It’s definitely an outdated and xenophobic way of thinking.

Terry, I know you love conspiracies, but honestly, the ridiculous scenario of a popularly elected evil manchurian president is just as (un)likely to happen with someone of native birth.

To say that being born here qualifies your loyalty is a joke. If the best man for the job was born abroad, why let that geographic trivia stand in the way? I guess you don’t fully trust Americans to choose their leaders.

Do you even accept the possibility that someone born abroad could be the best person to lead America? Do you hate America/freedom so much that you wouldn’t allow him the chance to run for office?

Well, I do consider myself to be pretty open-minded, but it goes without saying that your mind is fixed on your preconceptions about me, so there’s little point in trying to change it.

What I’ll offer to the rest of the readers is this:

I was born and raised a Roman Catholic, and believed & practiced devoutly through the beginning of college. At that time no one was trying to indoctrinate me or shake my faith, but I was being trained to think for myself. In fact, the best of my teachers din’t tell me they were right – they taught enough about the subject at hand to equip me to follow up on it myself, and to decide for myself what the facts were and if I agreed with how the teachers were interpreting them.

As my ability to think for myself analytically & critically developed, it’s not surprising that sooner or later I started facing the tenets of my faith. There’s nothing “cool” or smug about questioning what you were taught never to question, and if I was influenced by any indoctrination at that age it was the Church’s teaching that my immortal fate was on the line for daring to think for myself. To raise the stakes, admitting that I had problems with the dogma of my faith put me at risk of being shunned by my family – you don’t have to be gay to empathize with the risk one takes in “coming out” when keeping your real identity hidden is safer.

So what did I question? Things like whether the Bible was the literal truth or not, the concept of Original Sin, the validity of Paul in defining so much of the New Testament versus Jesus, wondering which branch of Christianity was more “true” to what Jesus taught than the rest, and many more topics.

Some of those uncomfortable questions could only be resolved for me by accepting the Bible as alegory instead of fact, and once you go down that road there’s no going back. I’ve noted that neither you, RoseAnn, or Pastor Bickel have responded to my points in your Creation Day Six article – someone with an open mind will discuss and debate it, while inflexible minds will sidestep it because of the contradiction.

By contrast, we’ve debated the age of the Earth, and I asked you multiple times that if you trained students in the sciences and the scientific method without providing any pre-set assumptions about the age of the universe or the Earth, what ages would they arrive at if left to figure it out objectively. You knew the answer could be many things, but not 6,000 years, and you concluded that science couldn’t find the answer unless a written history was provided to validate it. Walt Brown claims to be able to debate his hydroplate theory without any reliance on the supernatural, but then how can one explain with science how the planet was formed to be “just so” with pillars and floating plates and some mysterious actor setting it in motion.

Instead of submitting his work for peer review to win over the world with irrefutable logic, it’s easier to declare that all scientists worldwide are in conspiracy since any number of them anywhere in the world would refute his theories with ease.

In case after case we read about this judge or that State Attorney giving the birthers a forum because they are open-minded advocates of the people, and when they reach the conclusion you don’t want to accept, they’re re-labeled within the hour as being bought off, threatened into silence, or too incomopetent to see the truth.

THAT is close-mined thinking at work. It doesn’t matter how many different disciplines of science have correlating results, the only correlation that matters is to the book which can never be wrong, the only findings of law that could be valid are the ones you want.

I’ve given you credit for posting dissentibg views that would never be allowed on Conservapedia, so hopefully this one will make it too. The point of my writing this is not that you or I will suddenly change our outlooks, but that the readers will better understand where these differences come from. Let the readers decide where the open-minded positions are.