'Committed Christian'? Obama's religious history unmasked
A follow-up to LetsShrug's post on Obama's prayer breakfast comments
While we're very happy to have you in the Gulch and appreciate your wanting to fully engage, some things in the Gulch (e.g. voting, links in comments) are a privilege, not a right. To get you up to speed as quickly as possible, we've provided two options for earning these privileges.
Previous comments... You are currently on page 2.
Perhaps they could persuade their clerics to make specific statements rejecting radical islam, and encouraging people to "identify non-believing criminals that seek to bring about war, pestilence and continued poverty on their countries by wastefully taunting and offending the wrath of peaceful countries outside our borders. Our texts says to wage war on invaders, but these people are not invaders. We have become the offenders through radical actions."
Maybe I'm just jousting at windmills...again, but I think this could work, and what a position for the US to take!
Yes. I think they need a widely-recognized Pope-like figure to define the religion's position on modern events. Otherwise people are free to pick passages that show the religion is whatever they want it to be. Islamist extremists use this to call for a religious war, and people who want war for whatever reasons are eager to oblige.
If the Caliph represented the *average* religious person, the religion would be focused on things like getting our kids to respect others, work hard, and not squander their inheritance; it would be much less about violent extremism.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/pla...
Extremists of all types try to use religion get people to turn off their brains and hate one another. I can hear them in their chops at the prospect of widespread fighting and killing in the name of the religion.
Still, I've off and on been wondered about a passage in Revelations that the Antichrist will have his followers chop off the heads of Christian who refuse to worship him.
What's the only religion left in the world whose members (not all) still lop off heads with gleeful abandon?
Is this Islam's irreversible destiny? Is that from where the Antichrist shall spring up from?
Or shall the future prove that my theory barked up the wrong tree?
I'm just supposing here.
And there is a Christian school of thought who thinks Revelations should be one of the "lost books of the Bible."
Most of those lost books aren't really lost. I once had a book that contained such "lost books."
Later that became a program on the History Channel.
Just ran back after taking a quick look. There's gobs of stuff about those "lost books" on the Internet. Here's one picked almost at random--
http://amazingdiscoveries.org/S-deceptio...
The concept of the crusades being the christian answer to saracen invasion of Spain versus seeking to take back Jeruselum from the beginning is arguable. Clearly it was about power, the power of the ignorant, intolerant christian church over people versus the more tolerant, far more advanced muslim peoples over peoples.
You can argue that the saracens took over Spain in 771, but Spain was hardly secured by christians at that point. No doubt the christians were mortified of the muslims at that point. Around this time the muslims looked a whole lot more like the US than the christians. They were more tolerant, had banking, trade, technology and science. During this time, it was the saracens that tolerated other religions, particularly jews. Charlemagne, Urban and the christians were as bad as Nazis. Cordoba had muslims, jews, christians, mature trade, clocks compasses, paved streets, street lights and knowledge of Asia. Europe had none of these.
On his way to the crusades, Count Emicho (of Germany) took it on himself to slaughter jews in many towns. His troops killed ~5,000, in 1096, when the population of Europe was ~50M.
My point is that christians have been on the wrong side of the same justice you complain about more than muslims. Today is just a day, and neither text has changed significantly in 1,000 yrs.
Why are the christians so tame? They have SUVs, all the food ten people could eat and 50" TVs. Again, what would the Westboro Baptist Church be doing if it could institute policy, and separately where were the self-policing christians in Nazi Germany?
It is wholly inappropriate to act like the recent disgusting behavior is unique to islam. It is just wrong. Islam is a tool of the present terrorist to gain power and attention, nothing more, and chritianity has been used just as many or more times for the same end.
Immediate second thought: They need a miracle.
I stare at those thoughts in print.
Nothing else comes.
"We westerners have had our challenges with religious intolerance, including all sorts of intolerable, abominable acts of persecution and violence against persons not conforming. These persist in modest form, as do most forms of diverse opinion. However, they rarely society or cause violence. Ours was a Renaissance, a religious reformation taking considerable time. With the resources and speed of communication available today, the west (or US) seeks to help islam to free itself from the cancerous radical element causing so much societal damage to its people, in a manner more rapid than our own transition to religious tolerance and secularism..."
Great idea Robbie!
Load more comments...