, or me him/her. I bet we even emerge friends with a greater understanding of each other. I know this because I have experienced it dozens of times in my life. In fact, you and I could even sit in a room together and I wouldn’t strangle that bigoted hatred out of you – what other proof do you need! ------------ About the author Tom Pain: Just an American boy with so much common sense, it hurts. Email: thomas.pain@direcway.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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