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What is an Agnostic? By Khayyam and Bertrand Russell
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Oppenheimer



Joined: 03 Mar 2005
Posts: 1166
Location: SantaFe, New Mexico

PostPosted: Mon Feb 06, 2006 10:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Until I hear a rational theory of morality without God, I'll continue to bring God into the discussion.


What is theory without application? Here is rational application:


A very long time ago, Two Buddhist monks were traveling together on a path.
They came to a river, where a young woman was waiting for someone to come and help her across.

The younger monk charged into the water, crossing to the other side to see how deep and strong it was, and turned to see the older monk helping the woman up onto his shoulders...her dress hiked up so as not to get wet...and her busom draped over the monks face so he could hardly see where he was going...he started across.

The younger monk jumped back into the river to help guide them across, holding her feet so they wouldn't get wet.

Once across, the older monk set her down, and the two monks went on their way.

Just down the path aways, the younger monk asks, " Were you not tempted by her loveliness?" " No, she was in need of help." the elder replied.

A little further on the younger monk asks, " You wern't in the least tempted? Her busom was like two ripe melons, dangling in front of your eyes!"

"I was not using my eyes to feel my feet make solid footing in the river." the elder said.

After they had gone another mile, the younger speaks, " Ah, if only I had carried her across!"

The elder responded, " I put her down at the river's edge, three miles back...I see you are still carrying her...."

Balance is achieved when knowing when to let go of attachment.

------------

Who then in the present conversation is more attached to God, the athiest, or the believer?


Quote:
It is said that Buddhism is a practice of "exausive investigation and grinding disipline."

Indeed it is.
........(chuckle).

[/quote]
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Oppenheimer



Joined: 03 Mar 2005
Posts: 1166
Location: SantaFe, New Mexico

PostPosted: Mon Feb 06, 2006 10:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bertrand Russell gave this testimony about what motivated him:

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of humanity."
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American Visitor



Joined: 19 Feb 2004
Posts: 224

PostPosted: Wed Feb 08, 2006 3:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
The younger monk charged into the water, crossing to the other side to see how deep and strong it was, and turned to see the older monk helping the woman up onto his shoulders...her dress hiked up so as not to get wet...and her busom draped over the monks face so he could hardly see where he was going...he started across.


Quote:
The elder responded, " I put her down at the river's edge, three miles back...I see you are still carrying her...."

Balance is achieved when knowing when to let go of attachment.


If she was as good as you describe, perhaps the younger monk was correct. Why give up something good?
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Oppenheimer



Joined: 03 Mar 2005
Posts: 1166
Location: SantaFe, New Mexico

PostPosted: Wed Feb 08, 2006 8:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
If she was as good as you describe, perhaps the younger monk was correct. Why give up something good?


I was paraphrasing from memory, an old Bhuddhist story...

Can one "give up" what one doesn't already posess?

There's any number of ways to look at the question, and the story for that matter....take from it what you will, as you please.

There's an awful lot of humor in the human condition....folks tend to take God way too seriously....Frankly speaking, if God made man, or if man made God.....the element of humor was very much incorporated into the process.

Therin lies mankind's inherent capability to laugh at himself....and that my friend is how we can heal the dysfunctional human condition.

It is the forgetting how to laugh at one's self that creates so much distress in the world.
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American Visitor



Joined: 19 Feb 2004
Posts: 224

PostPosted: Sun Feb 12, 2006 8:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
There's an awful lot of humor in the human condition....folks tend to take God way too seriously....Frankly speaking, if God made man, or if man made God.....the element of humor was very much incorporated into the process.

Therin lies mankind's inherent capability to laugh at himself....and that my friend is how we can heal the dysfunctional human condition.


I agree with you about the humor. It is also true that my believe in God won't make Him exist any more than your lack of belief will make Him not exist. On the other hand, undersanding and preserving a great culture is very important. This is my concern about the anit-Christian secularists, that by forcing their own viewpoint on the rest of the country often by judicial fiat, they are attacking the foundations of our culture.

Perhaps our European friends who have almost completely given up their faith in the Christian God will win the cultural war with Islim eventually without re-embracing their faith by convincing Muslims to give up their faith and their culture also and partake in the great void. Or perhaps they will wake up and realize that they are about to loose something which they value greatly and return to the God of their fathers. At the moment it appears their future lies completely in the hands of the Islamists.

As the Danes have learned, a future with the Islamists is no laughing matter. A universal sense of humor is not evident in the Islamic world to the cartoons from Denmark. I have noticed a completely different reaction by the anit-Christian secualrists to the hurt feelings of the Muslims over the cartoons published by a private company compared to the reaction when Christians complained because taxpayer money was used to pay for an "art" exibit where a Crucifix was placed in a jar of urine. The reaction then was "how dare those Christians complain that their government was supporting our art(sacrilige)." When it comes to insulting Christians and their symbols the "wall of separation of church and state" is not supported, using government money to attack Christians in every way possible is "wonderful." On the other hand, allowing a private newspaper to print some cartoons which Muslims don't like requires an apology not only from the Danish government but also from our own government state department.

In other words there are two groups who are eagerly pulling all the levers of power to destroy our culture, the Muslims mostly from without and their allies the anti-Christian secularists from within, who appear to gladly embrace Islam if by so doing they can erase all traces of Christianity. The collusion by the anti-Christian anti-Jewish secularists is apparent around the world because in the end they are the same thing. Israel is the "Little Satan" for obvious reasons and America which is now the heart of Christiandom is the "Great Satan." The Hindus are also deserving of honorable mention in their struggle for freedom which they have purchased with their own blood although they don't rate the same hatred as the "Great Satan."
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Oppenheimer



Joined: 03 Mar 2005
Posts: 1166
Location: SantaFe, New Mexico

PostPosted: Mon Feb 13, 2006 3:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
I agree with you about the humor. It is also true that my believe in God won't make Him exist any more than your lack of belief will make Him not exist.


"my lack of belief"???

If you read the first post here and note the part regarding Bertrand Russlle's take on Buddhism....it is very accurate.

Visitor, I must say farewelll, this is my last post here at Activistchat, not because of anything you said, and I've very much enjoyed reading your thoughts on things, as well as the conversation.

If you are curious to know why this is, you can read my posts on the following thread.


http://activistchat.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=27319#27319



Take care, and as they say here in New Mexico:

"Vaya Con Dios"
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cyrus
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Joined: 24 Jun 2003
Posts: 4993

PostPosted: Mon Feb 13, 2006 4:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oppenheimer wrote:
Quote:
I agree with you about the humor. It is also true that my believe in God won't make Him exist any more than your lack of belief will make Him not exist.


"my lack of belief"???

If you read the first post here and note the part regarding Bertrand Russlle's take on Buddhism....it is very accurate.

Visitor, I must say farewelll, this is my last post here at Activistchat, not because of anything you said, and I've very much enjoyed reading your thoughts on things, as well as the conversation.

If you are curious to know why this is, you can read my posts on the following thread.

http://activistchat.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=27319#27319


Take care, and as they say here in New Mexico:

"Vaya Con Dios"


This is your own decision, I did not ask you not to post here.
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AmirN



Joined: 23 Sep 2005
Posts: 297

PostPosted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 1:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
I'm afraid I don't follow your argument here. I don't know anyone who believes human free will is unlimited.


I’m not trying to say that free will is necessarily unlimited. I’m only questioning your supposition that God gave us free will, which explains the existence of evil. If God is not acting to stop evil because he gave us free will and does not want to intervene, how is it that at some times he actually does intervene? Yet another inconsistency in the God theory.

Quote:
There is nothing wrong with any of the things you love. As you present it, it just does not provide a basis for a morality.


The things I presented were not intended to provide a basis of morality. Morality does exist for me, but like I said, it exists independently. Morality for me does not necessarily have to be tied in with my love for my family, Iran, science, or history. It is another matter altogether, and also very important.

Quote:
People who are truly moral will sometimes have to be willing to lose their family or their own lives if necessary.


I suppose there may be occasions which deem the loss of one’s own life or that of a loved one unavoidable. These occasions are few and far between. However, what I have a problem with is this:

Quote:
37"Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
Matthew, 10:37


Why would I love a stranger, Jesus, more than my own family? And why does he demand me to do so? Why am I “not worthy” if I have chosen to love most the people nearest and dearest to me? Only a selfish God would make such a demand.

Quote:
In Muslim lands Christians are often tortured, killed or disowned if they convert to Christianity. I don't know if I have the strength to endure what some of our Christian people have had to endure in the Muslim lands, but I pray God will give me the strength if the need ever arises.


That day will never come, I assure you. But if that hypothetical day arises that you would have to endure hardships for your faith, I know you WOULD have that strength. And don’t be surprised if an atheist or two joins you in your stance to freely exercise your religion. For even though the atheist/materialist/secularist does not share your faith, he shares your need to be free to practice it without persecution.

Quote:
Hitler Was a Christian


I noted your response to this article which I posted. I can honestly say that I agree with some of the points you raised, but disagree with many others. Specifically, I don’t think it’s fair to just dismiss it under the notion of “conspiracy theory.” It is not simply a conspiracy theory. Most of it is based on facts, occurrences, and Hitler’s own quotes.

Regardless, I don’t wish to make this article into a huge debate topic between us by responding and re-responding to the specific criticisms. It is not that important to me, and it would be a waist of time.

I didn’t post it to simply imply that Hitler was a Christian, or to say that Christianity was the cause behind the holocaust. I only posted it to present an alternative viewpoint; one with which I don’t completely agree. I only posted it to bring rightful doubt to the notion I have heard you push occasionally: “Hitler denied Christianity; Hitler was anti-Christian; look at what he did; a probable outcome of denying Christianity is such an event.”

This notion of yours is very challengeable, as pointed out. It is an explanation which lies on a far extreme. The article which I posted demonstrates the other extreme. I think that neither extreme viewpoint is correct; the truth probably lies in the middle.

As you point out (and I am well aware), Hitler conveys some very strong anti-Christian sentiments in Mein Kampf. As is pointed out by others, he also conveys many points which embrace Christianity in Mein Kampf as well as elsewhere. This seems contradictory. And yet, it is not necessarily contradictory if we consider Hitler’s true nature and motivation.

I’ll tell you my own interpretation of Hitler in relation to Christianity. I think that he was neither a Christian nor completely anti-Christian. I don’t think religion was his main motivator. His main motivations were ambition, power, domination, hate, and totalitarianism.

It was neither Christianity nor anti-Christianity which drove him. He therefore did not feel compelled to stay true to either. He only used each idea as it pertained to his ultimate quest. That is just my personal interpretation, and the only way I can make sense of Hitler as a whole.

Quote:
The moral path is love. God's appeal to humanity is not force or threats of violence but a demonstration of His unconditional love. You can not induce people to love you by appealing to selfish motives. Whether we chose to love Him in return is up to us and our free will. Any actions such as keeping a holy day, fasting, paying alms etc. are not genuine holiness unless motivated only by love.


Really?



9GOD said to Moses, "I look at this people--oh! what a stubborn, hard-headed people! 10Let me alone now, give my ANGER free reign to burst into flames and incinerate them. But I'll make a great nation out of you."
11Moses tried to calm his GOD down. He said, "Why, GOD, would you lose your temper with your people? Why, you brought them out of Egypt in a tremendous demonstration of power and strength. 12Why let the Egyptians say, "He had it in for them--he brought them out so he could kill them in the mountains, wipe them right off the face of the Earth.' Stop your anger. Think twice about bringing evil against your people! 13Think of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants to whom you gave your word, telling them "I will give you many children, as many as the stars in the sky, and I'll give this land to your children as their land forever.'"
14And GOD did think twice. He decided not to do the evil he had THREATENED against his people.

Exodus 32: 9-14

6GOD was hard on the citizens of Ashdod. He devastated them by hitting them with tumors. This happened in both the town and the surrounding neighborhoods. He let loose rats among them. Jumping from ships there, rats swarmed all over the city! And everyone was deathly afraid.
7When the leaders of Ashdod saw what was going on, they decided, "The chest of the god of Israel has got to go. We can't handle this, and neither can our god Dagon." 8They called together all the Philistine leaders and put it to them: "How can we get rid of the chest of the god of Israel?"
The leaders agreed: "Move it to Gath." So they moved the Chest of the God of Israel to Gath.
9But as soon as they moved it there, GOD came down hard on that city, too. It was mass hysteria! He hit them with tumors. Tumors broke out on everyone in town, young and old.
10So they sent the Chest of God on to Ekron, but as the Chest was being brought into town, the people shouted in protest, "You'll kill us all by bringing in this Chest of the God of Israel!" 11They called the Philistine leaders together and demanded, "Get it out of here, this Chest of the God of Israel. Send it back where it came from. We're threatened with mass death!" For everyone was scared to death when the Chest of God showed up. God was already coming down very hard on the place. 12Those who didn't die were hit with tumors. All over the city cries of pain and lament filled the air.

1 Samuel 5: 6-12

4Help us again, God of our help;
don't hold a grudge against us forever.
5You aren't going to keep this up, are you?
scowling and angry, year after year?
6Why not help us make a fresh start--a resurrection life?
Then your people will laugh and sing!

Psalm 85: 4-6

1At the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, this Message came from GOD to Jeremiah:
2"GOD's Message: Stand in the court of GOD's Temple and preach to the people who come from all over Judah to worship in GOD's Temple. Say everything I tell you to say to them. Don't hold anything back. 3Just maybe they'll listen and turn back from their bad lives. Then I'll reconsider the disaster that I'm planning to bring on them because of their evil behavior.
4"Say to them, "This is GOD's Message: If you refuse to listen to me and live by my teaching that I've revealed so plainly to you, 5and if you continue to refuse to listen to my servants the prophets that I tirelessly keep on sending to you--but you've never listened! Why would you start now? 6-then I'll make this Temple a pile of ruins like Shiloh, and I'll make this city nothing but a bad joke worldwide.'"

Jeremiah 26: 1-6

1Then the Word of GOD came to me: 2"Son of man, now turn and face the mountains of Israel and preach against them 3: "O Mountains of Israel, listen to the Message of GOD, the Master. GOD, the Master, speaks to the mountains and hills, to the ravines and the valleys: I'm about to destroy your sacred god and goddess shrines. 4I'll level your altars, bust up your sun-god pillars, and kill your people as they bow down to your no-god idols. 5I'll stack the dead bodies of Israelites in front of your idols and then scatter your bones around your shrines. 6Every place where you've lived, the towns will be torn down and the pagan shrines demolished--altars busted up, idols smashed, all your custom-made sun-god pillars in ruins. 7Corpses everywhere you look! Then you'll know that I am GOD.
8""But I'll let a few escape the killing as you are scattered through other lands and nations. 9In the foreign countries where they're taken as prisoners of war, they'll remember me. They'll realize how devastated I was by their betrayals, by their voracious lust for gratifying themselves in their idolatries. They'll be disgusted with their evil ways, disgusting to God in the way they've lived. 10They'll know that I am GOD. They'll know that my judgment against them was no empty threat.
11""This is what GOD, the Master, says: Clap your hands, stamp your feet, yell out, "No, no, no!" because of all the evil obscenities rife in Israel. They're going to be killed, dying of hunger, dying of disease-- 12death everywhere you look, people dropping like flies, people far away dying, people nearby dying, and whoever's left in the city starving to death. Why? Because I'm angry, furiously angry. 13They'll realize that I am GOD when they see their people's corpses strewn over and around all their ruined sex-and-religion shrines on the bare hills and in the lush fertility groves, in all the places where they indulged their sensual rites. 14I'll bring my hand down hard on them, demolish the country wherever they live, turn it into wasteland from one end to the other, from the wilderness to Riblah. Then they'll know that I am GOD!'"

Ezekiel 6: 1-14




Shall I continue, or is the theme clear?

I see…God’s appeal to humanity is never by force or THREATS OF VIOLENCE, only by his unconditional love.

How anyone can claim that this God is offering us unconditional love is quite bewildering.

Quote:
Not at all. It is impossible to truly love God and not love your neighbor. As the text I quoted says, by accepting God's salvation, He places His love in our hearts. If we don't love other people, that shows a weakness in our love for God.


So according to Christianity, you are saying salvation is offered by love: love of God, which also translated to love of others. Whom should we love? According to the edict of Christianity, unconditional love means we must love everyone, equally, and without judgment.

So, do you love Hitler? If not, why not? If not, have you not failed God by not loving Hitler?

Quote:
The understanding of God's unconditional love and His commitment to our freedom gives us a foundation for morality which the secularists lack.


Why? How?

Quote:
What if your secular cultural elites are named Marx, or Stalin, or Hitler?


And what if your religious elites are named Tomás de Torquemada, Pope Alexander VI, Ayatollah Khomeini, David Koresh, or Pat Robertson?

How are these religious elites more righteous than the cultural elites?

There will be good men mixed in with the evil men before we the people recognize them as such. As I said, it is the duty and responsibility of the people to identify and weed out the evil ones. It is our duty to oppose those who oppose righteousness. As I said before, unfortunately this system will not always be perfect, and the works of evil men will continue. But what are the options? Cultural elitism versus religious elitism. Again, I’ll take my chances with the cultural elites, but will not follow them blindly.

Here are a few interesting quotes I have come across regarding religion and politics:


"All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher."
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."
- Seneca

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."
- Aristotle, Politics.


I don’t care for much of what Aristotle said, but this one is right on the money.

Quote:
If you don't understand something you don't believe it? Do you believe the universe exists? Do you understand it? To me, the idea that we could understand everything God does with the limited knowledge of eternity we have is illogical.


I never claimed that I don’t believe in God because I don’t understand him. What I’m saying is that from what I do understand, he is contradictory to himself and acts and exists in an illogical fashion.

Notice that the last word of your sentence was “illogical.” It means you wish to portray your thoughts in a manner consistent with logic and reason, and you expect others to do so as well. The fact that you and I have engaged in these discussions and have both attempted to communicate using reason and logic attests that these are prerequisites to a firm argument. If we are not appealing to each other’s logic, why bother even to have a discussion? If we are to not make deductions based on logic, what do we have left? Only pure faith.

If you deny that we can and should provoke logic to examine the nature of things, including God, there really is no point to having any discussion. There has to be a basic ground rule to any discussion, and that is logic. Without logic, we could both just ramble random words which make no sense, and each make our own final conclusion, which also makes no sense.

So it is my intent to examine and discuss God based on logic. If you claim that God is beyond logic, then we are all at a loss, and any discussion on God becomes meaningless, and we must each just stick to our own faith and belief.

Quote:
There is enough we know about God already…


Exactly my point. I don’t need to understand God in his entirety to examine some specific aspects about him. I know enough about him to know that his existence is illogical and his actions contradictory.

Quote:
Hardly. What they couldn't have known is how this verse would be literally fulfilled. Israel was chosen to bless the world, not for selfish aggrandizement.


Israel was CHOSEN to bless the world. No matter what, this seems like preferential treatment to me. Why choose one group of people over another to carry out the blessing? Especially since having been chosen as the ones to do the “blessing” carries certain fringe benefits, such as the deed to certain real estate. This God was supposed to love us all equally. Why would he give preferential treatment to any one group?

Furthermore, consider the consequences of CHOSING the Israelites. By having chosen the Israelites, he has shown preferential treatment to a particular RACE. You said before that all men are equal in the eyes of God, and that belief in God allows us to surpass the shortcomings of race. How could that be, if God has CHOSEN a specific race to become his chosen people?

Consider the following:



1"When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are about to enter and occupy, he will clear away many nations ahead of you: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. These seven nations are all more powerful than you. 2When the LORD your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy. 3Do not intermarry with them, and don't let your daughters and sons marry their sons and daughters. 4They will lead your young people away from me to worship other gods. Then the anger of the LORD will burn against you, and he will destroy you. 5Instead, you must break down their pagan altars and shatter their sacred pillars. Cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols. 6For you are a holy people, who belong to the LORD your God. Of all the people on earth, the LORD your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure.
7"The LORD did not choose you and lavish his love on you because you were larger or greater than other nations, for you were the smallest of all nations! 8It was simply because the LORD loves you, and because he was keeping the oath he had sworn to your ancestors. That is why the LORD rescued you with such amazing power from your slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt. 9Understand, therefore, that the LORD your God is indeed God. He is the faithful God who keeps his covenant for a thousand generations and constantly loves those who love him and obey his commands. 10But he does not hesitate to punish and destroy those who hate him. 11Therefore, obey all these commands, laws, and regulations I am giving you today.
12"If you listen to these regulations and obey them faithfully, the LORD your God will keep his covenant of unfailing love with you, as he solemnly promised your ancestors. 13He will love you and bless you and make you into a great nation. He will give you many children and give fertility to your land and your animals. When you arrive in the land he swore to give your ancestors, you will have large crops of grain, grapes, and olives, and great herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. 14You will be blessed above all the nations of the earth. None of your men or women will be childless, and all your livestock will bear young. 15And the LORD will protect you from all sickness. He will not let you suffer from the terrible diseases you knew in Egypt, but he will bring them all on your enemies!
16"You must destroy all the nations the LORD your God hands over to you. Show them no mercy and do not worship their gods. If you do, they will trap you. 17Perhaps you will think to yourselves, `How can we ever conquer these nations that are so much more powerful than we are?' 18But don't be afraid of them! Just remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh and to all the land of Egypt. 19Remember the great terrors the LORD your God sent against them. You saw it all with your own eyes! And remember the miraculous signs and wonders, and the amazing power he used when he brought you out of Egypt. The LORD your God will use this same power against the people you fear. 20And then the LORD your God will send hornets to drive out the few survivors still hiding from you!
21"No, do not be afraid of those nations, for the LORD your God is among you, and he is a great and awesome God. 22The LORD your God will drive those nations out ahead of you little by little. You will not clear them away all at once, for if you did, the wild animals would multiply too quickly for you. 23But the LORD your God will hand them over to you. He will throw them into complete confusion until they are destroyed. 24He will put their kings in your power, and you will erase their names from the face of the earth. No one will be able to stand against you, and you will destroy them all.

Deuteronomy 7: 1-24




So, are all men equal before God? One cannot possibly make such a deduction according to these passages. Lines 1 through 6 actually point to the complete opposite. The way God is instigating the Israelites to rise and destroy the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites has a familiar ring to it. Where have I heard a similar theme before? It sounds a lot like the ramblings of a certain German madman from the 30’s.

God is saying:

“These seven nations are all more powerful than you. 2When the LORD your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy. 3Do not intermarry with them, and don't let your daughters and sons marry their sons and daughters. 4They will lead your young people away from me to worship other gods….
… you will erase their names from the face of the earth. No one will be able to stand against you, and you will destroy them all.”


Did the Nazis not make similar demands? If this is not a call by God for genocide, then I don’t know what is.

A few key words here are unavoidable:

conquer….
destroy…
show no mercy….
do not intermarry….
anger….
burn….
keeping the oath….
chosen….
punish and destroy…
obey…
bring diseases on your enemies….
terrors….

God also says “Of all the people on earth, the LORD your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure.”
Did Hitler not make similar outrageous remarks? Except that he held the Germans to be the “special race,” not the Jews.

Is this the God that promotes equality of all men? The God that is blind to race and color? Is this the same God that offers unconditional love?

Are we really discussing the same God here? Something definitely doesn’t make sense here.

Quote:
Genocide is not about "God teaching people a lesson" as if God had committed the act. It is about people using their freedom to kill other people. People are slow learners.


Even if God didn’t commit genocide himself (although he sure seems to promote it from time to time), the fact that he allows men to commit it is testimony to his nature. That he deems the lesson learned about the undesirable nature of genocide more important than preventing genocide from occurring is also testimony to his nature, especially since this lesson is yet to be learned after thousands of years.

Quote:
Human suffering is of two types
1. Suffering caused by nature, illness, old age etc. This type of suffering can be largely relieved by science and medicine.
2. Suffering caused by human evil or ignorance. This is the type of suffering which is amenable to moral learning and education.
It is by living in a real world with real consequences and real joy and real suffering that we can experience life to the fullest and mature spiritually.


The suffering caused by nature, old age, etc is partially amenable to relief by science and medicine, but at least in the present, it is still mostly not amenable to science. We still have no protection against hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc.

Are you saying that if evil and suffering did not exist, we could not enjoy life or experience it to the fullest? So then evil is a necessary requirement to a life fulfilled?

If so, why is God so busy trying to warn us against evil, and wants us to denounce evil and push it out of our lives? If God is successful and we steer clear of evil, don’t our lives become less fulfilling?

Stated plainly, God created (or allowed the existence of evil) so that our lives would be better fulfilled, yet his primary goal for us is to avoid the evil, which consequently deprives from our fulfillment.

This makes no sense, and we are again sent down a spiral of contradiction.

Quote:
In "pledge week" people are put through senseless abuse which teaches them nothing except that people can be dumb. Life on this earth is more like a strenuous college course with lab where people can learn lessons and then apply them in experiments.


You say “pledge week” is senseless abuse, which teaches them nothing. So is abuse that results in a “lesson learned” justifiable? Suppose an adult takes a child’s hand and forces it into a flame, burning his young flesh. The child probably learns that contact with an open flame should be avoided. Is that adult justified, because an important lesson was learned by the child? Is it less senseless because it teaches the child something?

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I can quote Hitler from HITLER'S TABLE TALK if you wish to support my statement. Hitler stated exactly what his goals were, and they were quite modest. He wanted to expand German territory eastward and colonize the slaves and keep them as surfs under German domination. He admired Americans and British greatly who were largely Germanic tribes. I know of no material which indicates the Nazis had designs on America, do you have anything to support that position?


My understanding of Hitler does not just arise from his books. They are only one part of the answer. To understand someone, we must examine everything about him, including his texts and speeches, but equally importantly his actions and behavior.

Hitler proved repeatedly that his word could not be trusted. He broke treaties, and did whatever he felt was to his advantage to expand and grow more powerful.

His speeches hint to me that he was more driven to world domination than being satisfied with just eastern Europe. Eastern Europe was his more immediate goal, but based on my assessment of his megalomaniac personality, it would have only been a start.

Here’s a one liner from one of his speeches, which I think is more powerful than whole chapters of textbooks he could have written:

“Today Germany, tomorrow the world.”

And here is an interesting little article or two on one of Hitler’s “globes:”

http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/080698/fea_124-7093.shtml

http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/02/21/hitler.globe/

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Our culture is what it is because of Judeo-Christian morals.


I disagree. Christianity is a part of this culture, but it is definitely not its defining feature.

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The fact that you have chosen to live in our country indicates that you appreciate the results of that morality, whether you personally choose to accept it for yourself or not.


I have chosen to live in our country only so much as you have chosen to live in our country. This country is as much mine as it is yours.

I certainly do appreciate the morality and legal system of this country. But I do not attribute it to Christianity.

I could just as easily say that this is a secular government, and the fact that you have chosen to live in our country means that you appreciate the moral and legal system which has arisen from this secularism, whether you personally choose to accept it for yourself or not.

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Your second question is a good one. If the south had won, they would have continued slavery for an indefinite time after the war since their economic self interested supported that stance and would have pushed a Biblical interpretation which supported their position.


This illustrates one of my prior points. If anyone can push his own interpretation of the Bible in a valid way, even on an issue of morality such as slavery, then how useful is the bible really? How does it guide us? If it is so open to interpretation, what authority and claim to morality can it really assert?

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According to my understanding, if anyone knows everything which can be known, they would be omniscient. In the other hand, if there is more to know but because of my incapacity I don't know it, that would not be omniscient.


