Saudis ask permission to build mosque in Moscow, Russia demands a Christian church in Saudi Arabia

@dagmaraka,

Are you into any sort of religion other than being anti-Christian?

@gungasnake,

That isn't how you'd translate it, huh? Dashenka speaks Russian--do you?

@gungasnake,

This is what Babel fish has to say about the translation

"Christ, [voskressya] from the corpses, to [smertyu] death after trampling"

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Sorry to pee on your parade, Intrepid, but Babel fish is hardly a reliable service. The "motto" of the English monarchy is honi soit quy mal y pense (it is specifically the motto of the Order of the Garter). This means "Evil be to him who evil thinks."

This is how Babel fish translates that:

"honi is quy badly thinks of it"

Here's another Babel fish gem:

J'y suis et j'y reste (Here I am and here I'll stay.)

BF: "J' there am and j' there remains"

But you can have even more fun with Babel fish by going back and forth between languages. So, for example, i asked BF to translate "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" into French, which yielded C'était le meilleur des périodes, il était le plus mauvais des périodes . Then i asked BF to translate that phrase from French into English, and got this response: "C' was best periods, it was worst of the periods"

If i were you, i wouldn't rely on Babel fish for anything truly important.

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@Setanta,

Yes; apparently, a bit better than Dagmaraka...

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@gungasnake,

I doubt that.

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@Intrepid,

That's simply wrong. Machine translation of human languages is problematical at best. IBM's best shot at it once translated "hydraulic rams" into "водянные бараны" ('water sheep') rather than into the necessary "гидро прессы", and that's just dry tech stuff, you can easily imagine how badly it would butcher something of Pushkins or something like the little Orthodox chant.

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The common Orthodox chant goes:

Quote:

Хростос, воскресся из мертвых, смертю смерть поправ, и сушим, во гробех, животь даровав

Literally: "Christ, risen from the dead, having brought death to death, and brought life to the righteous in their graves"

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@Foofie,

Quote:

"how come to Orthodox Jews, all of Israel is Holy Land"

Maybe because they're greedy ? Laughing

Seriously, I think Foofie is probably the only Zionist that I like and respect, you're very smart. If there were more Jews like you I'd change my position about Israel's survival. I've posted so much anti-zionist crap but I've never seen you lose it. You've always replied in a cool, logical and polite manner, most of the time making sense. It takes talant to do that. How do you keep so cool? (this is a serious post) Smile

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@Zippo,

Zippo wrote:

Quote:
"how come to Orthodox Jews, all of Israel is Holy Land"

Maybe because they're greedy ?

Seriously, I think Foofie is probably the only Zionist that I like and respect, you're very smart. If there were more Jews like you I'd change my position about Israel's survival. I've posted so much anti-zionist crap but I've never seen you lose it. You've always replied in a cool, logical and polite manner, most of the time making sense. It takes talant to do that. How do you keep so cool? (this is a serious post)

My quote above is out of context. It actually read:
"how come to Orthodox Jews, all of Israel is Holy Land (also), yet the place has some of the most holy sites of Christianity and Islam. Perhaps, this reflects Jewish largesse?"

As far as my replying "in a cool, logical and polite manner, most of the time making sense. It takes talant to do that. How do you keep so cool? (this is a serious post) Smile

," I think it has to do with my belief that I am fortunate to have been born in the U.S., and my concern about Israel is only from the standpoint of believing the history of WWII made for the current situation in the Middle East (and Europe has never been philo-Semitic; not even now with Arabs - where else can these survivors go?). I have no reason to get excited. I know the U.S. is a strong nation, and the people by and large are nicer than anywhere else. I count these blessings. No reason to get excited. And my grandparents were born in Czarist Russia in the 1870's. So, from that vantage point, I am in heaven only two generations later.

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@dagmaraka,

Seeing that you are watching him he is into Rapture!

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While the premise seems a bit silly, I think why not? It is only fair to require that you can put a Christian Church in the country that wants to put a house of worship of their national religion in yours.

There is a growing consensus that it is time for Iraq to start paying their debt to the USA by forking over some of their plentiful oil production for our use. It seems only fair.

In one community we used to live in, trick or treating was becoming a dangerous thing for very young children turned out without supervision. So some of the neighbors put out a notice: any little kid showing up without an adult supervisor nearby will have a kitten put in their candy sack. (Of course nobody would do that but the parents didn't take any chances. They got the hint.)

