Much Ado about Nothing

Davey Crockett said:

The Cartoons
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/public.pages/davey/cartoons/index.html

Reaction to the Cartoons
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/public.pages/davey/reaction/index.html

Reaction to the Reaction to the Cartoons
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/public.pages/davey/reaction2/index.html

--
Le Vent à Dos
Davey Crockett
Dit 'NON' aux brevets Logiciels
http://brevets-logiciels.info/

Hey Davey
In your Reaction to the reaction what's factually wrong about the first
and last Cartoons?
They seem pretty accurate to me. I agree that the Nazi Party should be
taken off the banned list and allowed all the full freedoms granted to
everyone else, that would have to include all the other far right
parties too. The Communists aren't banned and Stalin killed more than
the Nazis, just he did it to his own people so that's OK. The Muslims
haven't done it since they occupied large areas of Europe before WW1 so
they get a free pass despite their stated goal of doing it again. Go
SS! Since they worshipped physical culture that should help bike racing
a lot, unless another Jesse Owens happens to show up.
Davey I have no problem agreeing with you on the hypocrisy of our
civilization in giving a free pass to Christianity ansd it's
slaughters, but there's no way in hell I'm going to agree with you that
the Nazis weren't that bad.
Bill C

Davey Crockett said:

The Cartoons
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/public.pages/davey/cartoons/index.html

Reaction to the Cartoons
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/public.pages/davey/reaction/index.html

Reaction to the Reaction to the Cartoons
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/public.pages/davey/reaction2/index.html

--
Le Vent à Dos
Davey Crockett
Dit 'NON' aux brevets Logiciels
http://brevets-logiciels.info/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4692572.stm

The defence secretary said forces were on an "uneven battlefield",
because of the "scrutiny, accountability, media intrusion and
questioning" they face.

By contrast the enemy was not hindered "by any legitimacy, any
morality, any international convention", he said.

"Let us be very slow to condemn our troops, our forces," he told BBC
radio.

This is exactly my point with Davey. The west is wrong for everything,
and others are given a free pass no matter what they do. This goes as
far back as Korea and it's [censored]. I have yet to see a protest here
in protest central against kidnapping aid workers, torture by Islamic
extremists, Sharia Law, the Saudi's destroying any religious items
other than the approved version of the Quran etc...
We have our faults but that's no reason to give others a free pass
while condemning us.
Bill C

Bill C said:

Davey Crockett said:

The Cartoons
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/public.pages/davey/cartoons/index.html

Reaction to the Cartoons
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/public.pages/davey/reaction/index.html

Reaction to the Reaction to the Cartoons
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/public.pages/davey/reaction2/index.html

--
Le Vent à Dos
Davey Crockett
Dit 'NON' aux brevets Logiciels
http://brevets-logiciels.info/

Hey Davey

Quoted message said:

Davey I have no problem agreeing with you on the hypocrisy of our
civilization in giving a free pass to Christianity ansd it's
slaughters, but there's no way in hell I'm going to agree with you that
the Nazis weren't that bad.

Sheesh, Davey must be getting forgetful, but he can only remember
using the word AhkeNAZI, and that only once.

Davey shakes his head, saddles up Roxinante and trots off à la John
Cleese to Tilt at the odd Windmill and search for the Holy Grail or
the Blutfahne or Damzelz in Distress

--
Le Vent à Dos
Davey Crockett
Dit 'NON' aux brevets Logiciels
http://brevets-logiciels.info/

"Bill C" <[email hidden]> wrote

This is exactly my point with Davey. The west is wrong for everything,
and others are given a free pass no matter what they do. This goes as
far back as Korea and it's [censored]. I have yet to see a protest here
in protest central against kidnapping aid workers, torture by Islamic
extremists, Sharia Law, the Saudi's destroying any religious items
other than the approved version of the Quran etc...
We have our faults but that's no reason to give others a free pass
while condemning us.

What if Christians responded like the Muslims every time Jesus was mocked?
Jeepers creepers, talk about a slaughter.

Speaking of which, on your comment about hypocrisy of giving Christianity a
free pass for all its slaughters, what are you talking about?

Are you posting in HTML or something Bill? You never show up any > things
when I reply to your posts.

JF

Jim Flom said:

What if Christians responded like the Muslims every time Jesus was mocked?
Jeepers creepers, talk about a slaughter.

Speaking of which, on your comment about hypocrisy of giving Christianity a
free pass for all its slaughters, what are you talking about?

I guess it depends on how far back you go and whether you include
Christian on Christian slaughter as well (burn any Huguenots lately?),
but the list is long enough - and doesn't really mean much for too
many reasons. I think the church had pretty much screwed up the
message of Jesua by the second century and even that message has been
ill-used over and over.

So after everyone gets over how nasty it is that our governments and
our religions are held to a higher standard, let me know why that's a
bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, I only hope that becomes a
universal trend.

Curtis L. Russell
Odenton, MD (USA)
Just someone on two wheels...

"Curtis L. Russell" <[email hidden]> wrote ...

Quoted message said:

I guess it depends on how far back you go and whether you include
Christian on Christian slaughter as well (burn any Huguenots lately?),
but the list is long enough - and doesn't really mean much for too
many reasons.

I'm guessing this is where Bill is, although he hasn't weighed in on it as
of when I pulled this.
But if so, I'm curious what calling those infernal Christians to account
(versus giving
them a free pass) would look like. Let's take a fresh example, like between
the IRA and the innocent victims, for example ("What
would Bono do?"😉. Or do they not fit? And then, okay, let's extend the
idea of accountability back a few centuries, to the Huguenots -- again, what
would accountability look like?
But I'm also wondering that you say it really doesn't mean much, because I'm
guessing that we agree on the futility of trying somehow to extract
accountability.

Quoted message said:

I think the church had pretty much screwed up the
message of Jesus by the second century and even that message has been
ill-used over and over.

This would be fun to pursue but this is a bike racing forum.

