Let's discuss how peacefull is christianity? shall we?

I am sure there are plenty of people who can chip in?


Is it the most peaceful religion? or more peaceful than some other religions?


Thanks.

There will of course be many answers.

It is necessary to distinguish between what the religion of that name (led and organised by human beings) has done in its (or rather Christ's) name over 2000 years and what its founder (who we christains would regard as God incarnate) actually said should be done.

Christianity as envisaged in the Gospels and other books of the New Testament is based on the primary principles of loving God and loving everyone as yourself. That's a pretty peaceful sort of aspiration.

Sadly of course everyone (including all christians) fail in that mission because of human frailty. And of course even those trying to live in accordance with that have to live amongst those who do not wish to live in such a manner.

Whilst there is always no shortage of quoting of the appalling history of inquisitions and anti-semitism etc., I have to say that there are many places in the world were a true apostolic version of christainity has resolved local confilicts and brought peace. Examples can be found in Honduras, Mexico, Abania and even in Messianic Christian churches in Israel where former Judaistic and muslim enemies now work together in the same communities, to name but a few of which I am aware.

Much of this goes on unknown because it happens on a local basis, but the practical outpouring of christian love is what is winning converts in many parts of the world (mainly outside of the west). This is particularly so amongst people in countries with previous authoritarian regimes which prohibited religious freedom such as former communist states.

Sadly these are often only small glimmers of hope in countries where extreme evil and violence have become the daily norm but hope spreads.

I shall now expect the normal tirade of (often far from accurate) references to history, invective about George Bush and standard atheistic abuse (very similar to the propaganda from authoritarian atheist regimes in fact) but truth is not changed by any of that!

regards,



Gordon.

Brilliant response, Gordon. Such a thoughtful and insightful post is all too rare!

Let's discuss how peacefull is christianity? shall we?

I am sure there are plenty of people who can chip in?


Is it the most peaceful religion? or more peaceful than some other religions?


Thanks.


Followers of Jesus are without doubt the most peaceful people in the world.


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

Followers of Jesus are without doubt the most peaceful people in the world.

America can testify to that.

For myself, I have my entire life as a Christian believed in live and let live. That asparation lead to constant bullying in school. Once a lot of the "tough" kids figured out I didn't fight back I was an easy target. I was forced to abandon my total beliefs in non-violence and realize that everywhere in the world, no matter how benigh you personally might be, there is always going to be someone out there who wants to hurt you and "Beacuse I can" is a good enough reason. No matter how much I would love to be a non violent individual again, I must recognize that others out there can and will attack my person, and even my entire way of belief simply because they take joy in hurting others.

I see lots of killings and wars credited to Christians or Christian armies... slaughter of 66 million people in WWII. Instant deaths of hundred of thousands in Millions killed in world war one, also included 6 plus million Jews.

Korean and Vietnam wars? I believe the majority involved in those conflicts were Christians?


Historically Crusades then war in Balkans, mass killing and genocide in Bosnia- All Christians right? Genocide in Chechnya and thousands are dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why all the above have been ignored? Is that ok for Christian armies to kill each other and other nationalities?

What is the difference between Islamic extremist killing in the name of misguided beliefs and organized Christian armies killing in the name of greed, land, power, oil or whatever the reasons are to justify their wars?

The existence of military leaders who claim Christian motivation for their crusades doesn't mean that Christianity is not peaceful.

It means that military leaders are not peaceful.

It is without doubt that many individual Christians are not peaceful, and many individual Christians are peaceful... but what is "Christianity"? It is the sum of the people? Is it some agreed upon code of ethics?

No it is not alright for Christians to kill each other or unbelievers. Jesus Made that clear.

Matthew 5:38-39
38 "You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. 39But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.


Matthew 5: 43-48
43 "You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? 48Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.


Romans 12:17-21
17Repay no one evil for evil. Have regard for good things in the sight of all men. 18If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men. 19Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay," says the Lord. 20Therefore "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head." 21Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.


Matthew 5:9
Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God.


II Corinthians 10:3,4
"For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds."


Ephesians 6:12
"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places."
Ephesians 6:4
"And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord."


Zechariah 4:6
"Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts."


1 John 5:19
"The whole world lieth in the evil one."

Revelation 13:10
He who leads into captivity shall go into captivity; he who kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.


Those who know Jesus listen to His Words. The rest are just fakes using the "Christian" brand name to flog their own doctrines.


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

The existence of military leaders who claim Christian motivation for their crusades doesn't mean that Christianity is not peaceful.

It means that military leaders are not peaceful.

It is without doubt that many individual Christians are not peaceful, and many individual Christians are peaceful... but what is "Christianity"? It is the sum of the people? Is it some agreed upon code of ethics?


Christianity is not the sum of the people who claim to Be Christian. Christianity is the sum of the Message that the founder of Christianity taught. Christianity is the Word of Jesus.

The code is known by God and all who claim to be Christians will be measured by it.


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

For myself, I have my entire life as a Christian believed in live and let live. That asparation lead to constant bullying in school. Once a lot of the "tough" kids figured out I didn't fight back I was an easy target. I was forced to abandon my total beliefs in non-violence and realize that everywhere in the world, no matter how benigh you personally might be, there is always going to be someone out there who wants to hurt you and "Beacuse I can" is a good enough reason. No matter how much I would love to be a non violent individual again, I must recognize that others out there can and will attack my person, and even my entire way of belief simply because they take joy in hurting others.

Yes there are many who take joy in inflicting hurt on others. That type of sprit is in evidance in this forum. But to join in their game is to justify it. I know it is hard to face victimisation i faced it myself. But in the end we have to rise above even unto death. Because nothing is more important than our eternal relationship with God. This world is not worth fighting for anyway and our lives in this world are not worth killing for. This world is a despicable place, filled with heartlessness and cruelty. Why desire life in this world. Better to die with nobility then to live like a savage.

John 12
25 He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

Matthew 16
26 For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

I don't join in it. I simply stopped bein non-violent and I react when threatened.

I don't join in it. I simply stopped bein non-violent and I react when threatened.


I didn't expect you to respond to the Love of the truth. Most people who reject the Love of The Truth seek to justify their decision. So be it. But the Truth reigns in eternity and your lifetime is as a drop of water in the ocean in comparison to it. Even that comparison is inadequate.


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

I see lots of killings and wars credited to Christians or Christian armies... slaughter of 66 million people in WWII. Instant deaths of hundred of thousands in Millions killed in world war one, also included 6 plus million Jews. ?

Both these were world wars. They involved people of all different faiths and of course in the case of the USSR officially no faith at all. The architect of the final solution and the prime mover of the conflict of World War Two, one Adolf Hitler may have been baptised as a Roman Catholic but I challenge anyone to say that as German Leader, he was truly an adherent to any form of the christian faith, or indeed any other form of organised religion.

Would you honestly have preferred that WWII was not fought and that the world had completely lost its freedom and entered into a new era of fascist barbarism and terror?

Korean and Vietnam wars? I believe the majority involved in those conflicts were Christians??

Neither the Koreans nor Vietnamese are predominantly christians (Koreans Buddhist, Vietnamese mixed with very few christians and in both cases they fought on both sides - they started out as civil wars). Whilst as with all conflicts, the actual causes are difficult to pin down precisely and will always be contentious, there is no doubt that trouble in the area was deliberately stirred up by (the totally atheistic communist) USSR, in order to spread its influence further. The current (atheist communist) North Korea is of course one of the most repressive regimes in the world and spends a greater percentage of its GDP on weapons than any other country, whilst its people languish.

Interestingly you do not mention the much more recent invasion and continued occupation of the totally peaceful Buddhist country of Tibet by the atheistic communist regime of China.


Historically Crusades then war in Balkans, mass killing and genocide in Bosnia- All Christians right? Genocide in Chechnya and thousands are dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The most recent war in the Balkans was actually western (notionally christian) nations' forces fighting and dying to aid and protect (largely) muslims against (very notionally largely christian) Serbians!

The campaign against Chechnya was initiated by the (atheistic communist) regime of the former USSR!


If you are going to quote history, you really need to learn a bit more about it and not allow your particular political philosophy to replace actual facts with prejudice (I presume your nom-de-plume is significant!)


Why all the above have been ignored? Is that ok for Christian armies to kill each other and other nationalities?

What is the difference between Islamic extremist killing in the name of misguided beliefs and organized Christian armies killing in the name of greed, land, power, oil or whatever the reasons are to justify their wars?

Even if your historical facts were accurate, which as you can see they are not, the difference is very simple. Whilst what human beings do is often not much different and sometimes only the excuses are different, the basic tenets of the Christian faith are what Jesus said and did. Note even Judaism nor Jesus' enemies nor even those on this site have ever accused him of being a person who advocated and used organised violence.

Other religions with other founders may not necessarily be able to claim the same thing!

But remember the largest mass murders in the twentieth century involved Hitler (see above), Stalin (communist atheist), Mao Tse Tung (communist atheist) and Pol Pot (atheist communist).

If anyone started an 'Is Atheism Peaceful' thread - what would be the answer?




regards,




Gordon.

But remember the largest mass murders in the twentieth century involved Hitler (see above), Stalin (communist atheist), Mao Tse Tung (communist atheist) and Pol Pot (atheist communist).

According to the Bible all of these leaders were given their position and authority directly by God himself. They would have had absolutely no power to destroy the lives of millions unless God gave it to them.

According to the Bible all of these leaders were given their position and authority directly by God himself. They would have had absolutely no power to destroy the lives of millions unless God gave it to them.

Whilst I am sure you would like to divert the subject matter of this thread away from its original simple subject into deep philosophical debate about free will, God allowing evil and all the rest of it, I should first remind you that the proposition which concerns this thread is whether christianity is peaceful. I have made my contribution to that one. My last answer was to correct historical inaccuracies made by a previous contributor.

Your comment is not actually relevant to either.

