Christianity and AS

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I think that a lot of us want to do good for the world, because a lot of people have been cruel to us.

I'm not sure if you are speaking as a Christian, or not. But assuming so, what exactly do _you_ do regarding what Jesus preached on the sermon on the mount -- the center of what Christianity actually is?

Also, I can't recall ever being cruel to Christians. Fact is, Christians run the entire US and pretty much dominate everything. Just the fundamentalist part of the US, self-described folks only, ranks from about 28% to perhaps as much as 35% of the entire country! In 1993, the only year I got solid information for, from a GAO report to Congress, charitable contributions to churches that were describing themselves as fundamentalist or evangelical received in excess of $73 billion dollars that year. And that's enough to run most any country in the world. I'm not saying you are suggesting this, but it is pathetic to hear those with power complaining about folks "being cruel" to them.

They have no case, quite simply.

Now, those who go out to proselytize by riding bicycles to homes or walking from door to door to evangelize or "give testament" to the public can and do receive some abuse. Probably, mostly from other Christians. In my case, I talk pleasantly with them and offer them water, soda pop, or anything else that might help them feel a little better during the day. I know it isn't easy to walk around or bicycle like that and I sympathize a lot for their efforts. Not that I really want them interfering in my life on such short notice... but I know about politeness and I understand the difficulties they are taking on, too. They are people like me. Just misguided a bit. But that's the only case I know of where Christians might feel that slammed doors or brittle comments might be "abuse." Even that isn't, in my book. Abuse is real, not some feigned pretend thing about "ow, my finger hurts."

I was part of a "train" of people coming from El Salvador in the mid 1980's going to Canada. I saw people who were abused. People who'd lost almost all of their family and relatives to right wing death squads and only managed to survive under the bleeding bodies of their families, acting dead. People who knew nothing of politics and were just uneducated peasants. That was abuse.

Christians run the darned place! If any Christian here starts complaining about being abused, I'm not inclined to believe them if they live in the US. Elsewhere, yes. I can believe it. Not in the US. Doesn't happen, ever. On the other hand, I personally know people who have been beaten to the point of going to the hospital here BY CHRISTIANS because the kid they were beating up was an atheist. That does happen. No gangs of atheists running around beating up Christians, that I know of, though.

Jon

I hear you, Jon. When I was an active church-goer, before I realized that path wasn't going to give me the answers I sought, it used to annoy me to hear the way some Christians carried on about persecution here in the US. To hear them talk, the Coliseum was up and running again and everyone was about to get fed to the lions. Turns out in 99% of the cases, they were whining because they had to play by the rules.

I hear a lot of talk too about how America is a Christian country and how the Founding Fathers all believed in God, etc. Well, then, why didn't they write in Protestant Christianity as the official religion of the US when they had a chance? There was nothing to stop them. But when they sat down to write the Constitution, right at the very beginning they established the principle that the government was not to be involved in religion. Not to prohibit it, not to encourage it. It was to stay neutral. Their wishes were quite clear on the matter. These were men who knew full well that once religion got its hands on the government, it would be government who ran the churches, not the other way around. And so it was for religion's own good that they established the principle of separation of church and state. My mother used to say, "Be careful what you pray for, you might get it." Those who wish to make America a theocracy ought to think on that statement.

religion is BS there is no such thing as god or jesus, they are both fictitional If i ever met jesus I would anally rape him

My opinion? 100% of the cases.

Over the many years, I've seen many such cases brought up by Christians. NONE of them I looked into panned out, upon researching them.

I remember one case where a deeply believing Christian would put out case after case that he would get from some newsletter he read. I took them on, one by one, studied the situation, explained the details and gave him references to go check, and time after time he'd be forced to admit that the situation wasn't at all as he'd first said it was. I finally got to the point of figuring out he must be using some "rag" for his information and called him on it. He admitted it. But despite the fact that not a single case he brought up was any good -- even by HIS admission after he read what I reported to him later -- he still insisted to me, vaguely, that he is still sure that Christians are being fed to the lions here in the US.

By the way, he disappeared from the board for a while. A year and a half later he came back, completely changed from what I saw. He checked things out a lot more on his own and he was actually beginning to start to make a lot more sense to me. Still a Christian, but we could finally have a decent conversation and I could trust his word about things much better. I actually liked him a lot; after having before wondering if he'd ever get a clue.

So my bet? 100.0%.

Atheists are, by the way, a tiny minority who depend upon the good will of Christians in the US and cannot really afford to rile them. Atheists have no political representation or power. And we are oppressed in a small way. For example, in my work I've had potential clients drop certain keywords in our discussion (sometimes subtle, but usually something about as subtle as a battleship, like "We just love the Lord so much. Don't you?") at a point where it appeared we had a mutually rewarding possibility, looking to see how I'd respond. When I don't pick up on it, they immediately decide to look elsewhere for their services. It isn't a serious problem, per se, but it has cost me some contracts I'm fairly certain. No biggy. But Christians hold the power in the US, not atheists, and they are the ones who are able to do some pretty nasty things and get away with it where an atheist would be strung up twice before breakfast for merely wishing out loud about such a thing. Atheists are powerless here.


I actually spent some time researching some of the period from 1783 to 1787, which was a period starting with the British accepting defeat and a Confederation deeply in debt and States arguing viciously about paying their bills and suddenly faced with the concept of acquiring huge, monstrous tracts of land from Britain as part of the settlement.