Perhaps you missed my point.

The point is this: If omniscience is defined by you as “everything which CAN be known,” how do you set the parameters for CAN? Can be known by whom? The entity which has the ability to be the most knowledgeable? If God does not exist, and that entity is man, and man one day reaches the limits of his discovery and knowledge, is he omniscient? I think not.

If you trim omniscience with the word CAN, then omniscience only becomes a relative term and completely loses its intended meaning.

Another problem I see with the concept of God’s “limited” omniscience is this. He created everything, so how can there be anything about anything which CANNOT be known to him?

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I find it interesting that an atheist would be concerned about my definition of God. If you really believe God doesn't exist, any arguments about God's attributes would be like arguing about the attributes of a unicorn. Logically, how can you possibly have any opinions about the subject?


I may not believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand your definition of God. I didn’t define him, but based on how the theists define him, I am able to discuss and examine the subject.

I also don’t believe in unicorns. But if someone told me what he believes is a unicorn and defines certain attributes about this unicorn, then I can also discuss the topic of unicorns with him so much as some things about the existence of a unicorn may be logical or illogical.

If that person told me that a unicorn is simply a horse with a single horn, I may think that a unicorn’s existence is highly improbable since there is no evidence for its existence, but I wouldn’t necessarily prove its existence to be illogical.

However, if that person told me that a unicorn is simultaneously a horse and a monkey with a horn, or is simultaneously black as well as white (but not a combination thereof), or that it simultaneously has the power to fly but can actually never fly, then I could show that such a unicorn’s existence is not only improbable but impossible.

And just because I don’t believe in this unicorn’s existence does not mean that I cannot have an opinion regarding the subject.

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Jehovah was a very approachable being who actually appeared to folks such as Abraham and Moses and talked to them.


Is it only surprising to me that God approached such people directly a few thousand years ago, yet decided not to approach any of us in the last two millennia? Again, the only way this makes sense is either that God never talked to anyone (because he doesn’t exist), or that he has decided to abandon us to ourselves. Given the alleged nature of God, the second possibility is also illogical.

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The God you are talking about is very similar to the Greek philosophical ideal where everything on earth was represented by a perfect model which never changed or moved. That is not the God one finds in the Bible.


Actually I am doing no such thing. I am only discussing God within the parameters set by the creators of God. I am only discussing God within the definitions of God set by the theists.

And even though the Greeks had certain “philosophical ideals,” the opposite is true when it came to their ancient religion. The ancient Greek Gods were actually very much fallible and humanistic in their limitations. They had super-human powers, but were still very limited in most aspects. They were subject to negative human emotions, selfishness, greed, and defeat. No God, not even Zeus, had absolute power or control. Although the Greek Gods were equally a myth as Yahweh, at least the Greeks kept their Gods at a level which did not necessarily deem them illogical; just improbable.

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This depends upon whether a free decision is knowable before it is made. Since I don't think it is possible, there is no contradiction.


Certainly if you believe in the same God that Judeo-Christians believe in, you cannot deny that such a God is capable of existing within the future and knowing the future. If he has knowledge of the future, such a God must know the results of our decisions.

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Why not? I'd rather live in a real world with real choices and real consequences than to live in the ideal world you are describing.


It is not I who is describing an ideal world without real consequences and choices. This “ideal” world without consequences is the logical result of those that describe God as “unconditional love.” All I have done is to show what is the result of a God with “unconditional love.” If that result is inconsistent with the “real world,” don’t judge my conclusions; judge the premise which led to those conclusions.

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I believe many people at the turn of the twentieth century thought science was going to solve all problems and I wish they had been correct. Unfortunately they were wrong. The Enlightenment which began with great hope but ended in bitterness.


To assume that science will solve ALL problems is erroneous. And the people that made such assumptions are the same people that are always looking for a magic bullet, who will always set themselves up for disappointment.

Despite those people, science itself has not been a disappointment. It has marched on with amazing speed and result. It has grown exponentially. And at this pace, it will solve many more problems. I see no bitterness.

But let’s face it. Science has done much more for man just in the last century than God ever did in the last two millennia.

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Until I hear a rational theory of morality without God, I'll continue to bring God into the discussion.


The theory of morality based on God has no basis on rationality.

You claim:
1. That religious morality is handed to us by a higher source: God

BUT

2. We lack the ability to understand God, and God’s word cannot really be known to us because the holy texts are the works of men.

So, there can be no claim to a “rational theory to morality” via God.

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Instincts aren't a satisfactory basis for morality.


Can’t they be so?

Instincts and intelligence are a satisfactory basis for our emotions. They are just as legitimate a basis for morality as anything else, if not more.

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To me, material such as this is a strong indication of the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible. It includes material such as this which is clearly a relic of an early stage of moral development. One can trace the gradual revelation of God's character as one studies through the Bible from earlier passages to later writings.


It is very difficult to dismiss the nature of God evident in the scriptures based on it being a “relic of an earlier stage of moral development.” Besides, the earlier moral stage of man is only reflected in man’s shortcomings in morality, not in God’s shortcomings. God was clearly not in an earlier moral development. The passages I delineated reflect God’s nature and deviation from “unconditional love.” They are not a reflection of man’s earlier moral stage.

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"Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you FEAR God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."

Genesis, 22:12

I understand the word "fear" in the Bible to indicate awe and respect rather than being afraid.


So, God told Abraham to withhold his initial decree to sacrifice his son because now he knows that Abraham fears him. Given your interpretation of the word fear in the bible, that Abraham awes and respects God. His awe and respect has caused God to cancel the demand for the sacrifice. Even if we accept your interpretation of “fear,” ( which is hard to fathom), we must consider the following:

You said in a previous post:

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If we believe that God is self contained and existed for an eternity before our existence, we will by necessity arrive at the conclusion that God is not a needy soul who needs to be praised and obeyed to be happy. God has no fragile ego which I will damage if I reject Him or even refuse to believe in Him.


If God is aloof to whether we respect him, believe in him, or hold him in awe, then it is illogical that he would tell Abraham “"Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you FEAR God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."

In that prior post you also said:

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God has no fragile ego which I will damage if I reject Him or even refuse to believe in Him. There is no selfish reason whatsoever for God to interact with His creation. It was a voluntary act, not driven by his need or weakness but by His love; to postulate otherwise would be to redefine God’s nature itself.


And:

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The only genuine love is unconditional love, any other love is counterfeit. If one believes God will love you if you follow the rules and will not love you if you disobey the rules you know He really doesn’t love you at all but is manipulating you and robbing you of your freedom.


However, we find the following in the scriptures:




1 Then God spoke all these words:
2 I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery.
3 Do not have other gods besides Me.
4 Do not make an idol for yourself, whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth. 5 You must not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the fathers' sin, to the third and fourth [generations] of those who hate Me, 6 but showing faithful love to a thousand [generations] of those who love Me and keep My commands.

Exodus 20: 1-6



19 If you ever forget the LORD your God and go after other gods to worship and bow down to them, I testify against you today that you will perish. 20 Like the nations the LORD is about to destroy before you, you will perish if you do not obey the LORD your God.

Deuteronomy 8: 19-20


13 "If you carefully obey My commands I am giving you today, to love the LORD your God and worship Him with all your heart and all your soul, 14 I will provide rain for your land in season, the early and late rains, and you will harvest your grain, new wine, and oil. 15 I will provide grass in your fields for your livestock. You will eat and be satisfied. 16 Be careful that you are not enticed to turn aside, worship, and bow down to other gods. 17 Then the LORD's anger will burn against you. He will close the sky, and there will be no rain; the land will not yield its produce, and you will perish quickly from the good land the LORD is giving you.

Deuteronomy 11: 13-17




It is very difficult for anyone to reconcile your notion of God with what is found in the holy texts of the theists.

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I do believe in the Devil.


Would you mind expanding on that?
Do you think of the devil as simply a fallen angel?
Or is he an antithesis of God, like an “evil God?”
What do you think are his powers and limitations?
What is the interaction (if any) between God and the devil?
What is the devil’s role in the existence of “evil?”
Is God powerless to act against the devil?
If not, why does he not vanquish him?
Do you think that the existence of the devil is necessary, and planned by God?

I ask these questions simply out of curiosity.

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Exactly where does the Catholic church have a "death war" on all homosexuals?


I never claimed that the church had a death war on homosexuals, and I don’t think the author was implying this either. Nonetheless, since the issue of homosexuality is raised, I would like to know your thoughts on the matter. Do you condemn or accept homosexuality and homosexuals?

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I'll quit here. I believe Jesus didn't write anything down because He knew his followers would commit idolatry with His words.


Here is the dilemma. If Jesus wrote nothing, and what others wrote about him cannot be fully trusted because of the authors’ individual fallacy, how can anyone claim to know Jesus or what Jesus was all about?

Your own understanding of Jesus, where does it come from? I doubt it comes from any direct communication with Jesus. It therefore comes from the written accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.

If those accounts are not to be trusted because they are written by other men, then your understanding of Jesus and belief in him is also undermined. If those accounts are to be trusted, as they would any historical document, then that leaves Jesus and Christianity open to close examination, scrutiny, and criticism.

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Here is my belief in Jesus.
Quote:
Isa 9:6-7
6 For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7 Of the increase of his government and peace
there will be no end.
He will reign on David's throne
and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the LORD Almighty
will accomplish this.
NIV


Thank you for this explanation. However, it doesn’t answer my question. Was Jesus a man, and therefore potentially fallible, or God, and therefore infallible?
_________________
I am Dariush the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries containing all kinds of men, King in this great earth far and wide, son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenian, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, having Aryan lineage

Naqshe Rostam
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Joined: 19 Feb 2004
Posts: 224

PostPosted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 1:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Visitor, I must say farewelll, this is my last post here at Activistchat, not because of anything you said, and I've very much enjoyed reading your thoughts on things, as well as the conversation.

If you are curious to know why this is, you can read my posts on the following thread.


Oppenheimer,

It has been nice to talk to you. Good luck.

I realize all Buddhists aren't atheists. However, I may have misunderstood your position. My point is that what ever your decision about God is doesn't affect me one way or the other. What I'm concerned about are those people who are working to destroy our culture, mainly the neoMarxists. Unfortunately some of these people are in main stream Christian churches and are trying to use their churches as platforms to promote antiSemitism.

I will try to answer AmirN later today since I finally have a break from work. The questions about Christian theology are good ones and will be interesting to answer. My answers, of course, reflect my own opinion since in a country with freedom of religion different people have the right to disagree and still consider themselves Christians.
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 2:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
I’m not trying to say that free will is necessarily unlimited. I’m only questioning your supposition that God gave us free will, which explains the existence of evil. If God is not acting to stop evil because he gave us free will and does not want to intervene, how is it that at some times he actually does intervene? Yet another inconsistency in the God theory.

Where is the inconsistency?


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The things I presented were not intended to provide a basis of morality. Morality does exist for me, but like I said, it exists independently. Morality for me does not necessarily have to be tied in with my love for my family, Iran, science, or history. It is another matter altogether, and also very important.

How do you base your morality?

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People who are truly moral will sometimes have to be willing to lose their family or their own lives if necessary.



I suppose there may be occasions which deem the loss of one’s own life or that of a loved one unavoidable. These occasions are few and far between. However, what I have a problem with is this:

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37"Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
Matthew, 10:37



Why would I love a stranger, Jesus, more than my own family? And why does he demand me to do so? Why am I “not worthy” if I have chosen to love most the people nearest and dearest to me? Only a selfish God would make such a demand.
For a Christian Jesus is not a stranger but a personal friend. This statement by Jesus only makes sense if Jesus is alive and in Heaven as our Lord. As a corpse, no one could possibly love Him more than living people. Ultimately, this is a call for the universal brotherhood of all mankind based on our love for God which extends our love to everyone. Jesus is calling us to love our families more not less which demands a moral commitment which is supreme. If our commitment go our family or clan supercedes our commitment to humanity, we can not function at the highest levels of morality.

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In Muslim lands Christians are often tortured, killed or disowned if they convert to Christianity. I don't know if I have the strength to endure what some of our Christian people have had to endure in the Muslim lands, but I pray God will give me the strength if the need ever arises.



That day will never come, I assure you. But if that hypothetical day arises that you would have to endure hardships for your faith, I know you WOULD have that strength. And don’t be surprised if an atheist or two joins you in your stance to freely exercise your religion. For even though the atheist/materialist/secularist does not share your faith, he shares your need to be free to practice it without persecution.


Excellent thoughts! Unfortunately many of our Christian brothers in Africa have been killed right now this week over the cartoon frenzy. When they die, it is as if our own family members have died. This commitment to freedom and truth even if it costs our lives is what Jesus was talking about. I appreciate your commitment to freedom and know you would be there just as you say. However, the question is can materialists and atheists protect or change the dynamics in places like Africa? I really don’t see how it will happen since people want to believe in God. If they don’t have a positive religious experience they will be vulnerable to the extremists.

I believe you and the Iranians have chosen atheism for the right reasons since religion as you have experienced it has been destructive. A step from fanatical extremism is a step towards God’s love. Many atheists in the West have known about God’s love and have stepped away because they don’t want to pay the cost which following a perfect God entails.

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Hitler Was a Christian


Regardless, I don’t wish to make this article into a huge debate topic between us by responding and re-responding to the specific criticisms. It is not that important to me, and it would be a waist of time.

...As you point out (and I am well aware), Hitler conveys some very strong anti-Christian sentiments in Mein Kampf. As is pointed out by others, he also conveys many points which embrace Christianity in Mein Kampf as well as elsewhere. This seems contradictory. And yet, it is not necessarily contradictory if we consider Hitler’s true nature and motivation.

I’ll tell you my own interpretation of Hitler in relation to Christianity. I think that he was neither a Christian nor completely anti-Christian. I don’t think religion was his main motivator. His main motivations were ambition, power, domination, hate, and totalitarianism.

It was neither Christianity nor anti-Christianity which drove him. He therefore did not feel compelled to stay true to either. He only used each idea as it pertained to his ultimate quest. That is just my personal interpretation, and the only way I can make sense of Hitler as a whole.

That Hitler was not a Christian in any traditional sense is easily proven so as you say, it is a waste of time to debate it. I also agree that Hitler was motivated by ambition, power etc. which is exactly what Nietzsche believed and taught was the ultimate good. According to Nietzsche the Christian morality which placed limits on the individual ambition and brutality was an illness which Nietzsche proposed to heal. Nietzsche wanted to release the blonde beast. This type of attack on the Christian morality and the institutions which civilized young men succeeded much better than Nietzsche ever imagined. Of course Nietzsche was just one of a number of European philosophers who indulged in the same attacks against European culture. However we know Hitler thought very highly of Nietzsche.

Hitler understood human psychology well enough to know that people need an ideology to motivate and bind them together. For people who had left the love of God, the hatred for the Jews and racism served as an ideological foundation for the Nazi movement. My point isn’t that anti-Christian secularism gave him the motivation, since greed, lust for power and bigotry came natural to him, but that it did break down the moral and cultural barriers which could have held back Germany from the abyss. It is the job of moral systems such as Judeo-Christianity to take the normal aggressive selfish impulses and the desire for meaning in life and redirect them into positive directions. Ultimately the Christian love is the antidote to narcissism. When these cultural edifices which were constructed to control this type of behavior were broken down, the result was disaster.
I don’t accept my position is extreme since it is well documented, the anti-Christian forces in European society contributed to the vulnerability of the German nation to political extremism and ultimately the Nazis.

As you know well, Christian societies have done wrong many times so I’m not making the point from a position of perfection. My own country is far from spotless, life is messy particularly when there are large groups of people involved and like all humans we make mistakes. However, we have a standard of morality against which to measure our behavior and make corrections when necessary.

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The moral path is love. God's appeal to humanity is not force or threats of violence but a demonstration of His unconditional love. You can not induce people to love you by appealing to selfish motives. Whether we chose to love Him in return is up to us and our free will. Any actions such as keeping a holy day, fasting, paying alms etc. are not genuine holiness unless motivated only by love.



Really?



9GOD said to Moses, "I look at this people--oh! what a stubborn, hard-headed people! 10Let me alone now, give my ANGER free reign to burst into flames and incinerate them. But I'll make a great nation out of you."
11Moses tried to calm his GOD down. He said, "Why, GOD, would you lose your temper with your people? Why, you brought them out of Egypt in a tremendous demonstration of power and strength. 12Why let the Egyptians say, "He had it in for them--he brought them out so he could kill them in the mountains, wipe them right off the face of the Earth.' Stop your anger. Think twice about bringing evil against your people! 13Think of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants to whom you gave your word, telling them "I will give you many children, as many as the stars in the sky, and I'll give this land to your children as their land forever.'"
14And GOD did think twice. He decided not to do the evil he had THREATENED against his people.

Exodus 32: 9-14

6GOD was hard on the citizens of Ashdod. He devastated them by hitting them with tumors. This happened in both the town and the surrounding neighborhoods. He let loose rats among them. Jumping from ships there, rats swarmed all over the city! And everyone was deathly afraid.
7When the leaders of Ashdod saw what was going on, they decided, "The chest of the god of Israel has got to go. We can't handle this, and neither can our god Dagon." 8They called together all the Philistine leaders and put it to them: "How can we get rid of the chest of the god of Israel?"
The leaders agreed: "Move it to Gath." So they moved the Chest of the God of Israel to Gath.
9But as soon as they moved it there, GOD came down hard on that city, too. It was mass hysteria! He hit them with tumors. Tumors broke out on everyone in town, young and old.
10So they sent the Chest of God on to Ekron, but as the Chest was being brought into town, the people shouted in protest, "You'll kill us all by bringing in this Chest of the God of Israel!" 11They called the Philistine leaders together and demanded, "Get it out of here, this Chest of the God of Israel. Send it back where it came from. We're threatened with mass death!" For everyone was scared to death when the Chest of God showed up. God was already coming down very hard on the place. 12Those who didn't die were hit with tumors. All over the city cries of pain and lament filled the air.
1 Samuel 5: 6-12

4Help us again, God of our help;
don't hold a grudge against us forever.
5You aren't going to keep this up, are you?
scowling and angry, year after year?
6Why not help us make a fresh start--a resurrection life?
Then your people will laugh and sing!

Psalm 85: 4-6

1At the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, this Message came from GOD to Jeremiah:
2"GOD's Message: Stand in the court of GOD's Temple and preach to the people who come from all over Judah to worship in GOD's Temple. Say everything I tell you to say to them. Don't hold anything back. 3Just maybe they'll listen and turn back from their bad lives. Then I'll reconsider the disaster that I'm planning to bring on them because of their evil behavior.
4"Say to them, "This is GOD's Message: If you refuse to listen to me and live by my teaching that I've revealed so plainly to you, 5and if you continue to refuse to listen to my servants the prophets that I tirelessly keep on sending to you--but you've never listened! Why would you start now? 6-then I'll make this Temple a pile of ruins like Shiloh, and I'll make this city nothing but a bad joke worldwide.'"

Jeremiah 26: 1-6

1Then the Word of GOD came to me: 2"Son of man, now turn and face the mountains of Israel and preach against them 3: "O Mountains of Israel, listen to the Message of GOD, the Master. GOD, the Master, speaks to the mountains and hills, to the ravines and the valleys: I'm about to destroy your sacred god and goddess shrines. 4I'll level your altars, bust up your sun-god pillars, and kill your people as they bow down to your no-god idols. 5I'll stack the dead bodies of Israelites in front of your idols and then scatter your bones around your shrines. 6Every place where you've lived, the towns will be torn down and the pagan shrines demolished--altars busted up, idols smashed, all your custom-made sun-god pillars in ruins. 7Corpses everywhere you look! Then you'll know that I am GOD.
8""But I'll let a few escape the killing as you are scattered through other lands and nations. 9In the foreign countries where they're taken as prisoners of war, they'll remember me. They'll realize how devastated I was by their betrayals, by their voracious lust for gratifying themselves in their idolatries. They'll be disgusted with their evil ways, disgusting to God in the way they've lived. 10They'll know that I am GOD. They'll know that my judgment against them was no empty threat.
11""This is what GOD, the Master, says: Clap your hands, stamp your feet, yell out, "No, no, no!" because of all the evil obscenities rife in Israel. They're going to be killed, dying of hunger, dying of disease-- 12death everywhere you look, people dropping like flies, people far away dying, people nearby dying, and whoever's left in the city starving to death. Why? Because I'm angry, furiously angry. 13They'll realize that I am GOD when they see their people's corpses strewn over and around all their ruined sex-and-religion shrines on the bare hills and in the lush fertility groves, in all the places where they indulged their sensual rites. 14I'll bring my hand down hard on them, demolish the country wherever they live, turn it into wasteland from one end to the other, from the wilderness to Riblah. Then they'll know that I am GOD!'"

Ezekiel 6: 1-14




Shall I continue, or is the theme clear?

I see…God’s appeal to humanity is never by force or THREATS OF VIOLENCE, only by his unconditional love.

How anyone can claim that this God is offering us unconditional love is quite bewildering.


The moral principle I have iterated is rock solid; threats of violence will not induce people to love but will only induce fear and violence in return. In studying abused children we find that the abused often become abusers. That is exactly what we see today happening in those conservattive Islamic countries where people are not taught about God’s love. People can not be more moral than their God, so if God’s love is not understood, the people who are the most religious will be the most cruel and selfish. Ironically, because they don’t understand God’s love, they think they are holders of superior righteousness while missing the basic principles upon which righteousness is built. A proper understanding of God’s love is foundational for morality.

It appears the nation of Israel’s understanding of God’s love was rudimentary when those statements were made. One of the basic principles of Biblical exegesis which I have learned is to recognize that enlightenment came gradually over many generations. God gradually led the people step by step towards enlightenment. These steps are anchored by successive covenants each representing a new milestone in God’s revelation of truth. At each stage there is evidence that there is more truth to come. Because of His supreme love God works with us where we are as He gradually leads us towards His perfect truth.


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Not at all. It is impossible to truly love God and not love your neighbor. As the text I quoted says, by accepting God's salvation, He places His love in our hearts. If we don't love other people, that shows a weakness in our love for God.


So according to Christianity, you are saying salvation is offered by love: love of God, which also translated to love of others. Whom should we love? According to the edict of Christianity, unconditional love means we must love everyone, equally, and without judgment.

So, do you love Hitler? If not, why not? If not, have you not failed God by not loving Hitler?


Jesus said:
Matt 5:44-48
44 But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
NIV
When He was crucified this is how He acted:
Luke 23:32-34
32 Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. 33 When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals-one on his right, the other on his left. 34 Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.
NIV
In other words, Jesus wouldn’t allow those who committed such crimes to change Him.

No Christian will claim to love as Jesus did, however Jesus has given us the standard by which to measure our own behavior. No, I make no such claims to love tyrants like God does, but this is the example of how we are supposed to view those who commit crimes against us. Be quick to forgive, try to see the best in other people and slow to judge others.



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The understanding of God's unconditional love and His commitment to our freedom gives us a foundation for morality which the secularists lack.


Why? How?

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What if your secular cultural elites are named Marx, or Stalin, or Hitler?



And what if your religious elites are named Tomás de Torquemada, Pope Alexander VI, Ayatollah Khomeini, David Koresh, or Pat Robertson?

How are these religious elites more righteous than the cultural elites?


This is why we should not follow cultural elites whether they are religious men or secular. The understanding of the good God transcends cultural elites or the will of the majority to provide each a moral compass to provide moral guidance. This understanding of God is the foundation of the universal human rights charter which was proposed by the United States and adopted by the United Nations. However, universal rights are only valid if they are based on a sound philosophical foundation. If they are just a matter of opinion, they are open to change and interpretation or complete repudiation. In fact, I understand there is a competing group of fundamental human rights which the Muslim leaders have proposed to accomodate Sharia law.



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There will be good men mixed in with the evil men before we the people recognize them as such. As I said, it is the duty and responsibility of the people to identify and weed out the evil ones. It is our duty to oppose those who oppose righteousness. As I said before, unfortunately this system will not always be perfect, and the works of evil men will continue. But what are the options? Cultural elitism versus religious elitism. Again, I’ll take my chances with the cultural elites, but will not follow them blindly.

Here are a few interesting quotes I have come across regarding religion and politics:


"All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher."
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."
- Seneca
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."
- Aristotle, Politics.


I don’t care for much of what Aristotle said, but this one is right on the money.


Plato and Aristotle were both theists. Here is a description of Aristotle’s God and his view of the world. The early church largely adopted Aristotle’s views about God as the unmoved mover to a great extent which was different from the Hebrew understanding of God.
http://www.faithnet.org.uk/Philosophy/aristotle.htm

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If you don't understand something you don't believe it? Do you believe the universe exists? Do you understand it? To me, the idea that we could understand everything God does with the limited knowledge of eternity we have is illogical.



I never claimed that I don’t believe in God because I don’t understand him. What I’m saying is that from what I do understand, he is contradictory to himself and acts and exists in an illogical fashion.

Notice that the last word of your sentence was “illogical.” It means you wish to portray your thoughts in a manner consistent with logic and reason, and you expect others to do so as well. The fact that you and I have engaged in these discussions and have both attempted to communicate using reason and logic attests that these are prerequisites to a firm argument. If we are not appealing to each other’s logic, why bother even to have a discussion? If we are to not make deductions based on logic, what do we have left? Only pure faith.

If you deny that we can and should provoke logic to examine the nature of things, including God, there really is no point to having any discussion. There has to be a basic ground rule to any discussion, and that is logic. Without logic, we could both just ramble random words which make no sense, and each make our own final conclusion, which also makes no sense.

So it is my intent to examine and discuss God based on logic. If you claim that God is beyond logic, then we are all at a loss, and any discussion on God becomes meaningless, and we must each just stick to our own faith and belief.


I believe in logic and reason, but not knowing all the answers why God has done things is not a matter of logic. We understand much about God but not everything.

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There is enough we know about God already…

Exactly my point. I don’t need to understand God in his entirety to examine some specific aspects about him. I know enough about him to know that his existence is illogical and his actions contradictory.
That is a matter of opinion. You say things are illogical but it appears it is a matter of personal choice rather than logic.

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Hardly. What they couldn't have known is how this verse would be literally fulfilled. Israel was chosen to bless the world, not for selfish aggrandizement.



Israel was CHOSEN to bless the world. No matter what, this seems like preferential treatment to me. Why choose one group of people over another to carry out the blessing? Especially since having been chosen as the ones to do the “blessing” carries certain fringe benefits, such as the deed to certain real estate. This God was supposed to love us all equally. Why would he give preferential treatment to any one group?

Furthermore, consider the consequences of CHOSING the Israelites. By having chosen the Israelites, he has shown preferential treatment to a particular RACE. You said before that all men are equal in the eyes of God, and that belief in God allows us to surpass the shortcomings of race. How could that be, if God has CHOSEN a specific race to become his chosen people?