Quoted message said:

gets over how nasty it is that our governments and
our religions are held to a higher standard, let me know why that's a
bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, I only hope that becomes a
universal trend.

Not sure I was hearing anything about holding "our" religions to a higher
standard. For one thing, Judeo-Christianity originated in the Middle East.
We were proto-wiccan pagan Barbarians before that. And last I checked, and
I know this will tickle some, religion sets
the standard, e.g., the moral law of ten commandments, etc., which has
served as the foundation of western values for at least a week or two.
Regarding our comrades who look down their nose at all things religious,
flattering
themselves that they are somehow in a position to evaluate God and his
contemporary (self-appointed?) representatives, and expert enough to
generalize, stereotype,
and sit in judgment of people of faith, these pub buddies of ours
across the table fail to see that the house of their value systems are built
on sand (to paraphrase some religious guy). Knee-jerk anti-Christians
remind me of knee-jerk Canadian anti-Americans. And bigots.
The Muslims who are getting their shorts tied up in a knot over the cartoons
don't seem to get the fact that their actions only prove the point of the
satirists. They should be smart like most Christians and most of their
other Muslim
buddies, and a) recognize God doesn't need anyone to defend him, and b) pray
that the poor lost soul knuckleheads will see the light. The Philadelphia
Inquirer published one of the cartoons, and Muslims held a peaceful protest,
visited by the editor of the paper.

True religion will always have a subversive dimension, and will be wary of
being the puppet of Caesar or any earthly power. About the worst thing
that happened to the Christian church was when it became the state religion
of Rome.

And to put that paraphrase into context, he really said, "The one who hears
these words of mine and does not put them into practice," that's the one
building on sand, and that's a humbling challenge to any of us, regardless
of whether we wear our brand of religion on our sleeve or eschew it
altogether. Bono, the poster boy for putting the words into practice, said,
"If you wanna touch the sky you better learn how to kneel."

JF

Jim Flom said:

"Curtis L. Russell" <[email hidden]> wrote ...

Quoted message said:

I guess it depends on how far back you go and whether you include
Christian on Christian slaughter as well (burn any Huguenots lately?),
but the list is long enough - and doesn't really mean much for too
many reasons.

I'm guessing this is where Bill is, although he hasn't weighed in on it as
of when I pulled this.
But if so, I'm curious what calling those infernal Christians to account
(versus giving
them a free pass) would look like. Let's take a fresh example, like between
the IRA and the innocent victims, for example ("What
would Bono do?"😉. Or do they not fit? And then, okay, let's extend the
idea of accountability back a few centuries, to the Huguenots -- again, what
would accountability look like?
But I'm also wondering that you say it really doesn't mean much, because I'm
guessing that we agree on the futility of trying somehow to extract
accountability.

Quoted message said:

I think the church had pretty much screwed up the
message of Jesus by the second century and even that message has been
ill-used over and over.

This would be fun to pursue but this is a bike racing forum.

Quoted message said:

gets over how nasty it is that our governments and
our religions are held to a higher standard, let me know why that's a
bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, I only hope that becomes a
universal trend.

Not sure I was hearing anything about holding "our" religions to a higher
standard. For one thing, Judeo-Christianity originated in the Middle East.
We were proto-wiccan pagan Barbarians before that. And last I checked, and
I know this will tickle some, religion sets
the standard, e.g., the moral law of ten commandments, etc., which has
served as the foundation of western values for at least a week or two.
Regarding our comrades who look down their nose at all things religious,
flattering
themselves that they are somehow in a position to evaluate God and his
contemporary (self-appointed?) representatives, and expert enough to
generalize, stereotype,
and sit in judgment of people of faith, these pub buddies of ours
across the table fail to see that the house of their value systems are built
on sand (to paraphrase some religious guy). Knee-jerk anti-Christians
remind me of knee-jerk Canadian anti-Americans. And bigots.
The Muslims who are getting their shorts tied up in a knot over the cartoons
don't seem to get the fact that their actions only prove the point of the
satirists. They should be smart like most Christians and most of their
other Muslim
buddies, and a) recognize God doesn't need anyone to defend him, and b) pray
that the poor lost soul knuckleheads will see the light. The Philadelphia
Inquirer published one of the cartoons, and Muslims held a peaceful protest,
visited by the editor of the paper.

True religion will always have a subversive dimension, and will be wary of
being the puppet of Caesar or any earthly power. About the worst thing
that happened to the Christian church was when it became the state religion
of Rome.

And to put that paraphrase into context, he really said, "The one who hears
these words of mine and does not put them into practice," that's the one
building on sand, and that's a humbling challenge to any of us, regardless
of whether we wear our brand of religion on our sleeve or eschew it
altogether. Bono, the poster boy for putting the words into practice, said,
"If you wanna touch the sky you better learn how to kneel."

JF

Hi Jim
I didn't get on yesterday.
I'm not anti-Xtian by any means, but the denial of their history
really pisses me off. Here's a link that is a little shaky on detailed
facts but notes a large number of incidents, while still missing
others:
http://www.geocities.com/iconoclastes.geo/victims.html
You'll notice that an awful lot of this stuff was done
pre-reformation, or by the Catholic Church after the reformation. In
large part, my problem with them is the same one Martin Luther had, in
that the religion was secondary and was being used as a means to wealth
and power and not much else, but you can't seperate the religion from
acts done in it's name for a really decent short read cheack out:
The Bad Popes by Russell Chamberlin
http://tinyurl.com/9sxwz
It provides a serious, well researched, scholarly portrait of what the
Papacy was at it's worst, and VERY little of the people involved gave a
[censored] about the "religion". It was about power politics and greed, but
these were the people seeting the standard, rewriting the Bible, and
calling the shots that caused a lot of the violence. The level of
corruption was amazing. But THAT was Xtianity until the reformation,
there was nothing else that wasn't slaughtered.