It is of course logically false for an atheist to claim that God has done anything, since no-one can logically believe that something which they believe does not exist can have the power to act.

Whatever 'red herrings' you may produce, the simple fact is that neither christianity (nor even 'christians') have been responsible for most of the deaths in war and mass murders over the last 100 years or so. The 'honour' for that belongs firmly to atheists irrespective of any excuse they might make, although I cannot believe that Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot would appeal to any supposed biblical authority (although I do accept that someone with a very muddled view of 'destiny' like Hitler just might!)

So as not to be accused of avoiding the issue raised however, I shall comment on your point.

You seem to be saying that biblical scripture implies that if God allows someone to be in charge, they can do whatever they choose and that is God's fault and not theirs. They are in effect not personally accountable for their actions, because God has given them the potential to act in this manner by allowing them to have their personal power.

Apart form any logical falsehood in such a proposition, it is not what either Old or New Testament teaches. What is actually taught is that you should obey God (and his law) first and that providing that that is not contravened you should obey human leaders. This means that if you are a christian you have to use the free will given to you to decide what to do in difficult circumstances, where you cannot possibly obey both human leaders and God's laws. Note that judgment and scale of response also have to be used (God did not give us those powers for nothing). For instance you do not start riots for minor matters with all the associated damage and risk of injury(nor even burn down abortion clinics however seriously wrong you might believe abortion to be) as the 'treatment' may well be at least as great an infringement of Godly prinicples as 'the disease'. At the other end of the scale, you may however have to go to war against those who would commit genocide either internally or externally to the society in which you live.

By allowing free will, God does permit a limited amount of evil to be perpetrated by people for a period. One logically implies the other. If you were not to permit any evil to take place you would have to remove the ability for people to choose to do it, by taking away their free will and creating automata.

It is interesting to note that (despite all the odds) Hitler did not succeed and ended as a demoralised physical wreck who committed suicide, although still bringing appalling consequences to his fellow Germans for years afterwards. Both Stalin and Pol Pot are now almost universally despised even by (or perhaps particularly by) their own people. Pol Pot died from a heart attack and lack of medical care whilst the cause of Stalin's death is controversial and many believe he was murdered. In China Mao Tse Tung died of a heart attack, as a broken man having failed to achieve his desire for both China and the rest of the world. China now is very critical of Mao and is undoing most of his legacy very rapidly.

The biblical view is that those who stand fast for what is right (and therefore of God) against what is wrong (and therefore what is against God) will prevail ultimately. This may mean standing against civil authorities if those authorities are themselves seriously against what is right. Those who stand for right may succeed within their lifetime or not. There are some recent examples such as Nelson Mandela against apartheid South Africa (in his lifetime) or such as Martin Luther King and black civil rights in the USA (after his murder). Another way to look at this is that God does not condone evil but knowing it will happen, uses it to His own purposes.

I believe that one of the reasons human beings love stories like 'The Lord of the Rings' is that the concept of evil prevailing for a period but then ultimately being overturned by good (usually with the assistance of very ordinary type people - even children) is because this reflects the much greater epic story of real life and is therefore programmed into us as a form of inate knowledge (although we can as always suppress our knowledge of it or pretend it is something else).

regards,



Gordon.

... You seem to be saying that biblical scripture implies that if God allows someone to be in charge, they can do whatever they choose and that is God's fault and not theirs. They are in effect not personally accountable for their actions, because God has given them the potential to act in this manner by allowing them to have their personal power.

Apart form any logical falsehood in such a proposition, it is not what either Old or New Testament teaches. What is actually taught is that you should obey God (and his law) first and that providing that that is not contravened you should obey human leaders. This means that if you are a christian you have to use the free will given to you to decide what to do in difficult circumstances, where you cannot possibly obey both human leaders and God's laws. Note that judgment and scale of response also have to be used (God did not give us those powers for nothing). For instance you do not start riots for minor matters with all the associated damage and risk of injury(nor even burn down abortion clinics however seriously wrong you might believe abortion to be) as the 'treatment' may well be at least as great an infringement of Godly prinicples as 'the disease'. At the other end of the scale, you may however have to go to war against those who would commit genocide either internally or externally to the society in which you live.

By allowing free will, God does permit a limited amount of evil to be perpetrated by people for a period. One logically implies the other. If you were not to permit any evil to take place you would have to remove the ability for people to choose to do it, by taking away their free will and creating automata.

It is interesting to note that (despite all the odds) Hitler did not succeed and ended as a demoralised physical wreck who committed suicide, although still bringing appalling consequences to his fellow Germans for years afterwards. Both Stalin and Pol Pot are now almost universally despised even by (or perhaps particularly by) their own people. Pol Pot died from a heart attack and lack of medical care whilst the cause of Stalin's death is controversial and many believe he was murdered. In China Mao Tse Tung died of a heart attack, as a broken man having failed to achieve his desire for both China and the rest of the world. China now is very critical of Mao and is undoing most of his legacy very rapidly.

The biblical view is that those who stand fast for what is right (and therefore of God) against what is wrong (and therefore what is against God) will prevail ultimately. This may mean standing against civil authorities if those authorities are themselves seriously against what is right. Those who stand for right may succeed within their lifetime or not. There are some recent examples such as Nelson Mandela against apartheid South Africa (in his lifetime) or such as Martin Luther King and black civil rights in the USA (after his murder). Another way to look at this is that God does not condone evil but knowing it will happen, uses it to His own purposes. ...


Hi Gordon,

I appreciate your comments!

My basic point is simple: With ultimate control comes ultimate responsibility.

The Bible teaches that no one in authority has that authority unless God has given it to him or her. The Bible also clearly teaches that God is absolutely sovereign, in the book of Romans and elsewhere. I would guess that you might agree on this point, at least. Even with the existence of man's freewill, God can still influence people as He wishes and make history unfold as He sees fit. And according to the Bible, He does exactly that. He is in the total and ultimate control of everything, whether good or evil, that has ever happened or ever will happen on this earth. And absolutely no one can “do whatever they choose” as you might be suggesting. I can give you the scriptural basis for this if you wish. So if an evil dictator is in a position of power and authority, he is there because God directly placed him there.

Even in the face of a terrible mind numbing disaster like the World Trade Center, people still say, “God is in control.” And when they pray, they are probably, at times, directly asking God to either bless or curse someone else, often against the will of that person. Have you ever done that? Have you ever asked God to just wipe someone off the face of the earth? Hopefully not! I am sorry to say the model for this kind of thinking certainly does exist in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament.

My Conclusion: The God of the Bible, according to the Bible, is ultimately in control of all evil, therefore He is also ultimately responsible for all evil. If He is ultimately responsible for all of the evil that has ever occurred on this earth then He is actually not peaceful and neither is His religion.

If I am wrong, then where does my logic break down?

Thanks Gordon!

B




The campaign against Chechnya was initiated by the (atheistic communist) regime of the former USSR!



Gordon.

Thanks Gordon, nice try to defend certain aspects and you succeeded to the most part. However there are some questions.

Who decided that USSR is an Atheist country or the starter of wars were atheist? It was both Russia and USSR which invaded chechnya twice.

Interesting thing is that 75% of Russia is Christian, However even if take the practicing Christians not just people who call them some Christians, the number is around 20 plus Percent. The Majority accounts.

http://www.russiannewsnetwork.com/religion.html

"The most common religion in Russia is Christianity. Christians in Russia have their own special type of church. It is called the Russian Orthodox Church."

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia



Above can help you clear that misunderstanding of yours. So, In a way I stand correctly that it was the Russian majority which is 75% Christians who started the war and killed almost all of the Chechnya's Muslim population. In some cases you can say that only 20-25% are Christians but again majority counts.




I will address the rest tomorrow. I have very limited access to internet.

Thank you.

The most recent war in the Balkans was actually western (notionally christian) nations' forces fighting and dying to aid and protect (largely) muslims against (very notionally largely christian) Serbians!


If you are going to quote history, you really need to learn a bit more about it and not allow your particular political philosophy to replace actual facts with prejudice (I presume your nom-de-plume is significant!)

.


Since I have been accused of not knowing the history, I hope that Encyclopedia Britinica can help me out and clear my position.


http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9011972

Balkan Wars (1912–13), two successive military conflicts that deprived the ... {b}The immediate cause of the war was a religious quarrel. ..."[/b]


"They were characterised by bitter ethnic conflicts between the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, mostly between the Serbs or the Serb-controlled Yugoslav army and a different ethnic group: Slovenians, Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians. The conflict had its roots in various underlying political, economic and cultural problems, as well as long-standing ethnic and religious tensions."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_wars


I can't think of anything more direct then the following?



Thousands Of Bosnian Muslims Killed In Ethnic Cleansing


Morning Edition, March 13, 2000 · Host Bob Edwards talks to reporter Geraldine Coughlan about the latest trial before the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. General Radislav Krstic has been charged with genocide in what is considered the worst massacre in Europe since the Holocaust. Krstic is accused of leading the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims at the U.N. designated safe haven of Srebrenica. Thousands of civilians were killed.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1071481

The history is filled with the information. If you like I can post million links to prove my point, but there is no point to re write the history since the facts have already been recorded.


Do you see my point? They were not atheists or budhist or were they?

They weren't any tanks and planes attacking the christians nationalists, no armies of muslims killing the christians, but the recorded history shows that it was the opposite. Not that hard to understand.

Just to add a little bit more from Human Rights website:


Bosnia Genocide - 1992-1995 - 200,000 Deaths

In the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, conflict between the three main ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, resulted in genocide committed by the Serbs against the Muslims in Bosnia.

Bosnia is one of several small countries that emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia, a multicultural country created after World War I by the victorious Western Allies. Yugoslavia was composed of ethnic and religious groups that had been historical rivals, even bitter enemies, including the Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Croats (Catholics) and ethnic Albanians (Muslims).