Consider the following:



1"When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are about to enter and occupy, he will clear away many nations ahead of you: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. These seven nations are all more powerful than you. 2When the LORD your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy. 3Do not intermarry with them, and don't let your daughters and sons marry their sons and daughters. 4They will lead your young people away from me to worship other gods. Then the anger of the LORD will burn against you, and he will destroy you. 5Instead, you must break down their pagan altars and shatter their sacred pillars. Cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols. 6For you are a holy people, who belong to the LORD your God. Of all the people on earth, the LORD your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure.
7"The LORD did not choose you and lavish his love on you because you were larger or greater than other nations, for you were the smallest of all nations! 8It was simply because the LORD loves you, and because he was keeping the oath he had sworn to your ancestors. That is why the LORD rescued you with such amazing power from your slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt. 9Understand, therefore, that the LORD your God is indeed God. He is the faithful God who keeps his covenant for a thousand generations and constantly loves those who love him and obey his commands. 10But he does not hesitate to punish and destroy those who hate him. 11Therefore, obey all these commands, laws, and regulations I am giving you today.
12"If you listen to these regulations and obey them faithfully, the LORD your God will keep his covenant of unfailing love with you, as he solemnly promised your ancestors. 13He will love you and bless you and make you into a great nation. He will give you many children and give fertility to your land and your animals. When you arrive in the land he swore to give your ancestors, you will have large crops of grain, grapes, and olives, and great herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. 14You will be blessed above all the nations of the earth. None of your men or women will be childless, and all your livestock will bear young. 15And the LORD will protect you from all sickness. He will not let you suffer from the terrible diseases you knew in Egypt, but he will bring them all on your enemies!
16"You must destroy all the nations the LORD your God hands over to you. Show them no mercy and do not worship their gods. If you do, they will trap you. 17Perhaps you will think to yourselves, `How can we ever conquer these nations that are so much more powerful than we are?' 18But don't be afraid of them! Just remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh and to all the land of Egypt. 19Remember the great terrors the LORD your God sent against them. You saw it all with your own eyes! And remember the miraculous signs and wonders, and the amazing power he used when he brought you out of Egypt. The LORD your God will use this same power against the people you fear. 20And then the LORD your God will send hornets to drive out the few survivors still hiding from you!
21"No, do not be afraid of those nations, for the LORD your God is among you, and he is a great and awesome God. 22The LORD your God will drive those nations out ahead of you little by little. You will not clear them away all at once, for if you did, the wild animals would multiply too quickly for you. 23But the LORD your God will hand them over to you. He will throw them into complete confusion until they are destroyed. 24He will put their kings in your power, and you will erase their names from the face of the earth. No one will be able to stand against you, and you will destroy them all.

Deuteronomy 7: 1-24




So, are all men equal before God? One cannot possibly make such a deduction according to these passages. Lines 1 through 6 actually point to the complete opposite. The way God is instigating the Israelites to rise and destroy the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites has a familiar ring to it. Where have I heard a similar theme before? It sounds a lot like the ramblings of a certain German madman from the 30’s.

God is saying:

“These seven nations are all more powerful than you. 2When the LORD your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy. 3Do not intermarry with them, and don't let your daughters and sons marry their sons and daughters. 4They will lead your young people away from me to worship other gods….
… you will erase their names from the face of the earth. No one will be able to stand against you, and you will destroy them all.”


Did the Nazis not make similar demands? If this is not a call by God for genocide, then I don’t know what is.

A few key words here are unavoidable:

conquer….
destroy…
show no mercy….
do not intermarry….
anger….
burn….
keeping the oath….
chosen….
punish and destroy…
obey…
bring diseases on your enemies….
terrors….

God also says “Of all the people on earth, the LORD your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure.”
Did Hitler not make similar outrageous remarks? Except that he held the Germans to be the “special race,” not the Jews.

Is this the God that promotes equality of all men? The God that is blind to race and color? Is this the same God that offers unconditional love?

Are we really discussing the same God here? Something definitely doesn’t make sense here.


There are several points here:
1. Was God’s choice of Israel a breech of His unconditional love for the rest of humanity? Since the Israelites were chosen to be a blessing to the rest of mankind this hardly seems to be a problem. To use different groups in different ways isn’t an unloving act.
2. Was this racist? Only if other races were excluded from God’s love. At the time the nation of Israel was chosen, tribalism was the norm, so God began working with them where they were. With the New Covenant, this emphasis on tribal identity was replaced by individual standing before God.
3. Does this sound like genocide? Based on the available records, It certainly sounds that way to me, but we don’t have the full story so it is hard to say for sure what happened. These record in the Bible was written by the Israelites who gloried in the destruction of their enemies and emphasized the violence whereas many archeologists, who are also fallible, believe there was much less destruction than we had previously believed. Once again despite the glorification of violence, there are clues that God didn’t want the Israelites to engage in wholesale slaughter in which they seemed to delight. The following passage indicates they were supposed to live on property which had been abandoned because of ecological disasters rather than because they had killed all the people.
Ex 23:27-30
27 "I will send my terror ahead of you and throw into confusion every nation you encounter. I will make all your enemies turn their backs and run. 28 I will send the hornet ahead of you to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way. 29 But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you. 30 Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.
NIV

Later we find God actually fulfilled His promise.
Josh 24:11-13
11 "'Then you crossed the Jordan and came to Jericho. The citizens of Jericho fought against you, as did also the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites and Jebusites, but I gave them into your hands. 12 I sent the hornet ahead of you, which drove them out before you-also the two Amorite kings. You did not do it with your own sword and bow. 13 So I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build; and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.'
NIV

In other words, the battles were real and were largely defensive in nature. The reason the Israelites occupied the land which they did was because it was largely empty, a fact which I believe most archaeologists now accept. It appears, the Israelites occupied the hill country because it had largely been abandoned by other groups since farming was easier in the plains. The Israelites then, just as the Jews today, had the ability to make the waste places bloom. On the other hand, the heroic battles were what the people loved to discuss endlessly. If we had the Canaanites perspective things would probably look different; in fact some archeologists think we do have the Cannanites’ perspective since the Israelites themselves were a tribe of Canaanites.

Ironically, the major reason we know and care about the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites and Jebusites is from the Bible. In other words, rather than blotting out their memory from history, the Jews actually preserved them!

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Genocide is not about "God teaching people a lesson" as if God had committed the act. It is about people using their freedom to kill other people. People are slow learners.



Even if God didn’t commit genocide himself (although he sure seems to promote it from time to time), the fact that he allows men to commit it is testimony to his nature. That he deems the lesson learned about the undesirable nature of genocide more important than preventing genocide from occurring is also testimony to his nature, especially since this lesson is yet to be learned after thousands of years.

It is through an understanding of the good God that we have come to understand the evils of genocide. So far as your argument that God is responsible for genocide because He permits it doesn’t ring true. Experience can be a hard teacher, but it is the best way we can learn.

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Human suffering is of two types
1. Suffering caused by nature, illness, old age etc. This type of suffering can be largely relieved by science and medicine.
2. Suffering caused by human evil or ignorance. This is the type of suffering which is amenable to moral learning and education.
It is by living in a real world with real consequences and real joy and real suffering that we can experience life to the fullest and mature spiritually.




The suffering caused by nature, old age, etc is partially amenable to relief by science and medicine, but at least in the present, it is still mostly not amenable to science. We still have no protection against hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc.

Are you saying that if evil and suffering did not exist, we could not enjoy life or experience it to the fullest? So then evil is a necessary requirement to a life fulfilled?

If so, why is God so busy trying to warn us against evil, and wants us to denounce evil and push it out of our lives? If God is successful and we steer clear of evil, don’t our lives become less fulfilling?
Stated plainly, God created (or allowed the existence of evil) so that our lives would be better fulfilled, yet his primary goal for us is to avoid the evil, which consequently deprives from our fulfillment.

This makes no sense, and we are again sent down a spiral of contradiction.


Personally, I find living in this world to be a cause of great joy and am thankful that God has created it. If you live in God’s love, the pain and sorrows in this life are understood to be stepping stones to a brighter future and a deeper spiritual understanding. Although he was frequently persecuted and tortured, Paul had this understanding:
Rom 8:28
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
NIV
This doen't mean we should commit evil so God can turn it into good since that would place us in the category of the evil one and would block the blessings which come to those who do good. It is by confronting evil and hardship that we mature spiritually.

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In "pledge week" people are put through senseless abuse which teaches them nothing except that people can be dumb. Life on this earth is more like a strenuous college course with lab where people can learn lessons and then apply them in experiments.



You say “pledge week” is senseless abuse, which teaches them nothing. So is abuse that results in a “lesson learned” justifiable? Suppose an adult takes a child’s hand and forces it into a flame, burning his young flesh. The child probably learns that contact with an open flame should be avoided. Is that adult justified, because an important lesson was learned by the child? Is it less senseless because it teaches the child something?

Your example wouldn’t teach the child love, so it would be counterproductive.


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I can quote Hitler from HITLER'S TABLE TALK if you wish to support my statement. Hitler stated exactly what his goals were, and they were quite modest. He wanted to expand German territory eastward and colonize the slaves and keep them as surfs under German domination. He admired Americans and British greatly who were largely Germanic tribes. I know of no material which indicates the Nazis had designs on America, do you have anything to support that position?



My understanding of Hitler does not just arise from his books. They are only one part of the answer. To understand someone, we must examine everything about him, including his texts and speeches, but equally importantly his actions and behavior.

Hitler proved repeatedly that his word could not be trusted. He broke treaties, and did whatever he felt was to his advantage to expand and grow more powerful.

His speeches hint to me that he was more driven to world domination than being satisfied with just eastern Europe. Eastern Europe was his more immediate goal, but based on my assessment of his megalomaniac personality, it would have only been a start.

Here’s a one liner from one of his speeches, which I think is more powerful than whole chapters of textbooks he could have written:

“Today Germany, tomorrow the world.”

And here is an interesting little article or two on one of Hitler’s “globes:”

http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/080698/fea_124-7093.shtml

http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/02/21/hitler.globe/


Hitler’s Table Talk is probably among the most accurate insight into his thinking available since it was recorded by his permission by a trusted aid while talking to his closest confidants. Mein Kampf was propaganda produced before Hitler seized power, so he naturally tried to avoid his severe anti-Christian bigotry which might hurt him politically, whereas in this the Table Talk he was at the peak of his power among people who already reverenced him as his closest friends and sycophants. Under those circumstances Hitler would have little reason to lie and would be expected to be as candid as could be possible for a man of his personality. Hitler clearly realized his mortality by that time and didn’t have illusions of conquering the world. Hitler apparently found Chamberlain to be to his liking and actually believed the war with Britain could have been avoided if Chamberlain had remained in office. Once the US joined the war his goal was to win and assert power over his enemies which would explain the globes you linked to.

However, on closer thought, my point is so obvious it is hard to miss even if we ignore Hitler’s discussions of his goals in Table Talk. Since he had allies in Italy and Japan who he respected greatly and Arab allies in the Middle East who were eager to cooperate with him, world domination by one country was out of the question. If he had really wanted to rule the world, he would have had to overthrow his allies or otherwise subjugate them, an eventuality for which there is absolutely no evidence at all. The thought that the Japanese or Italian fascists were patsies of the Nazis is completely unrealistic. What Hitler had was an alliance which wanted their place in the sun, their own empire similar to what the British had amassed.

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Our culture is what it is because of Judeo-Christian morals.

I disagree. Christianity is a part of this culture, but it is definitely not its defining feature.


Exactly what do you consider it’s defining feature? Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto? Religion has a much more defining role in culture than you are willing to admit. Because Americans have traditionally been some of the more religious people in the world, religion would have had even a greater impact than usual.

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The fact that you have chosen to live in our country indicates that you appreciate the results of that morality, whether you personally choose to accept it for yourself or not.


I have chosen to live in our country only so much as you have chosen to live in our country. This country is as much mine as it is yours.

I certainly do appreciate the morality and legal system of this country. But I do not attribute it to Christianity.

I could just as easily say that this is a secular government, and the fact that you have chosen to live in our country means that you appreciate the moral and legal system which has arisen from this secularism, whether you personally choose to accept it for yourself or not.


My statement is based on the assumption that you are an immigrant which means you have made a choice to live here rather than in other places such as France, England, Japan, China, India or Saudi Arabia. Of course if you are not an immigrant, that assumption could be wrong. My ancestors also made the choice to live here long ago.

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Your second question is a good one. If the south had won, they would have continued slavery for an indefinite time after the war since their economic self interested supported that stance and would have pushed a Biblical interpretation which supported their position.



This illustrates one of my prior points. If anyone can push his own interpretation of the Bible in a valid way, even on an issue of morality such as slavery, then how useful is the bible really? How does it guide us? If it is so open to interpretation, what authority and claim to morality can it really assert?


Freedom to interpret the Bible for oneself has been very valuable in advancing Western civilization. It is called “the priesthood of all believers” and is a basic principle in Protestantism and is a key principle in developing individual liberty. Since there are no universal authorities in Protestant Christianity truth is learned and harmony achieved study and debates or discussions in which different views are explored rather than by fiat by the elite. Most Protestants with whom I have talked are united on an understanding of God’s love although many or possibly most might answer some questions differently than I have. Although people will vary in many areas, the concept of the good God of love which I have described is a fundamental principle which underlies standard interpretations of the Bible. Most people will deny that Christianity has been advanced strongly by these reforms. Also, as I have pointed out, the concept of the good God is foundational to Western Civilization and is one of the distinctive understandings which separates us from Islamic society for example and forms the basis of our laws and civilization.


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According to my understanding, if anyone knows everything which can be known, they would be omniscient. In the other hand, if there is more to know but because of my incapacity I don't know it, that would not be omniscient.



Perhaps you missed my point.

The point is this: If omniscience is defined by you as “everything which CAN be known,” how do you set the parameters for CAN? Can be known by whom? The entity which has the ability to be the most knowledgeable? If God does not exist, and that entity is man, and man one day reaches the limits of his discovery and knowledge, is he omniscient? I think not.

If you trim omniscience with the word CAN, then omniscience only becomes a relative term and completely loses its intended meaning.

Another problem I see with the concept of God’s “limited” omniscience is this. He created everything, so how can there be anything about anything which CANNOT be known to him?


By giving us freedom of choice, God has also given us the power to create. God is the first cause of the universe, but when we make a free decision we become the first cause for an entirely new chain of cause and effect. By my definition, what God knows is all that CAN be known, so I fail to see the problem. The answer is contained in my definition.

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I find it interesting that an atheist would be concerned about my definition of God. If you really believe God doesn't exist, any arguments about God's attributes would be like arguing about the attributes of a unicorn. Logically, how can you possibly have any opinions about the subject?



I may not believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand your definition of God. I didn’t define him, but based on how the theists define him, I am able to discuss and examine the subject.


However, if that person told me that a unicorn is simultaneously a horse and a monkey with a horn, or is simultaneously black as well as white (but not a combination thereof), or that it simultaneously has the power to fly but can actually never fly, then I could show that such a unicorn’s existence is not only improbable but impossible.

And just because I don’t believe in this unicorn’s existence does not mean that I cannot have an opinion regarding the subject.


To me, it appears that my definition of God is not self contradictory, but seems to differ from what you think a definition of God should include. That was what I was pointing out. If I say I believe in unicorns and define them, my definition may differ from the description of unicorns your learned as a child, but if they are really imaginary to begin with, there is no basis to challenge my definition. If they are real as I believe they are, it is just possible my description may be more accurate than the one you originally learned. Indeed, I’m willing to wager my eternal life on it.




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Jehovah was a very approachable being who actually appeared to folks such as Abraham and Moses and talked to them.



Is it only surprising to me that God approached such people directly a few thousand years ago, yet decided not to approach any of us in the last two millennia? Again, the only way this makes sense is either that God never talked to anyone (because he doesn’t exist), or that he has decided to abandon us to ourselves. Given the alleged nature of God, the second possibility is also illogical.


It is my understanding that there are still people who have experiences with the supernatural in a material way today. In addition, Christians also believe each of us can communicate with God directly through the Holy Spirit if we are open to His teachings.

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The God you are talking about is very similar to the Greek philosophical ideal where everything on earth was represented by a perfect model which never changed or moved. That is not the God one finds in the Bible.



Actually I am doing no such thing. I am only discussing God within the parameters set by the creators of God. I am only discussing God within the definitions of God set by the theists.

And even though the Greeks had certain “philosophical ideals,” the opposite is true when it came to their ancient religion. The ancient Greek Gods were actually very much fallible and humanistic in their limitations. They had super-human powers, but were still very limited in most aspects. They were subject to negative human emotions, selfishness, greed, and defeat. No God, not even Zeus, had absolute power or control. Although the Greek Gods were equally a myth as Yahweh, at least the Greeks kept their Gods at a level which did not necessarily deem them illogical; just improbable
.

The Greek Gods on Olympus were indeed very human, but this wasn’t the God of the philosophers. In discussing reality Plato an early Greek philosopher developed the concept of the ideal for each object which was unmoveable and unchangeable while the world we observe was illusionary because they changed and moved. I believe Zeno’s paradox may have had much to do with this idea.

The Medieval church united Christianity with Greek science and philosophy to such an extent, their description of God is very similar to the Greek philosophical ideal. To my mind the God they described can’t learn, can’t think, can’t move and can’t love since by their definition those things would indicate imperfection just as you pointed out. In other words, I can’t accept definition of God adopted by the early church which was in reality the Greek ideal of the perfect. Incidentally it was also Greek science which formed the church’s cosmology. It is this ancient ideal of perfection which I can’t relate to, since I believe in a personal God. Here is a link to Aristotle’s thinking about God:
http://www.faithnet.org.uk/Philosophy/aristotle.htm

I wasn’t saying you personally made up that definition since that would be nonsense, but that Greek ideal seems to be the idea which you seemed to be discussing. I just don’t relate to that type of God.

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This depends upon whether a free decision is knowable before it is made. Since I don't think it is possible, there is no contradiction.



Certainly if you believe in the same God that Judeo-Christians believe in, you cannot deny that such a God is capable of existing within the future and knowing the future. If he has knowledge of the future, such a God must know the results of our decisions.


I can’t disprove the validity of your statement, but it is not how I understand God. Since God is infinite and I’m not, it would be absurd for me to claim my understanding is a completely description of God. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no reason to think my idea is completely wrong either.

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Why not? I'd rather live in a real world with real choices and real consequences than to live in the ideal world you are describing.



It is not I who is describing an ideal world without real consequences and choices. This “ideal” world without consequences is the logical result of those that describe God as “unconditional love.” All I have done is to show what is the result of a God with “unconditional love.” If that result is inconsistent with the “real world,” don’t judge my conclusions; judge the premise which led to those conclusions.


I don’t see the connection between unconditional love and your argument. Why should a God who loves us unconditionally create a world which has no consequences. Wouldn’t that be a very boring world, almost the way some people define hell? It reminds me of a movie where a boy had to repeat the same day over and over again until he had actually gotten it right knowing full well that any mistakes he made would be wiped out the next morning.

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I believe many people at the turn of the twentieth century thought science was going to solve all problems and I wish they had been correct. Unfortunately they were wrong. The Enlightenment which began with great hope but ended in bitterness.



To assume that science will solve ALL problems is erroneous. And the people that made such assumptions are the same people that are always looking for a magic bullet, who will always set themselves up for disappointment.

Despite those people, science itself has not been a disappointment. It has marched on with amazing speed and result. It has grown exponentially. And at this pace, it will solve many more problems. I see no bitterness.

But let’s face it. Science has done much more for man just in the last century than God ever did in the last two millennia.


Unfortunately, many moderns have decided that science defines all reality. They have even tried to define morality according to science which is simply Darwin’s “idea of the survival of the fittest.” Many of these ideas of materialism and determinism were formulated before relativity and quantum mechanics were discovered, but still dominate the thinking of many anti-Christian secularists. It is this fundamental error which is so dangerous in a day when religious and political fanatics may soon have the atomic bomb.

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Until I hear a rational theory of morality without God, I'll continue to bring God into the discussion.



The theory of morality based on God has no basis on rationality.

You claim: 1. That religious morality is handed to us by a higher source: God

BUT

2. We lack the ability to understand God, and God’s word cannot really be known to us because the holy texts are the works of men.

So, there can be no claim to a “rational theory to morality” via God.


I agree with number 1. Number two is not completely correct. We do lack the ability to understand God completely, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything about God. We can know a great deal.
The holy texts are indeed the works of men, but that doesn’t mean they are devoid of truth about God, they are still inspired . On the other hand, it does mean there is not the complete truth about God. Indeed, I believe human language is incapable of containing God’s exact thoughts. Also a I have pointed out, although I derived the understanding of the good God directly from the Bible, the concept of the good God is logical within itself.

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Instincts aren't a satisfactory basis for morality.



Can’t they be so?

Instincts and intelligence are a satisfactory basis for our emotions. They are just as legitimate a basis for morality as anything else, if not more.


If morality is based on instinct, there is no basis to form a logical morality. Each person would have their private morality depending on what is their instinct. For instance, if my instinct makes me like to rape women, that instinct by itself makes it right. Since no culture is superior to any other, there is no basis to say Islam with it’s violence is any less valid than Buddhism which is more peaceful.

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To me, material such as this is a strong indication of the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible. It includes material such as this which is clearly a relic of an early stage of moral development. One can trace the gradual revelation of God's character as one studies through the Bible from earlier passages to later writings.



It is very difficult to dismiss the nature of God evident in the scriptures based on it being a “relic of an earlier stage of moral development.” Besides, the earlier moral stage of man is only reflected in man’s shortcomings in morality, not in God’s shortcomings. God was clearly not in an earlier moral development. The passages I delineated reflect God’s nature and deviation from “unconditional love.” They are not a reflection of man’s earlier moral stage.


God deals with people where they are and leads them towards truth.

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"Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you FEAR God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."

Genesis, 22:12

I understand the word "fear" in the Bible to indicate awe and respect rather than being afraid.



So, God told Abraham to withhold his initial decree to sacrifice his son because now he knows that Abraham fears him. Given your interpretation of the word fear in the bible, that Abraham awes and respects God. His awe and respect has caused God to cancel the demand for the sacrifice. Even if we accept your interpretation of “fear,” ( which is hard to fathom), we must consider the following:

You said in a previous post:

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If we believe that God is self contained and existed for an eternity before our existence, we will by necessity arrive at the conclusion that God is not a needy soul who needs to be praised and obeyed to be happy. God has no fragile ego which I will damage if I reject Him or even refuse to believe in Him.



If God is aloof to whether we respect him, believe in him, or hold him in awe, then it is illogical that he would tell Abraham “"Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you FEAR God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."
In that prior post you also said:

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God has no fragile ego which I will damage if I reject Him or even refuse to believe in Him. There is no selfish reason whatsoever for God to interact with His creation. It was a voluntary act, not driven by his need or weakness but by His love; to postulate otherwise would be to redefine God’s nature itself.



And:

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The only genuine love is unconditional love, any other love is counterfeit. If one believes God will love you if you follow the rules and will not love you if you disobey the rules you know He really doesn’t love you at all but is manipulating you and robbing you of your freedom.



However, we find the following in the scriptures:




1 Then God spoke all these words:
2 I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery.
3 Do not have other gods besides Me.
4 Do not make an idol for yourself, whether in the shape of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth. 5 You must not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the fathers' sin, to the third and fourth [generations] of those who hate Me, 6 but showing faithful love to a thousand [generations] of those who love Me and keep My commands.

Exodus 20: 1-6



19 If you ever forget the LORD your God and go after other gods to worship and bow down to them, I testify against you today that you will perish. 20 Like the nations the LORD is about to destroy before you, you will perish if you do not obey the LORD your God.
Deuteronomy 8: 19-20


13 "If you carefully obey My commands I am giving you today, to love the LORD your God and worship Him with all your heart and all your soul, 14 I will provide rain for your land in season, the early and late rains, and you will harvest your grain, new wine, and oil. 15 I will provide grass in your fields for your livestock. You will eat and be satisfied. 16 Be careful that you are not enticed to turn aside, worship, and bow down to other gods. 17 Then the LORD's anger will burn against you. He will close the sky, and there will be no rain; the land will not yield its produce, and you will perish quickly from the good land the LORD is giving you.

Deuteronomy 11: 13-17




It is very difficult for anyone to reconcile your notion of God with what is found in the holy texts of the theists.


At the time God chose the nation of Israel, tribalism was the order of society. And yet, from the first the nation of Israel was given a universal mission, to bless all mankind. Just how this would happen was not clear at the time, only later did they learn the spiritual truths which they taught the rest of mankind.
It is almost impossible to test the claims various religions make for the afterlife, so reality testing has to be done in this life. Fortunately most if not all religions have a great deal to say about how we live in this life. This is what is testable.

For instance, one of the reasons the Muslim world is so filled with hate right now is because their system which they thought was perfect has failed the test. The people who regarded Jews and Christians as dhimmis unworthy of respect have to accept the fact that Israel defeated the combined armies of much bigger countries. According to them, this just shouldn’t be since only they deserve God’s blessing. The answer according to a large portion of the Islamic world is to move deeper into fundamentalism which they think will bring God’s blessings and the victories and domination they think are rightfully theirs. Only when this approach fails will they be ready to move in a more positive direction.

Since the Iranian Mullahs think they are uniquely holy and special in God’s sight, they also think they are guaranteed victory against the United States and Israel. How better could God reach their darkened evil minds, if it is at all possible, than to bring upon them the defeat and humiliation which they wish to inflict on others? In other words, God still has lessons to teach us in the real world.

On the other hand the real test of religious teachings is not just the military might of the religious group but the justice, freedom, prosperity and goodness which defines the society. An example is the immense aid given by Americans to the tsunami victims, many of whom were Muslims. Can you imagine a Muslim country showing the same concern for a Christian or Hindu majority population? I recognize that the Iranian people grieved with us when the twin towers came down, but the more fundamentalist Muslims were celebrating the disaster. It was this goodness which the nation of Israel didn’t have yet.


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I do believe in the Devil.



Would you mind expanding on that?
Do you think of the devil as simply a fallen angel?
Or is he an antithesis of God, like an “evil God?”
What do you think are his powers and limitations?
What is the interaction (if any) between God and the devil?
What is the devil’s role in the existence of “evil?”
Is God powerless to act against the devil?
If not, why does he not vanquish him?
Do you think that the existence of the devil is necessary, and planned by God?

I ask these questions simply out of curiosity.


God is not powerless against the Devil, but because of His goodness He hasn't destroyed him.

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Exactly where does the Catholic church have a "death war" on all homosexuals?



I never claimed that the church had a death war on homosexuals, and I don’t think the author was implying this either. Nonetheless, since the issue of homosexuality is raised, I would like to know your thoughts on the matter. Do you condemn or accept homosexuality and homosexuals?


The Catholic church is in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position. The child abusers for which the church has received so much condemnation were almost all homosexual priests. With this in mind, the idea that the Catholic church is waging a death war on all homosexuals is ludicrous. The, church’s real problem was that it didn’t punish those priests harshly enough when they stepped out of line.

Regarding my personal views on homosexuals, let me relate a little personal history. My best friend for several years in college was a homosexual man. Later he moved to San Diego and became deeply involved in the gay lifestyle. Although I never criticized him, he was deeply disappointed since he couldn’t convince me to support the promiscuity rampant in the gay community. Later, he decided the gay life style would be better in Brazil and he moved out of my life forever. His father died and his mother moved so I have no way to get in contact with him, however mutual friends tell me they think he is dead the victim of the lifestyle he embraced.

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I'll quit here. I believe Jesus didn't write anything down because He knew his followers would commit idolatry with His words.



Here is the dilemma. If Jesus wrote nothing, and what others wrote about him cannot be fully trusted because of the authors’ individual fallacy, how can anyone claim to know Jesus or what Jesus was all about?

Your own understanding of Jesus, where does it come from? I doubt it comes from any direct communication with Jesus. It therefore comes from the written accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.

If those accounts are not to be trusted because they are written by other men, then your understanding of Jesus and belief in him is also undermined. If those accounts are to be trusted, as they would any historical document, then that leaves Jesus and Christianity open to close examination, scrutiny, and criticism.