I also noted some years ago that the USA has one lawyer for every three hundred or so folks while Japan has one lawyer for about ever six or seven thousand folks. I proposed that we solve the trade imbalance by requiring Japan to take one of our lawyers for every one of their cars that we import. I figure they would be as screwed up as we are in no time and the problem would be solved. (Apologies to those great lawyers that don't cause problems and who do yeomans duty to really help folks.)

But sometimes a trade off is the only fair way to do business.

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@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

Quote:
Хростос, воскресся из мертвых, смертю смерть поправ, и сушим, во гробех, животь даровав

Literally: "Christ, risen from the dead, having brought death to death, and brought life to the righteous in their graves"

Here is a translation (see Paschal Troparion) I find more precise:
"Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life"
Concerning the subject of this thread, I personally would not mind another mosque in my home city because a portion of my fellow countrymen were moslem for centuries (since Ivan the Terrible defeated the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates in mid XVI century, I guess). I am only very wary about Russian mosques being run by the Saudi.

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Good on the Russians! Saudi Arabia is a country where people live in an oil-wealth induced intellectual coma. Then again the legalization of religion in the former Soviet Union didn't occur because the Kremlin is stocked with devout christians. Putin is an atheist and a pragmatist and he doesn't pray.

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@snickerdoodle63,

snickerdoodle63 wrote:

Good on the Russians! Saudi Arabia is a country where people live in an oil-wealth induced intellectual coma. Then again the legalization of religion in the former Soviet Union didn't occur because the Kremlin is stocked with devout christians. Putin is an atheist and a pragmatist and he doesn't pray.

Hey, the U.S. has had a few Unitarian Presidents in its past. That does not make the U.S. a Unitarian country.

Russia has long been an Eastern Orthodox country. They also have Muslims and Jews. I think those three religions are the officially accepted faiths in Russia, due I think to their long history in the country.

Why should there not be a church in Saudi Arabia where a Russian grandmother (bubbe) could go to thaw out from the Russian winter?

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@Foofie,

For those that might want to know which U.S. Presidents were Unitarian:

http://www.adherents.com/adh_presidents.html

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Foofie wrote:

Quote:

My quote above is out of context. It actually read:
"how come to Orthodox Jews, all of Israel is Holy Land (also), yet the place has some of the most holy sites of Christianity and Islam. Perhaps, this reflects Jewish largesse?"

I think Israel is quite tolerant of other religions as we have come to be in the USA as well. And, to its credit, it does not interfere with the importance of Israel to the Christian faith as well as the Jewish faith. Some, like me, think Christianity is just a continuation of Judaism anyway, though I fully respect the beliefs of those who disagree with me about that.

But our laws/Constitution do not discriminate among religions. Islam does not have to get permission to build a mosque here for instance even though it is little or no influence in our culture and history except in negative ways. All it has to do is be chartered as a not-for-profit religious organization and purchase the land to put it on.

But I still believe there is some poetic justice in Russia's attitude on this one.

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@Foxfyre,

Foxfyre wrote:

But our laws/Constitution do not discriminate among religions. Islam does not have to get permission to build a mosque here for instance even though it is little or no influence in our culture and history except in negative ways. All it has to do is be chartered as a not-for-profit religious organization and purchase the land to put it on.

Well, Foxfyre, you see that's really a big difference: here (that's in nearly all uropean countries, I think) you must ask permission to built .. . for anything larger than a few square meters, no matter what it is.

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@Foofie,

Foofie wrote:

Russia has long been an Eastern Orthodox country. They also have Muslims and Jews. I think those three religions are the officially accepted faiths in Russia, due I think to their long history in the country.

Well, I think that you are incorrect.

Ceratinly the largest religion in Russia is Russian Orthodox Christianity. But you find a couple of other Orthodox Churches, too, as well as Roman Catholics, Armenian Gregorian and various Protestants churches.

If you believe the official statistics, then there are more Buddhists in Russia than Jews (if you take the old USSR, then this certainly had been the fact).

Though I'm a bit wondering what you mean here by "accepted faiths": by the Russian population, or officially by law/the Russian constitution, or ...?

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Ceratinly the largest religion in Russia is Russian Orthodox Christianity. But you find a couple of other Orthodox Churches, too, as well as Roman Catholics, Armenian Gregorian and various Protestants churches.

I was wrong.

Quote:

Russian Orthodox 20%, Muslim 15%, Protestant, Georgian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic 7%, Jewish less than 1%, atheist 57%.

Quote:

Adherents to Buddhism account for approximately 700,000 in the Russian Federation, about 0.5% of the total population.

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Saudis ask permission to build mosque in Moscow, Russia demands a Christian church in Saudi Arabia

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