During World War II, Yugoslavia was invaded by Nazi Germany and was partitioned. A fierce resistance movement sprang up led by Josip Tito. Following Germany's defeat, Tito reunified Yugoslavia under the slogan "Brotherhood and Unity," merging together Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, along with two self-governing provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina.

Tito, a Communist, was a strong leader who maintained ties with the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, playing one superpower against the other while obtaining financial assistance and other aid from both. After his death in 1980 and without his strong leadership, Yugoslavia quickly plunged into political and economic chaos.

A new leader arose by the late 1980s, a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic, a former Communist who had turned to nationalism and religious hatred to gain power. He began by inflaming long-standing tensions between Serbs and Muslims in the independent provence of Kosovo. Orthodox Christian Serbs in Kosovo were in the minority and claimed they were being mistreated by the Albanian Muslim majority. Serbian-backed political unrest in Kosovo eventually led to its loss of independence and domination by Milosevic.



In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia both declared their independence from Yugoslavia soon resulting in civil war. The national army of Yugoslavia, now made up of Serbs controlled by Milosevic, stormed into Slovenia but failed to subdue the separatists there and withdrew after only ten days of fighting.

Milosevic quickly lost interest in Slovenia, a country with almost no Serbs. Instead, he turned his attention to Croatia, a Catholic country where Orthodox Serbs made up 12 percent of the population.

During World War II, Croatia had been a pro-Nazi state led by Ante Pavelic and his fascist Ustasha Party. Serbs living in Croatia as well as Jews had been the targets of widespread Ustasha massacres. In the concentration camp at Jasenovac, they had been slaughtered by the tens of thousands.

In 1991, the new Croat government, led by Franjo Tudjman, seemed to be reviving fascism, even using the old Ustasha flag, and also enacted discriminatory laws targeting Orthodox Serbs.

Aided by Serbian guerrillas in Croatia, Milosevic's forces invaded in July 1991 to 'protect' the Serbian minority. In the city of Vukovar, they bombarded the outgunned Croats for 86 consecutive days and reduced it to rubble. After Vukovar fell, the Serbs began the first mass executions of the conflict, killing hundreds of Croat men and burying them in mass graves.



The response of the international community was limited. The U.S. under President George Bush chose not to get involved militarily, but instead recognized the independence of both Slovenia and Croatia. An arms embargo was imposed for all of the former Yugoslavia by the United Nations. However, the Serbs under Milosevic were already the best armed force and thus maintained a big military advantage.

The end of 1991 brokered a U.S.-sponsored cease-fire agreement between the Serbs and Croats fighting in Croatia.

In April 1992, the U.S. and European Community chose to recognize the independence of Bosnia, a mostly Muslim country where the Serb minority made up 32 percent of the population. Milosevic responded to Bosnia's declaration of independence by attacking Sarajevo, its capital city, best known for hosting the 1984 Winter Olympics. Sarajevo soon became known as the city where Serb snipers continually shot down helpless civilians in the streets, including eventually over 3,500 children.

Bosnian Muslims were hopelessly outgunned. As the Serbs gained ground, they began to systematically roundup local Muslims in scenes eerily similar to those that had occurred under the Nazis during World War II, including mass shootings, forced repopulation of entire towns, and confinement in make-shift concentration camps for men and boys. The Serbs also terrorized Muslim families into fleeing their villages by using rape as a weapon against women and girls.

The actions of the Serbs were labeled as 'ethnic cleansing,' a name which quickly took hold among the international media.

Despite media reports of the secret camps, the mass killings, as well as the destruction of Muslim mosques and historic architecture in Bosnia, the world community remained mostly indifferent. The U.N. responded by imposing economic sanctions on Serbia and also deployed its troops to protect the distribution of food and medicine to dispossessed Muslims. But the U.N. strictly prohibited its troops from interfering militarily against the Serbs. Thus they remained steadfastly neutral no matter how bad the situation became.

Throughout 1993, confident that the U.N., United States and the European Community would not take militarily action, Serbs in Bosnia freely committed genocide against Muslims. Bosnian Serbs operated under the local leadership of Radovan Karadzic, president of the illegitimate Bosnian Serb Republic. Karadzic had once told a group of journalists, "Serbs and Muslims are like cats and dogs. They cannot live together in peace. It is impossible."

When Karadzic was confronted by reporters about ongoing atrocities, he bluntly denied involvement of his soldiers or special police units.

On February 6, 1994, the world's attention turned completely to Bosnia as a marketplace in Sarajevo was struck by a Serb mortar shell killing 68 persons and wounding nearly 200. Sights and sounds of the bloody carnage were broadcast globally by the international news media and soon resulted in calls for military intervention against the Serbs.

The U.S. under its new President, Bill Clinton, who had promised during his election campaign in 1992 to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, now issued an ultimatum through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) demanding that the Serbs withdraw their artillery from Sarajevo. The Serbs quickly complied and a NATO-imposed cease-fire in Sarajevo was declared.

The U.S. then launched diplomatic efforts aimed at unifying Bosnian Muslims and the Croats against the Serbs. However, this new Muslim-Croat alliance failed to stop the Serbs from attacking Muslim towns in Bosnia, which had been declared Safe Havens by the U.N. A total of six Muslim towns had been established as Safe Havens in May 1993 under the supervision of U.N. peacekeepers.

Bosnian Serbs not only attacked the Safe Havens but also attacked the U.N. peacekeepers as well. NATO forces responded by launching limited air strikes against Serb ground positions. The Serbs retaliated by taking hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers as hostages and turning them into human shields, chained to military targets such as ammo supply dumps.

At this point, some of the worst genocidal activities of the four-year-old conflict occurred. In Srebrenica, a Safe Haven, U.N. peacekeepers stood by helplessly as the Serbs under the command of General Ratko Mladic systematically selected and then slaughtered nearly 8,000 men and boys between the ages of twelve and sixty - the worst mass murder in Europe since World War II. In addition, the Serbs continued to engage in mass rapes of Muslim females.

On August 30, 1995, effective military intervention finally began as the U.S. led a massive NATO bombing campaign in response to the killings at Srebrenica, targeting Serbian artillery positions throughout Bosnia. The bombardment continued into October. Serb forces also lost ground to Bosnian Muslims who had received arms shipments from the Islamic world. As a result, half of Bosnia was eventually retaken by Muslim-Croat troops.

Faced with the heavy NATO bombardment and a string of ground losses to the Muslim-Croat alliance, Serb leader Milosevic was now ready to talk peace. On November 1, 1995, leaders of the warring factions including Milosevic and Tudjman traveled to the U.S. for peace talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio.

After three weeks of negotiations, a peace accord was declared. Terms of the agreement included partitioning Bosnia into two main portions known as the Bosnian Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation. The agreement also called for democratic elections and stipulated that war criminals would be handed over for prosecution. 60,000 NATO soldiers were deployed to preserve the cease-fire.

By now, over 200,000 Muslim civilians had been systematically murdered. More than 20,000 were missing and feared dead, while 2,000,000 had become refugees. It was, according to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, "the greatest failure of the West since the 1930s."

Hi Gordon,

I appreciate your comments!

My basic point is simple: With ultimate control comes ultimate responsibility.

The Bible teaches that no one in authority has that authority unless God has given it to him or her. The Bible also clearly teaches that God is absolutely sovereign, in the book of Romans and elsewhere. I would guess that you might agree on this point, at least. Even with the existence of man's freewill, God can still influence people as He wishes and make history unfold as He sees fit. And according to the Bible, He does exactly that. He is in the total and ultimate control of everything, whether good or evil, that has ever happened or ever will happen on this earth. And absolutely no one can “do whatever they choose” as you might be suggesting. I can give you the scriptural basis for this if you wish. So if an evil dictator is in a position of power and authority, he is there because God directly placed him there.

Even in the face of a terrible mind numbing disaster like the World Trade Center, people still say, “God is in control.” And when they pray, they are probably, at times, directly asking God to either bless or curse someone else, often against the will of that person. Have you ever done that? Have you ever asked God to just wipe someone off the face of the earth? Hopefully not! I am sorry to say the model for this kind of thinking certainly does exist in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament.

My Conclusion: The God of the Bible, according to the Bible, is ultimately in control of all evil, therefore He is also ultimately responsible for all evil. If He is ultimately responsible for all of the evil that has ever occurred on this earth then He is actually not peaceful and neither is His religion.

If I am wrong, then where does my logic break down?

Thanks Gordon!

Your logic breaks down when you derive that God causes evil. When God only allows evil. God can allow something without endorsing something.

So yes the evil powers that be in this world are allowed to be by God. But the evil powers of this world are a snare for power hungry and evil men. They are allowed to follow their evil desires on the path that leads to their own eternal destruction. Just as other men are allowed to reject the powers that be in this world and their evil games to follow the path to eternal life.


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

God can allow something without endorsing something.

It seems to me that if someone has the power to prevent an occurence and knowingly chooses not to do so, then they are implicitly endorsing that occurence.

Consider the parable of the good Samaritan.

Your logic breaks down when you derive that God causes evil. When God only allows evil. God can allow something without endorsing something.

So yes the evil powers that be in this world are allowed to be by God. But the evil powers of this world are a snare for power hungry and evil men. They are allowed to follow their evil desires on the path that leads to their own eternal destruction. Just as other men are allowed to reject the powers that be in this world and their evil games to follow the path to eternal life.


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

Hi Adstar. I hope you are doing well!

I did not intend to say that God "causes" evil. I was trying to say that God is sovereign and as such He is ultimately in "control" of all evil. I am saying that with ultimate control comes the ultimate responsibility for all that He controls both good and evil. We are completely willing for God to receive all of the glory for all of the good that occurs in this world on this basis, even when the good is brought about by the freewill decisions of men. Why is He not also ultimately responsible for all evil, even the evil that is brought about by the freewill decisions of men? I am saying that whatever exists, good or bad, is His will. It is indeed His will that Satan deceives the vast majority of the children of men, is it not?