From my own study, I believe the gospels are extremely accurate in conveying the meaning of Jesus words. What we don’t have are an exact transcript of Jesus words which could form the basis of idolatry. Since the Bible was not written to be an exhaustive rule book to dictate every situation in life but does contain the principles upon which righteousness is based, that type of idolatry rather than making us righteous would have the opposite effect in making us rigid, self righteou
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American Visitor



Joined: 19 Feb 2004
Posts: 224

PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 11:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Before closing I would like to express my opinions on the historic relationship between church and state in the United States and explain why I think it has worked so well. I understand some Muslim countries are looking at our model of government since they don’t find the European brand of anti-religious secularism satisfactory and wish Islam to play a greater role in society. I would like to address some of these issues in my next post but for now I want to summarize and clarify my positions covered so far.

I doubt I have changed Amirn into a theist and I’m still not an atheist, but that is OK. For me the purpose of a debate is not to win, if that means forcing the other person to my point of view, but to learn from the other person. Since none of us has perfect understanding of reality, a discussion with someone who holds a different position can be very educational particularly if they are well informed. Amirn is an excellent teacher and I thank him for the good discussion.

First, is the love of God in the Hebrew scriptures. For one to find God’s love in the Hebrew scriptures, one has to look beyond the behavior of the Israelites towards their neighbors which was often limited either to war or servitude. Generally it appears the Israelites were more often the oppressed than the oppressors but this changed from time to time. Regardless of the crimes against their neighbors which Israel did at times commit, one finds little evidence of wholesale torture or forced conversions of the other surrounding tribes to the Hebrew religion. In other words one doesn’t find any evidence of jihad. Also the Israelite’s aggression was almost always limited in scope to the immediate vicinity of their homeland without much in the way of long distance conquests. The major exception was King David who was quite aggressive in expanding his empire.

The real message of universal love in the Hebrew scriptures is not in the behavior of the Israelites, but in the behavior of God towards His people. From this viewpoint, God’s love is abundantly clear through the entire Hebrew scriptures. This was not an exclusive love, on the contrary Israel’s God made it clear from the beginning that they had been chosen to bless the whole world. He made covenants with them which were for a thousand generations or about 15,000 to 20,000 years; they are still in effect today. These covenants were not to the exclusion of other people but were designed to showcase God’s love for all humanity. Regardless of how far the people of Israel strayed from the true path, God still loved them, and still loves them just as He still loves each of us.

Amirn correctly pointed out the promises and threats to the nation of Israel and contrasted it with my statements that people were required to love God because He loved us first, not because of possible rewards or to avoid punishments. However, this is not always the case. Just as the nation of Israel started out selfishly expecting rewards or punishments for behavior, so each human begins life a selfish individual who has to learn moral excellence step by step. As a child they do have to learn through rewards and penalties of some type until they reach the stage of moral development where those things are no longer necessary. In other words just as a parent relates to a child differently at different stages of moral development, so God related to the nation of Israel as they moved from moral infancy to maturity.

Second, the major point I tried to make in the discussion was how much humans need God, not just for the next life, but in this life to provide us with a moral compass which is so necessary not only for our individual lives but also to form the moral structure necessary to support a modern democratic society like ours in America. Without an understanding of the good God who loves us unconditionally and who jealously guards our freedom, it has thus far proven impossible to establish a logical moral system with which our behavior can be evaluated and regulated. Instead, completely secular societies have been forced to resort to multiculturalism in which every culture with it’s different moral system and differing views about God are all accepted as equally valid except Judeo-Christianity which they maintain is only practiced by ignorant bigots. For them each person chooses his or her own morality and so long as they follow this morality, they are good.

The only evil among the multiculturalists is to be a “hypocrite” who claims to believe something and doesn’t practice it or to be a “fundamentalist Christian” who is automatically considered the greatest evil possible, whose opinion by definition is never “rational” but always “bigoted.” Although Islamists are even more insistent on their own Islamic system of morality and are openly determined to force other people into their way of thinking and to shut down free speech, by definition they can not be “bigots” since they are not Christians and are “good’ since they are consistent in practicing their beliefs, not “hypocrites.” In fact, anyone who criticizes Islam is himself a bigot, an Islamophobe. This multicultural version of morality is why many gay activists and feminists will march in solidarity with the Islamists against “evil” Western civilization and the hated Christians.

If it is the common moral understanding which makes a free democratic society possible. Whether they realize it or not, these people are working for no less than the complete destruction of our democracy and the eradication of our freedoms which they claim to be protecting from the Christians. Once this common morality (in Western society called Judeo-Christian morality) is lost, any society no matter how successful it has been up to that time will soon fall into tyranny, decay and ruin. The seeds of our own destruction have already been planted by anti-Christian professors in our government universities who are using our schools as anti-Christian weapons with which to brainwashing the students, by the cultural elites in Hollywood whose only morality is to hate Christians and by a virulently anti-Christian mainstream press who love to blaspheme the name of Christ but hide under their desks in terror rather than publish a few offensive cartoons. While it is true that some of these folks are beginning to understand the danger the Islamists pose to their favorite projects, they have no moral or intellectual basis with which they can combat Islamism. The only remaining tool in their arsenal is violence, and that may indeed be the future of the multicultural societies who are in the process of transforming into Islamic societies. We may all be headed for civil war.

Third, in our discussion, we didn’t explore the nature of consciousness and the meaning of the human spirit very much. Clearly, it is through the mind and through the spirit that the existence of God can be understood. Some researchers claim to have discovered a “God spot” in the right cerebral hemisphere which is always activated when the research subject thinks about “God.” They believe it is mainly through this portion of the brain that we can understand and communicate with God. If this is true, it could explain some of Jesus’ actions and teachings which are otherwise difficult to explain.

Since the right brain is either completely or mostly nonverbal depending upon the particular individual, it is not directly accessible through the usual logical processes. Doubt and skepticism can block access to this portion of the brain which can only be accessed through “faith.” Faith prepares the verbal left brain to access to the information contained in the “God spot” of the right brain similar to the artist who also learns to contact and make use of the creative powers found in the right brain. This could explain why Jesus always insisted on faith from the recipients before they could receive the miracle which they had requested. Jesus’ miracles were never an end in themselves but were always a vehicle to enable people to understand and communicate with God. It was our spiritual healing which Jesus wanted not just material prosperity, physical health or military power. As Jesus said, “my kingdom is not of this earth.” He knew that if people were spiritually transformed into loving kind individuals the other things would automatically follow through a transformed free society which would ultimately lead to the science and technology necessary to meet our physical needs.

Fourth, understanding the spiritual dimensions of the battle, it becomes clear that unless the European intelligentsia reverse course, which seems highly unlikely, Europe is again headed forwards into the glorious 7th century dominated by religious leaders or Mullahs, Sharia law and possibly Caliphs. Some of the secular European leaders who have long since rejected Christianity, have apparently come to appreciate the potential benefits of Islamic culture to unite their populace and enable the formation of a common Islamic identity around the Mediterranean to combat the “Little Satan and the Great Satan.” They will soon fulfill their goal with the birth of Eurabia, the kingdom of Islam, the land where Christianity and Judaism will be completely expunged forever. In reality whether they recognized it or not, this has been the destiny chosen by the anti-Christian thinkers of Europe from the beginning of the Enlightenment in France and pursued vigorously to the present.

For their own reasons, probably sparked by the Saint Bartholomew’s massacre and the thirty years war, the French intelligentsia decided that Christianity stood in the way of their happiness and began to develop arguments why society was better off without the teachings of Christ. One can not blame them entirely since in their lifetimes religion had brought war rather than peace. On the other hand, these wars were necessary to save the Reformation and establish it’s emphasis on the freedom of the individual and Biblically based Christianity possible. This was not just another war of conquest, since there were real moral principles at stake here. Just as the American Civil War was a war of liberation, so the Protestant reformation was a liberation movement.

While the anti-Christian secularists could and still can recite a litany of crimes committed by Christians, they didn’t have the same ability or desire to recognize the reformation for what it was, a powerful movement for human liberation. Also since they have been unable to formulate a rational and consistent argument for morality for themselves, they have no internal standard against to measure their own behavior. Because of this lack of insight, when the secularist movement went off the track in the French Reign of Terror, the secularists were unable to recognize or correct the flaws in their movement and went on to commit even greater crimes against humanity which have been unequaled in human history (even giving honorable mention to Genghis Khan). Marxism and Nazism have now become the defining movements among the anti-Christian secularists responsible for the deaths of up to 100,0000,000 innocent people. Yet both movements, particularly Marxism in the West and Nazism in the Middle East, are still openly defended today. If reports are correct, Marxism has now become the ideology of choice in the humanities departments of the American universities. Never mind the millions of dead bodies over there, utopia is just beyond the next bend.

So Eurabia is nearly upon us. The answer for which they had searched for so many years, the ideology to destroy all traces of Christianity was always close at hand just waiting for them to recognize it, Islam. With the aid of the emigrants from North Africa, Turkey and other Islamic countries, their goal is finally within sight. The long journey is almost over, utopia is almost within reach. Within just a few decades now Europe will have finally realized her goal and will join the Umma as the prize jewel next to Saudi Arabia, and those who had no use for “irrational beliefs” such as the teachings of Jesus will happily bow 5 times a day to Allah and will gladly lay aside their arguments against the Christian God for the ultimate submission to the teachings of Muhammad’s God. The European leaders and thinkers, who have labored so long and hard, will finally be able to survey the fruits of their hard labors with joyful satisfaction. Europe eagerly expects to finally experience the peace, happiness and prosperity for which they have so long been denied by the evil Christians and Jews. Oh happy happy days indeed.

For now, the American anti-Christian secularists can only view Europe with envy as they also hope to someday soon achieve the same wonderful outcome here that their European counterparts have already achieved. If it weren’t for those darn religious fundamentalist Christian bigots and a few pesky Jews who keep getting in their way life would be so much easier.


Last edited by American Visitor on Tue Mar 21, 2006 4:45 pm; edited 1 time in total
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AmirN



Joined: 23 Sep 2005
Posts: 297

PostPosted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 9:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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Where is the inconsistency?


You claim that God has given us free will, which is the reason why evil acts occur. Yet, you also claim that God “might have to take steps to protect others from the abuse of freedom by His underlings.”

Do you not see the inconsistency?

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Excellent thoughts! Unfortunately many of our Christian brothers in Africa have been killed right now this week over the cartoon frenzy.


Yes, I know. This is very sad indeed.

Yet another example of people getting murdered in the name of religion and God. In this case, as in the majority of the time, it is the muslims that are doing the killing.

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37"Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
Matthew, 10:37

This commitment to freedom and truth even if it costs our lives is what Jesus was talking about.


I have difficulty concluding what you concluded from that phrase spoken by Jesus. There is nothing wrong with having a commitment to freedom and truth. But in doing so, why would anyone have to love Jesus more than his own mother, father, son, or daughter? And to fall short of that commitment, as Jesus implies, means that the person is “unworthy” of Jesus.

I say that anyone who asks me to love him more than my own daughter or mother is actually unworthy of MY love; his love to me becomes unimportant.

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I believe you and the Iranians have chosen atheism for the right reasons since religion as you have experienced it has been destructive.


I cannot speak for other Iranian atheists and their motivations. But as for myself, my reason for turning to atheism actually had nothing to do with Iran’s theocracy. I grew up mostly in western countries, and experienced religion via Christianity, not islam. I used western thought, philosophy, and experiences to reach the answer of atheism. Islam and Iran played no role for me. However, I later educated myself regarding islam and Iran, and that also served to reaffirm my atheism.

And I don’t think that Iranians as a whole have chosen atheism. I honestly don’t know that the proportion of Iranians who are atheist is any more than in western countries.

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Many atheists in the West have known about God’s love and have stepped away because they don’t want to pay the cost which following a perfect God entails.


I don’t think that is true. I think that almost everyone who has chosen atheism has done so after deep reflection and thought and reached the conclusion that God does not and cannot exist. I don’t think any atheist has chosen to deny God’s existence out of convenience.

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It is the job of moral systems such as Judeo-Christianity to take the normal aggressive selfish impulses and the desire for meaning in life and redirect them into positive directions. Ultimately the Christian love is the antidote to narcissism. When these cultural edifices which were constructed to control this type of behavior were broken down, the result was disaster.


I think that Christianity wasn’t really broken down by Hitler. As I said, I think that Hitler was neither Christian nor anti-Christian.

The fact that such ideology developed is not testament that Christianity was overcome, but that Christianity never really served the purpose of overcoming such ideology. Christianity existed before, during, and after the Nazi rise. It was a bystander.

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threats of violence will not induce people to love but will only induce fear and violence in return.


I agree. Where I disagree with you is in your claim that the Judeo-Christian God has not threatened people with violence or fear.

I think it is clear from numerous bible passages that Yahweh has done exactly that. Fear and threats of violence have been his signature move on countless accounts of him coercing people into believing in him and doing what he demands of us.

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That is exactly what we see today happening in those conservattive Islamic countries where people are not taught about God’s love.


I agree with you partially. Indeed we see exactly this hateful sentiment propagated in the Islamic countries via islam. And it is done because love is de-emphasized and violence emphasized.

That’s because the Islamic countries now find themselves in a time of conflict, struggle, or “jihad.” At a time of war, whether hot or cold, love does not serve the purpose of the “leaders.” Hate and violence serve the purpose of war much more. And so war, hate, and violence are emphasized. And since islam was forged at a time of great war and violence, by a person who loved, lived, and breathed war and violence – Mohammad – there is no shortage of calls for violence found in the Quran. Islam was a machine which was created for justification of war and violence, among other things.

However, although islam takes the cake when it comes to being the justification of war, it is not completely alone. Judeo-Christianity have their share of incitement to violence as well, even though they pale in comparison to islam.

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1Then the LORD said to Moses, 2"Take vengeance on the Midianites for leading the Israelites into idolatry. After that, you will die and join your ancestors."
3So Moses said to the people, "Choose some men to fight the LORD's war of vengeance against Midian. 4From each tribe of Israel, send one thousand men into battle." 5So they chose one thousand men from each tribe of Israel, a total of twelve thousand men armed for battle. 6Then Moses sent them out, a thousand men from each tribe, and Phinehas son of Eleazar the priest led them into battle. They carried along the holy objects of the sanctuary and the trumpets for sounding the charge. 7They attacked Midian just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed all the men. 8All five of the Midianite kings--Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba--died in the battle. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword.
9Then the Israelite army captured the Midianite women and children and seized their cattle and flocks and all their wealth as plunder. 10They burned all the towns and villages where the Midianites had lived. 11After they had gathered the plunder and captives, both people and animals, 12they brought them all to Moses and Eleazar the priest, and to the whole community of Israel, which was camped on the plains of Moab beside the Jordan River, across from Jericho. 13Moses, Eleazar the priest, and all the leaders of the people went to meet them outside the camp. 14But Moses was furious with all the military commanders who had returned from the battle.
15"Why have you let all the women live?" he demanded. 16"These are the very ones who followed Balaam's advice and caused the people of Israel to rebel against the LORD at Mount Peor. They are the ones who caused the plague to strike the LORD's people. 17Now kill all the boys and all the women who have slept with a man. 18Only the young girls who are virgins may live; you may keep them for yourselves.

Numbers 31: 1-18


This shows that God has more than just love in store for us according to all monotheistic religions. Judaism, Christianity, Islam can all call for death and destruction whenever they please. And that’s what makes them all so dangerous.

You have chosen to just focus on the aspect of love, and that’s great. Unfortunately, not all theists are like you. They can and do grasp their justification for war and violence in religion.

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God gradually led the people step by step towards enlightenment. These steps are anchored by successive covenants each representing a new milestone in God’s revelation of truth. At each stage there is evidence that there is more truth to come. Because of His supreme love God works with us where we are as He gradually leads us towards His perfect truth.


I might buy that argument if the steps that were shown were moving from a simpler form of “good” and “morality” to a more complex one. But these examples out of the scriptures are not just an “earlier” and “basic” form of morality. They are completely immoral. They are the anti-thesis of morality. They are outright evil.

You may refer to my prior quotes from the bible in my prior post as examples of the above. Here is another one, which clearly shows that God is not just guiding us from one lower form of morality to a higher one, but is instead clearly an evil God:



1"Suppose there are prophets among you, or those who have dreams about the future, and they promise you signs or miracles, 2and the predicted signs or miracles take place. If the prophets then say, `Come, let us worship the gods of foreign nations,' 3do not listen to them. The LORD your God is testing you to see if you love him with all your heart and soul. 4Serve only the LORD your God and fear him alone. Obey his commands, listen to his voice, and cling to him. 5The false prophets or dreamers who try to lead you astray must be put to death, for they encourage rebellion against the LORD your God, who brought you out of slavery in the land of Egypt. Since they try to keep you from following the LORD your God, you must execute them to remove the evil from among you.
6"Suppose your brother, son, daughter, beloved wife, or closest friend comes to you secretly and says, `Let us go worship other gods'--gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known. 7They might suggest that you worship the gods of peoples who live nearby or who come from the ends of the earth. 8If they do this, do not give in or listen, and have no pity. Do not spare or protect them. 9You must put them to death! You must be the one to initiate the execution; then all the people must join in. 10Stone the guilty ones to death because they have tried to draw you away from the LORD your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of slavery. 11Then all Israel will hear about it and be afraid, and such wickedness will never again be done among you.
12"Suppose you hear in one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you 13that some worthless rabble among you have led their fellow citizens astray by encouraging them to worship foreign gods. 14In such cases, you must examine the facts carefully. If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, 15you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock. 16Then you must pile all the plunder in the middle of the street and burn it. Put the entire town to the torch as a burnt offering to the LORD your God. That town must remain a ruin forever; it may never be rebuilt. 17Keep none of the plunder that has been set apart for destruction. Then the LORD will turn from his fierce anger and be merciful to you. He will have compassion on you and make you a great nation, just as he solemnly promised your ancestors.
18"The LORD your God will be merciful only if you obey him and keep all the commands I am giving you today, doing what is pleasing to him.

Deuteronomy 13: 1-18



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No, I make no such claims to love tyrants like God does, but this is the example of how we are supposed to view those who commit crimes against us.


So then you don’t love the likes of Hitler. Good…as well you shouldn’t.

My point is that unconditional love means that we SHOULD love even those like Hitler. So if we cannot, it shows that the concept of “unconditional love” is a myth. Unconditional love cannot and should not come from any of us humans. It also cannot come from this “God.”

Love is a wonderful thing, and I also wish there was more of it in this world. But unconditional love is non-sense.

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Be quick to forgive, try to see the best in other people and slow to judge others.


That’s wonderful advice. It’s good to forgive as much as possible. But forgiveness can only go so far, and really depends on what act is being forgiven. Some acts are unforgivable.

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This is why we should not follow cultural elites whether they are religious men or secular. The understanding of the good God transcends cultural elites or the will of the majority to provide each a moral compass to provide moral guidance.


So you wish to follow the word of God instead of that of the cultural elites.

But how did you reach your understanding of the good God? Unless you are in direct communication with God, your understanding of him came from other men, whether by their written or spoken word.

And who are (or were) these men, if not religious elites?

You have not shown me how you bypassed the religious elites, whom you consider as a subset of the cultural elites.

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Plato and Aristotle were both theists.


I never questioned Aristotle’s theism. I simply thought that the following quote was right on the money:

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."

- Aristotle, Politics.


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I believe in logic and reason, but not knowing all the answers why God has done things is not a matter of logic. We understand much about God but not everything.


Yes, it is true that we don’t know everything about this alleged God. But we do know some things. And frequently either the premises about him contradict each other or his words and actions are illogical. And since it is illogical to fathom a supreme being that is all powerful, all wise, and the creator of the universe as himself being illogical, one can only deduce that such a creature does not exist.

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There are several points here:
1. Was God’s choice of Israel a breech of His unconditional love for the rest of humanity? Since the Israelites were chosen to be a blessing to the rest of mankind this hardly seems to be a problem. To use different groups in different ways isn’t an unloving act.


I think that if God shows preferential treatment to one group of people over another, it is most definitely a breach of his unconditional love to the rest of humanity. And if he helps one group overcome, dominate, destroy, and drive out from the land another group of people, he absolutely has shown favoritism.


1"When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are about to enter and occupy, he will clear away many nations ahead of you: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. These seven nations are all more powerful than you. 2When the LORD your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy. 3Do not intermarry with them, and don't let your daughters and sons marry their sons and daughters. 4They will lead your young people away from me to worship other gods. Then the anger of the LORD will burn against you, and he will destroy you. 5Instead, you must break down their pagan altars and shatter their sacred pillars. Cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols. 6For you are a holy people, who belong to the LORD your God. Of all the people on earth, the LORD your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure.”

Deuteronomy 7: 1-6


How this can be interpreted as the Israelites being simply chosen to be a blessing to the rest of mankind is beyond amazing.

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2. Was this racist? Only if other races were excluded from God’s love. At the time the nation of Israel was chosen, tribalism was the norm, so God began working with them where they were.


Again, I would point you to the same passage above. God “cleared away” these other tribes ahead of the Israelites, and handed over their lands. So, these other tribes are obviously not included in God’s circle of love.

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3. Does this sound like genocide?


It sure does.

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These record in the Bible was written by the Israelites who gloried in the destruction of their enemies and emphasized the violence whereas many archeologists, who are also fallible, believe there was much less destruction than we had previously believed.


We must either treat these accounts in the scriptures as historical records, which are a testimony to God’s genocidal tendencies, or treat them as myths and folklore, which is a testimony to the mythological nature of the scriptures, Judaism, and God.

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Josh 24:11-13
11 "'Then you crossed the Jordan and came to Jericho. The citizens of Jericho fought against you, as did also the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites and Jebusites, but I gave them into your hands. 12 I sent the hornet ahead of you, which drove them out before you-also the two Amorite kings. You did not do it with your own sword and bow. 13 So I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build; and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.'
NIV




In other words, the battles were real and were largely defensive in nature


These don’t sound at all like defensive wars as far as God is concerned. God has delivered the defenders into the hands of the aggressors.

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Ironically, the major reason we know and care about the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites and Jebusites is from the Bible. In other words, rather than blotting out their memory from history, the Jews actually preserved them!


Then I suppose we ought to thank the Israelites!

How wonderful of them and Yahweh, to attack and destroy utterly these tribes, wiping them off the face of the earth in a genocidal fashion, but contributing to history by mentioning them in their scriptures. How magnanimous of them, to keep these tribes’ memories alive.

I wonder, if the Nazis were successful in wiping off the Jews entirely, but mentioned them in future Nazi textbooks, should we be thankful that this way they kept their memory alive?

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Personally, I find living in this world to be a cause of great joy and am thankful that God has created it.


I too find living in this world very joyful and am thankful for existing in it, however brief it may seem. But I am not thankful to a God, since I do not believe this God exists.

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If you live in God’s love, the pain and sorrows in this life are understood to be stepping stones to a brighter future and a deeper spiritual understanding.


You choose to view the evil in this world as stepping stones to a better existence.

However, I cannot accept that. A better existence to me means one devoid of this evil and suffering. The ultimate goal is to rid us of evil and suffering. Whether this goal is achievable or not I am not sure, but I guess that it probably is not.

It doesn’t make sense to me that we need evil and suffering as tools to achieve the ultimate goal, which is a world devoid of evil and suffering.

In a world that is not under control of an all good and all powerful supreme being, evil and suffering’s existence is not an enigma. They are beyond control, and an unfortunate part of our world. However, under the watchful eye of an omnipotent and benevolent God, evil and suffering become inexplicable. And not even free will can explain them, as I have shown.

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Your example wouldn’t teach the child love, so it would be counterproductive.


Very well. Let’s use a “love” example.

One child has picked up a gun, and points it to another. You, as the only adult in the room, have two choices. You can either grab the gun out of the first child’s hand, and subsequently sit him down and explain why it would be wrong to shoot another, or simply stand by and watch what transpires. If you do the latter, the child will probably pull the trigger and kill another child. Subsequently, the murdering child will face certain consequences. He will have a traumatic memory of the event, as he watched another bleed to death in front of him. He may even face certain social consequences. He may even learn that love is the answer.

You may make the argument that by having stood by, you allowed the child to “learn a lesson on love,” since he experienced the negative consequences of following a path contrary to love.

So, the question becomes, was this lesson really worth it and necessary? Most would say no. Yet, your explanation of God’s role in humanity’s world suggests a similar attitude.

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Since he had allies in Italy and Japan who he respected greatly and Arab allies in the Middle East who were eager to cooperate with him, world domination by one country was out of the question. If he had really wanted to rule the world, he would have had to overthrow his allies or otherwise subjugate them, an eventuality for which there is absolutely no evidence at all.


You are correct in that there is no evidence to support that possibility. On the other hand, there is really no evidence to refute it either. What Hitler would have done after hypothetically winning the war against the allies is open to conjecture. My own guess, based on my understanding of the man, is that he would have eventually subjugated even his allies to some degree. Whether by turning to war with them, or simply turning them into vassal states, or just having them as his yes men. Again, I don’t base this on any direct evidence; just my opinion based on my understanding of his character.

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Exactly what do you consider it’s defining feature? Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto? Religion has a much more defining role in culture than you are willing to admit. Because Americans have traditionally been some of the more religious people in the world, religion would have had even a greater impact than usual.


You list other religions as the alternative “defining feature.” Religion does play a role, and in some societies more than others, but it is not necessarily its defining feature.

Perhaps religion has a less significant role in culture than you are willing to admit. In the case of America, I believe that to be the case.

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My statement is based on the assumption that you are an immigrant which means you have made a choice to live here rather than in other places such as France, England, Japan, China, India or Saudi Arabia. Of course if you are not an immigrant, that assumption could be wrong. My ancestors also made the choice to live here long ago.


Yes, actually I am an immigrant. But that is irrelevant. You and I are both adults, and we are both free to get up and leave this country for another at any time we wish. It doesn’t matter as much how we arrived here (by birth or plane) so much as the fact that we have both chosen to remain here.

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Also, as I have pointed out, the concept of the good God is foundational to Western Civilization and is one of the distinctive understandings which separates us from Islamic society for example and forms the basis of our laws and civilization.


Again, as before, I must take issue with your claim that Christianity is foundational to western civilization, or that islam is foundational to eastern civilization.

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By my definition, what God knows is all that CAN be known, so I fail to see the problem. The answer is contained in my definition.


Again, there is ambiguity and folly in the term CAN as used here. What does it mean, that a fact CAN or CANNOT be known? If a fact or event exists, it is a piece of information. If an entity CANNOT know that information, it is only testimony to the limited omniscience of that entity. And since omniscience becomes a meaningless and hollow concept if it is limited, this means that the entity in question cannot be omniscient, by definition.

And if you change the definition of the term omniscience by adding CAN, you have turned the term omniscience meaningless.

Instead of destroying the term omniscience, why not realize that God actually cannot be omniscient, or if he is omniscient, that other contradictions arise?

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It is my understanding that there are still people who have experiences with the supernatural in a material way today. In addition, Christians also believe each of us can communicate with God directly through the Holy Spirit if we are open to His teachings.


Yes, and the majority of the people that claim to be communicating with God are usually locked up in the loony bin. It is interesting that such people now are recognized as delusional and schizophrenic, whereas a couple thousand years ago they were deemed as “possessed by demons” or “prophets,” depending on the case.