I do think that most of the modern Xtian religions have chosen to
cherry pick the good parts of the New Testament and therefore create a
new religion that really isn't Christianity, it's something based on it
that's much kinder and gentler. I've spent years studying church
history and really have some wonderful conversations with my in-laws
who are deacons and regularly attend things like The Jesus Seminar, but
none of that changes the fact that Xtianity has been the excuse,
justification for, or reason for brutal violence all throughout
history:
http://www.westarinstitute.org/Jesus_Seminar/jesus_seminar.html
Our daughter, along with them does the UCC Star Island summer retreat
every year and was supposed to work it this year but missed the
deadline.
So I really have no problem with most of current Xtianity other than
things like forbidding birth control to countries where thousands of
children are dying of starvation and Revolution Theology starring the
Jesuits.

Just a few thoughts for now but my problems with Islam are that it's
stuck in the forced conversion, hate everyone else including the other
sects etc...place that Xtianity was for so long, and the current crop
have all been led/taught/inspired by Grand Mufti Husseini who was a
personal friend of Eichman and, according to Eichman's aide lobbied
harder than anyone of the other Nazis to accelerate and become more
efficient about the extermination of the Jews. There's a little
anecdote about the Nazis loading up a train of mostly Jewish Women and
children who were going to be deported, but Husseini lobbied against
letting them escape to breed and instead they ended up going to a camp
and being exterminated. he considered that one of his finest moments.
After the war when he escaped being hung at Nuremberg, because he
promised to keep oil flowing to the Brits, he was sent back to the
Middle East, escaped house arrest, led several revolts against the
Brits, and almost single handedly created/mentored the Pan-Arabists and
the current hardliners including his, as far as I can find nephew or
cousin, but he's usually referred to as "a close relative" Arafat,
which by the way is his "Jihad" name, not his real name.
If you follow some of the sights that monitor and translate broadcasts
on the regions radio and television, all of which are tightly
government controlled, the hatred of, and calls for the extermination
of, all the Jews and infidels are a daily occurrence in the sermons
being preached by the Islamic clerics. What they are saying to the west
for print or broadcast is totally different than what they are telling
their own people, and what they are calling on their own people to do.
When you combine a brutal faith that's still in it's "dark ages"
period with ferverent belief in Naziism which was actively being
preached by their greatest spiritual leader in modern history up until
his death in the late 1970s. He became even more bitter and more
convinced that they weren't militant enough and that's why Allah had
allowed the Israelis to repeatedly beat the Pan-Arab Islamic forces,
and that's where the drive for people like the Taleban cmae from. He
almost single handedly creted the drive to complete fundamentalism by
preaching that Saladin was able to conquer because he was a true
believer and today they had become corrupted, they would be unable to
regain their rights and glory until the regained their religion as it
was.
That's what we are facing today.
Bill C

"Bill C" <[email hidden]> wrote ...

Quoted message said:

Hi Jim
I didn't get on yesterday.
I'm not anti-Xtian by any means, but the denial of their history
really pisses me off. Here's a link that is a little shaky on detailed
facts but notes a large number of incidents, while still missing
others:
http://www.geocities.com/iconoclastes.geo/victims.html
You'll notice that an awful lot of this stuff was done
pre-reformation, or by the Catholic Church after the reformation. In
large part, my problem with them is the same one Martin Luther had, in
that the religion was secondary and was being used as a means to wealth
and power and not much else, but you can't seperate the religion from
acts done in it's name for a really decent short read cheack out:
The Bad Popes by Russell Chamberlin
http://tinyurl.com/9sxwz
It provides a serious, well researched, scholarly portrait of what the
Papacy was at it's worst, and VERY little of the people involved gave a
[censored] about the "religion". It was about power politics and greed, but
these were the people seeting the standard, rewriting the Bible, and
calling the shots that caused a lot of the violence. The level of
corruption was amazing. But THAT was Xtianity until the reformation,
there was nothing else that wasn't slaughtered.

Thanks for the links, and while these objections are not unknown to me I'd
hate to throw out the baby Jesus with the bathwater.

Editing the text of a link I cite below, the credibility of the New
Testament is a frequent
target and an apparently plausible way to disqualify the whole of the
Christian religion before it is out of the starting blocks. If the New
Testament has been corrupted beyond recognition, Christendom as we know it
is a human construct, not a divine work through flawed people. But, if
people want to disregard the New Testament, then they also have to disregard
other ancient writings, such as Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and others. The
New Testament documents are far better preserved and more numerous than
_any_ other ancient writing. Currently there are 5,686 Greek manuscripts
available today for the New Testament. If we were to compare the number of
New Testament manuscripts to other ancient writings, we'd find that
attestation of the the New Testament manuscripts far exceeds the others. A
few of the better known of several possible examples:

Author: Plato
Date written: 427-347 B.C.
Earliest copy: 900 A.D.
time span betweem original and earliest copy: 1200 yrs
number of copies: a whopping 7

Author: Aristotle
Date written: 384-322 B.C.
Earliest copy: 1100 AD
time span betweem original and earliest copy: 1400 years
number of copies: a humble 49

Author: Homer (Iliad)
Date written: 900 BC
Earliest copy: 400 BC
time span betweem original and earliest copy: 500 years
number of copies: a venerated 643

Not to mention Pliny (7), Herodotus (8), Euripides (9), Caesar (10). There
is no serious discussion about the accuracy of the above mentioned
manuscripts.

By comparison, for the New Testament:
Author: various
Date written: 1st century AD (50-100 AD)
Earliest copies: 2nd century AD (c. 130 ff.)
time span: < 100 years
number of copies: a staggering 5600+

This doesn't even address the strength and accuracy of the Old Testament, as
the Dead Sea Scrolls have attested.

So you can see there are thousands more New Testament Greek manuscripts than
any other ancient writing. The internal consistency of the New Testament
documents is about 99.5% textually pure. Of the remaining0.5% , not one
variant strikes at the vitals of the Christian faith. They're mostly
grammatical in nature. That is an amazing accuracy.

