He had to go into hiding to avoid assasination.
Likewise Theo Van Gogh...lived in what is arguably one of the most free thinking countries in europe - The Netherlands.
Living in a country with free speech has absolutely no bearing on how much free speech you are allowed under certain religions.
You presented them...ergo they are your links.They're not my links
And the answer:John 5:31 - "If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true."
John 8:14 - "Even if I bear witness of myself, yet my witness is true"
We can do this all day.In John 5:31, the context is This post will be deleted if not edited immediately speaking about how He depends upon the Father and how He is seeking the will of the Father. John 5:30-32 says, "I can do nothing on My own initiative. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. 31"If I alone bear witness of Myself, My testimony is not true. 32"There is another who bears witness of Me, and I know that the testimony which He bears of Me is true." The word "alone" is not in the Greek but is included in the NASB translation, though not the NIV, the KJV. Contextually, This post will be deleted if not edited immediately is not speaking as one alone, but as one dependent on the Father and that His judgments are true because He does the will of the Father. This post will be deleted if not edited immediately is reflecting on the Old Testament law that didn't allow the testimony of one person to condemn another to death. Two witnesses were needed to establish the fact:
"One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established," (Deut. 19:15). and Matthew 8:16 says, ". . . in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established." See also 2 Cor. 13:1; Heb. 10:28.
In John 8:14, This post will be deleted if not edited immediately says, "IF" (kan, in the Greek) I bear witness of Myself, My witness is true. But He was speaking of being the light of the word, v. 12, and the Pharisees accused Him of bearing witness of Himself. This post will be deleted if not edited immediately was simply telling the truth that if He did, it would be true.
Then we can put your 'contradictions' down to simple misquotation also.By the way - nobody can know This post will be deleted if not edited immediately' actual words for sure since the Gospels were all written (or actually collated from individual tracts into various proto Gospels only four of which were eventually selected as being "true"long after he was gone and no (historically) reliable written record of his teachings exists.
Its an interesting story and a real lesson about religious freedom. After Khomeini died the new Iranian regime sought to re-open diplomatic channels with the west. They began toning down a lot of Khomeinis extremism. They were asked to lift the Fatwa off Rushdie. They pointed out that in Islam a Fatwa technically ends with the death of the originator (Khomeini died in 1989). However, extremist muslims continue to declare it valid.He appeared on stage with U2. Not exactly Osama Bin Ladin style hiding is it?
Are you suggesting that Van Goghs murder was simply a 'misinterpretation'? A kind of 'unfortunate accident'? Ooops...stabbed you twenty times by mistake Theo.Are you suggesting that no Christians ever misinterpret the teachings of their religion and kill someone? There are quite a few abortion clinic staff who'd disagree for a start.
Yes, a lot of your statements seem to be self evidently ridiculous, just like that one.That's self evidently ridiculous.
Are you suggesting that Van Goghs murder was simply a 'misinterpretation'? A kind of 'unfortunate accident'? Ooops...stabbed you twenty times by mistake Theo.
Incidentally, no abortionist carries out their actions in the name of any religion!
What I'd like to understand is how you two get so exercised if anyone points out the failings of any religion but christianity?
Are you more against christianity than Islam for some particular reason?
What makes you think that its OK for a muslim to take offense at hateful comments but not OK for a christian to feel offended by yours?
When your religious leaders tell you its OK - nay, MANDATORY - to kill someone who offends your religion, that is no minor personal misinterpretation. It is a religious instruction from the leadership to all the faithful under well worn and recognised precepts of Islamic Jihad. There is no mistake...it is policy.If someone interpreted Islam as telling them to do this then it was a misinterpretation (probably deliberate). The act of Killing wasn't an accident, but that doesn't mean the reason for it was valid. I can't believe I actually have to explain this to you.
I think your suggestion that an abortionist just might be acting in the name of any religion is bizarre in the extreme. Perhaps you consider Satanism a valid religion?You know the motive in every single case?
Fair play to you.
Better than? That's your word. You've tied yourself so much in knots you've forgotten what we were discussing.Right now, I'm getting exercised about your misrepresentation of Christianity as some how better than any other religion. If a Muslim comes on and starts making similar claims about his/her religion they'll get the same response.