I have visited a few psych wards. On every one, there is at least one person who claims to be a prophet, bringing the word of God. Many claim to be Jesus himself, re-incarnated.

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The Medieval church united Christianity with Greek science and philosophy to such an extent, their description of God is very similar to the Greek philosophical ideal. To my mind the God they described can’t learn, can’t think, can’t move and can’t love since by their definition those things would indicate imperfection just as you pointed out. In other words, I can’t accept definition of God adopted by the early church which was in reality the Greek ideal of the perfect. Incidentally it was also Greek science which formed the church’s cosmology. It is this ancient ideal of perfection which I can’t relate to, since I believe in a personal God. Here is a link to Aristotle’s thinking about God:
http://www.faithnet.org.uk/Philosophy/aristotle.htm

I wasn’t saying you personally made up that definition since that would be nonsense, but that Greek ideal seems to be the idea which you seemed to be discussing. I just don’t relate to that type of God.


The more I talk to you, the more I realize that you lie further and further away from mainstream theism and Christianity. Because as I said, the concepts of God I am discussing are not based on my definitions, but on those of the theists. But I especially enjoy my conversation with you because you are different, and are presenting a viewpoint which is new to me.

I am sensing that you are defining God very differently than traditional theism. You are still calling him the Judeo-Christian God, but even though you are calling him that, it is really not him you are talking about.

Now, the way you define God may be different and thereby escapes some of my criticism, but by redefining him, a whole new can of worms are opened up. You are saying that he is not perfect ( by being able to learn new things, desiring and needing love, etc), and that he is not omniscient or omnipotent (by the way you define omniscience and omnipotence with CAN, these terms are actually destroyed instead of modified).

In doing so, your God has lost a lot of power. He now becomes an entity which is simply more powerful than us, but not necessarily the most powerful being in the universe. As such, theoretically another entity may exist which may be more powerful than him.

Let me give an example of a theoretical circumstance. Assume that a more powerful race of aliens actually created our earth and us humans. Assume that these aliens are simply more technologically advanced than us, which allows them to do this. Now assume that we find out about them. Are we to worship them as our Gods, and live to please them?

The way you are defining God, he has become no more than a more advanced alien race.

So the question becomes, what attribute of “God” makes him a “God” and us his “worshipers?”

Is it creation? If one entity created another, is the first entity the God of the second? If a scientist creates a clone in a lab, is he the clone’s God? Clearly not.

Is it superior power? If one entity is vastly superior to another in power and technology, is he a God to the inferior one? As the “alien” example, clearly not.

Is it a higher morality? If one entity is more moral than another, is he the latter’s God? Is one person of higher moral standing the God of the one with a lower standing? Clearly not.

Is it love? Does offering love (or unconditional love as you claim) make one a God to another? If one offers love to another, does he become the latter’s God? Clearly not.

I applaud you for thinking of God as you do, and defining him differently than traditional theists. However, by escaping the pitfalls of an absolutely “perfect” God (which can learn, needs love and companionship, etc), or absolute omniscience and omnipotence, you have framed God in a “relativistic” setting. Your God is “relatively” more powerful, knowing, and perfect than us. But he is not absolute perfection, he lacks absolute power and knowledge because he can only do what CAN be done or know what CAN be known. As I said, these modifiers to the terms omniscience and omnipotence destroy the intended and conveyed meaning of the terms.

With a God which is only “relatively” superior to us, he loses the essence of what it means to be “God.” I think the original and traditional theists realized this problem, and wisely chose to define God as having “absolute” attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, perfection, etc…without any CANs. In doing so, they escape the criticisms of God only being relatively superior (and therefore not really a God). They have instead chosen the dilemmas posed by the problems of evil, omniscience, omnipotence, and perfection.

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don’t see the connection between unconditional love and your argument. Why should a God who loves us unconditionally create a world which has no consequences.


Actually, I believe I am saying the opposite of what you think I am saying. If God gives us unconditional love, that is what causes a world without consequences. If we receive unconditional love, he loves us regardless of what we do. Someone like Hitler can kill as he pleases, and be accepted by God’s unconditional love in the end. Unconditional love means a free pass for anyone to do anything as far as God is concerned. And that is contradictory to his desire for us to act morally.

And that’s why unconditional love creates a world without consequences.

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Unfortunately, many moderns have decided that science defines all reality. They have even tried to define morality according to science which is simply Darwin’s “idea of the survival of the fittest.”


I don’t think that science attempts to define reality. Reality can be defined only by itself. Science only serves to explain and organize that reality.

I don’t agree with defining morality according to science. Survival of the fittest is a matter of fact in our biological world, but it doesn’t make it moral. In fact, morality to me is in a way the “check” which was created by our intelligence which in some ways defies “survival of the fittest.”

Survival of the fittest in its raw form means “might over right.” To me, morality means the opposite.

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The holy texts are indeed the works of men, but that doesn’t mean they are devoid of truth about God, they are still inspired . On the other hand, it does mean there is not the complete truth about God. Indeed, I believe human language is incapable of containing God’s exact thoughts. Also a I have pointed out, although I derived the understanding of the good God directly from the Bible, the concept of the good God is logical within itself.


It is very convenient that when I criticize the fact that God’s word cannot be known to man, because it was conveyed to man via texts by other men, I get the reply that “the texts have truths to them and were inspired by God.”

And when I criticize the fact that the texts are ridden with inconsistencies, bigotry, hate, inequality, and violence, I get the reply that “the texts were the works of men, thereby prone to fallacy and error.”

Very convenient indeed, to emphasize two completely opposite views as the situation dictates.

This reminds me of the lazy Persian “shotor-morgh,” or ostrich, which translated literally means “shotor: camel” and “morgh: chicken.”

When she is asked to behave as a chicken and lay an egg, she replies “I am no chicken; I am a camel.” When asked to behave as a camel and carry goods, she replies “I am no camel; I am a chicken.”

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If morality is based on instinct, there is no basis to form a logical morality. Each person would have their private morality depending on what is their instinct. For instance, if my instinct makes me like to rape women, that instinct by itself makes it right. Since no culture is superior to any other, there is no basis to say Islam with it’s violence is any less valid than Buddhism which is more peaceful.


And if morality is based on religion, each religious sect can have its own private morality. Who is to say that Christian morality is better or worse than Islamic morality or Hindu morality? And that’s exactly what we have seen throughout history. One religion claims the rights to “morality” over another, and finds justification in persecuting or dominating another.

I mean this as no insult, but the “logical” basis of morality which you presented as based on God makes no logical sense to me, although I’m sure it makes sense to you. It makes no sense to me because the premises that it is based upon are open to breakdown.

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For instance, one of the reasons the Muslim world is so filled with hate right now is because their system which they thought was perfect has failed the test. The people who regarded Jews and Christians as dhimmis unworthy of respect have to accept the fact that Israel defeated the combined armies of much bigger countries. According to them, this just shouldn’t be since only they deserve God’s blessing.


I don’t see how islam has failed the test, compared to Christianity or Judaism. How are we to measure that test? By military victory? What about the times when Islamic forces defeated Christian ones centuries ago? Did the fall of Constantinople signify Christianity’s failure? I think not.

The standard by which an idea or religion must be tested is in its result on individuals as well as societies as a whole. Did it lead to an improvement in the individuals’ lives? Did it lead to a better functioning society, ie peace, security, justice, and happiness?

I suppose that Moslems will give a biased “yes” response to these questions regarding islam, because of the brainwashing they’ve received. But an unbiased person who looks at Islamic societies and the history and teachings of islam would clearly have to answer “no.”

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God is not powerless against the Devil, but because of His goodness He hasn't destroyed him.


So God can destroy the devil, but chose not to do so. Why not? What purpose does the devil serve, other than lead us away from God…the very thing that God is most concerned about?

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Regarding my personal views on homosexuals, let me relate a little personal history. My best friend for several years in college was a homosexual man. Later he moved to San Diego and became deeply involved in the gay lifestyle. Although I never criticized him, he was deeply disappointed since he couldn’t convince me to support the promiscuity rampant in the gay community. Later, he decided the gay life style would be better in Brazil and he moved out of my life forever. His father died and his mother moved so I have no way to get in contact with him, however mutual friends tell me they think he is dead the victim of the lifestyle he embraced.


Thank you for sharing this personal story. I’m sorry to hear this sad story about your friend.

I was unable to deduce from your story, however, your personal views on homosexuality. You mentioned you don’t support the promiscuity in the gay community. That’s understandable, but it doesn’t tell me if you accept or condemn homosexuality itself. Assume we are talking about a monogamous homosexual relationship…do you condemn it or accept it?

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From my own study, I believe the gospels are extremely accurate in conveying the meaning of Jesus words. What we don’t have are an exact transcript of Jesus words which could form the basis of idolatry.


It’s fine if we don’t have an exact transcript of a person’s speech. If we have accurate documentation of that person’s words and deeds, we can form a reasonably accurate basis of that person. Therefore, if you believe that the gospels are extremely accurate, we may scrutinize Jesus.

As for Jesus himself, I have yet to receive an understanding of whether he was a man, and therefore fallible, or God, and therefore infallible.

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I doubt I have changed Amirn into a theist and I’m still not an atheist, but that is OK. For me the purpose of a debate is not to win, if that means forcing the other person to my point of view, but to learn from the other person. Since none of us has perfect understanding of reality, a discussion with someone who holds a different position can be very educational particularly if they are well informed. Amirn is an excellent teacher and I thank him for the good discussion.


My thoughts exactly, dear friend. Neither of us realistically set out to change the other’s mind. The real benefit I see is getting a better understanding of the alternative viewpoint, as well as offer mine as a possible guidance to others who are undecided about the issue and are looking for more information.

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The real message of universal love in the Hebrew scriptures is not in the behavior of the Israelites, but in the behavior of God towards His people.


I agree. And since the scriptures supposedly highlight God’s word and behavior, they reflect God himself. And since there is an abundance of God making threats, destroying, killing, terrorizing, and humiliating man in the scriptures (as shown abundantly in my prior quotes from the scriptures), the presence of this “universal love” which this alleged God holds for us is not only challengeable but utterly contradictory.

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Israel’s God made it clear from the beginning that they had been chosen to bless the whole world. He made covenants with them which were for a thousand generations or about 15,000 to 20,000 years; they are still in effect today.


Covenant- dictionary meaning:

“A formal sealed agreement or contract.”

God made a “covenant” with the Israelites (and supposedly the rest of mankind). So he made a contract. What is the purpose of a contract? To convey that “if you do this, I’ll do that.” It is the essence of a condition. It is also the exact opposite of giving “unconditional love.” It is impossible for God to offer unconditional love while maintaining a contract with humanity.

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Second, the major point I tried to make in the discussion was how much humans need God,


I agree that some people do need God, but not for the reasons you point out. Many people need God as a security blanket; as a crutch. They need to believe in God in order to lift much responsibility off of themselves: “a higher power, with a grand scheme” which is really in charge of the world. Everything, whether good or bad, can be explained away as the “will” of this God.

Others need God specifically because of the evil and suffering present in this world. It is soothing to them that if justice is not served in this lifetime, it will at least be served in the next. It is for this very reason that the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all developed and took root from the lower, powerless classes of society. The oppressed, poor, and suffering masses are much more receptive to the idea that there is a powerful God who will serve justice to their oppressors in the next lifetime. “God” is a tremendous empowerment to those who otherwise feel powerless in this world. The promises of the afterlife are very appealing to those who suffer much in this lifetime.

Unfortunately injustice, suffering, oppression, and poverty run rampant in the world. And that is one reason (among some others) why theism has a strong hold upon this world.

What’s even more unfortunate is that with the psychological relief that theism provides the suffering masses comes a powerful reason and justification to commit further oppression, persecution, murder, war, and injustice…….GOD.
_________________
I am Dariush the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries containing all kinds of men, King in this great earth far and wide, son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenian, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, having Aryan lineage

Naqshe Rostam
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 21, 2006 4:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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You claim that God has given us free will, which is the reason why evil acts occur. Yet, you also claim that God “might have to take steps to protect others from the abuse of freedom by His underlings.”

Do you not see the inconsistency?


No

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I have difficulty concluding what you concluded from that phrase spoken by Jesus. There is nothing wrong with having a commitment to freedom and truth. But in doing so, why would anyone have to love Jesus more than his own mother, father, son, or daughter? And to fall short of that commitment, as Jesus implies, means that the person is “unworthy” of Jesus.

I say that anyone who asks me to love him more than my own daughter or mother is actually unworthy of MY love; his love to me becomes unimportant.


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Matt 22:37-39
37 Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'
NIV


As I have pointed out in previous posts only the Supreme Being can love unconditionally. We can not love any other person unconditionally since they may hurt us. The great commandment is for us to love God with all our hearts since we know He loves us unconditionally first and it is safe. It is God who makes it possible for us to love others. If you look at real life in pagan or primitive societies, you will find people often don't love their families at all but abuse them. Without God's love to transform our lives and to teach us how to love other people unselfishly, there is no cure for this evil.

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I don’t think that is true. I think that almost everyone who has chosen atheism has done so after deep reflection and thought and reached the conclusion that God does not and cannot exist. I don’t think any atheist has chosen to deny God’s existence out of convenience.


I'm sure you understand that atheism is completely unprovable. Ultimately the decision to be an atheist is a nonrational one in the same sense as the decision to believe in God is nonrational. Philosophically speaking, there is no way anyone can intellectually prove your statement that "God can not exist." Of course God can exist, otherwise some of the greatest minds that ever existed would have not have believed in him. For you "God can not exist" because of a choice you made not to believe. Your choice makes the existence of God impossible for you.

I have made the choice to believe in God because I have thought through the alternatives and believe the costs for making the nonrational choice to reject God are too high for me personally and especially for society. Since I enjoy living in an advanced morally based society which is only possible if people believe in the good God, the choice to believe in God is the only logical choice. In addition, since I have experienced God in my life, I have other reasons that philosophical reasons to believe in God. On the other hand, if you have never experienced God, that information is not available to you and can not enter into your logical equation.

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I think that Christianity wasn’t really broken down by Hitler. As I said, I think that Hitler was neither Christian nor anti-Christian.
The fact that such ideology developed is not testament that Christianity was overcome, but that Christianity never really served the purpose of overcoming such ideology. Christianity existed before, during, and after the Nazi rise. It was a bystander.


My understanding is that the "enlightenment" was an attack on Christianity which destroyed the spiritual barriers to folks like Marx and Hitler. Europe is in the post-Christian dispensation today and has no moral foundation for their culture. This has also removed their barriers to radical Islam. Christianity has been the moral wall which has protected Europe in the past. That wall has been torn down now and Europe is defenseless.

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I agree. Where I disagree with you is in your claim that the Judeo-Christian God has not threatened people with violence or fear.

I think it is clear from numerous bible passages that Yahweh has done exactly that. Fear and threats of violence have been his signature move on countless accounts of him coercing people into believing in him and doing what he demands of us.


What I'm presenting is Christianity viewed from the viewpoint of a more mature Christian. Christianity is designed to take people from basic level I morality and to move them to the highest levels of moral development. I personally like Kohlberg's theories of moral development. At the lowest levels the individual is completely self centered and can only respond to threats and authority. As they grow morally they grow to the mature level which is motivated by love and principles rather than for gain or pain.

I'm not sure it is possible for a human being to progress beyond stage I without discipline including rewards and punishments. Although we don't know all the reasons a person becomes narcissistic, I suspect part of the reason is that they are treated from childhood as if only their needs were important and as if they could do no wrong. If a person skips that stage of moral training in which they are subject to discipline I suspect, they are more apt to become narcissists. Of course, some of it may be genetic also. Christianity has spiritual exercises which are specifically designed to help people move from egoism to love, from stage I to stage VI.

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This shows that God has more than just love in store for us according to all monotheistic religions. Judaism, Christianity, Islam can all call for death and destruction whenever they please. And that’s what makes them all so dangerous.

You have chosen to just focus on the aspect of love, and that’s great. Unfortunately, not all theists are like you. They can and do grasp their justification for war and violence in religion.


First, let me point out that fundamentalist Christians are rarely violent. The motivation for religious wars can be of three types, defensive wars by a society which has been attacked, wars of liberation such as our civil war, andoffensive wars in which religious people try to convert others by the sword. Christians have almost universally come to the conclusion that the first type of war is justified and will often support the second type, but the third type of war is never justifiable. Regardless of the answer they would provide you about early Israel, it has no bearing on their religious practices today. They will all offer some reason why these things no longer apply.

Also, as I have pointed out, there is no evidence that Israel practiced jihad against other nations in an attempt to propagate their religion by force. They would fight their neighbors as a nation state and believed God would fight on their side if they followed Him, but there is no evidence they tried to impose their religious beliefs by force. Of course, they would kill each other for religious reasons at times, but their wars against their neighbors were tribal in nature. Therefore there is no moral equivalence between the practices of Islam which wishes to expand it’s theology world wide through war and Judaism which is very reluctant to proselytize or Biblical Christianity which relies on persuasion to win converts.

The Catholic church claims a higher authority which transcends that of the Bible and it s through this authority that the popes could justify torturing and killing heretic. It is this departure from Biblical authority which divides the orthodox Catholics from the orthodox Protestants. Therefore o try to trace any of the crimes committed by the Catholic church to the Bible is a mistake. As I have pointed out, the majority of Catholics who I have talked to reject Papal infallibility and have assumed a much more Protestant position than their priests would like. Also the modern Catholic church has apologized for many of it’s crimes against humanity so appears to be trying a more constructive approach to maintaining it’s authority.

Granted, the Israelites would kill people with in their community who they thought were apostates for their own reasons. However, based on interpretation of the Bible, this was not carried through to the Biblical Christian churches. The reason the United States has religious freedom is precisely because of religious arguments derived from the Bible by people like John Locke who showed from the Bible itself the absurdity of trying to "save" other people by forcing them to believe. Religion in the US is much stronger and better because of this commitment to religious liberty. Even the Catholic church is stronger here than in Europe where the church has tried to maintain it’s authority through force. The pope may hate the American version of Catholicism but even the most dense bureaucracy

Now, I'm ready to present my understanding of this portion of the Hebrew scriptures. The way the actions of Moses and Joshua are presented in some places would make one would think they were extremely violent. Other places such as Judges presents a completely different picture in which the Israelites coexisted with their neighbors.

A good article on the settlement of Israel is found in Biblical Archaeology Review 1999 addresses these very questions from a Biblical and Archeological standpoint. It has the following title:
The Settlement in Canaan: The Period of the Judges
By Joseph A. Callaway, revised by J. Maxwell Miller
This gives a good synopsis of current thinking on the subject of the exodus and the settlement of Canaan. As I pointed out before, the major Biblical and archaeological data support the proposition that the occupation of Israel was largely peaceful since the hill country was largely empty land.

On the other hand we shouldn't toss out the violence in the Hebrew scriptures since it establishes the right of a religious nation to defend itself. Although no religion has the right to force their ideas on other people, just because a nation is predominantly Christian does not mean the nation has to reject war to protect themselves or to protect other people from subjugation and abuse. If you have emigrants who move into your country with the intention of committing crimes against humanity which is the unfortunate choice many Muslim emigrants have made, the Christians, atheists and Hindus etc. have the right to defend their culture by what ever means necessary even if it means banning that religion from their lands.

At first that will seem to be a violation of people's religious rights, but it is actually an act to protect and maximize human freedom. For instance, in Japan there was a cult which tried to kill as many passengers in the subway system as possible for their own perverted religious reasons. In that instance people's right to practice religion freely ran into other people's right to live. In this instance the society decided the right of the unbelievers to live was more fundamental than the cultists' right to religious freedom. In the same sense, if Islam continues it's downward spiral to become a common criminal enterprise with a religious veneer to give it apparent legitimacy it too may have to be banned. It will not be banned for theological purposes but because of their evil behavior since the right of other people to live freely transcends the rights of Muslims to practice their religious beliefs which include killing and raping kaffirs.

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10Stone the guilty ones to death because they have tried to draw you away from the LORD your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of slavery. 11Then all Israel will hear about it and be afraid, and such wickedness will never again be done among you.


This passage represents the stage of moral development at which Israel existed at that time. This was the starting point from which they progressed. If this were the end point rather than the beginning, then I would agree with your criticism. Also, that form of behavior was common in that time and was probably milder than some. For instance the Assyrians used to skin people alive and even in the time of the Romans and later in the time of the Muslims in Spain, people were crucified. Historical figures have to be judged according to the environment in which they lived.

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So then you don’t love the likes of Hitler. Good…as well you shouldn’t.

My point is that unconditional love means that we SHOULD love even those like Hitler. So if we cannot, it shows that the concept of “unconditional love” is a myth. Unconditional love cannot and should not come from any of us humans. It also cannot come from this “God.”

Love is a wonderful thing, and I also wish there was more of it in this world. But unconditional love is non-sense.


From the standpoint of a human unconditional love is impossible, only God can love unconditionally. On the other hand, only love which approaches unconditional love is of any value. "Love" which is given with conditions, other than the need for self preservation, is not a positive thing at all, but just manipulation. Indeed, this type of love is just another form of selfishness. That is not what Christianity is about. What Jesus said was to love your neighbor as yourself, not to love him unconditionally.

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That’s wonderful advice. It’s good to forgive as much as possible. But forgiveness can only go so far, and really depends on what act is being forgiven. Some acts are unforgivable.


Forgiveness is not making excuses for crimes or pretending they never happened. Forgiveness is a positive step in emotional healing by releasing the hurts and pains so one can move on. Until you forgive someone, you carry them around with you all the time and are actually closely emotionally linked to them. Forgiveness gives one freedom to move on to something more positive.

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So you wish to follow the word of God instead of that of the cultural elites.

But how did you reach your understanding of the good God? Unless you are in direct communication with God, your understanding of him came from other men, whether by their written or spoken word.

And who are (or were) these men, if not religious elites?

You have not shown me how you bypassed the religious elites, whom you consider as a subset of the cultural elites.


Good point. I did learn the concept of the good God from the Bible or cultural elites, however once understood, the concept itself is not dependent upon the cultural elites. In every discipline, we have to learn from those who have mastered the subject in the earlier phases of training. Eventually one learns the discipline themselves and don't have to rely on the masters since they understand the discipline for themselves.

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Yes, it is true that we don’t know everything about this alleged God. But we do know some things. And frequently either the premises about him contradict each other or his words and actions are illogical. And since it is illogical to fathom a supreme being that is all powerful, all wise, and the creator of the universe as himself being illogical, one can only deduce that such a creature does not exist.


As you know, I don't accept the premises you begin with so I have no difficulties along those lines.

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1"When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are about to enter and occupy, he will clear away many nations ahead of you: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. These seven nations are all more powerful than you. 2When the LORD your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy. 3Do not intermarry with them, and don't let your daughters and sons marry their sons and daughters. 4They will lead your young people away from me to worship other gods. Then the anger of the LORD will burn against you, and he will destroy you. 5Instead, you must break down their pagan altars and shatter their sacred pillars. Cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols. 6For you are a holy people, who belong to the LORD your God. Of all the people on earth, the LORD your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure.”

Deuteronomy 7: 1-6


How this can be interpreted as the Israelites being simply chosen to be a blessing to the rest of mankind is beyond amazing.


I believe we have discussed the Israelites quite extensively above so to try to keep this post readable, I will pass on this one here. Suffice it to say, that for the nation of Israel to be a blessing to the whole world they had to exist.

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3. Does this sound like genocide?


It sure does.


Your editing of my comment leaves a false impression although I’m sure it was unintentional.

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We must either treat these accounts in the scriptures as historical records, which are a testimony to God’s genocidal tendencies, or treat them as myths and folklore, which is a testimony to the mythological nature of the scriptures, Judaism, and God.


Not really. We can treat them for what they really are, a historically based folk memory told from the viewpoint of later generations of Israelites. History is always told from someone's point of view, that doesn't mean history is wrong or is simply myth in the sense that it is not true. On the other hand, other people may have a different interpretation of the same events. What I’m doing is taking the facts told in the Hebrew scriptures combining them with the latest archeological discoveries and trying to interpret them in light of the entire Bible.

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It doesn’t make sense to me that we need evil and suffering as tools to achieve the ultimate goal, which is a world devoid of evil and suffering.

In a world that is not under control of an all good and all powerful supreme being, evil and suffering’s existence is not an enigma. They are beyond control, and an unfortunate part of our world. However, under the watchful eye of an omnipotent and benevolent God, evil and suffering become inexplicable. And not even free will can explain them, as I have shown.


As I have pointed out, the understanding of the good God is the best moral platform by which evil can be identified and eradicated. The French "enlightenment" was an attempt to solve the world's problems through atheism and pure reason. The unfortunate results have been the formation of hedonistic, narcissistic societies which have caused huge amounts of human suffering. You can either accept that God is good and has given us the freedom to learn moral lessons for ourselves and fight human moral depravity as defined by the good God, or you can reject the concept of a good God for whatever reason and in the process lose the ability to define morality in the first place and secondly by binding people to the nature of evil ultimately contributing to further human suffering. For the atheist it may seem to be a logical choice, but it is one which has big moral import.

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One child has picked up a gun, and points it to another. You, as the only adult in the room, have two choices. You can either grab the gun out of the first child’s hand, and subsequently sit him down and explain why it would be wrong to shoot another, or simply stand by and watch what transpires. If you do the latter, the child will probably pull the trigger and kill another child. Subsequently, the murdering child will face certain consequences. He will have a traumatic memory of the event, as he watched another bleed to death in front of him. He may even face certain social consequences. He may even learn that love is the answer.


It appears you are arguing both sides of the question. When God intervenes to save the nation of Israel, you deplore the violence and when he allows history to flow unimpeded you claim He doesn't care. When I trying to imagine how God might see things, I see a Being who knows He can restore everything in the end and allows us to experiment and learn through hard experiences now knowing He can and will step in eventually to correct our mistakes. That is what the resurrection is all about and paradise is all about, death is not the final curtain. Paradise is the ability to live in the restored universe within God’s presence.

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You are correct in that there is no evidence to support that possibility. On the other hand, there is really no evidence to refute it either. What Hitler would have done after hypothetically winning the war against the allies is open to conjecture. My own guess, based on my understanding of the man, is that he would have eventually subjugated even his allies to some degree. Whether by turning to war with them, or simply turning them into vassal states, or just having them as his yes men. Again, I don’t base this on any direct evidence; just my opinion based on my understanding of his character.


In Hitler's Table Talk he discusses his allies quite extensively. At that time he realized his own mortality and had no interest in dominating either Japan or Italy. His vision was for Germany to become a great colonial power just as England and to a lesser extent France. His colonies would be Eastern Russia which he intended to subjugate and populate with Germans who would lord it over their Slavic surfs. On the other hand, it is clear he wanted to maintain control over the European countries he had conquered so that they would not be a future threat to Germany. He expressed sorrow that he wouldn't live long enough to see Germany fulfill its destiny according to his vision. He kept hoping the British and American people would realize it was in their best interest to leave the war and make peace with Germany with it's territorial conquests assured.

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You list other religions as the alternative “defining feature.” Religion does play a role, and in some societies more than others, but it is not necessarily its defining feature.

Perhaps religion has a less significant role in culture than you are willing to admit. In the case of America, I believe that to be the case.


If you accept as I do that our founders were profoundly religious men who wrote our constitution with the express purpose to protect religious observance and based our democracy on the assumption that people would hold shared moral beliefs based on religion, then your argument is not very convincing. The glue which has held our country together is the shared morality provided by religion. Remove that glue and we become just another failed state.