If the critics of the Bible dismiss the New Testament as reliable
information, then they must also dismiss the reliability of the writings of
Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, Homer, and the other authors mentioned in the
chart at the beginning of the paper. On the other hand, if the critics
acknowledge the historicity and writings of those other individuals, then
they must also retain the historicity and writings of the New Testament
authors; after all, the evidence for the New Testament's reliability is far
greater than the others. The Christian has substantially superior criteria
for affirming the New Testament documents than he does for any other ancient
writing. It is good evidence on which to base the trust in the reliability
of the New Testament.

For example, we have a fragment of the gospel of John that dates back to
around 29 years from the original writing. This is extremely close to the
original writing date. This is simply unheard of in any other ancient
writing and it demonstrates that the Gospel of John is a first century
document.

http://www.carm.org/evidence/textualevidence.htm

Aside from the NT manuscripts themselves, there are over 19,000 copies in
the Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Aramaic languages. The total supporting New
Testament manuscript base is over 24,000.

There are also some 86,000 quotations from the early church fathers and
several thousand Lectionaries (church-service books containing Scripture
quotations used in the early centuries of Christianity), enough that
virtually the entire New Testament can be reconstructed on citations alone.
In fact, there are enough quotations from the early church fathers that even
if we did not have a single copy of the Bible, scholars could still
reconstruct all but 11 verses of the entire New Testament from material
written within 150 to 200 years from the time of Christ.

You can google "new testament manuscript evidence" for more.

Quoted message said:

I do think that most of the modern Xtian religions have chosen to
cherry pick the good parts of the New Testament and therefore create a
new religion that really isn't Christianity, it's something based on it
that's much kinder and gentler.

Can you think of an example or two of cherry picking, Bill? I work hard to
comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. If I have blind spots in
my treatment of the NT I'm wide open to seeing them.

Quoted message said:

So I really have no problem with most of current Xtianity other than
things like forbidding birth control to countries where thousands of
children are dying of starvation and Revolution Theology starring the
Jesuits.

I'm not aware of any branches of Christinaity that have enough political
power to forbid birth control to certain countries. I can think of some
Muslim ones, and it may be that I'm just not aware of them. But it's one
thing to oppose birth control (which is by no means a universal Christian
position, and certainly not a core faith issue), and another to have the
power to forbid it to entire countries.

Quoted message said:

Just a few thoughts for now but my problems with Islam are ...

Interesting read, from which I googled "Grand Mufti Husseini Al Qaeda" and
got a fascinating result.

Best,

JF

In article
<[email hidden]>,

Bill C said:

Jim Flom said:

"Curtis L. Russell" <[email hidden]> wrote ...

Quoted message said:

I guess it depends on how far back you go and whether you include
Christian on Christian slaughter as well (burn any Huguenots lately?),
but the list is long enough - and doesn't really mean much for too
many reasons.

I'm guessing this is where Bill is, although he hasn't weighed in on it as
of when I pulled this.
But if so, I'm curious what calling those infernal Christians to account
(versus giving
them a free pass) would look like. Let's take a fresh example, like between
the IRA and the innocent victims, for example ("What
would Bono do?"😉. Or do they not fit? And then, okay, let's extend the
idea of accountability back a few centuries, to the Huguenots -- again, what
would accountability look like?
But I'm also wondering that you say it really doesn't mean much, because I'm
guessing that we agree on the futility of trying somehow to extract
accountability.

Quoted message said:

I think the church had pretty much screwed up the
message of Jesus by the second century and even that message has been
ill-used over and over.

This would be fun to pursue but this is a bike racing forum.

Quoted message said:

gets over how nasty it is that our governments and
our religions are held to a higher standard, let me know why that's a
bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, I only hope that becomes a
universal trend.

Not sure I was hearing anything about holding "our" religions to a higher
standard. For one thing, Judeo-Christianity originated in the Middle East.
We were proto-wiccan pagan Barbarians before that. And last I checked, and
I know this will tickle some, religion sets
the standard, e.g., the moral law of ten commandments, etc., which has
served as the foundation of western values for at least a week or two.
Regarding our comrades who look down their nose at all things religious,
flattering
themselves that they are somehow in a position to evaluate God and his
contemporary (self-appointed?) representatives, and expert enough to
generalize, stereotype,
and sit in judgment of people of faith, these pub buddies of ours
across the table fail to see that the house of their value systems are built
on sand (to paraphrase some religious guy). Knee-jerk anti-Christians
remind me of knee-jerk Canadian anti-Americans. And bigots.
The Muslims who are getting their shorts tied up in a knot over the cartoons
don't seem to get the fact that their actions only prove the point of the
satirists. They should be smart like most Christians and most of their
other Muslim
buddies, and a) recognize God doesn't need anyone to defend him, and b) pray
that the poor lost soul knuckleheads will see the light. The Philadelphia
Inquirer published one of the cartoons, and Muslims held a peaceful protest,
visited by the editor of the paper.

True religion will always have a subversive dimension, and will be wary of
being the puppet of Caesar or any earthly power. About the worst thing
that happened to the Christian church was when it became the state religion
of Rome.

And to put that paraphrase into context, he really said, "The one who hears
these words of mine and does not put them into practice," that's the one
building on sand, and that's a humbling challenge to any of us, regardless
of whether we wear our brand of religion on our sleeve or eschew it
altogether. Bono, the poster boy for putting the words into practice, said,
"If you wanna touch the sky you better learn how to kneel."