Are you saying that all evil is somehow outside of His control or that He is not sovereign in some way?

Thanks!

Consider the parable of the good Samaritan.


WOW! That is a really profound insight!

Christianity is not the sum of the people who claim to Be Christian. Christianity is the sum of the Message that the founder of Christianity taught. Christianity is the Word of Jesus. The code is known by God and all who claim to be Christians will be measured by it.That's a nice facile definition that gets you off the hook. If it makes you feel good then go with it. Or bless you, as I suppose you would say.

But I don't see the usefulness of an abstract definition of an abstract thing like a religion. What matters is the impact it has had on civilization.

I'm so happy for the citizens of those little countries who were able to find something in Christianity that made them better people. But they are tiny exceptions over the two-millennium history of the faith. It did not inspire the Spaniards to avoid obliterating two entire civilizations. That single pair of atrocities is enough to damn the entire religion forever because it's the greatest loss the human race has ever experienced and it can never be undone. (Or at least it ties with Islam for obliterating the civilization of Egypt, which does not exactly put it in the best of company.)

One can be charitable and say that many of the atrocities committed by so-called Christian people were not inspired by Christianity, which is the reason I did not use the Holocaust as an example. But the razing of the Aztec and Inca civilizations was religiously inspired. The Christians found everything about them to be an affront to Jesus, to the extent that they actually burned their historical records and melted down their artworks in an attempt to erase them from time and not just from space.

This is not forgivable, my friend, not ever. There's nothing Christians can ever do to make up for this cosmic loss to the people of earth. I realize that this is not what Jesus foresaw or recommended--and I'm gnashing my teeth here to go along with the barely supportable myth that he was a real person. But there is only one yardstick by which to judge a leader, and that is the accomplishments of his followers. Jesus may have been a great man but he did not have the ability to instill that greatness in those who followed him, so he was in reality--to use the term loosely--merely a very nice man who failed.

The evil perpetrated by the followers of Jesus will haunt us until the day that the sun explodes and nothing we did matters any more. And of course if on that day humans have not managed to colonize another solar system and take our history and our civilization with them, I'm sure that Christians will have had a lot to do with the ignorance and intolerance that made it not happen. Real Christians motivated by their faith, not the faux Christians from whom you distance yourself without a pang of responsibility.

If you want to talk about a religious figure whose followers have so far acquitted themselves honorably enough that he has a chance of being elected to the Galactic Hall of Fame, try Buddha. Jesus is a big loser.

It seems to me that if someone has the power to prevent an occurence and knowingly chooses not to do so, then they are implicitly endorsing that occurence.

God is responsible for allowing evil to exist, But it will be seen in eternity why this had to be. God will be justified.



Consider the parable of the good Samaritan.

In what way?


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

Hi Adstar. I hope you are doing well!

I did not intend to say that God "causes" evil. I was trying to say that God is sovereign and as such He is ultimately in "control" of all evil. I am saying that with ultimate control comes the ultimate responsibility for all that He controls both good and evil. We are completely willing for God to receive all of the glory for all of the good that occurs in this world on this basis, even when the good is brought about by the freewill decisions of men. Why is He not also ultimately responsible for all evil, even the evil that is brought about by the freewill decisions of men? I am saying that whatever exists, good or bad, is His will. It is indeed His will that Satan deceives the vast majority of the children of men, is it not?

God would have all saved. But God knows not all will accept His Love. So those who reject His love are given over to the deceiver. Yes the vast majority are deceived because the vast majority hate the Love of The Truth.



Are you saying that all evil is somehow outside of His control or that He is not sovereign in some way?

Thanks!

Evil springs forth from sources other than God, but God allows that evil to spring forth. It is an unavoidable consequence of free will. People have the freedom to choose God and His will or they can chose something else. That something else is evil, not matter how many different wrappers it comes in.

If one wants to give people the opportunity to embrace the truth they must also have the opportunity to embrace a lie. There has to be a choice.



All Praise The Ancient Of Days

Fraggle Rocker

This is not forgivable, my friend, not ever. There's nothing Christians can ever do to make up for this cosmic loss to the people of earth. I realize that this is not what Jesus foresaw or recommended-- and I'm gnashing my teeth here to go along with the barely supportable myth that he was a real person. But there is only one yardstick by which to judge a leader, and that is the accomplishments of his followers. Jesus may have been a great man but he did not have the ability to instill that greatness in those who followed him, so he was in reality--to use the term loosely--merely a very nice man who failed.

Thank you Fraggle Rocker. Even in your disbelief in Jesus as Messiah you can still understand that those who comitted the atrocities in Jesus name where not acting in the way Jesus taught ( "recommended-- " ).

This is the exact point i was making. To be a Follower of Jesus one must follow the teachings of Jesus otherwise what value is there in saying Jesus is my Lord when one does not follow His teachings. To say such a thing is to be a liar.



But the razing of the Aztec and Inca civilizations was religiously inspired. The Christians found everything about them to be an affront to Jesus, to the extent that they actually burned their historical records and melted down their artworks in an attempt to erase them from time and not just from space.

You right it was "religiously" inspired. But was it inspired by Jesus or the catholic religion? Of cource both the aztec and inca civilizations where evil, as is the catholic civilization that destroyed them. So too is the islamic civilization that destroyed other evil civilizations. But non of these civilizations where or are following the teachings of Jesus. So therefore if one evil civilization tears another evil civilization apart what has it to do with Jesus?

Just like today as we are nearing the clash of the evil humanist atheist western civilization against the evil islamic civilization. What will that have to do with Jesus? Of course some will do their best to weave Jesus into the plot somewhere. That’s what the evil powers have always done. But the truth of the matter is that Jesus has nothing to do with those who claim to be His and in fact are liars.

Matthew 7
21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

"I realize that this is not what Jesus foresaw or recommended"

This is the exact point i was making. To be a Follower of Jesus one must follow the teachings of Jesus otherwise what value is there in saying Jesus is my Lord when one does not follow His teachings. To say such a thing is to be a liar.Again, this may absolve Jesus and you from responsibility for these atrocities in your own mind. But for the rest of us there is a blatant cause-and-effect relationship between the teachings attributed to Jesus and the cult that sprang up in his name and engulfed much of humanity. The most evil of the people who call themselves Christians are often the ones who believe most strongly that they in fact are doing his bidding, and can cite chapter and verse just as convincingly as you do to make their point. If one of them dares to show up here he will present us with exactly the same sort of argument you do to explain why he is the true Christian and you are a lost sheep who needs to be born again. To an outsider with no ties to either side, there is absolutely no difference between the two of you except the obvious one that you are a nicer person. To attribute your niceness to the inspiration of Jesus is no more valid than to so attribute your opponenent's meanness. You're both selling yourself short. This stuff is inside you and you don't need to give someone else credit.You're right [the razing of the Aztec and Inca civilizations] was "religiously" inspired. But was it inspired by Jesus or the Catholic religion?This is angels dancing on a pinhead. Again, it's a facile way for you to duck any responsibility for promoting a faith with a long list of evil accomplishments to say, "No no, those other guys got it all wrong, they should listen to me because I truly understand what Jesus meant." But this subtle and almost semantic distinction makes no difference to the billions of people who have for two thousand years suffered the horrifying consequences of the existence of Christianity.Of cource both the Aztec and Inca civilizations where evil, as is the Catholic civilization that destroyed them. So too is the islamic civilization that destroyed other evil civilizations.I think if I look up "facile" in the dictionary your picture will be there. :) No civilization is evil. Civilizations arise and evolve over millennia. They grow and change and mature and backslide and falter and recover just like individuals do. They do good things, they do bad things, but they inexorably move in the direction of harmony. Homo sapiens is a social species by instinct and all social animals are preprogrammed to live in relative peace with their packmates because they have to or the species won't survive. All civilizations are born with a superiority complex for the obvious reason that they look around them and see only uncivilized people. They think it's their mission to enlighten them. This builds up to such a sense of hubris that by the time their boundary reaches that of the next civilization down the road, they've been taught for generations that only they understand the path to enlightenment so those other guys must be stamped out.

Yet somehow the civilizations with polytheistic religions--those that provide a richer and more useful model of the human spirit than Abrahamism with its absurd and pathetic binary good-versus-evil model that looks like it was created by a computer programmer--managed to coexist with each other. Sumeria, Persia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome... they conquered each other over and over again but they never set out to painstakingly destroy all evidence of each other's existence, and in fact routinely assimilated those principles, technologies, artifacts and cultural motifs that they found useful or interesting.

It wasn't until the monotheistic religions of Abraham engulfed the civilizations of the Middle East and Europe that they began to regard other civilizations as "blasphemous" and to believe that God wanted them not only conquered but wiped from the face of the earth.

This is the enduring legacy of Abraham and his successors, Jesus and Mohammed. (I give Moses a cautious exemption because since Roman times Judaism has neither evangelized itself nor inspired draconian treatment for non-Jewish blasphemers.) It does not matter one whit what these guys actually said or what they actually hoped would be done in their names. The cold hard evidence provided by history is that the communities that sprang up to carry forth their teachings have overwhelmingly selected leaders whose interpretation of those teachings is intolerant and angry and whips their flocks into recurring frenzies of violence of unprecedented scope and nearly unprecedented thoroughness.But none of these civilizations were or are following the teachings of Jesus. So therefore if one evil civilization tears another evil civilization apart what has it to do with Jesus?I appreciate your ability to intepret the teachings of Jesus to endorse peace, love and tolerance. I really do; you are clearly a good person. The problem I have with Christianity is that over the centuries the majority of people who claim with equal authority to call themselves Christians do not agree with you when it matters, which is when times get tough and there are difficult decisions to make.