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Again, as before, I must take issue with your claim that Christianity is foundational to western civilization, or that islam is foundational to eastern civilization.


I don't understand your thinking. Religion has such a profound effect on any group of people I don’t see how it can be denied. To reject the effect of religion on society is almost like saying climate or geography has no effect on culture.

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Again, there is ambiguity and folly in the term CAN as used here. What does it mean, that a fact CAN or CANNOT be known? If a fact or event exists, it is a piece of information. If an entity CANNOT know that information, it is only testimony to the limited omniscience of that entity. And since omniscience becomes a meaningless and hollow concept if it is limited, this means that the entity in question cannot be omniscient, by definition.

And if you change the definition of the term omniscience by adding CAN, you have turned the term omniscience meaningless.

Instead of destroying the term omniscience, why not realize that God actually cannot be omniscient, or if he is omniscient, that other contradictions arise?


I'm quite comfortable with my definition, however we could state things differently if that suites you. In the Bible God identifies Himself as the I AM THAT I AM and doesn't try to explain His existence any further. Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth and the life." Perhaps we should say God is salvation and truth and life and leave it at that.

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Yes, and the majority of the people that claim to be communicating with God are usually locked up in the loony bin. It is interesting that such people now are recognized as delusional and schizophrenic, whereas a couple thousand years ago they were deemed as “possessed by demons” or “prophets,” depending on the case.

I have visited a few psych wards. On every one, there is at least one person who claims to be a prophet, bringing the word of God. Many claim to be Jesus himself, re-incarnated.


It is a fact that most of the individuals whom schizophrenics claim to be actually existed. They aren't smart enough to create a whole new persona. For instance, when Albert Einstein claimed to be Albert Einstein, no one thought about locking him up in a psych ward for making those claims. For there to be a counterfeit there has to be a genuine original first. The fact that schizophrenics claim to be "Jesus" shows just how much influence Jesus' life and teachings have actually had and how powerful an effect Jesus’ teachings have had. Just as Einstein was not crazy because he claimed to be himself, Jesus was not crazy for making claims to be Himself. The power in his ideas lives on 2000 years later with undiminished power to bless and uplift humanity.

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The more I talk to you, the more I realize that you lie further and further away from mainstream theism and Christianity. Because as I said, the concepts of God I am discussing are not based on my definitions, but on those of the theists. But I especially enjoy my conversation with you because you are different, and are presenting a viewpoint which is new to me.


I see myself as holding the very center of Christian theology. I see the Bible is a manual for deep spiritual truths which many people never comprehend, even the dedicated followers of Christ. That is OK since if they understand something of God's love they are all correct. The Bible is meant to be a guide to people at all levels of understanding. However, to say I’m not mainstream because I have a different understanding is a mistake. You can hold the same truths in common with a completely different perspective of what they really mean at a deeper level.

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Now, the way you define God may be different and thereby escapes some of my criticism, but by redefining him, a whole new can of worms are opened up. You are saying that he is not perfect ( by being able to learn new things, desiring and needing love, etc), and that he is not omniscient or omnipotent (by the way you define omniscience and omnipotence with CAN, these terms are actually destroyed instead of modified).

In doing so, your God has lost a lot of power. He now becomes an entity which is simply more powerful than us, but not necessarily the most powerful being in the universe. As such, theoretically another entity may exist which may be more powerful than him.


My point is not to escape your criticism, but to tell you what kind of God I find in the Bible. I find a personal loving, thinking Being whose power and knowledge can not be surpassed. That is why I said He knew everything that could be known. If another being could know more than God or be more powerful than He, then my definition would be faulty. I don’t think my appreciation of God’s power is lessened but my definition is more Biblically founded rather than based on ancient Greek philosophy.

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I applaud you for thinking of God as you do, and defining him differently than traditional theists. However, by escaping the pitfalls of an absolutely “perfect” God (which can learn, needs love and companionship, etc), or absolute omniscience and omnipotence, you have framed God in a “relativistic” setting. Your God is “relatively” more powerful, knowing, and perfect than us. But he is not absolute perfection, he lacks absolute power and knowledge because he can only do what CAN be done or know what CAN be known. As I said, these modifiers to the terms omniscience and omnipotence destroy the intended and conveyed meaning of the terms.

With a God which is only “relatively” superior to us, he loses the essence of what it means to be “God.” I think the original and traditional theists realized this problem, and wisely chose to define God as having “absolute” attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, perfection, etc…without any CANs. In doing so, they escape the criticisms of God only being relatively superior (and therefore not really a God). They have instead chosen the dilemmas posed by the problems of evil, omniscience, omnipotence, and perfection.


Since I'm not God, I may be missing something here, but I doubt it. To me, the Greek concept of God is not a perfect God at all but resembles a statue or possibly a vase of plastic flowers. What good is mindless power? The Biblical God who is a personal being seems vastly superior to me.

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Actually, I believe I am saying the opposite of what you think I am saying. If God gives us unconditional love, that is what causes a world without consequences. If we receive unconditional love, he loves us regardless of what we do. Someone like Hitler can kill as he pleases, and be accepted by God’s unconditional love in the end. Unconditional love means a free pass for anyone to do anything as far as God is concerned. And that is contradictory to his desire for us to act morally.


Only by His giving us a free pass can we really love. That is one of the hardest concepts in New Testament theology to grasp. I have looked for this understanding in Islam and haven't found it. This is probably the fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity and perhaps from all other religions. "Love" which is forced is not love but selfishness. Since the goal of Christianity is to teach us the real meaning of love, God has to give us a free pass. (Incidentally, by the Greek definition of God, that last statement of mine would be nonsense since I’m setting limits on God’s power. Many theologians will make similar statements and not realize they have just contradicted themselves. All theology is setting limits on God by it’s very nature of trying to explain Him or define Him.)

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I don’t agree with defining morality according to science. Survival of the fittest is a matter of fact in our biological world, but it doesn’t make it moral. In fact, morality to me is in a way the “check” which was created by our intelligence which in some ways defies “survival of the fittest.”

Survival of the fittest in its raw form means “might over right.” To me, morality means the opposite.


It is interesting that we agree on so many things. After reading Darwin's books, many of the Germans who considered themselves very scientific, actually tried to explain morality based on evolution. In fact, there are many people today who have fallen into that trap. Hitler was one of those people who openly used evolution as his moral standard. After WWII the eugenics movement and the race betterment movements which had quite a following in the USA quietly closed down. People understood the dangers in this policy. As is so often the case, society has moved over to the other extreme where they ignore the lessons evolution could teach us. Modern secular societies act as if evolution doesn’t exist.. For example, Marxism has been the greatest dysgenics movement in history. Entire countries have been purged of their best and brightest in the name of "equality." Think of the tons of human potential which have been needlessly wasted. On the other hand, many of the societal rules based on Judeo-Christian ethics, which modern secularists have found so repellant, have been set in place to protect and foster the survival and flourishing of the best and brightest while using their talents for the benefit of all.

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This reminds me of the lazy Persian “shotor-morgh,” or ostrich, which translated literally means “shotor: camel” and “morgh: chicken.”

When she is asked to behave as a chicken and lay an egg, she replies “I am no chicken; I am a camel.” When asked to behave as a camel and carry goods, she replies “I am no camel; I am a chicken.”


That is an interesting illustration, I love it. The truth is that the Bible contains divine truth but is written by humans with human language and with human understanding. My exegesis actually makes sense, but it takes considerable time to catch on to what I'm up to. I haven't changed my opinions to make them appear better for the debate, I have been very consistent from the beginning. You're apparently trying to combat what you think the Bible says or perhaps what you have learned from someone else and are missing the mark because that is not where I am. I take Jesus' teachings about God's love as foundational and then build from there. As a Christian I don't see how I could logically do otherwise.

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And if morality is based on religion, each religious sect can have its own private morality. Who is to say that Christian morality is better or worse than Islamic morality or Hindu morality? And that’s exactly what we have seen throughout history. One religion claims the rights to “morality” over another, and finds justification in persecuting or dominating another.

I mean this as no insult, but the “logical” basis of morality which you presented as based on God makes no logical sense to me, although I’m sure it makes sense to you.


If the truth of a religion were just a matter of which holy man was inspired your argument would be persuasive. People would arbitrarily choose which "prophet" they wished to follow and submit to him and fight all the rest. Perhaps, that is how it works in Islamic countries where people are asked to submit without question and are shielded from other understandings about God. That is not how things happen elsewhere.

To be successful in the free market place of ideas, a religion has to actually make sense and actually contribute positively too the happiness and success of the society which embraces it. This was the basis upon which Judaism and now Christianity were built, and has proven remarkably successful. The understanding of the good God has been very beneficial to many people personally and as a basis for the morality of our country and at one time of Europe as well.

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I don’t see how islam has failed the test, compared to Christianity or Judaism. How are we to measure that test? By military victory? What about the times when Islamic forces defeated Christian ones centuries ago? Did the fall of Constantinople signify Christianity’s failure? I think not.

The standard by which an idea or religion must be tested is in its result on individuals as well as societies as a whole. Did it lead to an improvement in the individuals’ lives? Did it lead to a better functioning society, ie peace, security, justice, and happiness?

I suppose that Moslems will give a biased “yes” response to these questions regarding islam, because of the brainwashing they’ve received. But an unbiased person who looks at Islamic societies and the history and teachings of islam would clearly have to answer “no.”


Actions speak louder than words. If he Islamists thought they could win the debate by the excellence of their ideas and the success of their societies, they would not be so angry right now. The Muslims themselves know their societies can not compete without the use of arms to make people accept their ideas, so are determined to kill the rest of us.

The ancient Israelites measured their success militarily and that is clearly a useful guide but is clearly incomplete. The best measure I have found so far is which country has the most people wishing to immigrate into the country and which has the most folks wishing to emigrate elsewhere. When you have to erect walls to keep people out, that is a successful society. The exception would be societies which have unusual resources which were discovered afer the society was already formed and gave it a temporary appeal unrelated to the society built over these resources. Over the long term these events will be short blips in the long term trajectory the society is following since they societies will fall back to their natural level as soon as the bonanza is spent.

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So God can destroy the devil, but chose not to do so. Why not? What purpose does the devil serve, other than lead us away from God…the very thing that God is most concerned about?


The Bible says the present conflict will persist until everyone has had the chance to know truth for themselves. The pope has even proposed that hell will be an empty set, but we really don't know. What we do know is that God will do what's best for each individual.

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I was unable to deduce from your story, however, your personal views on homosexuality. You mentioned you don’t support the promiscuity in the gay community. That’s understandable, but it doesn’t tell me if you accept or condemn homosexuality itself. Assume we are talking about a monogamous homosexual relationship…do you condemn it or accept it?


I never have had any strong feelings regarding homosexuality either way. So long as they are not hurting anyone else, I really don't care what consenting adults do privately so long as no one is hurt. I understand that in ancient society it was culturally acceptable for men to have sexual relations with juvenile boys which was where the homosexuals in the Catholic church went. That is of course wrong as is the irresponsibility and promiscuity prevalent in the gay community. To a large extent, I blame the leadership of the gay community for the abysmal lack of progress in suppressing the AIDS epidemic. So far as I know, AIDS is the only communicable disease which is treated like a civil rights issue.

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It’s fine if we don’t have an exact transcript of a person’s speech. If we have accurate documentation of that person’s words and deeds, we can form a reasonably accurate basis of that person. Therefore, if you believe that the gospels are extremely accurate, we may scrutinize Jesus.

As for Jesus himself, I have yet to receive an understanding of whether he was a man, and therefore fallible, or God, and therefore infallible.


The Bible presents Him as both. He had knowledge about the character of the Father which was first hand and exceeded what was available to other humans, but said He didn't know the day or the hour of His returning. I really have no basis to speculate beyond those facts which are found in the Bible.

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I agree. And since the scriptures supposedly highlight God’s word and behavior, they reflect God himself. And since there is an abundance of God making threats, destroying, killing, terrorizing, and humiliating man in the scriptures (as shown abundantly in my prior quotes from the scriptures), the presence of this “universal love” which this alleged God holds for us is not only challengeable but utterly contradictory.


Eventually, God sent His own Son to the earth so we could see for ourselves God's character. When one goes back to the Hebrew scriptures, one can find God's character but you have to stand back a little to get the picture. It is like pictures painted by followers of the school of pointillism, if you look closely at the detains you see meaningless bits of data, but if you stand back you see a beautiful picture. In reading the Hebrew scriptures, one has to stand back to get the overall picture to understand the meaning. Jesus understood the picture and not only explained it to us but lived it.
John 14:8-10
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8 Philip said, "Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us."
9 Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? 10 Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.
NIV


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God made a “covenant” with the Israelites (and supposedly the rest of mankind). So he made a contract. What is the purpose of a contract? To convey that “if you do this, I’ll do that.” It is the essence of a condition. It is also the exact opposite of giving “unconditional love.” It is impossible for God to offer unconditional love while maintaining a contract with humanity.


Perhaps you aren't acquainted with the terms of the New Covenant which Christians believe was ratified by Jesus. I don't see how this covenant can be against God's unconditional love.
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Jer 31:31-34
31 "The time is coming," declares the LORD,
"when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their forefathers
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,"
declares the LORD.
33 "This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
after that time," declares the LORD.
"I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will a man teach his neighbor,
or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,'
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,"
declares the LORD.
"For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more."

NIV

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I agree that some people do need God, but not for the reasons you point out. Many people need God as a security blanket; as a crutch. They need to believe in God in order to lift much responsibility off of themselves: “a higher power, with a grand scheme” which is really in charge of the world. Everything, whether good or bad, can be explained away as the “will” of this God.

Others need God specifically because of the evil and suffering present in this world. It is soothing to them that if justice is not served in this lifetime, it will at least be served in the next. It is for this very reason that the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all developed and took root from the lower, powerless classes of society. The oppressed, poor, and suffering masses are much more receptive to the idea that there is a powerful God who will serve justice to their oppressors in the next lifetime. “God” is a tremendous empowerment to those who otherwise feel powerless in this world. The promises of the afterlife are very appealing to those who suffer much in this lifetime.

Unfortunately injustice, suffering, oppression, and poverty run rampant in the world. And that is one reason (among some others) why theism has a strong hold upon this world.

What’s even more unfortunate is that with the psychological relief that theism provides the suffering masses comes a powerful reason and justification to commit further oppression, persecution, murder, war, and injustice…….GOD.


Carl Marx said "religion is the opiate of the people." Unfortunately the atheistic ideology he invented was and is much like having major surgery without any anesthetic. Sometimes a little opiate is necessary for survival. The results of Marxism have been always the same, societies which are so bad people would rather die trying to escape than to live in these Godless paradises.

It is true that the Bible contains good news which is almost too good to be true. The God of he universe loves us and will restore everything to perfection someday. Not only that but He has given us power to live in His love now with renewed families and progressive just societies. We are far from perfect, but the understanding of the good God has given us the moral compass which can guide us to improve our society and to meet new challenges as they arise.

Either Jesus was a lunatic who made absurd claims and Paul was a fool, or they were the genuine articles. From my own experience with lunatics and from my own Bible study, I’m convinced no lunatic could have invented the religion which is so designed to lead us to higher planes of moral development and deeper spirituality. After years of study, I can understand it, but I certainly couldn’t have invented it. What Jesus and Paul did was to open an entirely higher level of morality to humanity which so far as I know was not previously available. I imagine some of the Jewish rabbis understood God’s love and perhaps some deep thinkers in the East, but to open this level of morality to everyone appears to have been new. Jesus died with the faith that His father would restore Him and it happened just as He had expected. He actually was raised, His tomb was empty. Muhammad’s tomb is with us, Moses died and was buried, only Jesus’ tomb is empty.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 25, 2006 11:52 pm    Post subject: A Political Warning Shot: 'American Theocracy' Reply with quote

A Political Warning Shot: 'American Theocracy'
by Terry Gross
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5290373

Kevin Phillips, 65, lives in Connecticut, where he is registered as an independent. Katherine Lambert

Scroll below to read "Radicalized Religion" - Chapter 4 of the book.

Fresh Air from WHYY, March 21, 2006 · Kevin Phillips rose to prominence on the heels of Richard Nixon's political triumphs. His 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority was hailed as a visionary work of political analysis. But his new book, American Theocracy, argues that the Republican Party -- and the country -- is headed for disaster.

Subtitled "The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century," American Theocracy puts the trials of modern America into the context of other great historical powers. From Rome to Great Britain, Phillips identifies the keys to their decline -- and draws parallels to modern America.

Phillips wrote a 2004 bestseller, American Dynasty, about the Bush family. American Theocracy is a harsh criticism of the current Bush administration and the Republican Party. Phillips, a senior strategist for Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential bid, registered himself as a political independent in 2002.
The Emerging Republican Majority correctly predicted the trend of American voters toward greater conservatism -- particularly in the South. Since then, Phillips has written 11 books about economics, history and politics.

In 1978, Phillips became a radio commentator for CBS News, and in 1984, for National Public Radio as well.

________________________________________________

Excerpt: 'American Theocracy'
by Kevin Phillips



The book's cover.


Chapter 4

Radicalized Religion

As American as Apple Pie

Since at least 1776 the upstart sects have grown as the mainline American denominations have declined. And this trend continues unabated, as new upstarts continue to push to the fore.

-- Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1992

It is impossible to locate a period of American history when so-called small sects were not growing at a faster clip than denominations then viewed as large and stable.

-- R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, 1986

T he place of the United States as the world's only remaining superpower magnifies the importance of the Christian history of North America. The spread of American influence around the world has meant that American versions of the nature, purpose, and content of the Christian faith have also spread widely.

-- Mark A. Noll, The Old Religion in a New World, 2002

Few questions will be more important to the twenty-first-century United States than whether renascent religion and its accompanying political hubris will be carried on the nation's books as an asset or as a liability. While sermons and rhetoric propounding American exceptionalism proclaim religiosity an asset, a somber array of historical precedents -- the pitfalls of imperial Christian overreach from Rome to Britain -- tip the scales toward liability.

Christianity in the United States, especially Protestantism, has always had an evangelical -- which is to say, missionary -- and frequently a radical or combative streak. Some message has always had to be preached, punched, or proselytized. Once in a while that excitability has been economic -- most notably in the case of the Social Gospel of the 1890s, which searched through Scripture to document the Jesus who emphasized caring for the poor and hungry. In the twentieth century, though, religious zeal in the United States usually focused on something quite different: individual pursuit of salvation through spiritual rebirth, often in circumstances of sect-driven millenarian countdowns to the so-called end times and an awaited return of Christ. These beliefs have often been accompanied by great revivals; emotionalism; eccentricities of quaking, shaking, and speaking in tongues; characterization of the Bible as inerrant; and wild-eyed invocation of dubious prophecies in the Book of Revelation. No other contemporary Western nation shares this religious intensity and its concomitant proclamation that Americans are God's chosen people and nation. George W. Bush has averred this belief on many occasions.

In its recent practice, the radical side of U.S. religion has embraced cultural antimodernism, war hawkishness, Armageddon prophecy, and in the case of conservative fundamentalists, a demand for governments by literal biblical interpretation. In the 1800s, religious historians generally minimized the sectarian thrust of religious excess, but recent years have brought more candor. The evangelical, fundamentalist, sectarian, and radical threads of American religion are being proclaimed openly and analyzed widely, even though bluntness is frequently muted by a pseudo-tolerance, the polite reluctance to criticize another's religion. However given the wider thrust of religion's claims on public life, this hesitance falls somewhere between unfortunate and dangerous. Charles Kimball, a North Carolina Baptist and professor of religion, speaks very much to the point: "Although many of us have been taught it is not polite to discuss religion and politics in public, we must quickly unlearn that lesson. Our collective failure to challenge presuppositions, think anew, and openly debate central religious concerns affecting society is a recipe for disaster."1

Still, the challenge is gathering. Academic projects that spotlight the resurgence of religious fundamentalism around the world now routinely include the United States, along with India, Israel, and many Islamic countries. Scholars have always touched on "militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism," but there is a renewed focus.2 Some moderate-toliberal theologians have begun to challenge half-baked preaching about the rapture and the end times as "a toxin endangering the health -- even the life -- of the Christian churches and American society."3 Suburban megachurches, in turn, find themselves explained as offering the spiritual equivalent of a shopping mall: would you like psychic healing today, Hindu breathing exercises, or just a little observant mood music?4 Ultimately, the larger political resurgence of historically controversial religiosity is what demands attention.

Evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal denominations began the new millennium verging on juggernaut status. To the surprise of some observers, the sectarianism and fragmentation of American Christianity remained as visible at the turn of the twenty-first century as they had been one hundred years earlier. A consensus on this development is taking shape, as we will see. The old mainline churches have been culturally and institutionally displaced by a new plurality; yesteryear's supposed fringes are taking over American Protestantism's main square.

Documentation is far from perfect, and statistics can be as misleading or obscure in this realm as in any other. The half dozen or so periodic religious surveys, membership directories, and atlases of religion published in the United States are useful but incomplete, in part because of the unwillingness of many small and midsized denominations to participate in religious samplings. The Atlas of Religious Change in America, 1952–1990 begins with several pages to explain its methodologies and omissions. In a nutshell, only 80 to 85 percent of religious adherents were included because scores of churches, mostly white conservative or black, did not cooperate or submitted unsatisfactory data.5 Fully presenting them would only enlarge the biblical and conservative predominance.

In contrast to the secular and often agnostic Christianity dominant in Europe, Canada, and Australia, the American view encompasses a very different outlook -- one in which a large minority is in key ways closer to the intensity of seventeenth-century Puritans, Presbyterian Covenanters, and earlier Dutch or Swiss Calvinists. As we will see, these are not comforting analogies. The world's leading economic and military power is also -- no one can misread the data -- the world's leading Bible-reading crusader state, immersed in an Old Testament of stern prophets and bloody Middle Eastern battlefields.

There is, to be sure, a large and growing secular culture in the United States. Among northern university graduates and cultural elites, it is dominant -- stronger by far than that of the biblical and salvationist contingent. However, the Republican coalition and administration of George W. Bush is heavily weighted toward the 30 to 40 percent of the electorate caught up in Scripture and the prospect of being suddenly transported to God's side. This is enough to push the United States toward what chapter 6 will posit as a national Disenlightenment. Indeed, American foreign policy has its own corollary to the end-times worldview: the preemptive righteousness of a biblical nation become a high-technology, gospelspreading superpower.

Figure 1 details several of the most striking public faces of this extraordinary American belief system. Against this backdrop, Christianity's unusual evolution in North America does indeed merit more attention, as religious historians such as Mark Noll contend, than sophisticated elites in London, Paris, Beijing, or New Delhi -- or for that matter in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles -- have so far extended. While American religious tendencies toward parochialism and moral or political crusades mattered little in 1890, 1914, or even during the Cold War, they take on much greater importance now as Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holy lands occupy absolute center stage in world politics and as sites of military confrontation.

The idea of the United States as a biblically spurred great power, which has been framed by historians such as Walter McDougall in Promised Land, Crusader State (1997), has had unforeseen relevance to the Bush administration and cannot be cavalierly dismissed.6 Historically, great powers have too often gone out in blazes of religious invocation. The newly Christian fourth-century Rome of the emperor Constantine and his successors held up the cross as Rome faced military defeat and crumbling frontiers from Hadrian's Wall to Assyria. So did seventeenth-century Spain, the proud but ill-omened command post of the Catholic Counter Reformation. Vestments of crusaderdom also cloaked imperial Britain's overreach in World War I and its aftermath. Those uncomfortable precedents will be elaborated upon in later chapters. First, however, we will take on the prominence and many flavors of religious radicalism in the United States, truly as American as apple pie.

The Sect-Driven Dynamic of American Religion

Part of the unusual sectarian quality of U.S. Protestantism derives from its cultural parentage. Britain, itself once a biblical nation convinced it was God's chosen one, was unlike other European powers in a willingness to populate the American colonies with Scripture-reading religious dissenters. The resultant flow from Britain and Europe helped to stamp the North American colonies as a religious refuge -- for English and Welsh Puritans, Baptists, and Quakers, Scottish and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Jews from many parts of Europe, French Huguenots, and a myriad of German speakers fleeing continental wars: Moravians, Palatines, Amish, Mennonites, Anabaptists, Dunkers, and Salzburgers. Especially in the middle colonies, New York and Pennsylvania, the result was a population that exhibited the religiosity of refugee faith across a kaleidoscope of denominations and sects. Following independence, this all but mandated tolerance and ruled out any official church in these states. Only relatively homogeneous New England kept official Congregational churches in three states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

While many foreign visitors commented on this national trait -- high religiosity and tolerance seemingly buoying each other -- fewer remarked on a related belief pattern. With choice of worship permitted, lateeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American Protestants, among the world's most Bible-reading, flocked to the sort of individualist and antihierarchical faith that emphasized a personal relationship with God. This made them responsive to pioneering evangelists such as English visitor George Whitefield during the so-called Great Awakening of the 1740s and to others during the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s.

Periodic revivalism, in turn, fed a still-resonant exodus of Americans from established churches that had given up emotion for respectability, turning instead to movements or sects that emphasized salvation, spirituality, physical displays, founders' claims to special revelation (Mormons, for example), faith healing, and "holiness upon the land." Over the years, new waves of fervor, zeal, and agitation -- from quakes, shakes, and jerks to millennial watch keeping and speaking in tongues -- have sparked almost continuous cultural and behavioral comment from domestic and foreign observers. In one of the latest nontraditional evolutions, "third wave" Pentecostalism, hundreds of churches have replaced organ music with guitars, drums, and synthesizers, some adding unusual new forms of personal expression and spiritualism.

Mark Noll, one of America's foremost religious historians, in 2002 wrote the book The Old Religion in a New World, explaining the differences in Christianity in Europe and in North America. The major divergences go to the heart of what is unusual about American religion. As might be expected, the United States has a superabundance of denominations and sects compared to Europe, as well as a far higher ratio of churchgoers. By one count, the United States in 1996 had 19 separate Presbyterian denominations, 32 Lutheran, 36 Methodist, 37 Episcopal or Anglican, 60 Baptist, and 241 Pentecostal.7 Globalization and immigration have added to the proliferation in surprising ways. In A New Religious America (2001), Diana Eck pointed out that Muslims in America outnumber Presbyterians or Episcopalians, and that Los Angeles is the most varietal Buddhist city in the world.8 Each Sunday the Los Angeles Times publishes a directory of services that includes more than six hundred denominations.

To add to the complexity, theological crosscurrents are sapping the old denominations and making their labels less meaningful. In Noll's words, "free-flowing Pentecostal and charismatic styles will go on spreading their influence far beyond the explicitly Pentecostal churches. The most important Christian schisms will increasingly follow theological-ideological lines rather than denominational lines. Especially as the historic Catholic-Protestant chasm continues to narrow, Christians will be linked to fellow believers from other denominations according to shared convictions."9 Examples of this emerging transdenominationalism include the growth of the new suburban megachurches -- some boasting congregations of ten to fifteen thousand -- and the post-Pentecostal networks of Calvary Chapels and the Association of Vineyard Churches.