JF

Hi Jim
I didn't get on yesterday.
I'm not anti-Xtian by any means, but the denial of their history
really pisses me off. Here's a link that is a little shaky on detailed
facts but notes a large number of incidents, while still missing
others:
http://www.geocities.com/iconoclastes.geo/victims.html
You'll notice that an awful lot of this stuff was done
pre-reformation, or by the Catholic Church after the reformation. In
large part, my problem with them is the same one Martin Luther had, in
that the religion was secondary and was being used as a means to wealth
and power and not much else, but you can't seperate the religion from
acts done in it's name for a really decent short read cheack out:
The Bad Popes by Russell Chamberlin
http://tinyurl.com/9sxwz
It provides a serious, well researched, scholarly portrait of what the
Papacy was at it's worst, and VERY little of the people involved gave a
[censored] about the "religion". It was about power politics and greed, but
these were the people seeting the standard, rewriting the Bible, and
calling the shots that caused a lot of the violence. The level of
corruption was amazing. But THAT was Xtianity until the reformation,
there was nothing else that wasn't slaughtered.

I do think that most of the modern Xtian religions have chosen to
cherry pick the good parts of the New Testament and therefore create a
new religion that really isn't Christianity, it's something based on it
that's much kinder and gentler. I've spent years studying church
history and really have some wonderful conversations with my in-laws
who are deacons and regularly attend things like The Jesus Seminar, but
none of that changes the fact that Xtianity has been the excuse,
justification for, or reason for brutal violence all throughout
history:
http://www.westarinstitute.org/Jesus_Seminar/jesus_seminar.html
Our daughter, along with them does the UCC Star Island summer retreat
every year and was supposed to work it this year but missed the
deadline.
So I really have no problem with most of current Xtianity other than
things like forbidding birth control to countries where thousands of
children are dying of starvation and Revolution Theology starring the
Jesuits.

What you call `cherry picking' I call rejection of cant
and hypocrisy; recognition that anything that attracts
peoples attention will be put to use by power mongers.

--
Michael Press

"Michael Press" <[email hidden]> wrote ...

Quoted message said:

What you call `cherry picking' I call rejection of cant
and hypocrisy; recognition that anything that attracts
peoples attention will be put to use by power mongers.

Rejection of cant?

Jim Flom said:

"Bill C" <[email hidden]> wrote ...

Quoted message said:

Hi Jim
I didn't get on yesterday.
I'm not anti-Xtian by any means, but the denial of their history
really pisses me off. Here's a link that is a little shaky on detailed
facts but notes a large number of incidents, while still missing
others:
http://www.geocities.com/iconoclastes.geo/victims.html
You'll notice that an awful lot of this stuff was done
pre-reformation, or by the Catholic Church after the reformation. In
large part, my problem with them is the same one Martin Luther had, in
that the religion was secondary and was being used as a means to wealth
and power and not much else, but you can't seperate the religion from
acts done in it's name for a really decent short read cheack out:
The Bad Popes by Russell Chamberlin
http://tinyurl.com/9sxwz
It provides a serious, well researched, scholarly portrait of what the
Papacy was at it's worst, and VERY little of the people involved gave a
[censored] about the "religion". It was about power politics and greed, but
these were the people seeting the standard, rewriting the Bible, and
calling the shots that caused a lot of the violence. The level of
corruption was amazing. But THAT was Xtianity until the reformation,
there was nothing else that wasn't slaughtered.

Thanks for the links, and while these objections are not unknown to me I'd
hate to throw out the baby Jesus with the bathwater.

Editing the text of a link I cite below, the credibility of the New
Testament is a frequent
target and an apparently plausible way to disqualify the whole of the
Christian religion before it is out of the starting blocks. If the New
Testament has been corrupted beyond recognition, Christendom as we know it
is a human construct, not a divine work through flawed people. But, if
people want to disregard the New Testament, then they also have to disregard
other ancient writings, such as Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and others. The
New Testament documents are far better preserved and more numerous than
_any_ other ancient writing. Currently there are 5,686 Greek manuscripts
available today for the New Testament. If we were to compare the number of
New Testament manuscripts to other ancient writings, we'd find that
attestation of the the New Testament manuscripts far exceeds the others. A
few of the better known of several possible examples:

Author: Plato
Date written: 427-347 B.C.
Earliest copy: 900 A.D.
time span betweem original and earliest copy: 1200 yrs
number of copies: a whopping 7

Author: Aristotle
Date written: 384-322 B.C.
Earliest copy: 1100 AD
time span betweem original and earliest copy: 1400 years
number of copies: a humble 49

Author: Homer (Iliad)
Date written: 900 BC
Earliest copy: 400 BC
time span betweem original and earliest copy: 500 years
number of copies: a venerated 643

Not to mention Pliny (7), Herodotus (8), Euripides (9), Caesar (10). There
is no serious discussion about the accuracy of the above mentioned
manuscripts.

By comparison, for the New Testament:
Author: various
Date written: 1st century AD (50-100 AD)
Earliest copies: 2nd century AD (c. 130 ff.)
time span: < 100 years
number of copies: a staggering 5600+

This doesn't even address the strength and accuracy of the Old Testament, as
the Dead Sea Scrolls have attested.

So you can see there are thousands more New Testament Greek manuscripts than
any other ancient writing. The internal consistency of the New Testament
documents is about 99.5% textually pure. Of the remaining0.5% , not one
variant strikes at the vitals of the Christian faith. They're mostly
grammatical in nature. That is an amazing accuracy.

If the critics of the Bible dismiss the New Testament as reliable
information, then they must also dismiss the reliability of the writings of
Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, Homer, and the other authors mentioned in the
chart at the beginning of the paper. On the other hand, if the critics
acknowledge the historicity and writings of those other individuals, then
they must also retain the historicity and writings of the New Testament
authors; after all, the evidence for the New Testament's reliability is far
greater than the others. The Christian has substantially superior criteria
for affirming the New Testament documents than he does for any other ancient
writing. It is good evidence on which to base the trust in the reliability
of the New Testament.

For example, we have a fragment of the gospel of John that dates back to
around 29 years from the original writing. This is extremely close to the
original writing date. This is simply unheard of in any other ancient
writing and it demonstrates that the Gospel of John is a first century
document.

http://www.carm.org/evidence/textualevidence.htm

Aside from the NT manuscripts themselves, there are over 19,000 copies in
the Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Aramaic languages. The total supporting New
Testament manuscript base is over 24,000.