Look at the world this very day. The Pope, the beloved and trusted leader of most of the world's Christians, made a totally intolerant and inappropriate remark about Islam that will surely not help us find the path to peace. The leaders of many, if not most, American Christian churches believe that war in the Middle East is the only way to protect the god-fearing folk of America against the god-fearing folk over there. To say that these people are not following the teachings of Jesus once again leads me back to your picture next to the word "facile." You don't speak for all the people in the world who claim to be Christians. They believe they are following his teachings and can "prove" it by quoting the bible. Who am I to believe? Somehow his teachings have been misinterpreted, arguably in good faith by people who were doing the best they could.

The only major Christian community on earth that has its wits during these troubled times and is trying to avert WWIII is Europe, which has been compulsively secularizing for so long that it might as well relabel itself Unitarian.

One of the two or three most important essences of Christianity (and Islam) is evangelism. The belief that only Jesus's teachings, of all possible philosophies the human race will ever think up, has the answer to the universe's questions, and that it is a holy duty to bring every single human being into it. Considering that the words attributed to Jesus were not even written down until long after the traditional date of his death, Christianity was founded on the principle of evangelism by the existing Christian community rather than on some direct link to the prophet himself. You cannot duck the issue of the evil done in Jesus's name by his followers by saying that's not what Jesus meant because the very mechanism for the spread of this faith has always been interpretation of what Jesus meant by the ordinary people who came after him.

Jesus set something in motion that has gripped a good portion of the world in evil for the better part of two thousand years. To grant the faint possibility that he was real for the sake of the argument, I admit that this is most certainly not what he wanted, and he would probably have kept his mouth shut and become a yogi if he could have foreseen it. So I forgive him in an outpouring of charitable feelings that many of his followers today will not extend to me reciprocally. And I even forgive you for your idealistic view that Jesus can somehow still be a force for good even though he has overwhelmingly been used as a force for evil whenever it mattered; the world needs idealists like you and Jesus.

But this does not excuse the movement that he started. Jesus was a failure and he unwittingly brought down centuries of abject grief on this poor planet.

[QUOTE=Fraggle Rocker]

Yet somehow the civilizations with polytheistic religions--those that provide a richer and more useful model of the human spirit than Abrahamism with its absurd and pathetic binary good-versus-evil model that looks like it was created by a computer programmer--managed to coexist with each other. Sumeria, Persia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome... they conquered each other over and over again but they never set out to painstakingly destroy all evidence of each other's existence, and in fact routinely assimilated those principles, technologies, artifacts and cultural motifs that they found useful or interesting.

It wasn't until the monotheistic religions of Abraham engulfed the civilizations of the Middle East and Europe that they began to regard other civilizations as "blasphemous" and to believe that God wanted them not only conquered but wiped from the face of the earth. [QUOTE]


Excellent post Fraggle!
It's because of all this you mention that I left behind the harshness and cruelties of the Abrahamic faiths.
I still maintain a belief in God but without all the man-written nonsense and personifications of God that were created in these religions.
I'll be the first to admit I admire and respect many of the nobler teachings of peace and love that they all contain but it is the dark side that exists in them all that drove me away from their nutty visions of God.

Let's discuss how peacefull is christianity? shall we

sure, lets see what their guide book says
www.evilbible.com
you say you dont follow that book to the letter? how can you be a True xian then?

and since you'll all no doubt start knocking the atheists pov lets see what their perspective on life is
www.atheists.org

Again, this may absolve Jesus and you from responsibility for these atrocities in your own mind. But for the rest of us there is a blatant cause-and-effect relationship between the teachings attributed to Jesus and the cult that sprang up in his name and engulfed much of humanity.

Yes is does absolve Jesus of all these atrocities., And those who did these things in His name will face a far more terrible ending then that which they did upon their fellow man. You’re right a "cult" did spring up and it did attribute many things to Jesus that are not supported by the Words of Jesus at all.

The most evil of the people who call themselves Christians are often the ones who believe most strongly that they in fact are doing his bidding, and can cite chapter and verse just as convincingly as you do to make their point. If one of them dares to show up here he will present us with exactly the same sort of argument you do to explain why he is the true Christian and you are a lost sheep who needs to be born again.

God knows His own and He also knows the liars. You say they are just as convincing as me? Well if that is the case then you are deceived and just like them. Many people who have rejected the Love of The Truth desperately want the arguments of the false Christians to be true because they think it justifies their rejection of God. But sadly it never has nor will it ever justify them.


To an outsider with no ties to either side, there is absolutely no difference between the two of you except the obvious one that you are a nicer person.

I never said i was nice. I can be as big of an S.O.B as the next guy. But i know when i am wrong that i am wrong. I don't seek to justify my wrong as being right.

To attribute your niceness to the inspiration of Jesus is no more valid than to so attribute your opponenent's meanness. You're both selling yourself short.

You don't get it. I do not turn my cheek and love my enemies because i am a nice guy. I do so out of obedience and trust in the guidance of Jesus. That's something that a lot of people just cannot do. They use the Word of Jesus as a smorgasbord of teachings that they can pick and chose from depending on how that teaching aligns with what they think is right. They can call themselves Christian after they pick their selection, but they are only deceiving themselves. All the Words of Jesus are Spirit. All the Words of Jesus are Life.


This stuff is inside you and you don't need to give someone else credit.This is angels dancing on a pinhead. Again, it's a facile way for you to duck any responsibility for promoting a faith with a long list of evil accomplishments to say, "No no, those other guys got it all wrong, they should listen to me because I truly understand what Jesus meant." But this subtle and almost semantic distinction makes no difference to the billions of people who have for two thousand years suffered the horrifying consequences of the existence of Christianity.

It makes a Hell (pardon the pun) of a difference to their eternal destination. Yes billions have suffered from false Christianity. But as far as God is concerned these false doctrines have as much to do with His will as Hinduism does. A miss is as good as a mile as far as God is concerned. God demonstrated that fact with the Jews. Once again there distinction is Not Facile at all but is definite and of absolute importance.




I think if I look up "facile" in the dictionary your picture will be there. :)

I don't think so.


No civilization is evil. Civilizations arise and evolve over millennia. They grow and change and mature and backslide and falter and recover just like individuals do. They do good things, they do bad things, but they inexorably move in the direction of harmony. Homo sapiens is a social species by instinct and all social animals are preprogrammed to live in relative peace with their packmates because they have to or the species won't survive. All civilizations are born with a superiority complex for the obvious reason that they look around them and see only uncivilized people. They think it's their mission to enlighten them. This builds up to such a sense of hubris that by the time their boundary reaches that of the next civilization down the road, they've been taught for generations that only they understand the path to enlightenment so those other guys must be stamped out.


All civilizations are not perfect . So in being not perfect they are evil. There is no human path to "enlightenment" only paths to deceptions wrapped in different suits.

Yet somehow the civilizations with polytheistic religions--those that provide a richer and more useful model of the human spirit than Abrahamism with its absurd and pathetic binary good-versus-evil model that looks like it was created by a computer programmer--managed to coexist with each other. Sumeria, Persia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome... they conquered each other over and over again but they never set out to painstakingly destroy all evidence of each other's existence, and in fact routinely assimilated those principles, technologies, artifacts and cultural motifs that they found useful or interesting.

Rome did go out to eliminate totally all traces of the civilization of Carthage. You view on history is faulty and has been affected by your bias.





This is the enduring legacy of Abraham and his successors, Jesus and Mohammed. (I give Moses a cautious exemption because since Roman times Judaism has neither evangelized itself nor inspired draconian treatment for non-Jewish blasphemers.) It does not matter one whit what these guys actually said or what they actually hoped would be done in their names. The cold hard evidence provided by history is that the communities that sprang up to carry forth their teachings have overwhelmingly selected leaders whose interpretation of those teachings is intolerant and angry and whips their flocks into recurring frenzies of violence of unprecedented scope and nearly unprecedented thoroughness.

Do not mix the teaching of muhammed with Jesus they are diametrically opposed.



I appreciate your ability to intepret the teachings of Jesus to endorse peace, love and tolerance. I really do; you are clearly a good person.

I am not a good person. Only the proud think of themselves as good. I endorse peace and love but under no circumstance do i endorse tolerance. Jesus never endorsed tolerance. I will never accept false teachings or false religions. Wether that be catholicism, islam, hinduism or buddhism.



The problem I have with Christianity is that over the centuries the majority of people who claim with equal authority to call themselves Christians do not agree with you when it matters, which is when times get tough and there are difficult decisions to make.

The only Problem you could justifiably have is with Jesus Himself. If you cannot bring forward a teaching that Jesus Himself gave then your problems with "christianity" is not a problem with Christianity but a problem with a false man made faith, a bastardisation of what Jesus taught.

Look at the world this very day. The Pope, the beloved and trusted leader of most of the world's Christians, made a totally intolerant and inappropriate remark about Islam that will surely not help us find the path to peace. The leaders of many, if not most, American Christian churches believe that war in the Middle East is the only way to protect the god-fearing folk of America against the god-fearing folk over there. To say that these people are not following the teachings of Jesus once again leads me back to your picture next to the word "facile." You don't speak for all the people in the world who claim to be Christians.

It should be obvious that i do not claim to speak for all the people in the world who claim to be Christians i doubt i speak for more that .05% of them. But that is irrelevant. If i speak for Jesus and for God then the only .05% of people who claim to be Christians are in fact Christians.


They believe they are following his teachings and can "prove" it by quoting the bible. Who am I to believe? Somehow his teachings have been misinterpreted, arguably in good faith by people who were doing the best they could.

They might be able to deceive a lot of people into thinking that they are true Christians but they will never deceive God into thinking that they are His children. As I said before on the subject we are talking about in this thread the teachings of Jesus are very clear. People can bring forward an army of theologians to argue against the Words of Jesus but all their efforts are self defeating and are vain.




One of the two or three most important essences of Christianity (and Islam) is evangelism. The belief that only Jesus's teachings, of all possible philosophies the human race will ever think up, has the answer to the universe's questions, and that it is a holy duty to bring every single human being into it.