Also to the point, U.S. Protestantism uniquely abounds with what Noll terms "populist innovations," or forms of worship developed by laypeople. One is the widespread American embrace of "dispensational premillennialism" -- a fervor launched in the nineteenth century around biblical passages interpreted to signal the second coming of Christ. A second, Pentecostalism, is based on the "latter rain" of revival in the Holy Spirit prophesied in Joel 2:23. To Pentecostals the defining sign of an individual's possession by the Holy Spirit is the gift of tongues -- the ability to utter words and sentences intelligible only to God and those with the gift of interpretation.10 Noll acknowledges that "neither dispensationalism nor Pentecostalism has ever appeared respectable in academic environs, but each has attracted far more adherents and driven far more practical religious activity than any academically respectable theology of the twentieth century."11 Although survey results vary, some 7 to 10 percent of U.S. churchgoers appear to be Pentecostals, and perhaps a quarter of churchgoers are full-fledged end-times believers, as opposed to the 50 percent or so who relate to the symbolism when holy wars or tsunamis dominate the news.12

Conversion on the part of adults -- the deep personal experience of being "born again" in Christ -- is also far more important in the United States, with its emphasis on individual choice and personal experience, than elsewhere.13 In the mid-1980s some 33 percent of respondents told the Gallup Poll they had been "born again"; by the early 2000s the number had climbed to 44 to 46 percent.14 George W. Bush's own tale of coming to God struck a chord in the churchgoing United States that would have been impossible in less-observant Europe. Even in kindred Canada, supposedly no prime minister has ever claimed to be born again. 15

Likewise notably American is the pervasive influence of the Bible, from the first English migrations a staple of belief and interpretation. Bible publishing in the new republic quickly became an industry -- some 1,800 different English-language editions were published between 1777 and 1865 -- and remains one today, with more than seven thousand editions available as of 1990.16 National attentiveness to Scripture, in turn, helps to explain the unusual popular commitment to biblical inerrancy, prophecy, and the supposed end times. A related topic, the recurrent conflict between religiosity and science, reflects how much American thinking has been steeped in both. Tensions between the Book of Genesis and Darwinian theories of evolution, brought to a theatrical and political head in 1925 in Tennessee's famous Scopes trial, still throb. "The result," concludes Noll, "has been a much greater salience in America concerning evolution and 'creation science' than in any other Western society."17

Sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, in their pioneering study The Churching of America, 1776–1990, provide a revealing explanation of America's religious idiosyncrasies. The religious history of the United States, they say, rests heavily on sectarian emotion and revival -- a process under way since the eighteenth century, in which churches become establishmentarian, "compromise their 'errand into the wilderness' and then ... lose their organizational vigor, eventually to be replaced by less worldly groups, whereupon the process is repeated."18

Even by the time of the American Revolution the old colonial elite denominations -- Congregationalists in New England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, and Anglicans from Chesapeake Bay and to the south -- were in places being challenged or overtaken by upstart Baptists and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. By 1850 revival-minded Methodists and Baptists, with their itinerant preachers, circuit riders, and camp meetings, ranked first and second nationally. By the early twentieth century Baptists had pulled ahead, with Pentecostal, charismatic, "restorationist," holiness, and other sects gaining traction. The colonial-era elite denominations kept slipping down the list, holding ever smaller ratios of U.S. worshippers.

By the end of the twentieth century, the fundamentalist-leaning Southern Baptist Convention, wedded to biblical inerrancy, was by far the largest Protestant group. Indeed, as we will see in greater detail, the SBC, together with other once-peripheral sects, boasted some forty million adherents versus a combined fifteen million members of the four leading mainline churches (Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Church of Christ Congregational).19 Like Stark and Finke, historian Noll observed that "previously marginal groups have become larger and more important, while previously central denominations have moved toward the margins. ... The Protestant bodies whose rates of growth in recent decades have exceeded general population increases -- sometimes far exceeded -- are nearly all characterized by such labels as Bible-believing, born again, conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist, holiness, Pentecostal, or restorationist."20

While avoiding judgmental descriptions, Stark and Finke did insist on "the primary feature of our religious history: the mainline bodies are always headed for the sideline."21 Sectarianism keeps claiming center stage, reinforcing or reinventing the radical aspects of American religion.

The Ever-Expanding American Revival Tent

As the twenty-first century began, none of the western countries in which Reformation Protestantism bred its radical or anarchic sects nearly five hundred years earlier -- England, Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands -- still had congregations of any great magnitude adhering to that theology. Even sympathetic commentators have described church attendance in England with phrases such as "catastrophic decline," and a recent survey of students at Belgium's ancient Catholic University in Louvain found only 16 percent crediting the resurrection of Christ and a mere 3 percent believing in the infallibility of the Pope.22 The United States, religiously inspired and settled by some of those same radical Protestant sects in the 1600s and early 1700s, took a different course. Its religious revivals keep coming, now jumping from rural tents to the electronic podiums of televangelism.

At the close of the American Revolution, which began with only 15 to 20 percent of the population regularly attending church, Anglicans, Quakers, and even politically victorious New England Congregationalists found their strongholds besieged by Baptists and Methodists. Inspired by democratic rhetoric and opportunity, the insurgent denominations found the late 1780s and 1790s a fruitful time for promoting personal salvation and harvesting souls. In contrast to the staid services and educated clergy of the established denominations, Baptists and Methodists shared practices and techniques especially successful in remote or frontier areas -- reliance on part-time or itinerant preachers who had little formal education and received minimal pay and, most of all, revivals and camp meetings.

It is an exaggeration to think of this as a largely American behavioral innovation. Princeton's Leigh Schmidt and other religious historians have located important roots in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Presbyterian "holy fairs" that developed in the southwest of Scotland and then in nearby northern Ireland. Sometimes involving many thousands of worshippers, these outdoor events were marked by swaying, crying, swooning, and the like -- mockingly caricatured by the famous Robert Burns and others. Being much in the minds of Scottish and Scotch-Irish settlers in North America, their memories helped to inspire the similar revivals and camp meetings along the Appalachian frontier.

But if the Scottish ancestry is clear, the enthusiasm and lack of re-straint does seem to have been greater in the New World. New physical ecstasies joined "Quaker" and "Shaker" in the religious lexicon. One Methodist recalled that "while I was preaching, the power of God fell on the assembly, and there was an awful shaking among the dry bones. Several fell on the floor and cried for mercy."23 Cane Ridge, Kentucky, where on one evening in August 1801 twenty thousand sobbed, shrieked, and shouted themselves into near hysteria, gained particular fame as a revival ground. Between 1800 and 1850 the western half of New York became known as "the burned-over district" because of the emotional inflammations there that matched the searing heat of forest fires.24

Both evangelical insurgencies saw their flocks multiply. Between 1776 and 1806 Methodist ranks in the United States increased by 2,500 percent -- from 4,900 adherents to 130,000 -- while Baptist membership ballooned from 35,000 in 1784 to 173,000 in 1810.25 By 1850 populist outreach had made Methodists the largest U.S denomination, with 2.7 million members, the Baptists placing second, with 1.6 million.26 Successful American Protestantism proselytized with an evangelical accent.

For both churches the burgeoning South (including the southern settled Ohio Valley) had emerged as their principal center of gravity.27 Nevertheless, before the Baptists and Methodists could make evangelical religion dominant below the Mason-Dixon Line, they had to -- and did -- shed notions that were perceived as radical, such as opposition to slavery and enmity to social hierarchies, as well as their early emphasis on selfrevelation and church fellowship, which in some localities had been deemed harmful to family bonds. As one recent historian of the Bible Belt has pointed out, this meant "altering, often drastically, many earlier evangelical teachings and practices concerning the proper roles of men and women, old and young, white and black, as well as their positions on the relationship between ... Christianity and other forms of supernaturalism. As a result, evangelism looked much different in the 1830s than it had in the 1790s."28 In some poor, low-slaveholding areas, white dissidents did break away into minor sects.

Especially in the North, well-educated, established clergy often deplored the emotionalism, physical displays, and lack of erudition among the Baptists and Methodists. Those churches, said Connecticut Congregationalist Lyman Beecher, were "worse than nothing."29 Critics also harped on the prurient incitements when baptism involved total immersion of girls wearing flimsy shifts, and they disparaged the liquor often sold in proximity to camp meetings. Barton Stone, later a famous evangelist, candidly described the "bodily agitations" seen at the Cane Ridge revivals of the early 1800s. They included "falling" (often with a piercing shriek), "the jerks" (often of the head), "dancing" (as an extension of the jerks), and "barking" (as an accompaniment to the jerks).30 While opponents frequently exaggerated this behavior, they were hardly making it up.

Comparable insults had been leveled in the 1740s, when old-line Virginia Anglicans and New England Congregationalist leaders blistered evangelists like George Whitefield for emotionalism, enthusiasm, and threat to good order. Even so, the first half of the nineteenth century introduced a range of new denominations that made Baptists and Methodists look sedate.

The frontier-centered restorationist movement -- by some also called "primitivism" -- sought to recapture the pure, unencumbered Christianity of the New Testament by stripping away the imported corruptions of European ecclesiastical authority and practice. Labels such as Lutheran, Anglican, or Baptist -- for that matter, even the term "reverend" -- were to be cast aside. During the 1830s the several groups of dissidents cohered as the simply named Christian Church but later split into three separate networks -- confusingly named the Churches of Christ, the Christian Churches, and the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ. Accepting no more than a bare-bones institutional framework, the three became significant sects in the upper South and Ohio Valley states during the decades before the Civil War.31

Greater flamboyance marked two other new sects, both enlivened by founders' claims of special divine revelation. After the failure of predictions by William Miller, a self-educated farmer from upstate New York, that Christ would return in 1843 and then 1844, elements of his following were reorganized by associates. They claimed that the return had indeed taken place, but only as a spiritual (and invisible) passage into the presence of the father.32 A full return was still to come. One founder, Ellen White, claimed to have had a personal vision of creation. The Seventh Day Adventists, as they became known in 1860, worshipped on Saturday, kept awaiting the advent, and emphasized dietary practices that pioneered the role of grains as cold cereal. They, too, thrived and grew to count one million members in the United States by 2000.

Most provocative of all was the emergence of the Mormon faith in the 1820s under the messianic leadership of Joseph Smith, another New Yorker. In 1830 he published The Book of Mormon, explaining how God had prevailed on Christopher Columbus "to venture across the sea to the promised land, to open it for a new race of free men." Revelations to Smith by the angel Moroni told how the future United States had been occupied many years before Christ by several Hebraic peoples: the Lamanites (ancestors of the American Indians) and the Nephrites. Mormon himself, the father of Moroni, was a Nephrite who recorded the story of his tribe on gold plates.33 The New Jerusalem would be in America, and when Jesus returned it would be to the area near Independence, Missouri. No shrinking violet, Smith announced in 1844 that he was running for president. With his popularity as worrisome to the respectable as his beliefs -- an early example of the political threat of populist religion -- Smith was jailed in Illinois and then shot while incarcerated.

The Mormons had embraced polygamy, authorized by a revelation to Smith, while honoring both the Christian Bible and The Book of Mormon. After Smith was killed, they left their major settlement in Nauvoo, Illinois, and followed new leader Brigham Young west to Utah, establishing their New Israel around the Great Salt Lake, the River Jordan, and Utah Lake, a grouping that resembled an upside-down map of the biblical Galilee -Jordan–Dead Sea region. A century and a half later, more or less (but not entirely) shorn of polygamy, the Mormon religion dominated Utah and Idaho and constituted an influential regional force in six adjacent states. From under fifty thousand in 1850, the Mormon population of the United States expanded to 1.1 million in 1950 and 5 million in 2000.34 In most surveys, however, Mormonism is still categorized as not quite Christian and not quite Protestant.

Jehovah's Witnesses were yet another of the militant denominations assembled in the nineteenth century to await a second coming. Founder Charles Russell, who rejected the doctrine of the trinity, proclaimed that Christ had returned to earth invisibly in 1874 preparatory to establishing a full presence. The cataclysm or advent was predicted for 1914. Over the years, Witnesses refused to serve in the military, vote, hold office, or salute the American flag, calling such practices the province of the antichrist.35 As with the upsurge of the Seventh Day Adventists, part of the Witnesses' twentieth-century growth was international, resulting from missionary activities. In the United States alone, nearly one million witnessed the millennium.

Evangelism of the more prosaic sort also accelerated after the Civil War. This time, though, Methodism -- now the nation's largest denomination, embracing a middle-class mind-set and edging away from earlier Wesleyan intensity -- had become a religious establishment to be raided. The holiness movement, which had pre–Civil War roots, advocated a return to Methodist founder John Wesley's striving for Christian perfection as a gift of the Holy Spirit. As Methodism boasted more costly church buildings, seminaries, and a plentitude of bishops, breakaway movements proliferated. They included the Indiana-based Church of God in 1881, the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1887, the Church of the Nazarene in 1895, and the Church of God in Christ in 1897.36 Poaching-minded holiness preachers called on "all true holiness Christians to come out of Methodism's church of mammon."37

In the nineteenth century, as we have seen, religious historians tended to minimize fragmentation and downplay the sects. They preferred to emphasize eventual and ultimate Christian unity (and the fulfillment of America's divine mission). In his 1986 book Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, Cornell University's R. Laurence Moore explained that historians writing in the 1840s and 1850s also wanted to support the separation of church and state, in New England still politically controversial. (Massachusetts, the last New England state to disestablish Congregationalism, did so in 1837.) To that end, they argued that sectarianism had not run wild and that "many churches existed in America, but only a few were significant."38

That tenuous hope could still be justified during Methodism's midnineteenth-century heyday, but not for much longer. Too many Protestants, lacking priests to assure them of forgiveness, searched for God's grace in personal experience. By the 1890s holiness Methodists were defecting from their old church. Baptists were overtaking and passing Methodists in the South and overtook them in the nation as a whole around 1906.39 As the twentieth century got under way, not only were the holiness churches thriving, but fundamentalism and Pentecostalism were beginning their own ascents. Mainline Protestantism fell behind the revivalminded denominations by World War I, if the restorationist and holiness churches are counted alongside the Baptists. However, religious historians of that era, mainline Protestants, were not eager to give them such credence and position. Moore quotes one respected chronicler, William W. Sweet, whose Story of Religion in America became a standard text in 1930, ridiculing the sects while matter-of-factly describing the recruits of the "great Protestant churches" as "sane Christians."40

Sociologists Stark and Finke, for their part, employed a new technique in their statistical trail blazing. Disregarding the actual head counts of individual churches -- numbers that usually rose as population increased -- they introduced a comparative calculus: the rise or fall of each denomination's share of the total sum of religious adherents in the United States. Middling membership gains, they argued, often disguised a relative decline. These mathematics shone a more negative light on the appeal of the established churches while spotlighting insurgent developments. For example, between 1776 and 1850 the Congregationalists dropped from 20.4 percent of all religious adherents to just 4.0 percent, and the Episcopalians from 15.7 percent to 3.5 percent, while the Methodists soared from 2.5 percent to a peak 34.2 percent.41 Then between 1850 and 1980, in a different statistical format, the Methodists fell from 117 adherents per one thousand population to 74, a relative decline even though actual Methodist numbers rose over those 130 years.42 Few of Stark and Finke's predecessors or colleagues swung such an iconoclastic ax, and so the rise of extreme sects was slow to be recognized.

Another explanation why the early-twentieth-century strides of the holiness, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal groups escaped emphasis for so long hangs on these unfashionable elements' much publicized embarrassment during the 1920s. Press and public mockery swelled after the evolution-centered 1925 Scopes trial, the foolish 1924 attempt of the Presbytery of Philadelphia to bring modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick to trial for heresy, and the 1927 publication of Elmer Gantry, novelist Sinclair Lewis's scathing portrait of a corrupt revivalist. As the fundamentalists reeled, pundits employed dismissive characterizations such as "split and stricken," saying such movements had "lost any semblance of unity or collective force."43

According to Calvin College historian Joel Carpenter in his book Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, after "fundamentalism's fall from respect in the late 1920s," inward-turning adherents used the thirties and forties to "consolidate an institutional network, and rethink their mission to America," using Bible institutes, fellowships, and radio gospel hours.44 As for Pentecostals, they were even more withdrawn civically. Their "journals that appeared between the early 1930s and the late 1940s, years of a catastrophic depression and war, [gave] no sense that events took place in the world other than the wonder working, soulsaving miracles of the Holy Ghost."45

Small wonder, then, that most observers, naturally unaware of what trends the late twentieth century would confront, glossed over any indications of mainline Protestant weakness -- its public and social authority during the twenties remained unchallenged -- and saw little future for primitive fundamentalism and revivalism. In fact, though, the actual statistics of the World War I years and the 1920s document their gains, not a retreat. Between 1916 and 1926, according to Stark and Finke, the Presbyterians (USA), Congregationalists, and Methodists retired or closed down a significant percentage of their denominations' individual churches. Yet during that same period unfashionable sects were recording huge expansions of churches: a 656 percent rise for the holiness Churches of Christ, 577 percent for the Church of the Nazarene, 553 percent for the Assemblies of God, and 442 percent for the Tennessee-based Church of God.46

Noll, too, concluded that "during the first half of the twentieth century, the fragmentation of Protestantism meant that the nation's historically most potent religious force became a declining influence in the nation as a whole."47 He argued that "the 1930s marked the beginning of the relative decline of the older, mainline Protestant churches." Meanwhile, despite any lingering negative imagery, "for fundamentalist, holiness, Pentecostal, African American, and the new-evangelical churches and organizations, it was a time of expansion. The Southern Baptist Convention, the holiness Church of the Nazarene, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, and the main black Baptist denominations all grew rapidly during this period."48

Acceptance of this thesis has been solidifying: sects up, mainline down. Carpenter also agrees that the religious crisis during this period was only among the "older or more prestigious denominations," some of which lost membership, baptisms, and revenues. At the same time, "fundamentalists' missions and ministries grew, Southern Baptists gained almost 1.5 million members between 1926 and 1940, and the pentecostal denomination the Assemblies of God quadrupled."49 During the 1930s, moreover, the middle-class Northern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterians (USA) were split by a fundamentalist exodus that launched new conservative denominations: the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (1932), the Presbyterian Church of America (1936), and the Bible Presbyterian Church (1937).50 These multiple citations buttress a different interpretation than the received wisdom: that evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal religion, far from evaporating or stagnating in a backwater during the early twentieth century, seem to have been a gathering force, like an incoming tide. No wonder the much-reported revival captained by the youthful Billy Graham in 1949–1950 could surprise with such unexpected attendance -- and bring in its wake a further conservative momentum throughout the sixties and seventies. An important piece of missing U.S. religious history seems to be slowly, albeit belatedly, reappearing.

By this point the reader may feel baptized by statistical and denominational total immersion. However, there is no other way to lay out the foundations, crossbeams, and buttresses of the unusual American religious structure that led to the rise of the religious right and to the related transformation of national politics, the consequences of which we face today.

By the 1950s even the mainstream media perceived the implications of Billy Graham's fulsome public reception. A graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, the Harvard of American evangelicalism, Graham had roots in born-again, biblically inerrant, premillennial Protestant fundamentalism. His achievement, first in southern California, and then in bringing fifty thousand listeners to Boston Common in January 1950, where the great evangelist Whitefield had drawn twenty thousand or so in 1740, gave his contemporaries pause about the real meaning of the supposed rout during the cynical 1920s.51 Graham himself was wise enough to duck any fundamentalist tag, embracing ecumenicalism and preferring the unelaborated label "evangelist."

In retrospect, the apparent seamlessness of holiness, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal expansion from the 1880s and 1890s through Graham's Christian crusade should focus our questions about the rise of today's influential sects. The mismeasurement after the twenties is not the only one. We should be more broadly skeptical about the labeling of the several so-called great awakenings, which start to look less like sudden eruptions than high points in ongoing momentum. Based on the data now available, the twentieth century saw sectarian gains and surges to match those of the eighteenth and nineteenth. Indeed, Stark and Finke match up the reasonably continuous revivalist tendencies of the public with a more or less steady rise in the percentage of Americans who stated some religious adherence -- from 17 percent in 1776 to 34 percent in 1850 to 45 percent in 1890, 56 percent in 1926, 62 percent in 1980, and 63 percent in 2000.52 Neither historical calculus has been seriously rebutted, although their calculation of religious adherents does not represent one uniform statistical series, and the new figure for 2000 is controversial.

A bit more history is in order to grasp the twentieth-century emergence of the fundamentalists. We have seen how the century began with the Baptists pulling ahead of the Methodists as the largest Protestant denomination. By one account, the impetus that became fundamentalism "began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as an interdenominational revivalist network that formed around the era's greatest evangelist, Dwight L. Moody. This movement drew most of its constituents from the generally Calvinist wing of American Protestantism."53 At this point, it was more northern than southern.

Between 1910 and 1915 Moody's conservative successors, alarmed at the growth of liberal theology and secular spirit, published a series of booklets called "The Fundamentals." These most basic of the basics, all beyond compromise, included an intense focus on evangelicalism; the need for an infilling of the Holy Spirit after conversion; belief in the imminent second coming of Christ; and the absolute, inerrant authority of the Bible.54 In 1919 the hard-liners promoted the formation of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association, and in 1920 the new antimodernist faction was given the name "fundamentalist" by Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Baptist paper The Watchman-Examiner.55 To some religious historians, the rise of fundamentalism from the 1920s through the 1960s is now seen as the period's most dynamic and influential U.S. evangelical impulse.56

Joel Carpenter, in his profile of fundamentalism during those years, cites the interpretations of two principal authorities, Ernest Sandeen and George Marsden, that fundamentalism had serious roots in nineteenthcentury religious ideas and so could not be dismissed as simply a revolt against modernism.57 Of course, roots in nineteenth-century sectarianism, itself born amid the dislocating modernism of steamboats, railroads, and the telegraph, are not necessarily very different.

Pentecostalism, the faith many religious historians identify as Protestantism's late-twentieth-century populist innovation, emerged out of the late-nineteenth-century holiness movement, updated in the sectarian pressure cooker of early 1900s California. It caught hold in the 1910s and 1920s, abetted by preachers in the black community and then by the flamboyant Aimee Semple McPherson, radio personality and founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, another fringe sect that has since climbed much higher in membership. McPherson, who sometimes rode a motorcycle down the aisle of her Los Angeles temple, thrived on publicity and even claimed to have been kidnapped in 1926 when she was actually hiding out with a new lover.58 Like Baptism in its early form, Pentecostalism did not thrive by being respectable.

The movement's distinguishing characteristic, the practice of speaking in tongues, took its name from the New Testament. During the biblical celebration of Pentecost, when "the Holy Spirit descended in power upon the apostolic worshipers, one manifestation of that power was that those present 'began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.'"59 Today, only people with the "gift" could understand words and sentences of godly derivation that otherwise seem babbling and unintelligible. As with early southern evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, in order to take hold, was obliged to ease its initial egalitarianism and interracialism and become more acceptable to middle-class and commercial society.60 Like the Baptists in the South, however, it prospered from some perceived moderation. Economic conservatives often warm to sects in which a preoccupation with personal salvation turns lower-income persons away from distracting visions of economic and social reform.

To return to the mainstream, observers have long identified the tumultuous 1960s as the decade when the mainline Protestant denominations declined, partly by taking cultural and political positions on war, society, and civil disobedience that were too liberal for their congregations. Religiously, though, the decade of Vietnam and Woodstock seems to have been less of a watershed than assumed. By the calculations of Stark and Finke, between 1940 and 1985 mainline Protestantism's share of all U.S. religious adherents was steadily plummeting. The largest group, the United Methodists, dropped from 124.7 adherents per thousand total church members in 1940 to 93.0 in 1960 and to just 64.3 in 1985. For the Presbyterians (USA), the simultaneous decline was from 41.7 to 36.4 to 21.3, while the Episcopalian fall was from 30.9 to 28.6 to 19.2.

Meanwhile, the United Church of Christ (Congregationalists) slid from 26.5 to 19.6 to 11.8. In mid-twentieth-century cultural and political terms, these denominations, seats of relative theological centrism, had been home to a disproportionate share of the nation's college graduates, business elites, and elected national officeholders. Changes in theological dominance thus proved to be harbingers of broader political and societal changes.

The ascendant Southern Baptists, during the same period, climbed from 76.7 adherents per thousand total church members in 1940 to 85.0 in 1960 and to 101.3 in 1985. The Pentecostal Assemblies of God vaulted from 3.1 in 1940 to 4.4 in 1960 and to 14.6 in 1985.61 These, in the 1940s and 1950s, were national outsider denominations, found more often in unfashionable locales than in wealthy ones. Nonestablishment Protestantism were moving to the fore.

Wheaton's Noll dates the gathering mainline slump from the thirties but acknowledges that "the public turmoil of the 1960s accelerated that decline."62 For the nearly four-decade period between 1960 and 1997 -- and taking denominational mergers into account -- the Presbyterian Church, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ (including the Congregationalists), and the Methodists lost between 500,000 and 2 million members each, the last being the Methodist slippage.63 In the meantime, the Southern Baptist Convention added 6 million, the Mormons 3.3 million, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God 2 million, and the Church of God (Tennessee) some 600,000.64 The direction in these several tabulations is clear: the sectarian gains race across the decades like an express train, another hint of the changes to come.

Taken together, Starke and Finke, Noll, and Carpenter concur that in recent decades American Protestantism, through itself slowly ebbing in relative adherence, has increasingly leaned toward the Pentecostal and charismatic movements and churches.65 The two categories are hardly monolithic. The more numerous Pentecostals of the older Assemblies of God are fundamentalist and Scripture-minded, epitomized by former attorney general John Ashcroft, who on being sworn into office also had himself anointed with cooking oil in the biblical manner of King David. A nondancer and disbeliever in frivolity, Ashcroft, on becoming attorney general, covered the bare breast of the Justice Department's large statue of the Spirit of Justice.

In a vivid contrast, the small but fast-growing Vineyard Churches and Calvary Chapels -- California-born, charismatic, and third wave -- mix informality, unchurchly language, and soft-rock music with what skeptics call the "spiritual smorgasbord" of charismatic experience from physical healing to speaking in tongues. Their story has been told sympathetically in Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium.66

However, critics have noted that the "holy laughter" cultivated in some Vineyard churches can degenerate. In 1995 the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church was booted out of the Association of Vineyard Churches for allowing it to include animal noises -- barking like dogs, oinking like pigs, roaring like lions, and so forth.67 Some sociologists assert that elements of West Coast Pentecostalism, very much a minority nationally, have made a liberalizing cultural accommodation to the loose and mellow Pacific Coast culture -- a so-called Californication of conservative Protestantism.68

By a careful synthesis of polling results, we can affirm that "about one in four Americans (or 25 percent) are now affiliated with a church from this network of conservative Protestant churches (that is, fundamentalist, evangelical, holiness, or Pentecostal). Not quite one in six (around 15 percent) are affiliated with the older denominations that used to be called the Protestant mainline."69 Still, the conservative ratio may be understated by leaving out America's million Mormons and million Jehovah's Witnesses, and perhaps also by pegging Pentecostals at a cautious ten million adults rather than in the sometimes suggested twentymillion range. On the other hand, the so-called third wave may be misplaced in the conservative category.

This is no abstract inquiry. The fundamentalist, evangelical, and sectarian head count helps to explain the poll findings in figure 1 of such widespread popular belief in matters ranging from biblical inerrancy to the imminence of the end times. The national population does appear to be more sectarian and movement driven, with a lower proportion of mainline Christians and fewer secular nonbelievers than common wisdom has assumed.