There are also some 86,000 quotations from the early church fathers and
several thousand Lectionaries (church-service books containing Scripture
quotations used in the early centuries of Christianity), enough that
virtually the entire New Testament can be reconstructed on citations alone.
In fact, there are enough quotations from the early church fathers that even
if we did not have a single copy of the Bible, scholars could still
reconstruct all but 11 verses of the entire New Testament from material
written within 150 to 200 years from the time of Christ.

You can google "new testament manuscript evidence" for more.

Quoted message said:

I do think that most of the modern Xtian religions have chosen to
cherry pick the good parts of the New Testament and therefore create a
new religion that really isn't Christianity, it's something based on it
that's much kinder and gentler.

Can you think of an example or two of cherry picking, Bill? I work hard to
comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. If I have blind spots in
my treatment of the NT I'm wide open to seeing them.

Quoted message said:

So I really have no problem with most of current Xtianity other than
things like forbidding birth control to countries where thousands of
children are dying of starvation and Revolution Theology starring the
Jesuits.

I'm not aware of any branches of Christinaity that have enough political
power to forbid birth control to certain countries. I can think of some
Muslim ones, and it may be that I'm just not aware of them. But it's one
thing to oppose birth control (which is by no means a universal Christian
position, and certainly not a core faith issue), and another to have the
power to forbid it to entire countries.

Quoted message said:

Just a few thoughts for now but my problems with Islam are ...

Interesting read, from which I googled "Grand Mufti Husseini Al Qaeda" and
got a fascinating result.

Best,

JF

Hi Jim
Believe it or not I think we're generally on the same page. By cherry
picking I meant the emphasis on the NT while leaving the nastiness of
the OT out of mainstream Xtianity today. I come from a hardcore
Catholic background so I really see the Bible as a whole split into two
seperate books, none of which is any less applicable to your faith or
any less relevant. To ignore, or downplay any portion is NOT following
the Xtian faith. That's where I have a hard time with most of the
modern mainstream groups being truly Xtian. I think that what is
basically the jettisoning of large portions of the OT has made the
faith more friendly and approachable, but is it really still Xtianity?
I'm sure you know that all of this was struggled with at the Council of
Nicea and onward from there. There was a lot of "revising" early on,
and we definitely have some serious differences in differing versions
of the Bible. What had stuck in my head was "The Donation of
Constantine" which has been known to be fraudulent for centuries, but
was typical of the Popes who were fighting more to justify their
temporal power and wealth than for anything to do with the actual
religion. There were a lot of VERY interesting decisions made for
politcal reasons, especially early on, as to what constituted the
bible. Fortunately we are now at a point where we have a lot of good
independent scholarship on the early writings and their historicity.
Being Catholic, intellectual, and curious seems to be a recipe for
disaster if you are honest. I couldn't find any way for it to work for
me given their history so I've gone off in a different direction. If
you can manage to view Christianity as basically re-starting with
Christ and the OT as mostly being in error then it would be a lot
easier to deal with. Then you have to seperate out all of the [censored] done
in the name of it, or using it for personal wealth and power as not
being part of it's tradition. I can't get past any of that personally,
but have no problem with people who can.
As for the Birth Control, no they don't currently have enough
political power to get it banned by the government, but they do have
the power, especially in a lot of the developing and S. and C. Americas
to massively influence the populations against it.
The Catholic church has basically decided to abandon Europe and North
America because people there wont jump through those hoops anymore, but
they are really concentrating on the developing world, and Africa in
particular and the numbers are astounding.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,,1461044,00.html
http://www1.georgetown.edu/explore/news/index.cfm?ID=300

They have massive influence in some of the areas hardest hit by famine,
overpopulation and aids and still insist that you'll go to hell for
using birth control. Since they are feeding, educating, providing
medical tratment etc...for these people they are given much more
creedence and my personal opinion is that the drive to create more
little catholics is causing massive suffering.
As for Husseini, is this what you got?
http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com/gallery/
Nice stuff huh? I just wish there was some info on who the .org
actually was composed of, but it's all available in lots of other
places.
I'm sure that you're doing a lot of good, for a lot of people and wish
you the best with it.
Bill C

In article <3k7If.18$Y22.0@clgrps12>,

Jim Flom said:

"Michael Press" <[email hidden]> wrote ...

Quoted message said:

What you call `cherry picking' I call rejection of cant
and hypocrisy; recognition that anything that attracts
peoples attention will be put to use by power mongers.

Rejection of cant?

cant: n. ...
4. insincere or almost meaningless talk used merely from
convention or habit. 4. insincere, pious talk.

--
Michael Press

Bill C said:

I'm sure you know that all of this was struggled with at the Council of
Nicea and onward from there. There was a lot of "revising" early on,
and we definitely have some serious differences in differing versions
of the Bible.

I think that this is a myth that circulates around. Since Tertullian,
ca. 200 AD, is working with much the same NT as we are, it can't really
be right.

Possibly you are thinking of the gnostic 'gospels'? All of these were
dismissed as forgeries in antiquity, and, since they disagree with each
other and the gospels that the church knew, it seems like a valid
verdict.

Quoted message said:

What had stuck in my head was "The Donation of
Constantine" which has been known to be fraudulent for centuries, but
was typical of the Popes who were fighting more to justify their
temporal power and wealth than for anything to do with the actual
religion...

The DoC is something that I am interested in. It is certainly a
composition of the Dark Ages, but it may not have been a forgery as
such. It was written at a time when imperial power was collapsing, and
the Popes had to take secular measures for their own security and that
of everyone else, as the last remaining source of any authority. A
legend existed at that time that Constantine had made such a donation,
since this is documented earlier than the DoC can have been composed.
In such a desperate situation, and unable to find the text that
'everyone knew' existed, no doubt some papal secretary stuck down the
essentials himself.