Not exactly right. Firstly it is Not our duty to bring every single human being into the faith of the Messiah Jesus. It is our duty to bring the message of the Messiah Jesus to all men so that they can have the opportunity to accept the Message of Jesus and be saved. So we do not fail in our duty if people reject the Message. Also once again do not mix up islam with Christianity. Islam promotes the teachings of the false prophet muhammed, and his teachings are opposed to the teachings of Jesus.



Considering that the words attributed to Jesus were not even written down until long after the traditional date of his death, Christianity was founded on the principle of evangelism by the existing Christian community rather than on some direct link to the prophet himself.

Wrong.Jesus call upon His followers to go our into the Word and preach to all men the gospel message. It matters not a jot when this order what finally written down.



You cannot duck the issue of the evil done in Jesus's name by his followers by saying that's not what Jesus meant because the very mechanism for the spread of this faith has always been interpretation of what Jesus meant by the ordinary people who came after him.

I can duck the issue of evil done in Jesus name, because the evil done in Jesus name was done in rebellion to the orders given by Jesus. It’s that simple. Their interpretation was false therefore they where not following the will of the one they claimed to follow, therefore they where not true followers of Jesus.



Jesus set something in motion that has gripped a good portion of the world in evil for the better part of two thousand years.

False. Jesus set something in motion that would save many people in the world. False preachers set in motion evil teachings in an effort to undermine the message of Jesus.



To grant the faint possibility that he was real for the sake of the argument, I admit that this is most certainly not what he wanted, and he would probably have kept his mouth shut and become a yogi if he could have foreseen it.

So you admit Jesus would not approve of the evil done in His name. Thank you. Jesus knew there would be false prophets that would twist His message, But He also knew that people would see through the deceivers and the true message of Jesus would survive in the minds of men until His return. It matters not if only .05% have that Mssage and 99.95% do not. Eternity has never been a numbers game and the kingdom of heaven is not a democracy.



So I forgive him in an outpouring of charitable feelings that many of his followers today will not extend to me reciprocally.

Jesus has done nothing that needs your forgiveness. It is you that need His forgiveness to have eternal life with God.



And I even forgive you for your idealistic view that Jesus can somehow still be a force for good even though he has overwhelmingly been used as a force for evil whenever it mattered; the world needs idealists like you and Jesus.

I do not need not do I seek your forgiveness. As in relation to my views on Jesus.



But this does not excuse the movement that he started. Jesus was a failure and he unwittingly brought down centuries of abject grief on this poor planet.

Jesus did not start that evil movement you talk of. That was a deviant human creation. May you seek the Messiah Jesus and may you be forgiven for your false accusations against Him.



All Praise The Ancient Of Days

Christianity does not exist. Under that umbrella title sit dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller facet religions. Each must be classified individually.

The link below is a letter addressed to the reverend Billy Graham concerning the validity of the so called authority of the bible.
Not to get off the topic here but since some are posting that the only way to God is thru Christianity or more specifically Jesus, I thought it would be of interest.
Whether you agree with the author of the letters' other views on the afterlife is not the issue here but rather his challenge that the bible has supreme God given authority.

Personally, I agree with him.
Anyways, have a look if you like.

http://www.victorzammit.com/articles/billygraham.html

This thread now seems to have developed into many different areas.

My contribution to a few as follows:

Evil

Evil does not exist in its own right. It is the absence of good just as dearkness is the absence of light. God is goodness and love and therefore not evil at all. Everyone that falls short of that (i.e. every human who has ever existed) has a lesser degree of goodness and therefore a degree of 'evil'. Just as we describe 'cold and hot' to refer to a very small range of temperatures well above absolute zero (no heat) but also far away from for instance the temperatures inside stars, so our comparison of people as 'good' or 'evil' is a measurement along a similarly small scale within the overall band. I doubt that there is any human who is or was totally evil (not even Adolf Hitler who managed to love dogs and some people). But conversely we are nowhere near the goodness of God. We should humbly recognise this when considering our own actions and not believe that we are so much better than any of the others that we might to choose to think of - we are not!


Free Will

God had two choices when he created mankind. He could produce automata who had to do what He required of them and thus never did anything that was not good or he could give mankind free will and the risk that they would choose that which was not good.

Is there anyone on this forum who would not want free will?

If you give free will but say that God could always intervene, that is in a sense true but where would He stop?

Would He have ensured Mrs. Hitler did not give birth to Adolf?
Would He have allowed him in to the Vienna Art School?
Would he have prevented the election of George Bush?
Would he have stopped all road accidents like a version of 'Superman' rescuing Lois Lane from her own stupidity?!
Just where would you place the line?

In fact there is no sensible place to draw the line. You either have the concept of free will or not and to blame God because He does not save you from the consequences of your own free-will actions is simply not logical. It is a convenient form of escapism, a not so subtle shifting of the blame on to someone or something else at which this post-modern western society is so good.


Choosing Good or not Good (Evil) and 'Going to Hell'

But of course giving a choice of free will must imply the (very high) risk of choosing that which is not good (or evil). This does not make God responsible for people choosing to do wrong. Nor does God 'send people to hell'. The availability of everlasting life is to everyone. You have to make the choice. If you choose not to take it, the responsibility is yours not that of He who made the offer available (If it was a free product in a supermarket, would it be the supermarket's fault if you chose not to accept the free product).


Destruction of 'civilizations'

As someone with Mexican friends I do not wish to be an apologist for the appalling things done by Spanish colonists but the destruction of civilisations has gone on continually throughout history. The civilization that built the pyramids at Teotihuacan was destroyed by the Aztecs (apart from the huge structures such as the pyramids themselves). Even if you believed in religious freedom (and certainly no marks here for the Spanish conquistadors and the RC church of the time) what would you have done about people who practised human sacrifice? If an atheist humanist government had taken over a land where this went on, what would they have done (or indeed do now)? All artefacts were of course not destroyed as many hours visiting the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City will prove. Nor were all indigenous peoples (including Aztecs) killed although they tended to be pushed in the mountainous areas. Their descendants can still be found today (often discriminated against) but still nonetheless in existence in their ethnic groups.


Summary

Is christianity meant to be peaceful? Yes it is.

Are (were) there those who falsely claim to be adherents but who are (were)not really christians, are (were) not peaceful and give christianity a bad name? Yes there are (were)?

Are (were) there those who are (were) truly adherents but sometimes get (got) it badly wrong and are (were) not as peaceful as Jesus meant them to be? Yes there are (were).

The great difference in regard to christianity is that it sets an absolute standard of 'peace' to aim for, 'Love your neighbour as yourself'. This is not a standard ever set by any other mainstream religion

Atheism of course allows moral standards to be set by people in accordance with their own human thoughts (there being no belief in any external arbiter). We have seen the end results of that throughout the 20th. century where various excuses were dreamt up by totalitarian regimes to excuse the greatest persecutions and mass murders in history.

Even today atheist North Korea is the worst persecutor of christians on the globe (worse than all muslim countries). According to the 'Open Doors' ( a christian charity), 'It is believed that tens of thousands of Christians are currently suffering in North Korean prison camps, and are having to endure extreme abuse and violence. Though no exact figures can be given, Open Doors estimates that hundreds of Christians were killed by North Korea’s ‘Hermit Regime’ in 2005'.

I should suspect that many non-christians are also being persecuted there too.


regards,



Gordon.

It seems to me that if someone has the power to prevent an occurence and knowingly chooses not to do so, then they are implicitly endorsing that occurence.

Consider the parable of the good Samaritan.

You do not seem to understand the significance of the parable correctly.

Jesus at no time implied that the Levite or the priest were responsible for what had happened to the man who was robbed.

He was making the point that they did not live up to their words. They only 'talked the talk' about helping people, they did not walk it!

The point was that the Samaritan went out of his way to help to do something for the man and thus did God's work to improve a situation brought about by those who had done an evil deed.

There was never any question that those responsible for the man's condition were the muggers.


regards,



Gordon.

Christianity is not the sum of the people who claim to Be Christian. Christianity is the sum of the Message that the founder of Christianity taught. Christianity is the Word of Jesus.

actually, christianity is the sum of the actions taken in good faith based on the garbled, filtered, mistranslated, and edited quasi-fictional statements and deeds attributed to jesus and written down in a book by people who lived hundreds of years after the events and conversations actually took place. christianity is not the word of jesus, it is at best jesus's word distorted by men. considering that no one on earth can actually detemine with any degree of certainty what it was that jesus said or did, one would think that this makes actions taken in his name somewhat disingenuous.

The code is known by God and all who claim to be Christians will be measured by it.

i bet. i love it when you tack on this kind of thoughtless hyperbole to what you consider to be a legitimate argument.

You do not seem to understand the significance of the parable correctly.

Jesus at no time implied that the Levite or the priest were responsible for what had happened to the man who was robbed.
Of course. But he did imply that by not helping the man, they were doing the wrong thing. They were implicitly endorsing his desperate condition.

He was making the point that they did not live up to their words. They only 'talked the talk' about helping people, they did not walk it!
That's precisely why we're having this conversation.
Bad things happen to people. God does not appear to intervene, when it is accepted that he is capable of doing so.
Why does God not "walk the walk" of helping people in desperate situations?
Why do people starve, freeze, or live in suffering?

The point was that the Samaritan went out of his way to help to do something for the man and thus did God's work to improve a situation brought about by those who had done an evil deed.
Yes, the Samaritan did God's work.
Why did God not do God's work? Why does God always outsource?

There was never any question that those responsible for the man's condition were the muggers.
My point is not that God is responsible for bad things, but that by failing to correct them, He implicitly endorses them.

Pete

A Quick question for Gordon, how many of the people killed in the last 100 years were christians and killed by other christians? I am focusing on all the wars started by the christians or so called chrisitans, majority counts right? In all those wars, world war, US-Korea war, vietnam war, majority were christians, even in Iraq twice Allies have murdered hundred of thousands of innocent civilians and military people and the last war was totally un provoked. Now, there will be another Iran war, right?