This discussion started with a comment about church collections. It was turned into a diatribe against Catholicism and Christianity. I have the right to defend my faith. All religions think themselves 'inherently more right' than all others, but some have rather less tolerance than others to criticism. You are free to criticise christianity or the catholic church - I won't threaten your life in response, but keep it honest and fair please.I do have a problem with people who make false claims, or who claim that one religion is inherently more right than another.
If Catholics would stop looking down there noses at non-Catholics with a mix of pity and scorn I might have more time for them. Y'all ain't got so much to be proud of...
what about all the other stuff like "an eye for an eye", hell/purgatory/limbo and so on?
He [This post will be deleted if not edited immediately]also said lots of other stuff some of which was mutually contradictory.
So much for constancy of belief so.
And I seriously doubt you'd be harsh on a muslim who came on here, even if they told you that you are an infidel and a crusader, which you are in the eyes of Islam.
Actually yes, I do have a low tolerance to your comments. I developed it after realising that other religions accept NO debate or discussion on their precepts. They won't tolerate it...why should I?Whatever about the first comment above, if you think that the three that follow (from me as it happens) constitute a "diatribe" then you must have a pretty low tolerance to the normal cut and thrust of discussion/debate.
America's New Model Army
Anatol Lieven
Fundamentalist Christians are the backbone of the Bush administration. An analyst probes their origins and assesses their influence, which has been boosted by the ‘war on terror’
In the United States today, in this land of ultra-modernity, of continual economic, social and cultural change, a large and powerful section of the population is in revolt against modernity and, indeed, modern versions of rationality. It is unlike anything else in the developed world, and its roots are to be found in the history of Britain – the history which paradoxically created Britain’s culture of political tolerance. Some 350 years ago, Britain experienced a series of great civil wars, waged between rival forces of religious and political absolutism. Fortunately for Britain, Europe and the world, both sides lost. Out of their joint defeat came the latitudinarian and humanist ideology of eighteenth-century England.
The ideologies that were defeated at different points in the seventeenth century experienced very different subsequent fates. The Catholics were repressed for more than a century; but after 1829, having abandoned their political absolutism, they returned and now form a valuable and uncontroversial part of the British population and cultural scene, and are represented across the political spectrum.
Many of the Puritan absolutists, by contrast, emigrated from Britain to the British colonies in America, where they multiplied. Over time, a great many modified their religion under the influence of modern change and development, or abandoned religious belief altogether. Many others, however, retained their original fundamentalist religion in a form which if by no means unchanged, was still – by the standards of Europe and the rest of the developed world – remarkably similar to its original seventeenth-century form.
This was especially true of the Scots and “Scots-Irish” Protestants who populated so much of the American South and south-west. They were deeply shaped by their experience of the Protestant settlement of Ulster, where warfare against the native Irish prefigured their later experience of war with the Indians. In its particular combination of religious fundamentalism and chauvinist nationalism, the world of Ian Paisley and the Democratic Unionist Party is indeed the only part of Europe today which resembles – and is indeed closely related to – the so-called “Bible Belt” of the United States.
This is the world which produced General “Jerry” Boykin, the now notorious American general who – after his appointment as deputy under-secretary of defence for intelligence – was quoted as declaring among other things that the enemy of the United States in the war against terrorism is Satan, and he will only be defeated “if we come against him in the name of This post will be deleted if not edited immediately”. Most famously, General Boykin said, of a Somali warlord, “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” This last was widely described as “crude machismo”, which it may have been, but it was also a straight biblical reference to the Book of Isaiah, and to the victorious contests of Hebrew Prophets with the priests of Baal. The God of this tradition is essentially a tribal God, a Cromwellian “God of Warre” who fights for them against Amalekites, Irish Papists, Red Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, Japanese, Communists, Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Muslims and any other enemy who appears.
In his ideology, General Boykin is essentially an officer of Cromwell’s New Model Army. He is a remarkable individual to find in a senior position at the start of the twenty-first century, and in a country which is, after all, supposed to represent the very epitome of successful modernity.
It is the traditional doctrine of millenarianism that is mobilising Christian fundamentalists in the United States behind ultra-hardline Israeli positions – because Israel supposedly has to be reconstituted on the whole of its former territory before the Antichrist can appear and begin the End of the World.