The renaissance use of the text for the aggrandisment of secular
'popes' is of course another matter. But it was not truly known to be
forged until Lorenzo Valla's book on it.

Quoted message said:

There were a lot of VERY interesting decisions made for
politcal reasons, especially early on, as to what constituted the
bible.

I think not.

Quoted message said:

Fortunately we are now at a point where we have a lot of good
independent scholarship on the early writings and their historicity.
Being Catholic, intellectual, and curious seems to be a recipe for
disaster if you are honest.

I'm not a Catholic, but I have some doubts about this.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

"Jim Flom" <[email hidden]> a écrit dans le message de news:
QjAHf.6227$bd4.3698@edtnps84...

Quoted message said:

"Bill C" <[email hidden]> wrote

This is exactly my point with Davey. The west is wrong for everything,
and others are given a free pass no matter what they do. This goes as
far back as Korea and it's [censored]. I have yet to see a protest here
in protest central against kidnapping aid workers, torture by Islamic
extremists, Sharia Law, the Saudi's destroying any religious items
other than the approved version of the Quran etc...
We have our faults but that's no reason to give others a free pass
while condemning us.

It's not about right and wrong, it's about PR. The protests in the arab
world are in part for the western media. Did you notice that the signs they
were carrying were in English? The west has (more or less) democracies,
which are moved by public opinion. How productive do you think 100000 people
demonstrating in Trafalgar Square against kidnapping aid workers would be?
What do you want to bet that it would increase the frequency of such events?

Quoted message said:

I think that this is a myth that circulates around. Since Tertullian,
ca. 200 AD, is working with much the same NT as we are, it can't really
be right.

Windows NT 200AD (Build 1.27.1059) ?

Quoted message said:

Bill C said:

I'm sure you know that all of this was struggled with at the Council of
Nicea and onward from there. There was a lot of "revising" early on,
and we definitely have some serious differences in differing versions
of the Bible.

I think that this is a myth that circulates around. Since Tertullian,
ca. 200 AD, is working with much the same NT as we are, it can't really
be right.

Possibly you are thinking of the gnostic 'gospels'? All of these were
dismissed as forgeries in antiquity, and, since they disagree with each
other and the gospels that the church knew, it seems like a valid
verdict.

Quoted message said:

What had stuck in my head was "The Donation of
Constantine" which has been known to be fraudulent for centuries, but
was typical of the Popes who were fighting more to justify their
temporal power and wealth than for anything to do with the actual
religion...

The DoC is something that I am interested in. It is certainly a
composition of the Dark Ages, but it may not have been a forgery as
such. It was written at a time when imperial power was collapsing, and
the Popes had to take secular measures for their own security and that
of everyone else, as the last remaining source of any authority. A
legend existed at that time that Constantine had made such a donation,
since this is documented earlier than the DoC can have been composed.
In such a desperate situation, and unable to find the text that
'everyone knew' existed, no doubt some papal secretary stuck down the
essentials himself.

The renaissance use of the text for the aggrandisment of secular
'popes' is of course another matter. But it was not truly known to be
forged until Lorenzo Valla's book on it.

Quoted message said:

There were a lot of VERY interesting decisions made for
politcal reasons, especially early on, as to what constituted the
bible.

I think not.

Quoted message said:

Fortunately we are now at a point where we have a lot of good
independent scholarship on the early writings and their historicity.
Being Catholic, intellectual, and curious seems to be a recipe for
disaster if you are honest.

I'm not a Catholic, but I have some doubts about this.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

That's why thousands of people are studying this stuff every day at
universities and other centers of learning. Because it's incredibly
difficult to know exactly what went on, and there are definitely
differing interpretations of events. As for variations of the Bible
those are plain as day.

http://www.deism.com/biblevotes.htm

Quoted message said:

From the above:

According to Professor John Crossan of Biblical Studies at DePaul
University the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (274-337 CE) who
was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity, needed a single
canon to be agreed upon by the Christian leaders to help him unify the
remains of the Roman Empire. Until this time the various Christian
leaders could not decide which books would be considered "holy" and
thus "the word of God" and which ones would be excluded and not
considered the word of God.
The Church leaders gathered together at the Council of Nicaea and voted
the "word of God" into existence. (I wish to thank Brian Show for
pointing out in his rebuttal to this article that the final version of
the Christian Bible was not voted on at the Council of Nicaea, per se.
The Church leaders didn't finish editing the "holy" scriptures until
the Council of Trent when the Catholic church pronounced the Canon
closed. However, it seems the real approving editor of the Bible was
not God but Constantine!

There's a lot more to be found concerning just what got chosen and what
got left out, along with serious questions about who actaully wrote
what, and when.

http://www.rhttp://gbgm-umc.org/
http:http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/Bible/ethrcot.stm
http://tinyurl.com/8ncvd
http://www.catholic.com/library/Bible_Translations_Guide.asp
http://tinyurl.com/73vpl
http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/charts/catholic_protestant.htm

For those who believe no proof is needed, for those who don't no proof
is possible. For those who don't know there's always more to be
learned.
Bill C

Stu Fleming said:

Quoted message said:

I think that this is a myth that circulates around. Since Tertullian,
ca. 200 AD, is working with much the same NT as we are, it can't really
be right.

Windows NT 200AD (Build 1.27.1059) ?

Heh heh. I can quite believe that the first builds of WinNT were done
by people who didn't speak English....

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Jim Flom said:

The
New Testament documents are far better preserved and more numerous than
_any_ other ancient writing. Currently there are 5,686 Greek manuscripts
available today for the New Testament.

Two points:

Early copies of works that were written well after the time that they
purport to have been written don't make it accurate history; it only
confirms that the early writing was well distributed. The Pauline
texts are considered by many to be the earliest and he does not
mention many 'historical truths' mentioned in the 'earlier' texts.
Paul IMO is as contemporaneous as you can get and, guess what, he
ain't gospel...

