I just emailed my religious vaccination exemption request to the U.S Department of State. Thoughts?

No there isn't. "Personal responsibility" is a pathetic hope and involves cases where individuals don't even know what best practices could be.

The regulations we have today were implemented in order to reduce harm to others.

I agree with this. A "religious exemption" makes no sense to me. I don't support that idea.

At the very least, a serious examination of past behavior should be required. If someone is partaking in modern science based medicine (prescription medicine, etc.), then game over, as far as I'm concerned.

The idea that there is a god that is fine with taking pain meds, diabetes meds, blood thinners, blood pressure meds, or any of the rest, but not taking vaccinations is just not acceptable.

 

Are you willing to forego treatment for COVID if you should catch it? Medical resources are not only not infinite, they are extremely limited in regard to the demand for them that exists right now. Since you yourself are almost certainly contributing to or may be about to be contributing to that demand it seems only right that we give what might be used on you to someone who has put forth the very minimal efforts required to protect oneself almost entirely from this malady

 

Would you support the government telling you what to eat and forcing you to exercise?

What law do I want terminated? Be specific.

All I’m doing is pointing out there are many accepted behaviors worse than not being vaccinated for Covid. There is no law against them. Why mandate vaccination? It isn’t logical.

 

COVID is an emergent national problem. We have a rather small set of defense methods - vaccines, masks, social distancing being pretty much the whole list.

The list of health and safety regulations goes on forever. I see your call for ignoring our national defense against COVID as clearly undermining a significant portion of those regulations.

If I fail to protect myself against COVID I put our healthcare system under greater duress and risk the health of those around me. That also adds to the cost of healthcare insurance, etc. Obviously, one can claim that 1 individual can't do that, but the population of America absolutely DOES make this kind of impact.

These are the same kind of arguments used for many of those regulations we have in other areas. We require vaccinations for school. We require seat belts. We require hard hats on construction sites - rather than allowing personal choice. The very fact that you ask what "law you want terminated" makes me think you haven't thought through what our government does in this category.

 

Quite frankly, and with all due respect, you are wrong. I didn't say that "personal responsibility" is *all* that is required. I wrote "There is also personal responsibility to do the same."

So, unless you are advocating that our government sends in the National Guard to go door-to-door to vaccinate or arrest people, laying the burden of "public welfare" SOLELY on governmental action is extremely short-sighted. Should we just let everybody currently incarcerated out of prison so we can force anti-vaxxers to comply or spend the rest of their days there?

There is absolutely NOTHING the government can do ALONE no matter what the objective is. Yes, personal responsibility is not only very important but a key player in the equation.

That appears to be the case. Do you have any reason to believe that I've suggested anything else? If so, please post it so we can sort this out.

You have that right. And, the people that support it also have the right to their opinions on the matter.

A few months ago somebody posted that people that don't understand the policies of our elected officials should be denied the right to vote. In essence, the poster was saying "Either vote the way *I* think you should vote or your are too intellectually incapable of choosing for yourself so should lose the right to vote."

That is basically what you are saying. Please feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken, but you are basically saying "Unless a person examines whatever information I think is important to make an informed decision about accepting or not accepting the vaccine and the various ways to meet their objective in that regard, they should not have the right to that decision.".

Can you tell my why your position on this should usurp another person's right to make that choice for themselves? We can't have a society in which the rules are haphazardly applied based on anything beyond the facts of any given situation. Why does your opinion hold any "more weight" than anybody else's?

You absolutely have the right to that opinion. I am a avid defender of Americans' right to Freedom of Speech.

However, what you do NOT have the right to do is tell other people (with that same Freedom of Speech) how they should think, feel, respond or execute any decision they choose to make for themselves. I have NEVER understood why so many people get hung up on this.

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Here's an example from my own life that I've posted elsewhere but it illustrates this issue.

Many years ago, my grandmother (a widow) went to her doctor because of female trouble. He told her that he would contact her when he got the test results and "no news is good news". She didn't hear from him or any of his staff members and, as instructed, she believed that "no news was good news." Fast forward several months and she continued to not feel well and went back to the doctor. He told her that her biopsies came back malignant and that she had ovarian cancer. The cancer had progressed due to the delay in her receiving that information.

My grandmother decided that she would NOT take any medications, no chemotherapy, no radiation. She didn't want to go through all that. She had made peace within herself that she would just let it ride out to the end. *I* wanted her to take medications and do anything and everything she possibly could to fight it. She didn't want that. I pleaded with her to do it and she wouldn't. I had very abusive parents so I did not have family support in any direction and they had basically turned their back on her.

