Unfortunately the press and others tend to use absolutes far too readily. Like not all religious people are zealots. Some are or a few are would be more pertinent. But does that sell papers? Oh we are 'all' (hehe) guilty of it at times. Myself included. My wife 'always' uses absolutes. Like I 'never' empty the dishwasher or I 'always' make a mess making a cuppa. No dear, 'sometimes' I forget to empty it and 'occasionally' I make a mess. Always, never, all...nuts to it.
By generalising are you not tarring all with the same brush. If not make the inference clear ie SOME muslims are extremist nutters, SOME catholics demonstrate no forgiveness and SOME bikers eat babies
If your god that you believe in is all seeing and all knowing then why bother talking/praying etc about it? Surely it knows any way! We are a social animal so getting together is what we like doing. It's when you start making up rules, that's when it gets interesting.
The issue with Obamacare, the proposed "free healthcare" that is coming into effect now, is that a large number of independent-minded folks object paying money to Federal Government in the form of taxes. These independent-minded folks want to choose how their tax dollars are spent - in simple terms, Federal taxes should be for things like the Military, a pool of money for disaster relief for things like hurricane Katrina ... the big things that are beyond what a local community, or even an individual State can afford. In their minds, Federal taxes should be relatively tiny. In terms of healthcare for the poor, in an ideal world, or an ideal USA, you would have "good neighbour" policies, where a local community, a town, a city, looks after its own. The widow down the road cannot afford medicine for her kids, so the local community has a whip-round to fund what she needs for her kids. Such a policy is impractical for depressed areas, like Detroit or Baltimore or wherever, where there are ghettos and large numbers of folks living at or below the poverty line. The independent-minded folks I mentioned above would argue that such communities are not self-sustaining - they haven't the wealth they need to stand on their own two feet and look after their less fortunate neighbours. Such communities, I would guess, need to be allowed to (euphemism-alert) disintegrate, break up naturally and disappear. The problem with the good-neighbour policy that libertarians seem to embrace is that it is rooted so thoroughly in the 19th or early 20th Centuries. There were no fabulously expensive medications available then, which meant poor folks died of "incurable" diseases. A community was able to deal with someone's misfortune where a guy lost his leg, but that same community would in no way be able to deal with the cost of medicines needed to treat an outbreak of HIV, for example. The cost of keeping people alive has sky-rocketed, and this is largely due to the fact we can keep people alive who would certainly have died 100 years ago. The ability of Medicine to treat people has outstripped the ability of a small or even medium-sized community to generate the wealth necessary to afford such improvements in healthcare. The resistance of certain US citizens to "Obamacare" is rooted in a past that no longer exists. So, you either have affordable healthcare for all, or you put up with the stink of corpses coming from the poorer sections of town. Make your choice.