The other philosophers that you mention are judged not as the center
of a current religion, but on what they purported to have written or
said. This removes in large part the issue of accuracy of what is
written. No one says you're wrong because you disagree with the text
as written, unless you are being judged on your ability to quote.
Arguments with Christians and followers of Islam often return to the
text to decide the argument. It isn't what is said, but who can best
argue who said it.

When the best argument the follower of a religion can make is that it
most closely follows what the originator said, the religion IMO is
bankrupt.

Curtis L. Russell
Odenton, MD (USA)
Just someone on two wheels...

Bill C said:

Quoted message said:

Bill C said:

I'm sure you know that all of this was struggled with at the Council of
Nicea and onward from there. There was a lot of "revising" early on,
and we definitely have some serious differences in differing versions
of the Bible.

I think that this is a myth that circulates around. Since Tertullian,
ca. 200 AD, is working with much the same NT as we are, it can't really
be right.

Possibly you are thinking of the gnostic 'gospels'? All of these were
dismissed as forgeries in antiquity, and, since they disagree with each
other and the gospels that the church knew, it seems like a valid
verdict.

Quoted message said:

What had stuck in my head was "The Donation of
Constantine" which has been known to be fraudulent for centuries, but
was typical of the Popes who were fighting more to justify their
temporal power and wealth than for anything to do with the actual
religion...

The DoC is something that I am interested in. It is certainly a
composition of the Dark Ages, but it may not have been a forgery as
such. It was written at a time when imperial power was collapsing, and
the Popes had to take secular measures for their own security and that
of everyone else, as the last remaining source of any authority. A
legend existed at that time that Constantine had made such a donation,
since this is documented earlier than the DoC can have been composed.
In such a desperate situation, and unable to find the text that
'everyone knew' existed, no doubt some papal secretary stuck down the
essentials himself.

The renaissance use of the text for the aggrandisment of secular
'popes' is of course another matter. But it was not truly known to be
forged until Lorenzo Valla's book on it.

Quoted message said:

There were a lot of VERY interesting decisions made for
politcal reasons, especially early on, as to what constituted the
bible.

I think not.

Quoted message said:

Fortunately we are now at a point where we have a lot of good
independent scholarship on the early writings and their historicity.
Being Catholic, intellectual, and curious seems to be a recipe for
disaster if you are honest.

I'm not a Catholic, but I have some doubts about this.

That's why thousands of people are studying this stuff every day at
universities and other centers of learning. Because it's incredibly
difficult to know exactly what went on, and there are definitely
differing interpretations of events.

Quoted message said:

As for variations of the Bible those are plain as day.

http://www.deism.com/biblevotes.htm

Quoted message said:

From the above:

According to Professor John Crossan of Biblical Studies at DePaul
University [snip].... The Church leaders gathered together at the Council
of Nicaea and voted the "word of God" into existence.

I think Dr Crossan would be very cross to be associated with such a
statement, since he can hardly not know that it isn't true. It isn't
true, at all events.

Some years ago I got rather fed up of reading this story about Nicaea,
which never had any ancient reference given for it, and wanted to check
it. What I did was to draw up a list of every ancient text that could
possibly mention the council -- say up to a century later -- and then
go through them and see what they said about it. I found that not one
of them gave such an account. Instead, one and all described wrangling
over whether the second person of the Trinity was of the same substance
(homoousios) as the first, or of a like substance.

If there is nothing in the material that has come down to us from the
past that tells this story, then I think we can be confident that the
story is bogus. (I did come across some much later indications that
the story evolved from a medieval myth, and was circulated by
Voltaire).

NB: it may sound like a lot of hard work to go through all those texts,
but an awful lot are online in English these days, and a copy of
Quasten's patrology gives a good idea of who wrote what when.

Quoted message said:

(I wish to thank Brian Show for pointing out in his rebuttal to this article
that the final version of the Christian Bible was not voted on at the Council
of Nicaea, per se. The Church leaders didn't finish editing the
"holy" scriptures until the Council of Trent when the Catholic church
pronounced the Canon closed. However, it seems the real approving
editor of the Bible was not God but Constantine!

You will note how little this paragraph agrees with itself, even.

Quoted message said:

There's a lot more to be found concerning just what got chosen and what
got left out, along with serious questions about who actaully wrote
what, and when.

I'm asking.

Quoted message said:

http://www.rhttp://gbgm-umc.org/

Something wrong with this URL...

Quoted message said:

http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/Bible/ethrcot.stm

Lists differences of OT in Ethiopia with that in the RC. The relevance
of this is unclear, since the OT was taken by the church from the Jews.
The Ethiopian list merely includes some of the OT apocrypha, which it
shouldn't; but since they were cut off from civilisation rather a long
time ago, it's understandable how it got confused.

Quoted message said:

http://tinyurl.com/8ncvd

This is a link to a page advertising a book on Amazon.

Quoted message said:

http://www.catholic.com/library/Bible_Translations_Guide.asp

This is about bible translations. Ahem, these links offered in
evidence seem to have no relevance to the assertion of massive
differences in the canon of the NT pre-Nicaea.

Quoted message said:

http://tinyurl.com/73vpl

This is another Amazon link, this time to an amateur polemic against
the bible by G.A.Wells.

Quoted message said:

http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/charts/catholic_protestant.htm

This is a list of supposed differences in theology between Catholics
and Protestants.

Quoted message said:

For those who believe no proof is needed, for those who don't no proof
is possible. For those who don't know there's always more to be
learned.

Indeed. I for one would like to learn why you quoted this bunch of
links! <smile>

But just to reiterate: there are no real differences in canon of the NT
perceptible. But since the apostles didn't lay one down, the one we
have today coalesced over time. What we cannot say is "we definitely
have some serious differences in differing versions of the Bible."
Sorry -- not being personal -- but it is not so.

All the best,

Roger Pearse