[DEBATE] Presidential Election - 2016 (closing Nov 22)

Well what Bernie said, it depends on how you interpret it. Planned Parenthood facilities have been violently attacked dozens of times since Roe v. Wade, and they provide more than just services relating to contraception and abortions. While I believe that it is 200% wrong to have an abortion, it is still a good resource to learn about and seek help/counsel relating to things that aren't killing babies. Sorry for the nonchalant wording.

I believe in evolution.
The Catholic Church as a whole fully accepts evolution. If you put it together with Genesis, it makes sense, believe it or not. You can't interpret every passage of the bible literally. Also an issue, is that the books of Genesis are SEVERAL thousand years old and have been transcribed and translated and lost and found so many times that the mistranslations and miscommunications do pile up enough to make differences in the wording. When God created everything in six days, the word 'day' has several translations into both Hebrew and Aramaic. The word that is used in the translation just means 'period of time' for example. When God created all the animals of the earth and all the creatures of the sea, Genesis does not tell us how he did it. Did he just say so and they appeared? Maybe. We can't tell. One of the many reasons there is so much 'mystery' in religion.

So in short, yes, I believe in evolution and I do tie it in with my faith.

We are debating the rights and wrongs of the policies and beliefs of our chosen candidates... It's still on topic

God created man in his own image. Not chimpanzees... God didn't slowly evolve into what He is, and I believe man did not either. But, our beliefs differ. I'm not a Catholic, and along with other members of my denomination I believe every word of the bible that is not clearly a metaphor is the whole, uncontaminated truth (Not the word day, I don't know how long it took for God to create the world, but that it has been properly transcribed). God spoke the world into existence, he didn't speak fish into existence and see what they'd evolve into. If there's such a mystery in religion, and if the Bible has been so mistranslated how can you truly believe any of it?

You just have to take some of it... With a grain of salt.

If it's all literal, than why is the host during communion not the body of Christ?

Now a more on topic question: in your opinion, what do you think Ted Cruz will do for the country that Hillary, Bernie, Trump will not?

Well, I consider the breaking of the body of Christ to be clearly metaphoric. I don't think Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead was a metaphor, or David slaying Goliath.

Ted Cruz will both cut taxes and decrease government spending, unlike Hillary and Bernie. He will defend my second amendment rights unlike Hillary and Bernie, he will repeal the affordable care act, and he will repeal laws that restrict small business. And unlike Donald Trump, I know that he's true to what he says, is against planned parenthood, and will keep our country out of WW3 to the best of his abilities.

How is Cruz going to decrease government spending enough to lower the deficit and cut taxes at the same time? What programs is he going to cut? What programs do you think he should cut?

One can only imagine the costs of free college on everyone else. It's already horrible enough with the perception that everyone has to go to college. Here lets add government to this problem as well, it'll be fine. No worries.

I don't know about my opinion on humans yet. But evolution does not contradict with the bible. However, I admit that I have likely had many fewer years of studying the bible than most of the adults on here, so I can't say.

Yes. God is omnipotent and omnipresent. He knows everything that ever has and ever will happen. This is the very reason that evolution is possible. He spoke things into existence, but how does that work? In Genesis God said let there be light, and there was light. It doesn't exactly give a detailed analysis on how things happened.
Did everything just pop into existence or did God shape the universe over time? Hence, it is arguable possible that since God made man after he made all other things, that he used evolution to achieve this and we didn't just go 'poor' and there we were. Just a point. Let's take the religious debate to a private conversation if we are to continue this, it's not very relevant to the thread.

In this time, you do have to go to college secure a living wage. I mean, unless you'd rather increase the minimum wage so people can work normal times at minimum wage and still get bye. That's another of bernies policies as he has made very clear.

You could become an air traffic controller, plumber, welder or electrician with no college. Just technical school. They make good money.

Or start your own business on eBay.

You're not done for if you don't have a college degree, you just have fewer options and you have to work hard and be passionate about what you do. Someone always tries to cite billionaires without college degrees in a topic like this.

You think part of why politics exist is because it's easy to become sidetracked? If it was just talk about who'd make the country better, decide, and vote, would we have as many news channels as we do? Here I am talking about how it's not too bad to not have a college degree.

The establishment had many years to fix our problems, they just get worse. When something is broke, you change things to try to make it work. So give an outsider a shot at it. If it doesn't work keep looking for talented outsiders. If nothing works, buy gold, cause we're all on our own when everything crashes.

Not everyone can take those jobs, and not everyone is satisfied with those jobs.

While there are some successful startups on eBay I wouldn't call it a career.