One day, in a moment of despair and deep reflection on the unavoidable end I reached a place of acceptance. I finally had some peace from the mental anguish of wrestling with something that I had absolutely NO control over and also did not have the *right* to decide. It was the first time I slept in months and I awoke resolved that it wasn't my body, my life or my choice. It was hers and I would stand behind her (rather than against her due to my own selfish need for her to reconsider) regardless if I agreed with her or not. And, the reason I was able to reach that point is simple. I vehemently believe that EVERY person has the right to make the choices they deem right for themselves. I don't have to like it. I don't have to agree with it. I don't even have to participate but I will ALWAYS stand on the side of respecting other people's choices just as I want mine respected. The irony is that there were only two of us grandkids and I wasn't her favorite. It didn't matter to me. To me, what was *right* was doing the kind, helpful and respectful thing to HONOR *her* choice. I won't lie. It was hard as hell. I was mentally and physically exhausted for close to a year until the cancer finally took her. And, as hard as it was to stand in that gap (my father, her son didn't want to be bothered so I had to make ALL her medical decisions alone), I received the most precious validation when she was near the end. I just had a little apartment back then so I gave her my bedroom and slept on the couch. She called to me one night and asked me to sit down. I did. My grandmother told me that she knew that her choice not to fight the cancer hurt me deeply. For the one and ONLY time in my life, my grandmother told me that she was so proud of me for being by her side and respecting and honoring her wishes for her own life.

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So, please understand, I "get" where you're coming from. I do, BUT, people have the right to make their own choices about their lives and their body. You can't expect to exercise that right for yourself but want to take it from others.

 

many are bearing false witness against their own religion, saying their religion is against the vaccine

 

Let's not get overly dramatic. I just mean that personal responsibility has not proven to be much of a solution, and I don't see ways of improving that.

For example, the obvious correct decision is for people to protect each other by masks, vaccines, distancing, etc., and we've seen major refusal on that front.

Republicans are working HARD to ensure that those who don't agree with them find it significantly harder to vote, and have their votes watered down by gerrymandering.

So, yes that is a problem.

I think scientific analysis is important. And, I think there is NO CHANCE that the full population can be experts in all the fields necessary.

Sure. My opinion doesn't hold any more importance than does the opinion of others.

BUT, I am not depending on my own expertise in any of the fields I'm posting about.

The safety and efficacy of COVID vaccination is something that we have experts working on. And, they have a FABULOUS record of being right.

This isn't a unique story.

But, it doesn't disprove science. Every scientist KNOWS that the wrong result can be obtained. The difference is that science based medicine has a STUPENDOUS record of being right, and there are no other sources that are reliable.

Also, doctors are almost never scientists - that is, they have the problem of diagnosing and treating disease based on the science they know. But, that is not the same job as determining whether specific treatments are effective or safe.

Good for you for insisting that things weren't working and demanding a better answer.

The cases I disagree on are those where a person is impacting others.

And, that absolutely DOES pertain to vaccination and other methods of defending against pandemic.

 

Obesity is a bigger problem. In fact obesity is the main driver of the Covid pandemic. Something like 90% of Covid deaths are in countries with over 50% of the population overweight and obese. Focusing on vaccination only for mandates isn’t logical.

You need to quote me my friend. I have never called for ignoring National defense against Covid. Come up with something that isn’t a strawman and I’ll address it.

Absolutely. That’s why mandating one mitigation and ignoring others that are actually more important isn’t logical. Do you realize breakthrough infections are more likely in vaccinated individuals with lifestyle choice comorbidity? Do you realize being overweight alone makes you more likely to be infected vaccinated or unvaccinated? When you mandate vaccination you are forcing a bunch of people to be vaccinated that won’t even mount an effective immune response and won’t benefit from vaccination. You’d be better off forcing them to get healthy.

Again I’ll ask you to quote me citing a law I want terminated. I’m completely uninterested in your strawman arguments.

You may misunderstand my position on vaccine mandates so here you go. I support the right of any private business to mandate vaccination. And I have no problem really with most school vaccination. Nobody is forced to attend. Of course I’m only talking about traditional vaccinations, not Covid or influenza or HPV, etc.

I’m opposed to government mandating Covid vaccination. There is NO precedent for doing so and NO law in effect allowing for doing so. We have never force vaccinated adults, even for Influenza that kills at least 3 times as many Americans annually as you’ve been led to believe.

If you are aware of some law or precedent for forcing vaccination for a mostly lifestyle preventable disease go ahead and inform me of it. But don’t say I want to do away with some law that doesn’t exist.

