IS THE EARTH DYING OF TERMINAL RELIGION?

This has to be the most amazingly ridiculous first sentence of any essay, anywhere -- and I've read some really idiotic essays in my life.

Before GWB, Chrisitans were involved in some really horrid behavior and they will be after GWB is long gone.

Equally important is that there are a lot of Christians that are kind, compassionate, spiritual people.

That first sentence is so completely bad I can't even begin to imagine finishing the essay.

Boom, if you went beyond the opening, you would find that the remainder fleshes out and gives validity to the statement.

I think there was a period, though relatively short in the context of civilized man, that Christianity met that description. However, Bush and the Christian Right have somewhat militarized the religion. As someone said recently, Bush is proud that, despite the slaughters in Afghanistan and Iraq, he has not killed a single stem cell.

There is little doubt that, once again, the world is sinking into a morass of hatred and violence in connection with religion. The really dangerous thing now is that some of the affected countries have the bomb.

From the OpEd News list of goals:

The OpEdNews project aims to facilitate the following goals..........equal rights for minorities, women, etc.;


Apparently equal rights does include freedom of religion from this left wing trash site, which has other fine articles such as:

Iran Does Itself No Favors Broadcasting Statements From Captives

US Attack on Iran Imminent According to Kremlin

Jesus, The Liberal of History, Vs. Jesus, The Fascist of The Christian Right's Fantasies

How to say NO to Bush's planned attack on Iran

Castro Castigates US About Global Warming

FACELESS POL POTS OF THE SKIES

The Decider is Delusional

More Minorities Near Polluting Facilities Than Twenty Years Ago

the Media's Castration During the Bush Presidency

<heehee>

Seen....and raised:


TEEEEEEEHEEEEEEEE!

Many moons from now ET will return and explain to his children that this planet was destroyed by terminal goofiness.

Real, where has freedom of religion been denied in this country? The problem is that there is too much religious intrusion. The constitution provides for separation of church and state.

My answer is NO.

I am not religious, at least not in the sense most people use the word.

Religion can be either confining or enlightening. It's like a shovel. You can use it to dig a hole to hide from realiy, or you can use it to clear the dirt away from it to see more clearly.

Religion is a tool, and as with all tools, it is the motive of the user that decides the tools usefulness or value.

The one thing all of those mentioned in the initial post have in common is their identical motive. That is fear. Fear is the enemy. Always was, always will be.

Hmmm! So religion is a tool. Interesting! But would God, whoever he or she may be, appreciate being called a tool?

I think religion denotes a blind faith, which is based on superstition. The existence of a religion certainly cannot be proven in the scientific sense. Tragically, it is connected to so many mass murders and other horrible events in history. While it is not the root of all evil, it is certainly a large part of the horrific chapters in man's existence.

In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century. . - Never again? Perpetrators and bystanders in Rwanda - book review
Christian Century, Feb 27, 2002 by Stephen R. Haynes



I VIVIDLY REMEMBER riding in a car during the summer of 1994 and listening with rapt attention to an account of the tragedy in Rwanda. In just 100 days, following a government coup in early April, some 800,000 Rwandans were ruthlessly murdered by their countrymen. When I arrived home, I located Rwanda on a map. For several weeks I paid close attention to reports of the refugee crisis that followed the slaughter. But then the genocide and its aftermath were mentioned less and less frequently by the news media and, like most Westerners, I stopped thinking about it. Later, when Rwanda did enter my mind, I had difficulty remembering who had killed whom. Had Tutsis been the victims of Hutus? Or was it the other way around?

While popular interest in Rwanda has waned in the years since the genocide, the literature of description and analysis continues to grow. Mahmood Mamdani's When Victims Become Killers is a detailed account of the political conditions underlying the Rwandan tragedy. While it devotes little attention to the killing per se or to the individuals who committed it, it sheds a great deal of light on Rwandan history and political institutions--precolonial, colonial and revolutionary. One notable feature of Mamdani's analysis is his recurrent mention of parallels between Rwanda and the Holocaust.

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In fact, most studies of the Rwandan slaughter refer to the Nazi Final Solution. Apparently, the landscape of contemporary genocide is so dominated by the Holocaust that other tragedies remain invisible unless they are compared to it. As arguments for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience have multiplied over the past decade, students of genocide in other places--in Armenia, the Americas, the Balkans--have combated that argument with attention to understudied cases of genocide.

Philip Gourevitch introduces his riveting account of the Rwandan crisis and its aftermath (We Wish to Inform You ...) with the observation that "the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." One of the first books on the subject, Alain Destexhe's Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, begins with a quote from Holocaust survivor Primo Levi: "It has happened once, and it could all happen again."