The numbers of strongly committed fundamentalists in the United States at the start of the twenty-first century have been variously estimated at somewhere between 7 and 12 per cent of the total American population (white evangelical Christians as a whole are between 20 and 25 per cent). They form a very much higher proportion of Republican Party members and activists, however, and are the backbone of the “Christian Right”. They provide a number of Bush administration officials, of whom the most prominent is the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and leading Republican members of Congress such as Representative Tom DeLay.
The political apathy of so much of the American population, and in particular the shockingly low figures for voter turnout, gives quite disproportionate power to relatively small but highly committed groups. Thus in the Congressional elections of 2002, the Republican victory was produced by barely 15 per cent of registered voters – of whom fundamentalist Christians constituted a large part.
It is the ultra-modernity of the United States that has brought about the reaction of Protestant fundamentalism, prey to three successive moral panics. The first is horror at some aspect or other of the America of the time, whether Catholicism (in the mid-nineteenth century), prostitution, alcohol, drugs, abortion or homosexuality. The second is social and economic: the threat to the traditional white middle classes represented by economic change, today epitomised by “globalisation” and the “new economy” which are seen to undermine middle-class incomes.
The third is ethnic: the fear of established American groups that they are being swamped by alien immigrants. The accepted elements of this white middle-class community, and their targets, have both changed enormously over time. In the nineteenth century, the hatred and fear of the older Americans were directed above all at Irish Catholics. Later, Jews, Italians and others came to be seen as the main threat. Now, all these groups are accepted, and more recent immigrants, Muslims and (to a somewhat reduced extent) blacks are the hate figures.
The ethnic resentment and fear of the old Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish populations of the South’s Bible Belt continue to strengthen still further the forces of religious fundamentalism. Simply put, these groups feel that they have “lost their country”. Hence all the Republican rhetoric – so amazing to an outside observer – about “taking back” America.
This element in the American scene is partly responsible for one of the strangest and most depressing aspects of America today: that the country which dominates the globe and benefits more than any other from the present world order is influenced, and sometimes possessed, by a spirit of embittered, resentful, hate-filled nationalism that would seem more appropriate to a country which had been defeated, humiliated, and oppressed.
This is only comprehensible if one sees that many ordinary Americans do indeed feel that they, their religion and their culture have been defeated, humiliated and oppressed by the modern world. In particular, the decades since the 1960s have brought together a very dangerous combination of cultural change which these groups (not, it must be said, without some reason) abominate and economic change which has made them profoundly afraid for their future security and status.
This mood is not, of course, by any means true of the United States as a whole, most of which remains pluralist and tolerant, and much of which is also determinedly secular. If George Bush is defeated in the next elections, the fundamentalist elements will lose their influence over the US executive, though not over powerful sections of the US Congress. As a recent study by the Pew Research Centre concluded, America is “evenly divided and increasingly polarised” to an extent which has few precedents in American history, with questions of religious culture at the heart of the split.
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent “war on terrorism” perfectly suited the Manichaean, apocalyptic, militarist and nationalist culture of these fundamentalist and Cromwellian elements. If – God forbid – the United States comes under really serious attack again, they may achieve a position of real and enduring dominance.
Anatol Lieven is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. He is completing a book on American nationalism.
I don't think Theo Van Gogh simply 'perceived' the 'alleged' knife that murdered him.Seems odd to ape the alleged intolerance that you perceive in others.
No, as far as I'm concerned, turning the other cheek means not striking back physically, but I reserve the right to defend my faith verbally. Even This post will be deleted if not edited immediately did as much. You won't walk over us that easily.I don't consider my comments to be that contentious but surely any committed Christian that considers them to be might be inclined to "turn the other cheek"
Right HERE...The Christians that I refer to where exactly?
QEDChristians spouting hatred about any number of groups, from Gays, to Abortion Clinic Staff, to Jews, even other Christians
I provided the details to save you the trouble.I heard of the essays all right but I am not so interested in the subject that I would seek them out.
Abide in ignorance then, if you will.Must I? I think not.
The Christians that I refer to where exactly?
Right HERE...
Quote:Christians spouting hatred about any number of groups, from Gays, to Abortion Clinic Staff, to Jews, even other Christians
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