So again, how many of those 100 million or so people who have died by the hands of Christians in last century were killed by muslims? or the followers of Islam?

Even if for a moment I take your side and believe that wars were started by Athiests, but then majority of fighters were christians, decesion makers were christians, don't tell me that when US president ordered to Bomb the $h1t out of Japanese people, he wasn't a christian? Or didn't GW Bush said that God came to him and Asked him to Invade Iraq?


All I am asking, who is more violent? people who have killed 100 million people in last 100 years or the muslims, who are the bad guys these days, since the world is running out of bad guys.

Any thoughts?

Since you mentioned that Hitler wasn't a christian, however the history speaks something else. Enjoy the following link.



http://www.nobeliefs.com/speeches.htm




My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922



Looks pretty christian to me.

In the life of nations, what in the last resort decides questions is a kind of Judgment Court of God.... Always before god and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills.

-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 13 April 1923



Doesn't look like an Athiest to me or does he?

Please read the rest of the details. So, If I take him as a christian then Christianity at this point is leading all the genocides in the world, all the killings in our history, single handedly one man is leading in horrible killings. I don't think that Islam or Muslims can even catch his dust. So, again I wonder who is more violent?


Interesting article:


Hitler's Christianity

Some people say Adolf Hitler was an atheist. They blame atheism for Hitler's philosophy. But the historical record shows that Hitler believed in God and was convinced he was carrying out God's will.

Hitler served as an altar boy in the Catholic Church. Growing up in this environment, he surely learned something of the centuries of discrimination and persecution the Church had supported against Jews in Europe.

Former Jesuit theologian Peter de Rosa describes the groundwork Catholic theology laid for Hitler and the Nazis: "[Catholicism’s] disastrous theology had prepared the way for Hitler and his ‘final solution.’ [The Church published] over a hundred anti-Semitic documents. Not one conciliar decree, not one papal encyclical, bull, or pastoral directive suggest that Jesus’ command, ‘love your neighbor as yourself,' applied to Jews."

Not surprisingly, then, Hitler wrote in his book, Mein Kampf: ". . . I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work." He made essentially the same claim in a speech before the Reichstag in 1938.

Hitler considered himself a Catholic until the day he died. In 1941 he told Gerhard Engel, one of his generals: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." In fact, Hitler was never excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and Mein Kampf was not placed on the Church's Index of Forbidden Books.

Hitler's biographer John Toland explains Catholicism's influence on the Holocaust. He says of Hitler: "Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god. . .."

Even after World War II, Catholic assistance to the Nazis continued. The Vatican aided the escape of more Nazis than any other governmental or private organization.

The Protestant influence on Nazi Germany was no better, because Hitler is said to have admired the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, more than any other German. Among Luther's many denunciations of the Jews, there are such religious sentiments as: "The Jews deserve to be hanged on gallows seven times higher than ordinary thieves," and "We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them."

When Hitler was asked in 1933 what he planned to do about the Jews, he said he would do what Christians had been preaching for centuries. And the Nazis carried out their first large-scale pogrom of Jews in honor of Luther's birthday.

Christians constituted a wellspring of support for Hitler. Steve Allen notes that in the 1930s, Nazi Germany "was the most church-affiliated nation in Europe. The German people were almost entirely Catholic and Lutheran. Despite such factors they launched the Holocaust and World War II." Charles Kimball likewise says the Holocaust "would not have happened without the active participation of, sympathetic support of, and relative indifference exhibited by large numbers of Christians."

Also in pre-World War II Germany, corporal punishment was used in the schools and schoolchildren were required to start their days with prayer. Today's advocates of spanking and school prayer should consider that those practices, although supported by religion, proved ineffective in promoting high ethical standards and good behavior among German youth.

Further, Nazi Germany's soldiers wore belt buckles inscribed "Gott mit uns" ("God is with us"). This slogan sounds eerily similar to Ohio's present motto, "With God, all things are possible."

Like many tyrants both past and present, Hitler used the mantle of religion to justify and further his selfish, hateful, and destructive philosophy. By conditioning people to blindly accept the pronouncements of authorities, instead of teaching them to think for themselves, religions often make it easy for such evil dictators and demagogues to succeed.




Seemed prettly much like OBL or GWB.

Hiter was deeply anti-christian. But he was a politician working one a population that was vaugly influenced by Christian ideas so he had to be careful in His public utterances. Of cource He like so many others twisted the Words of God to try and use it to conform to His onjectives.

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922

Jesus was not a fighter nor did he call upon His followers to kill the jews. what a diabolical lie.

Hitler’s private statements were more suspect. There are negative statements about Christianity reported by Hitler’s intimates, Goebbels, Speer, and Bormann.. Joseph Goebbels, for example, notes in a diary entry in 1939: “The Führer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay.” Albert Speer reports a similar statement: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"

Hitler was no Christian. He was just a cunning politician playing games with people's minds. Nothing has changed, politicians still play the same game.

All Praise The Ancient Of Days

According to the Bible, Jesus said:

"Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household." (Matthew 10:34-36 NASB)

"I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!" ... "Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division; for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three."... (Luke 12:49,51-53 NASB)

Of course. But he did imply that by not helping the man, they were doing the wrong thing. They were implicitly endorsing his desperate condition.Pete


I presume that you are not sending this reply from a village of starving people in Africa so are you endorsing their condition? I am sorry the second part does not logically follow from the first. It is not Jesus' implication either. It is simply your personal implication.


That's precisely why we're having this conversation.
Bad things happen to people. God does not appear to intervene, when it is accepted that he is capable of doing so.
Why does God not "walk the walk" of helping people in desperate situations?
Why do people starve, freeze, or live in suffering?Pete


This is part of the free-will discussion (in my other post). Why do fathers let their children do things that they could do faster and easier? Because it helps them to develop.

Three logical possibilities:

No free will - automata manipulated totally by God (not my idea of existence!)
Free Will to do evil but God always intervenes personally to put it right so no opportunity like the Good Samaritan. In fact the only options open for us to do would be evil. So we would all be doing the evil things and God continually clearing up - Strange form of world (again not my idea of existence!)
Free Will - God allows people to do both good and evil and only interevenes on certain occassions or at least controls how far the evil is allowed to go.
This to me makes logical sense and as stated is repeated by we humans when dealing with our own children.

Yes, the Samaritan did God's work.
Why did God not do God's work? Why does God always outsource?Pete


See above


My point is not that God is responsible for bad things, but that by failing to correct them, He implicitly endorses them.Pete


Sorry but as above this is false logic. No such link is intrinsically logically implied.



Pete[/QUOTE]

Hi Gordon,

According to the Bible, ALL MEN are born into sin, and are so depraved they are actually incapable of choosing “good” from birth. How is this freewill? How can a man make a freewill decision for God or “good” when he does not even posses the ability to do so?

Thanks

I presume that you are not sending this reply from a village of starving people in Africa so are you endorsing their condition? I am sorry the second part does not logically follow from the first. It is not Jesus' implication either. It is simply your personal implication.

This is part of the free-will discussion (in my other post). Why do fathers let their children do things that they could do faster and easier? Because it helps them to develop.

Three logical possibilities:

No free will - automata manipulated totally by God (not my idea of existence!)
Free Will to do evil but God always intervenes personally to put it right so no opportunity like the Good Samaritan. In fact the only options open for us to do would be evil. So we would all be doing the evil things and God continually clearing up - Strange form of world (again not my idea of existence!)
Free Will - God allows people to do both good and evil and only interevenes on certain occassions or at least controls how far the evil is allowed to go.
This to me makes logical sense and as stated is repeated by we humans when dealing with our own children.



Gordon, don't these verses disagree with your view of freewill?

Acts 13:48
And as many as were ordained to eternal life believed.

Rom.8:29-30
For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate.... Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.

Rom.9:11-22
For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth. .... For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? ... Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction.

Eph.1:4-5
He hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.

2 Th.2:11-12
God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned.

2 Tim.1:9
Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.

Jude 4
For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation.


These verses do not describe freewill at all do they? They blow more than a few circuits in my brain anyway. According to Jude 4, God even ordains people to be condemned!?!? What chance do they have? Can they resist His will in this?!!! What do you think?

Sorry! I didn’t take the time to look them up in a more recent translation!
Apologies!

Thanks!

You don't get it. I do not turn my cheek and love my enemies because i am a nice guy. I do so out of obedience and trust in the guidance of Jesus. That's something that a lot of people just cannot do.Rather a lot of people are quite able to choose to be nice without having to believe in a fairy tale. And rather a lot of people who believe in your particular fairy tale manage to lose their way and choose to be nasty. But as I have said, it is a basic instinct preprogrammed into a social species like Homo sapiens to live in peace and harmony with our pack mates. As our packs increase in size our ability to apply that instinct to ever-larger numbers of pack mates increases with it. Unfortunately our biology lags behind our technology so we're always catching up. But we've gone from being able to feel kinship in tribes of a couple of hundred people to being able to do it in cities of thousands, and many of us can do it in nations of millions. And as many of us have done that without Jesus as with him. There is no convincing evidence that communities who have adopted Jesus are doing any better than those who have not.

You give your religion credit for accomplishing something that it has not, and at the same time you deny credit to our very nature for accomplishing something that it has. What is it about you Christians that requires you to invent something larger than ourselves in order to snatch our achievements from us and denigrate us as a species? It's a really crappy thing to be telling your fellow humans and I'm getting really pissed off about it. People are basically good and I resent the hell out of you telling us that we require the care of a mythical being to overcome our inherent evil natures.Rome did go out to eliminate totally all traces of the civilization of Carthage. You view on history is faulty and has been affected by your bias.Oh whoopee. Out of dozens of cases of polytheistic civilizations retaining at least a minimal level of respect for each others' histories, cultures and artifacts so that we still have evidence of them to enrich our own civilization, you've dredged through your history books and found one counterexample.