Because these pages are principally concerned with the radicalization of U.S. Protestantism, they touch only lightly on overlapping phenomena within American Catholicism. However, Noll and Stark and Finke see the church of Rome as caught by some of the same trends that have sapped the mainline Protestant denominations, principally inroads by charismatic movements, widespread nonattendance, and rising losses to Pentecostalism. The Roman Catholic Church claims some sixty million members, but only half are frequent churchgoers. The sharp decline from 1965 to 1990 in church ability to recruit priests, nuns, and seminarians in the United States has been charted from the Official Catholic Directory by Stark and Finke. From 10.6 enrollments in seminaries for every ten thousand U.S. Catholics in 1965, the number plummeted to 1.1 in 1990.70

Until the last generation or two, their argument goes, the Catholic Church in the United States was an amalgam of outsider ethnic factions and parishes -- Irish, Italian, French, Serbian, Polish, Hungarian, et al. For this reason Catholicism as an institution behaved more like a group of sects than an established church. Outsider psychologies and distinctive ethnic nationalisms were supporting pillars for the church, not debilitating weaknesses. As these were lost, and as the U.S. Catholic hierarchy followed the papacy's Vatican II liberalizations in the 1960s -- ending masses held in Latin, voiding the prohibitions against eating meat on Fridays, removing impediments to Protestant-Catholic marriages, promoting Christian unity -- the old Catholic hold weakened. Not everyone agrees, but Stark and Finke cite these changes to explain why, between 1964 and 1978, the percentage of U.S. Catholics regularly attending services dropped from 71 percent to 50 percent.71

Although Stark and Finke do not hypothesize the "Protestantization" of American Catholicism, they do promote an analogy between weakening faiths.72 Because Catholics can marry non-Catholics, can set foot in other churches, and can miss mass without thereby committing a sin, less is being demanded of them, and less loyalty is being returned. As with Protestants, more decision making and interpretation is being left to individuals and consciences. Many Catholic organizations and universities have measurably secularized. Pentecostal and other Protestant inroads among Hispanic Catholics have been described by theologian Andrew Greeley as an "ecclesiastic failure of unprecedented proportions," trends that lead Stark and Finke to doubt that "the American Catholic Church will be able to halt its transformation from an energetic [nineteenthcentury] sect into a sedate mainline body."73

The point here is less to survey the various denominations -- in examining the GOP electorate, we will revisit aspects of their size, ideology, and political geography from several perspectives -- than to sketch the revival-prone sectarian and radical side of American religion. Its increasing presence is breeding a politics of cultural narrowness, moral and biblical bickering, revivalism in the White House, and international warfare to spread the gospel, fulfill the Book of Revelation, or both. Yet far from being a sudden national departure, religion's powerful role in U.S. politics and warfare goes back to the seventeenth century.

Religion, Politics, and War

We can begin by describing the role of religion in American politics and war with two words: widely underestimated.

To be sure, forces that once impelled twentieth-century sophisticates and academicians to minimize the role played by religion -- Marxist economics, scientific modernism, market determinism, Enlightenment fashion, secular humanism, and dismissive sociology -- are giving ground. The resurgence of faith is too clear, not least in Islamic, Christian, and Jewish fundamentalism. Pentecostalism is turning parts of Latin America into "burned over" districts like that in New York in the nineteenth century. Dismissals of worship as the mere opium of the people are today running up against hypotheses that humankind may have something like a "God gene" that breeds religious impluses.74

From colonial days to the present, war and politics in the United States have borne a heavy imprint of church leadership and denominationalism, the latter frequently overlapping with racial, regional, and ethnic self-identifications. Economics has been subordinate in this basic framework, more of a separate cross-hatching that becomes increasingly important during downturns and panics. My own research into U.S. voting patterns over five decades beginning in the mid-1950s turned up regional, racial, ethnic, and religious factors as the most frequent and best explanations of why State A or County A differed from State B or County B. To find out how people in a particular neighborhood or apartment building in New York City, for example, were likely to vote, your first question should be ethno-religious: are the residents Irish, Jewish, black, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or what? Incomes would tell you less. In Greenville, South Carolina, especially in a Republican primary, you would want to identify various Protestant evangelical, fundamentalist, and separatist factions. Despite its importance, religion remained an underappreciated factor in U.S. politics well into the 1960s.

To suggest the depth of religion's political influence, an examination of the historical and political dynamics of the three principal civil wars among English-speaking peoples -- the English Revolution of the 1640s, the American Revolution, and the 1861–1865 War Between the States -- will show religion as a major factor, often the decisive one, in how individuals and communities chose sides.* Moreover, in these cases the clergy were commonly among the most prominent drumbeaters. This involvement has also been documented in less significant combats -- notably, the War of 1812 and the Spanish-American War -- and in the two U.S. military engagements in Iraq. Unfortunately, relatively few Americans know what to watch for. Ignorance is not bliss.

So, too, for religion's role in electoral patterns. In 1990, Oxford University Press published Religion and American Politics, a volume that assembled distinguished contributors. Its purpose was trenchantly described in a chapter by editor Mark Noll and contributor Lyman Kellstadt: "Social scientists studying twentieth-century politics have assumed, until quite recently, that religion in America is a private affair of little public influence. From this assumption, the conclusion followed that it was not worth studying religion with the same care that sociologists and political scientists devoted to race, income, education and other important social variables. Scholarship on nineteenth-century America should have shaken these assumptions, but it took the surge of the Religious Right to alert academics to the continuing salience of religion in political life."75

Consider: America's founding event, the Revolution, was in many ways a religious war, reiterating some of the cleavages found 130 years earlier in the English Civil War. Two major religious denominations, Congregationalist and Presbyterian, furnished the highest ratios of patriots in 1776, just as their antecedent groups had been leaders on the parliamentary side in the England of the 1640s. Meanwhile, colonial parishioners of the Church of England -- Anglicans then, Episcopalians now -- divided in fair measure along high church–low church lines. High Anglicans, especially in New England, New York, and New Jersey, supported the Crown, as their forebears had in 1642. Low-church Anglicans -- the Enlightenment-oriented vestrymen planters of Virginia and the Carolinas who read John Locke and wanted bishops in America no more than Massachusetts Puritans did -- supported the Revolution.76

Much more supporting detail exists, as well as the inevitable exceptions. Suffice it to say that when Federalist and Jeffersonian political-party lines began to emerge in the late 1790s, religious divisions again bulked large. The depleted ranks of Anglicans joined New England Congregationalists on the conservative (Federalist) side, whereas the anti-ecclesiastical Baptists of the southern backcountry were ardent Jeffersonians.

In Religion and the American Civil War, another useful volume, Randall Miller, Harry Stout, and Charles Wilson waited barely a page into their introduction before instructing that "the United States was the world's most Christian nation in 1861 and became even more so by the end of the war. In the late 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville had remarked on the pervasive influence of religion on American private and public life, and swelled by revivals during the 1830s and again during the 1850s, membership in churches rose dramatically."77 During the 1830s and 1840s, when U.S. national politics matched Democrats against Whigs, religious divisions were central enough that most denominations could be assigned to one camp or the other.78 Religious cleavages remained central when the Republican party replaced the Whigs in the mid-1850s.

Organized amid the slavery crisis, the Republican Party enjoyed lopsided support from members of those northern Protestant churches that took strong antislavery positions and also from free blacks in states where they could vote. Before and after the War Between the States, the Democrats could count on the southern churches that defended slavery and split away from their national organizations. That party also commanded usual majorities among members of the two major faiths -- Catholic and Lutheran (particularly Missouri Synod) -- that took no position on slavery. With some variations, these divisions lasted into the 1890s.

So clear was the religious imprint that historian James McPherson argued in the 1990s that "because the American Civil War was not a war of religion, historians have tended to overlook the degree to which it was a religious war. Union and Confederate soldiers alike were heirs of the Second Great Awakening. Civil War armies were, arguably, the most religious in American history."79 Indeed, as we will see, the major Protestant denominations split along geographic lines before the nation as a whole did along political ones. And in the case of the Confederate flag–waving Southern Baptist Convention, the consequences of that separation still resonate.

By most criteria the cleavage of U.S. politics left by the Civil War lasted through World War II, only beginning to shift in the 1940s and 1950s. During these transitional years, one could still cite the old alignments in religious divisions. Mainline Protestantism was Republican and centered in the small-town and suburban North. Catholics clustered in ethnic and industrial areas and voted Democratic disproportionately. Members of black churches usually couldn't vote in the South and rarely had much influence in the North. Southern white Baptists and sects were still heavily Democratic, especially in local elections.

Over the four decades beginning in the 1960s, new alignments slowly emerged in which religion played a new kind of central role, as chapters 5 and 6 will pursue. In the 1990s pollster George Gallup stated that "religious affiliation remains one of the most accurate and least-appreciated political indicators available."80 By 2004, as religiosity became the key to how Americans voted for president, USA Today led off a lengthy analysis by labeling the "religion gap" as the clearest divide in U.S. politics.81

However, with religion also playing so much of a role in the 2002–2003 buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in which George W. Bush proclaimed America's commitment to upholding liberty and freedom, it is well to note important antecedents: among Anglo-American Protestants these twin threads of justification for wars hark back to the Reformation. As detailed in The Cousins' Wars, these themes can be traced from the English Civil War through the American Revolution to the American Civil War, but they always applied to internal freedoms and jeopardies. That U.S. Protestant theology has now refocused itself on the biblical holy lands as a battleground is just another of the extraordinary transformations taking place on account of the influence of religion on American politics and war.

American Self-Perceptions of Being a Chosen People and Nation

This national self-importance is no secret, at home or abroad. For centuries Americans have believed themselves special, a people and nation chosen by God to play a unique and even redemptive role in the world. Elected leaders tend to proselytize and promote this exceptionalism -- presidential inaugural addresses are a frequent venue -- without appending the necessary historical cautions. Previous nations whose leaders and people believed much the same thing wound up deeply disillusioned, as when Spanish armadas were destroyed while flying holy banners at their mastheads, and when World War I German belt buckles proclaiming "Gott Mit Uns" became objects of derision in the Kaiser's defeated army.

Millennial prophecies have fared no better. They conspicuously failed in the fourth century, at the millennium in 1000, amid the tumult of the medieval Crusades, during the savage seventeenth-century European religious wars, in prerevolutionary New England, in the U.S. Civil War period, during World War I, and in 2000. In consequence, believers have time and time again had to work out elaborate explanations for why Jesus did not appear, why premillennial claims had not been borne out. Books and videos detailing and amplifying these relentless embarrassments and disappointments -- as far as I know, few such exist -- might offer a useful counterpoint to the end-times and second-coming materials marketed in such profusion by current fundamentalist drummers.

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American Visitor



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PostPosted: Sun Mar 26, 2006 2:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I would like to thank Cyrus for an excellent article about the role of religion in the development of the culture and government in both America and England. As I have said, it is impossible to understand American culture without understanding the deep commitment to the Protestant religion. The shared belief in the Good God and the moral imperatives which flow from that idea is the basis of our freedom and democracy. The English had already established their parliamentary form of government prior to the French revolution. The US had achieved independence and had finished our constitution before the French tried achieve the same results in their own land.

It was not us that copied them, but the reverse, they were following our lead. Voltaire spent time in England before returning to France and got many of his better ideas from England. The difference was that our revolutions and constitutions were based on the Judeo-Christian culture and the Christian religion while the French "Enlightenment" was based on atheism. The new idea unique to the French was that religion was a relic of an era of ignorance and that only pure reason divorced from any belief in God was the true basis for morality, scientific enlightenment, and guaranteed a good free government and a just society. Despite massive evidence that the French were wrong, the followers of anti-Christian ideology today still maintain the same mantra even if they have to rely on massive self deception to maintain their illusions.

Since their atheist revolution, France has had one failed government after the other. The French are still living in the afterglow of Napoleon's totalitarian regime which proceeded one constitution after another, one regime following another into oblivion. Despite their claims to love for liberty and equality, the French under Napoleon apparently were some of the worst slave masters on earth. Although I have not had the opportunity to read the book, I have read on the internet that there is now a French author who claims that Napoleon tried to exterminate all the slaves on the Island of Haiti I believe when they rebelled and replaced them with a new batch of slaves who would be more compliant. It was the British who declared slavery to be a moral crime and worked to wipe it out around the world. Here is a list of the constitutions of France since their revolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_France If one goes to the bottom you will find the list of their constitutions.
It appears they have had about 15 constitutions or about 1 every 15 years, whereas the USA has had only one during this same period of time. So contrary to what Rousseau in all his pure enlightened reason said, the "fundamentalist" Judeo-Christian culture is much more capable of providing a stable and free democracy in the USA that their atheistic anti-Christian philosophy has produced in France.

When I said the anti-Christian secularists wanted Islam to take over Europe and later the US I was expecting to be challenged. Since that has not happened, I will elaborate further. I have already provided a quote from Nietzsche where he expressed his great regret that the Crusaders had blocked the Muslims from spreading their great religion and culture throughout Europe. I will now provide a quote from the French Enlightenment philosopher, Rousseau, which I think the Iranians will find especially interesting. In book IV chapter 8 Rousseau endorses the Civil Religion in which the ideal society would have a state religion complete with the death penalty for those who apostatize. He then trashes Christianity since it is incompatible with that function and turns to what he considers the ideal state religion. Talking of state religion he says:
Quote:
"Many peoples, even in Europe or nearby, have tried to preserve or re-establish the ancient system, but without success: the spirit of Christianity has won completely. The religious cult has always kept, or recovered, its independence of the sovereign, and has lacked its necessary connexion with the state. Mahomet had very sound opinions, taking care to give unity to his political system, and for as long as the form of his government endured under the caliphs who succeeded him, the government was undivided and, to that extent, good. But the Arabs, in becoming prosperous, cultured, polite, effeminate and soft, were subjugated by the barbarians; then the divisions between the two powers was started afresh, and even though the division is less apparent among the Moslems than among the Christians, it nevertheless exists, above all in the sect of Ali and in states like Persia where it has never ceased to make itself felt."


From this quote, it is clear that Rousseau just as Nietzsche knew exactly what he was doing. He knew enough about Islam to reject the Shia sect with it's history of separation of church and state and to endorse the Sunni branch of Islam. I'm not sure he was acquainted with the Wahhabi branch of Islam, but I'm quite sure he would have found them a source of true "goodness." Although the anti-Christian philosophers attacked the belief in God, it is really the Christian belief in the Good God they hated since it places moral imperatives on them which they detest. For the European intelligentsia, who crave absolute power and tyranny, Christianity and Judaism are their mortal enemies. Sharia law is much more compatible with their goals. Although Bat Ye'or in her book on Eurabia doesn't try to explain the behavior of the European leaders, this becomes clear when one studies the philosophical foundations of the "Enlightenment."

The intellectual connection between the Enlightenment with it's commitment to personal freedoms and equality is not be readily apparent. However, if one digs deeper one finds strong moral connections between the Islamists and the anti-Christian secularists. I'm using the word Islamist rather than Moslem and anti-Christian secularists rather than atheists deliberately since I don't want to categorize all people in those larger groups as culpable for the actions of the smaller groups. In my own study of the anti-Christian secularists and the Islamists I have found that when I begin to dig deeper into their motivation they are almost completely by malignant narcissists. For the Islamist "morality"is motivated by intense fear of hell and a selfish desire to live forever in a drunken orgy in paradise by whatever means necessary. Love or concern for others has nothing to do with the Islamist's version of righteousness. For the anti-Christian secularists there is no higher reality than their own existence. When they die, the universe for them ends forever. Their motivation is therefore going to be completely selfish, to preserve and enlarge their own pleasure and extend their own lives regardless of the consequences to society at large or to others around them. This natural selfishness is modified to some extent in both groups by the overpowering biological urge to reproduce and rear children based on the understanding of the "selfish gene."

There is much more to be said along these lines, but let me state that according to my research, the only form of government compatible with a nation of narcissists is a totalitarian fear based society. Democracy and freedom requires a large reservoir of common love and the willingness to sacrifice one's own interests for the good of other people. When that is lacking, the only way to form a cohesive society is to install a totalitarian leader who benefits enormously from his position and has a selfish interest in maintaining his position. He then uses rewards and terror to control those under him to control them and to merge them into a cohesive society. If the anti-Christian secularists succeed in destroying our Judeo-Christian culture as they clearly are attempting to do, our democracy will rapidly fail just as democracy has failed in so many other countries which lack the moral foundations for freedom and democracy.

I would like to make a few comments about the excellent article Cyrus posted since I disagree with a few of their comments which seem to indicate either contempt for or misunderstanding of contemporary Christianity.

I'm not sure why they chose the title "American Theocracy" since the real danger to our democracy is not a Christian theocracy but the exact opposite, a take over of our government by anti-Christian secularists whose ultimate result will to be turn the country Islamic. Although I agree with most of the facts in the article, I do not believe all the conclusions they draw from the facts are correct.

Quote:
Phillips wrote a 2004 bestseller, American Dynasty, about the Bush family. American Theocracy is a harsh criticism of the current Bush administration and the Republican Party. Phillips, a senior strategist for Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential bid, registered himself as a political independent in 2002.


The premise of this book is wrong. One of the reasons Bush's poll numbers are so low is because the Christians including myself have concluded that Bush is a good politician who has little connection with our historical roots or the Christian foundation of our democracy. It is not that Christians have much of a choice, with Bush who comes across on one hand as a politician with some loose association with Christians, while on the other hand the Democrats have mocked many Christian beliefs, have attacked on our Judeo-Christian culture and have supported the anti-Christian secularism when they blaspheme against Christianity. Unfortunately Democrats often come across as the anti-Christian party rather than a genuine alternative to the Republicans. The Democrats lose elections because they come across as anti-American, anti-Christian and unpatriotic. If the Democrats ever wise up and move towards the center, they will become a legitimate contender for power again.

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Still, the challenge is gathering. Academic projects that spotlight the resurgence of religious fundamentalism around the world now routinely include the United States, along with India, Israel, and many Islamic countries. Scholars have always touched on "militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism," but there is a renewed focus.2 Some moderate-toliberal theologians have begun to challenge half-baked preaching about the rapture and the end times as "a toxin endangering the health -- even the life -- of the Christian churches and American society."3 Suburban megachurches, in turn, find themselves explained as offering the spiritual equivalent of a shopping mall: would you like psychic healing today, Hindu breathing exercises, or just a little observant mood music?4 Ultimately, the larger political resurgence of historically controversial religiosity is what demands attention.


When you actually analyze what they teach and what they stand for, the moderate-to-liberal theologians themselves are the "half baked", not the fundamentalist Christians. What you find these men and their "mainstream" churches standing for has often been totalitarian Communist regimes in the past and more recently totalitarian Islamic regimes, wi th a healthy dose of Anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure. It is not the fundamentalist churches which have so much sympathy for the Islamists and want to lead the nation to divest from Israel.

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In contrast to the secular and often agnostic Christianity dominant in Europe, Canada, and Australia, the American view encompasses a very different outlook -- one in which a large minority is in key ways closer to the intensity of seventeenth-century Puritans, Presbyterian Covenanters, and earlier Dutch or Swiss Calvinists. As we will see, these are not comforting analogies. The world's leading economic and military power is also -- no one can misread the data -- the world's leading Bible-reading crusader state, immersed in an Old Testament of stern prophets and bloody Middle Eastern battlefields.


This is typical anti-Christian rhetoric. They wish the British or the French had the power since they would use it much more wisely than the fundamentalist Americans. In other words, if we would just all become atheists and accept the malignant narcissism which dominates Europe, all would be well. Better yet, let's let the UN run things, they are sufficiently amoral and corrupt to satisfy even the most virulent anti-Christian secularist.

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There is, to be sure, a large and growing secular culture in the United States. Among northern university graduates and cultural elites, it is dominant -- stronger by far than that of the biblical and salvationist contingent. However, the Republican coalition and administration of George W. Bush is heavily weighted toward the 30 to 40 percent of the electorate caught up in Scripture and the prospect of being suddenly transported to God's side. This is enough to push the United States toward what chapter 6 will posit as a national Disenlightenment. Indeed, American foreign policy has its own corollary to the end-times worldview: the preemptive righteousness of a biblical nation become a high-technology, gospelspreading superpower.


This continues to support my statements in the previous post. The American constitution has made it illegal to make laws governing religion. However, the universities have become centers of anti-religious Anti-American propaganda paid for by the taxpayer's dollars. This is just as wrong as using the universities to proselytize for Christianity or any other religion. It is this government sponsored attack on Christianity which the fundamentalists are opposing.

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The idea of the United States as a biblically spurred great power, which has been framed by historians such as Walter McDougall in Promised Land, Crusader State (1997), has had unforeseen relevance to the Bush administration and cannot be cavalierly dismissed.6 Historically, great powers have too often gone out in blazes of religious invocation. The newly Christian fourth-century Rome of the emperor Constantine and his successors held up the cross as Rome faced military defeat and crumbling frontiers from Hadrian's Wall to Assyria. So did seventeenth-century Spain, the proud but ill-omened command post of the Catholic Counter Reformation. Vestments of crusaderdom also cloaked imperial Britain's overreach in World War I and its aftermath. Those uncomfortable precedents will be elaborated upon in later chapters. First, however, we will take on the prominence and many flavors of religious radicalism in the United States, truly as American as apple pie.


Again they are right that America is traditionally a Christian country. However as anti-Christian secularists they think Europeans with their atheistic "enlightenment" are the only ones who should have power. By all rights the Europeans should be the most powerful continent in the world with their history of scientific excellence. But there is the little matter of the French revolution followed by the Communist revolution enhanced by the Nazi movement which has destroyed their culture and made them a second rate continent. If it weren't for the Christians in America Europe would be completely totalitarian either ruled by the Nazis or the Communists or both.

According to the anti-Christian secularists, the Christians are the real enemies and always have been. This is why Europe is running as fast as possible towards Islam since they view the Islamists as the antidote to Christianity. A few of the people who like to live in a free democracy are objecting but the "college people" and the "elites" know what is best for everyone else. Let's all hear the anti-Christian cheer. Islam, Islam it is the answer. If Mohammad can't do it, nobody can.

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Periodic revivalism, in turn, fed a still-resonant exodus of Americans from established churches that had given up EMOTION FOR RESPECTABILITY, turning instead to movements or sects that emphasized salvation, spirituality, physical displays, founders' claims to special revelation (Mormons, for example), faith healing, and "holiness upon the land."


This shows the complete intellectual failure of the anti-Christian secularists. I have capitalized the part which is so misleading. Who is to determine which religion is "respectable" provided they all obey the law and uphold our democracy? This statement shows the supreme arrogance of the self styled "elite" who take it upon themselves to judge who is "respectable" and who is not according to their own multi-cultural standards.

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Also to the point, U.S. Protestantism uniquely abounds with what Noll terms "populist innovations," or forms of worship developed by laypeople. One is the widespread American embrace of "dispensational premillennialism" -- a fervor launched in the nineteenth century around biblical passages interpreted to signal the second coming of Christ. A second, Pentecostalism, is based on the "latter rain" of revival in the Holy Spirit prophesied in Joel 2:23.


So exactly who made this individual the expert on Biblical exegesis that he presumes other people how to interpret the Bible? The basis of the Protestant Reformation was that the people had the right to read and interpret the Bible for themselves rather than rely on the "elites" to tell them what to believe. This set off the next step which was allowing the common man to decide how to run the country rather than allowing the "elites" to make the decisions for them. That is what is called "democracy."

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A related topic, the recurrent conflict between religiosity and science, reflects how much American thinking has been steeped in both. Tensions between the Book of Genesis and Darwinian theories of evolution, brought to a theatrical and political head in 1925 in Tennessee's famous Scopes trial, still throb. "The result," concludes Noll, "has been a much greater salience in America concerning evolution and 'creation science' than in any other Western society."17


So, the author is saying, if only everyone could be forced to believe in evolution then we would have such a good world. Only those who believe "evolution is the theory of everything biological" have any smarts. Evolution makes such a wonderful platform for morality with it's emphasis on "survival of the fittest" and the "selfish gene" uber alles. Yes if we could all just be a little more selfish and liberate Nietzsche's "blonde beast" everything would be wonderful. Totalitarian regimes based on race just as Darwin said in his book Descent of Man with wars to exterminate the less fit. Eugenics laws and laws for race betterment. That is the answer. Wonderful, wonderful. How very Enlightened.

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Although Stark and Finke do not hypothesize the "Protestantization" of American Catholicism, they do promote an analogy between weakening faiths.72 Because Catholics can marry non-Catholics, can set foot in other churches, and can miss mass without thereby committing a sin, less is being demanded of them, and less loyalty is being returned. As with Protestants, more decision making and interpretation is being left to individuals and consciences. Many Catholic organizations and universities have measurably secularized. Pentecostal and other Protestant inroads among Hispanic Catholics have been described by theologian Andrew Greeley as an "ecclesiastic failure of unprecedented proportions," trends that lead Stark and Finke to doubt that "the American Catholic Church will be able to halt its transformation from an energetic [nineteenthcentury] sect into a sedate mainline body."73


This observation is exactly what I find in the Catholics whom I know. They are becoming more "Protestant" in their orientation. This is not a bad thing for he Catholic church but a good thing. Where this transformation is not happening, the Catholic church is dying whereas in the USA it is very strong.

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To be sure, forces that once impelled twentieth-century sophisticates and academicians to minimize the role played by religion -- Marxist economics, scientific modernism, market determinism, Enlightenment fashion, secular humanism, and dismissive sociology -- are giving ground. The resurgence of faith is too clear, not least in Islamic, Christian, and Jewish fundamentalism. Pentecostalism is turning parts of Latin America into "burned over" districts like that in New York in the nineteenth century. Dismissals of worship as the mere opium of the people are today running up against hypotheses that humankind may have something like a "God gene" that breeds religious impluses.74


This is an excellent observation with which I agree completely. So far as I can tell, human society as we know it is impossible without a faith in God of some type. Evolution and survival of the fittest will get you to the level of the head hunters in the Amazon jungle, but to develop an advanced society you have to have a belief system of some type. It is not just a "God gene" but a fundamental understanding which religious people share that human society is completely dependent upon a belief of God to survive. So far the anti-Christian secularists have been completely unable to provide a rational moral basis upon which to build an advanced culture.

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However, with religion also playing so much of a role in the 2002–2003 buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in which George W. Bush proclaimed America's commitment to upholding liberty and freedom, it is well to note important antecedents: among Anglo-American Protestants these twin threads of justification for wars hark back to the Reformation. As detailed in The Cousins' Wars, these themes can be traced from the English Civil War through the American Revolution to the American Civil War, but they always applied to internal freedoms and jeopardies. That U.S. Protestant theology has now refocused itself on the biblical holy lands as a battleground is just another of the extraordinary transformations taking place on account of the influence of religion on American politics and war.


I believe the authors have completely misunderstood the sentiment of the conservative religious community here. So far as I can tell, there is no religious component to Bush's foreign adventures. The Christians in Iraq are more persecuted and are in more danger of being killed today than they were under Saddam Haussein so for them there has been no liberation. If Bush were really interested in the welfare of Christians, he would have intervened in Sudan to protect the Black Sudanese Christians and Animists who are being slaughtered by the fundamentalist Islamic government. That would be a war of liberation which many Christians could support. On the other hand, many Christians feel Bush is wasting our resources and manpower in Iraq rather than doing more to protect and strengthen our culture at home which is under assault by the Saudi Arabians and their Wahabbi religion.

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Subsequent chapters will return to the high stakes of contemporary religious politics. However, one corollary -- the importance of SUPPOSED biblical covenants with God


Once again the author's prejudice overshadows their otherwise excellent article. Upon whose authority have they judged whether Christians have interpreted the Bible correctly in understanding the Biblical covenants?
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