Yes, yes, I've heard the lot. Steve jobs, Andrew Carnegie, et cetera. My point is not everyone is naturally good at being an entrepreneur. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, here have to be some followers or there can't be leaders. Simply put, hard work and passion do not necessarily work every time. It is very easy to start a business, have the business fail, go bankrupt, and never try again because no one will give you the loans to try.

The thing is it is bad to not have a college degree in today's society because for most jobs that provide livable wages they will not hire you if you do not have a degree. My best friend's dad laid off all their personnel because their company got bought. He worked for a hardware company for almost thirty years, and now he can't find a job that will provide for his family and keep their heads above the water, as he doesn't have a degree. Twenty-eight years of experience, no degree, no job. And you know why he doesn't have a college degree? Because he couldn't afford to go. Now my best friend's mom has had to pick up a minimum wage job, and her brother dropped out of college to work for them.
They've had to move into a poor neighborhood and give up lots of things we all take for granted.
THIS is why I support free public education. To give people the ABILITY to actually make it in the world without continuing the vicious cycle and pulling their families under.

You don't have to look for outsiders. Bernie has been an independent since the eighties, fighting against the establishment. He has the backing of many well known economists including former secretary of labor Robert Reich who teaches/(taught?) at Harvard.

Hold off on your gold buying, unless we elect Trump. Then I say your best bet's to leave the country.

They're intertwined, though.

I'm just posting this to opt out of alerts from this thread, I have no idea how to actually opt out, but there is a option here like "Watch this thread" and I just un-ticked that and now I should not receive notifications after this post, I'm assuming. Also I know this doesn't mean anything really to the current state of events in this thread but I have nothing good to say and also I tried to just tick the box and leave but I'm still getting alerts xD

Something that has bothered me recently are the ways many of the issues like I am seeing discussed here are being treated. I don't know how many times I have seen a complex issue turned into a one sided cartoon, posted on FB then "Liked" by someone's followers. One I saw today and that has been brought up here is "Free college".

I do not see it as free college. My view of education extends to technical career training as well as general knowledge that everyone can use in their everyday lives like when they buy a house or car, go shopping or cook, paint a room, or treat a cut finger.

In any place I have ever been, seen, or read about, it seems to me that the more educated a populace is, the wealthier, healthier, and happier they are. Look anywhere that there is poverty, crime, and disease and you'll also see ignorance. To be successful we need educated people making intelligent decisions, not just for themselves, but for the people in the communities they live and work in. Think of some of the places in our country where our drop out rates are high and they are usually places where there is poverty and crime. I think they are intimately linked.

I like the prospect of greater funding of education in general. Our education system is suited in some ways for educating people for jobs that no longer exist here on a large scale, like farming, or manufacturing jobs. The jobs we have now generally require college education or more technical training beyond high school.

The H1B visa program allows us to employ up to 85,000 foreign workers per year and a further 20,000 more that are exempt from the cap because they have Master's degrees. I read recently about the Immigration Innovation Act of 2013. It proposes to more than double the current cap to 115,000 and remove the cap on Master's degrees so that they are unlimited. It further would adjust these limits annually.

The need for the H1B program is caused by the lack of qualified workers in our country. In most of our states you can leave school between the ages of 16-18 and seek employment between the ages of 14-18. We already educate our young people up to a level that readies them for many jobs, but most of those no longer can support a family. The day when the majority of us could leave high school then walk into a factory and make a living turning bolts are gone.

If you are worried about illegal immigrants taking jobs or skewing job pay, you should also be concerned about the state of our education system relevant to the rest of the world, because we are losing jobs at the other end of the pay scale too and it is being done legally.

Instead of training our best and brightest students to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, dentists, programmers, teachers, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, and so forth; we train our young people up to a level that would better suit the 19th century, saddle those who are capable and want to continue their education with crippling debt at the beginning of their adult lives, then hire foreign workers to make up for the lack of skilled workers so we can have cheap cell phones.

China and India are kicking our ass in the number of graduates their universities turn out annually. I have heard that those two countries will turn out more together by 2020 than the US and Europe combined. If you have been to a university and seen a lot of foreign students you will know why I wonder if that estimate is low. I think these countries are taking their best students and educating them and sending their overflow here.

Pretty much everyone who touches you in a hospital has a degree of some sort and technical training. What might happen in our country if those people could work off their college debt by putting in extra time at a hospital or doctor's office? Extend that to other industries like pharmaceutical or engineering and it could make a big difference for all of us.

I know not everyone is suited for college ora technical career, but any amount of education can benefit all of us. Making higher education part of the rights we have as citizens would improve all of our lives by improving the lives of those who receive it and those who they come in contact with.

Public education is an investment in the people around us. We shouldn't be afraid to pay a little more in taxes to educate our neighbor's kid if they are qualified regardless of where that kid may eventually work because the value we will get will be greater.