On the other hand... By the time the two evangelistic patriarchal monotheistic religions of Abraham reared their ugly heads in the First Millennium CE, there were only six civilizations: Mesoptamia/Europe, Egypt, China, India, Olmec/Maya/Aztec, and Inca. One third of them were obliterated from history by Europeans in Jesus's name.

The numbers speak for themselves.Do not mix the teaching of muhammed with Jesus they are diametrically opposed.Angels on a pin. Both Jesus and Mohammed preached monotheism, a warped model of the human spirit that goes against human instinct and causes its followers to suppress major parts of their own spirits, with colossally disastrous results. Both Jesus and Mohammed (as well as Moses) chose not to include the male chauvinism that was institutionalized in their eras in the list of sinful behaviors to be eschewed, another failure that has led to a dismal warping of the spirits of their followers.

Monotheism and patriarchy are arguably the two greatest defects in contemporary human philosophy and they are both fundamental to all three sects of Abrahamism.The only Problem you could justifiably have is with Jesus Himself. If you cannot bring forward a teaching that Jesus Himself gave then your problems with "christianity" is not a problem with Christianity but a problem with a false man made faith, a bastardisation of what Jesus taught.Jesus taught monotheism. That is a huge problem. Jesus taught a rather elaborate philosophy on how to build a good and decent world that blatantly omitted any criticism of the rampant male chauvinism that was staring him in the face. That is also a huge problem.

So yes, I've got two huge problems with Jesus. Two of the basic premises of the model of human behavior he taught are things that we have to not only forgive and ignore, but overcome. Also once again do not mix up islam with Christianity. Islam promotes the teachings of the false prophet muhammed, and his teachings are opposed to the teachings of Jesus.They both teach the same thing: Monotheism and patriarchy. They're wrong on both counts to the point of being downright evil.

Monotheism and patriarchy are arguably the two greatest defects in contemporary human philosophy and they are both fundamental to all three sects of Abrahamism.Jesus taught monotheism. That is a huge problem. Jesus taught a rather elaborate philosophy on how to build a good and decent world that blatantly omitted any criticism of the rampant male chauvinism that was staring him in the face. That is also a huge problem.

.


Yep, one of the BIG reasons I now follow a spiritual system that includes the female aspect as well as the male.
It's all about balance. Creation has manisfested itself in a dual nature and to dis-regard one part of it is idiotic.

I take an example of our sun...a perfect example of balance ...a balance between two forces that are always working against each other.The weight of the star, and the desire to collapse in on itself vs the pressure generated by the fusion at the core.
It's worked for 4.5 Billion yrs...luckily for us.

Evil Evil does not exist in its own right. It is the absence of good just as dearkness is the absence of light. God is goodness and love and therefore not evil at all. Everyone that falls short of that (i.e. every human who has ever existed) has a lesser degree of goodness and therefore a degree of 'evil'. Just as we describe 'cold and hot' to refer to a very small range of temperatures well above absolute zero (no heat) but also far away from for instance the temperatures inside stars, so our comparison of people as 'good' or 'evil' is a measurement along a similarly small scale within the overall band. I doubt that there is any human who is or was totally evil (not even Adolf Hitler who managed to love dogs and some people). But conversely we are nowhere near the goodness of God. We should humbly recognise this when considering our own actions and not believe that we are so much better than any of the others that we might to choose to think of - we are not!As I mentioned in my reply to Adstar above, humans are much better than the Abrahamists give us credit for. Our greatest challenge is of our own making. We have the instincts of Mesolithic people, to live cooperatively and peacefully among a few score pack or tribe mates with whom we are personally acquainted and almost all of whom are blood relatives. Basically an extended family. The Neolithic revolution launched by the invention of agriculture increased the size of our tribes to several hundred and required us to learn to live in peace and harmony with people whom we didn't instinctively regard as kin, and we managed to do that. Essentially by augmenting our instincts with learned behavior that was passed down by elders to succeeding generations. The Dawn of Civilization increased the size of our communities by another order of magnitude, and we were able to learn to live and work with complete strangers. As cities grew and assimilated diverse tribes, we learned to get along with people who didn't look like us, spoke funny, and had different customs.

And we did that all without Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. We were always well served by the polytheistic spiritual models that were instinctive to all humans in all societies--"archetypes" as Jung calls them, models hard-wired in our collective unconscious that are so precisely drawn that every one from the pantheons of the Egyptians and Greeks to the casts of Shakespeare's plays has the same set of spirits. We instinctively tolerate the diversity inside us and that guided us to tolerate the diversity around us.

The rate of growth of our cities has increased geometrically. Unfortunately our instincts are starting to lag behind. Most of us are at the point where we live in peace and harmony in cities of 20,000 people, but we have cities a thousand times larger.

We will catch up, but Moses, Jesus and Mohammed are not helping us.Destruction of 'civilizations' As someone with Mexican friends I do not wish to be an apologist for the appalling things done by Spanish colonists but the destruction of civilisations has gone on continually throughout history.Yes, but as I covered in my previous post they were never of this scope. Even the Muslim-Arab destruction of Egypt was not as thorough as the Christian-Iberian destruction of the Aztec and Inca civilizations. The Aztecs were at about that same level of development when the Europeans arrived, with a wealth of written documents, yet our knowledge of their culture is sparse. Their written records were very systematically seized and destroyed.The civilization that built the pyramids at Teotihuacan was destroyed by the Aztecs (apart from the huge structures such as the pyramids themselves).Just as the entire Western world from Rome to Persia was a collage of individual cultures descended from the original Mesopotamian civilization, the individual cultures that sprang up in various places in Mesoamerica were all various flavors of Olmec civilization. The Aztecs wiped out one small part of it but the ruins of the Mayas and of the Olmecs themselves survived. The Spaniards tried their best to wipe it all out. There is a huge gap in our history of Mesoamerica between the demise of the Maya and the arrival of Montezuma which I don't believe has a parallel in the Old World.Even if you believed in religious freedom (and certainly no marks here for the Spanish conquistadors and the RC church of the time) what would you have done about people who practised human sacrifice? If an atheist humanist government had taken over a land where this went on, what would they have done (or indeed do now)?It's easy to make this remark in our enlightened age, but please put it in context. The Christians of Europe were practicing their own brand of "human sacrifice" in the Inquisition. The institution of human sacrifice owed as much to the Aztec form of government as it did to the Aztec religion.

As outraged as I would be today to encounter a society that practiced human sacrifice, I would nonetheless try to be true to my principles and remember that virtually all attempts by one nation to "improve" another by use of superior force have, in the long run, caused more harm than good. The only way to deal with the Aztecs if they were still around would be to argue with them, send them our TV shows and CDs, let our tourists visit each other's countries (with perhaps some interesting rules about certain traditions not being universally respected) and let their citizens find out that There Is A Better Way. It's what we should be doing in Iraq and it's what I would do in Aztlán.All artifacts were of course not destroyed as many hours visiting the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City will prove.Yes, the Spaniards didn't go to the trouble to smash all of those stone chacmooles. Of course there is stuff left, but their history books are all gone.Nor were all indigenous peoples (including Aztecs) killed although they tended to be pushed in the mountainous areas. Their descendants can still be found today (often discriminated against) but still nonetheless in existence in their ethnic groups.I very carefully tried to avoid implying that I thought all the people had been destroyed. The Arabs did a far more thorough job of that in Egypt. Heck, even the Anglo-Saxons virtually killed off or ran off the entire original Celtic Briton population of Angle-Land.

Genocide of an entire ethnic group is one unforgivable cosmic crime. But obliteration of an entire civilization is another.

Atheism of course allows moral standards to be set by people in accordance with their own human thoughts (there being no belief in any external arbiter). We have seen the end results of that throughout the 20th. century where various excuses were dreamt up by totalitarian regimes to excuse the greatest persecutions and mass murders in history.Once again, you're ignoring the role of biology in this. We have perfectly good instincts to follow here. As pack animals we're quite capable of getting along with one another without the help of a fairy tale creature. The problem we're up against at this moment in history is that our packs have merged and grown to the size of a herd, and as pack animals we don't have the instincts of herd animals to live peacefully and cooperatively among endless hordes of anonymous strangers. Nonetheless we've clearly found the path to that particular enlightenment since such a huge number of us are in fact able to live in peace in today's civilization. And roughly half of us have done it without the monotheistic model for guidance.Even today atheist North Korea is the worst persecutor of christians on the globe (worse than all muslim countries). According to the 'Open Doors' ( a christian charity), 'It is believed that tens of thousands of Christians are currently suffering in North Korean prison camps, and are having to endure extreme abuse and violence. Though no exact figures can be given, Open Doors estimates that hundreds of Christians were killed by North Korea’s ‘Hermit Regime’ in 2005'.A person who is not gritting his teeth in order to be scrupulously charitable to Christians might suggest that the North Koreans simply see evangelical patriarchal monotheism as a dire threat to civilization which must be removed by whichever regrettable means prove effective.I should suspect that many non-christians are also being persecuted there too.I wonder. I really wonder. Members of evangelical religions can be such a huge pain in the ass. One must at times have the patience of the saints one does not believe in to tolerate them with grace.

I presume that you are not sending this reply from a village of starving people in Africa so are you endorsing their condition? I am sorry the second part does not logically follow from the first. It is not Jesus' implication either. It is simply your personal implication.
Jesus implied that the levite and the pharisee who passed by on the other side had not done what is necessary to inherit eternal life: to love their neighbour as themselves.
Yes, each time I walk past a homeless person, I am implicitly endorsing their condition.
Yes, by not walking the walk of helping those in need, I am implicitly endorsing their condition.
Yes, if you do not "Go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor," then perhaps you might not "have treasure in heaven." "If thou wilt be perfect", then you must do all in your power to alleviate suffering.

This is part of the free-will discussion (in my other post). Why do fathers let their children do things