But references to the Holocaust reflect more than competition for the attention of atrocity-numbed readers. The two tragedies share quite a few formal similarities. There are analogous stories of unprovoked cruelty and betrayal, of rescue and gratuitous kindness, of hiding, passing and surviving. There are similar rationalizations on the part of perpetrators and by-standers--self-exculpating images of entrapment, of killers having no choice but to act as they did. There is similar evidence of complicit Christian leaders and institutions, evidence that poses a challenge to the credibility of faith.

There are the same pregenocidal legal persecutions used to identify and stigmatize an ethnic minority (including quotas and identity cards); the same essentializing of "race" that casts one group as a threat to the other's survival; the same mystification of a minority as a strangely powerful entity against whom the majority must defend itself; the same dehumanizing of the victims through images ("rats" in Germany; "cockroaches" in Rwanda) that makes elimination easier once the genocide begins. And there are the same painstaking attempts afterwards to discover why some people killed their neighbors while others protected them, along with the same amazement at the latter's refusal to consider their behavior extraordinary.

Like Nazi Germany, genocidal Rwanda is an exceedingly unattractive venue for Christian self-examination. Much of the evidence indicates that "blood" proved thicker than baptismal water, that faith was powerless to overcome the interests of class or ethnicity. And Rwanda has provided few stories designed to restore our trust in humankind or the role of faith in confronting evil. So far, we know of no Rwandan Bonhoeffers with whom mainline Protestants can identify; no Hutu Corrie ten Booms to sustain evangelicals' belief that God protects the righteous; no Catholic bishops who risked their lives to speak out against the violence; no Le Chambon-sur-Lignons where the persecuted were sheltered by simple Christians in a "conspiracy of goodness."

YET PRECISELY BECAUSE so little good news can be gleaned from the Rwandan genocide, Christians must not ignore it. One pressing issue raised by Rwanda is human nature, what theologians have traditionally called anthropology. Although scholars of the genocide assiduously avoid theological questions, Christians must ask what this and other episodes of mass killing reveal about the essence and extent of our fallenness.

When was that exactly? During the Crusades? The Inquisition? The Witch Trials of both Europe and North America? The killing off of millions of Native Americans? The owning of slaves?

Religion has been used as an excuse to commit acts of evil by the less than scrupulous ever since religion was first conceived. It's probably been a scapegoat for just as long.

I was responding to the following statement in the opednews piece.

"Once upon a time, before the Christian Right, before Christian fundamentalists, before George W. Bush, Christianity had at least something to do with compassion, kindness, and spirituality."

Otherwise, I am in full agreement with you.

Here is a funny video on religion that illustrtes its sad state of affairs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8cN2pB3MCE

wow...

god hates crippled soldiers????

I'd put these people in the same category as teenage black metal kids who are angry and just searching for an outlet. They could just as easily use biology to back their insane opinions. Nothing to do with religion and everything to do with lunacy, fanaticism and fear.

Lunacy, fanaticism and fear, for certain, but these folks do back up their lunacy with quotes from the Bible which has no shortage of fertile pickings for the demented.

Westboro Baptist Church FAQ[/u]

I'm curious whether this thread is officially monitored. One of my posts was, at least initially, changed somewhat, and another was deleted. Does anyone know anything about this?

What was modified/deleted? Every post on the site can be monitored by the Moderators but unless something violates the Terms Of Service they don't change or delete.

The deleted stuff was definitely not offensive, so I was very surprised.

Strangely enough, I would somewhat agree with the original post if the author had applied it to religious fanatics and fundamental Islam. As it stands though, the post is so full of holes, presumptions, and erroneous links that it has little to no credibility.



This is wrong, Holy Warriors is not a contradiction in terms in Islam (he is writing from what he knows of Christianity, and applying it to Islam).



We strangely don't seem to be dying out as a species from this…not even the worst stats manipulation can come close to backing up this claim (of killing us all). The author has arrived at a conclusion that can't be supported...yet down the track - who knows, it may happen that way.



An interesting question, with the answer depending entirely on a persons perspective of life and how it effects us. The authors perspective seems to be that all religions have a latent heart of darkness. As an example of another possible perspective, I'm sure many others would suggest that all humans have a latent heart of darkness.



No, no, no - they would more likely kill you in a heartbeat, and bring up your child in their cult (probably with you as the Great Satan)



Authors conclusion : A small proportion is fanatical - therefore - the whole is.



Translation - if you believe in what the author views as insane beliefs, you are insane.

Secondary translation - If you believe the same in the same named religion as a fanatic, but disagree entirely with said fanatic, you are still as insane as said fanatic - for you are insane, and so is said fanatic, and therefore in no position to argue that you are not as insane as said fanatic, for you are not sane enough to argue the merits of your sanity.