 

Obesity has many causes. Creating legislation against obesity is just plain STUPID.

The issue on this thread is national defense against COVID.

I'm not going to bother with your particulars.

I just want to here what you are proposing. Who knows? Maybe it will sound good!

There is ZERO logic to accepting one prove vaccination and opposing another proven vaccination.

COVID has been proven to be immune against "lifestyle".

This is primarily because the population chooses for it to be that way by their "lifestyle" choices, but that's not a justification for allowing the pandemic to run rampant across the USA when we do have a solution.

I don't believe that we have to wait until the death count is greater than flu to justify defending against other disease.

 

I'm not discounting your opinion or saying it's invalid. I'm trying to convey that there are significant barriers to reaching the goals Fauci and the CDC says is required to get this under control. I'm not trying to be overdramatic at all and this is not a political issue. It's a personal health issue. I have no more right to tell you what to put in your body as you have to tell me what to put in mine. At the end of the day, regardless of what happens, the person that made their decision (in either direction) is the one that lives with any consequences.

If you take a couple steps back and think about this situation compared to any other health threat to the general public the only thing that's different is there are more people personally aware of what's going on so it naturally follows there will be arguments from every angle.

For example, during the outbreak of HIV, most people believed it was a "gay disease". Heterosexual and monogamous people weren't aware of it and weren't concerned about it because of this. It was also primarily associated with African people (and ignoring the countless reasons why they are deemed "worthless") and, by association, African-American people. To this day, people are still spreading that ALL black and/or gay people have HIV so one is "safe" if they just have indiscriminate unprotected sex with anybody not in either or both of those subsets.

Female cancer is another subgroup of this kind of thing as well. It has been documented that the drugs used to treat breast cancer CAUSE ovarian cancer. It only makes sense that nobody with female body parts would know or be concerned about it. There is not reason to be unless one happens to love someone that is at risk in either of those subgroups.

So, think about that...

Do we have the right to put ankle monitors on all black and/or gay people to ensure they aren't doing anything that would spread what is pretty much believed to be a disease within their subgroups?

Do we have the right to make ALL women get preventative double mastectomies so they don't develop breast cancer (and, subsequently ovarian cancer if they take the drugs associated with that) in the future?

Another example that I've mentioned previously is about blood donations. I was in a pre-surgery consultation and declined to accept blood transfusions. They sent several RNs and doctors in the room to basically bully me into giving consent for a transfusion. I was there for hours and every single one of them gave their reassurances that it was safe and I had nothing to worry about. They even called the Red Cross so I could speak to a representative there who also tried to reassure me that it was okay. Here's the problem...the Red Cross was found negligent and fined MILLIONS of dollars because it was determined they were NOT testing *ALL* blood donations. MULTI-Million dollar lawsuit and fines and penalties so there is nothing anybody on the other side of the table can tell me about "how safe it is". The reality is they don't know (and it's unethical, immoral and probably just damn evil) to spout whatever to try to manipulate someone into doing something only that person will endure if they are wrong.

And, this is the same issue with the COVID vaccines. Notwithstanding the idiocy of taking medical advice from politicians, the reality is YOU, they, the stray cat outside my window and nobody else knows what will happen IN THE FUTURE because we're not there yet. You absolutely have the right to get the vaccine(s) if you want and other people absolutely have the right not to get it if they don't want to. This isn't any different than any other communicable disease (other than in numbers of people impacted). Anti-vaxxers were forging Vaccine cards before the vaccine even got to the public. So, unless you are proposing that we start branding people to verify who has or has not actually received them, we're back at square one.

And, unless you are weirdo (I'm not saying you are. I don't know you), unless you are walking around in a Hazmat suit with a couple tanks of oxygen every time you leave your house you ARE exposed to other people's germs and have no clue if they are vaccinated (with other stuff besides the COVID vaccine), have some other condition that can spread through airborne particulates and anything other people cough, sneeze or breathe into the air around you. I'm going to go on assumption here and probably say that you don't leave your sterile environment dressed that way. If you don't do that, why not? And, why is exposure to all the other "cooties" outside COVID an acceptable risk and COVID isn't?

I've been kinda ticked off since early last year because I've never understood why anybody would need somebody to tell them to wash their hands. Who wasn't doing that already and if we're a society that needs that to be told to us beyond the age of about 5-6, we have way bigger problems than COVID.

 

Then again I KNOW what's in it

 

You know very little about Ebola, and COVID is not that, not even close..

 

Well, vaccine hesitancy has many causes. So creating legislation against it is also STUPID? LOL Nice appeal to the stone fallacy.

No it isn’t. It’s about Covid vaccine mandates. If it were about National defense against Covid the OP would be writing emails about mandated exercise regimens and diet restrictions and reimplementation of prohibition and 10:00 pm Internet shut downs.

Most people don’t like my particulars because they are based on evidence and logic. Almost always, when people don’t like my particulars their opinion is based on a lack of knowledge, incorrect knowledge, or denial of evidence. I’m getting used to it.

The only thing I’m proposing is treating people equally. I’m opposed to letting some people make choices that spread disease, harm others, and kill others but not giving other demographics the same consideration. That’s my only proposal.

What do you mean “accepting”? I’m talking about mandating. If people want to vaccinate their kids for HPV I support that. But I don’t support mandating it. See the difference? We don’t just mandate any old vaccine that turns out to be efficacious. Is anyone forcing you to get a tetanus vaccination? Is anyone forcing you to get any vaccination? Have you taken every available vaccine?

And on Covid specifically I’ve been advocating for months for an available vaccine that’s more effective for immunocompromised individuals than the approved ones we have now. I’ve met mostly opposition. People seem to hate the idea of a better vaccine. The people pushing vaccines now won’t allow its use. Not me. I say use what works. But I wouldn’t mandate it either. Just make it available to people it can help.

What does that mean? Except for the very aged, Covid is primarily a preventable lifestyle disease. It’s even a lifestyle disease in the vaccinated.

Which solution? The one that helps those that need it most the least? Nobody has been more truthful than I about how good these vaccines are at preventing infection. But we have to start admitting the truth. They don’t stop transmission well enough to depend on them exclusively for our solution to the pandemic. And as I said, they don’t work particularly well at all in demographics that need protection the most.

You are choosing to mandate one solution that isn’t even the best solution for an obese society. You are picking and choosing lifestyles subjectively on how you feel about them. That’s not how the United States is supposed to function.

Nor do I. But I’m not going to force you “defend” against diabetes or obesity or staph infections or anything else. I’m not going to take your Twinkie so you don’t kill some kid in your diabetic stupor. I’ll inform you of the facts and society will continue to let you make decisions that harm others as a result of the diseases you choose to not defend against. You should reciprocate by letting others choose their lifestyle.

 

Update: The mandate does not apply to contactors (contradicting EVERYTHING previously issued by the SFWTF). I do not need an exemption at all, or they accepted my exemption communications.

It is reproachable that this is even requisite, but there you have it; refraim ideology as spiritiluality and you can undernine the Feds.

The latest EO is falling apart faster than expected and I think itnis possibly a trial-baloon to see in what state of conformity lies the nation.

Keep resisting. Keep on defending your individual sovereignty and buying high-caliber weap...

 

Yeah.

 

Maybe. Maybe not. Why is that a question you ask on a message-board like this?

 

Has anyone tried getting a religious exemption to seatbelts yet?

 

OK Fine. I have to give you credit for that.

 

Well if the long term risks of seatbelts are unknown and if simply wearing a seatbelt can cause sickness, death, or lifelong complications then an apple would be exactly like an orange.

 

Implicit in this unAmerican "Mandate" is the notion that an unvaccinated person is a threat to a vaccinated person. Not only is this not supported by data but the idea is completely self defeating for getting the vaccine in the first place. Yep, people are f***ing stupid, can't come to any other conclusion.

 

Sometimes seatbelts can have unintended consequences, though that's neither here nor there. I would expect a religious exemption to be based on religion, not unwarranted fear of the health effects of the vaccines. To claim a religious exemption on that basis would be quite disingenuous.

 

I don't know which is worse, the aversion to the vaccine, or the efforts to mandate it. I really don't understand the aversion. Then again, only about half the population ever get the flu vaccine even though the flu kills up to eighty thousand Americans per year. And yet it is never mandated. So the aversion to a vaccine is not so unusual. A mandate however is unusual. I have been around long enough to know that I harbor much ignorance and blind spots. So I can only speak for myself.

 

So you're one of those deceived spreaders of false information who "believe" the vaccination is not really "only" about disease. UnbeLEIVABLE!!! Yup, an unbelievable inability to distinguish blatantly false propaganda from factual truth backed by a distrust of the whole world's medical community. In addition, you are essentially admitting that you really don't have a religious objection but are using the availability of it as an excuse to get what you want. And you think we should be nice to you as you deceive and admit willingness to infect others.

 

What makes you think that "freedom" is some all-encompassing, all-inclusive, unlimited right?? In every country, in every historical instance, "freedom" is limited to specific rights.

 

He's not changing the subject. His point is that all freedoms are qualified freedoms.