Some of the books I have and have also read are:


I own one of these originals and it is superb! Included are the proceedings of the Annapolis Convention, the Continental Congress, Federal Convention, etc. Details on the daily votes, who voted and for what, etc. Letters, circulars, letters of credentials from the states, resolutions, ... you name it.

I also have and have read an excellent two-volume, five-book set by George Bancroft, copyrighted in 1882, called: History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America. I think it is now available on the web, by the way. But I've read it.

Ben Franklin, like most of us in our own lives, went through religious transitions. In his earlier days he followed more that of a pious moralist, then during his period in London he was at least an agnostic if not an outright atheist, then finally settled down into a pragmatic state of mind, feeling that man is the measure of virtue, not that virtue is the measure of man. His epiphany is spelled out in this comment, "I entertained an opinion, that although certain actions might not be bad _because_ they were forbidden by it, or good _because_ it commanded them, yet probably those actions might be forbidden _because_ they were bad for us, or commanded _because_ they were good for us." This was a kind of inverted version of moral cause and effect and it lit his later life. He concluded, considering the vastness of our universe, that if there was a God, that it would be "great vanity in me to suppose that the Supremely Perfect does in the least regard such an inconsiderable nothing as man." He felt a desire in the end to pay his respects "to something" but more as a matter of satisfying his own needs and nothing at all about believing that there was any kind of personal God. In fact, he didn't believe in such a thing at all towards the latter part of his life.

Meanwhile, many of the others were Deists, which the modern Christian right would see as heathens of the worse sort. Even Washington, though more religious than many, would probably be considered heretical. He completely endorsed Jefferson's view of the religious separation of church and state in a speech he made as President in the fall of 1789 at a Jewish synagogue in Newport -- and Jefferson's view of this was a __VERY HIGH__ barrier, indeed.

From one side to another, religion was to be kept out of government. Even _before_ the Philadelphia convention and before the US came to be, but soon after the US was granted vast territories in their cessation of hostilities with Britain, the earlier federal congress worried about surveying the huge area they'd won and about how to encourage people to emigrate out and develop them. Although Jefferson argued for 10x10 mile townships (first reading was in May 1784), they settled upon William Grayson's (he had been an aide-de-camp to Washington during the war) 6x6 as the size. With 36 square miles per township and after many other considerations were dealt with, it then came to the idea of wondering if there should be any special purposes assigned to any of land within each township.

Timothy Pickering from Philadelphia addressed 'most earnest' letters to Rufus King, for example, complaining that no reservation of land was made for the support of ministers of the gospel, nor even for schools.

In 1785, on April 12th, 1785, the committee for framing an ordinance for the disposal of the western lands finally made their report to the general congress, written by Grayson. It was a land law for people to go and to take possession of a seemingly endless domain. Formed out of differing opinions, but as an inducement for neighborhoods of the same religious sentiments to confederate for the purpose of purchasing and settling together, the division into townships was to have a perpetual reservation of one mile square in every township for the support of religion and another for the support of education. The house refused its assent to the reservation for the support of religion, as connecting the church with the state; but the reservation for the support of schools received a general welcome. And that is what passed. Keep in mind, this is _before_ the Philadelphia convention or the framing of the US Constitution and its later debate before ratification.

A main point of the above is that this idea of reserving some of the land for religious use was on the table and in discussion for a year or so. It wouldn't actually _cost_ the congress a penny to implement. All they had to do was to vote it in. And in the committee itself, they included the idea when they reported it out to the general congress. However, that part of the resolution was almost immediately under attack and was swiftly removed before final passage. There was no question at all that even in 1785, two years and more before the US Constitution would be written, a cheap (free) measure that might set aside less than 3% of each township for religious use was defeated soundly and quickly.

Ben Franklin was one of the more liberal folks of his time, but in no way were there ANY people involved in any significant way with the US Constitution's formation, with views similar to those of the religious right today. Frankly, I think they would all be shocked to the core by them, in fact. To a person.

Jon

Isn't rape BS too?

When people try to push religion on me i just shut down or go berserk...

I cannot stand when people push s**t on me...

i cant say i am atheist...

i just dont care enough to be religious...

fukai, i think your AS could get in the way of your expression of Christianity. When you try to "tell" others about your Christianity or any other religion for that matter it sometimes has a negative effect. It is like trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole. I find that it is better to express your Christianity with doing and not saying. Remember the verse, "my little children, love not word neither by tongue, but in deed and truth"? If you are living the "good life" people who are seeking will ask you questions about your life and faith.

I agree. Follow Jesus' Sermon on the Mount by action, not words. That is the proper expression that demonstrates.

Well, I hope you don't mean this in a material way and mean it as a matter of following Jesus' words in deed, instead. Granting that, I agree.

Jon

"Christians" who try to force their beliefs onto others are not really Christians. True Christians know that it is God who does the converting. God provides helpers to be there for those who He draws in by His gift of faith. Those helpers recognize who to share their faith with because converted people will seek after truth.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that they aren't Christians. They're just young. There also is a difference between forcing and encouraging.

And once again, could we please just end this thread. It has ventured too far off-topic, even from page one.

A lot of threads wander in a lot of almost random directions. Someone makes a "sound" in the emptiness, it resonates in different ways with different people, and those resonations add their din to the "music", causing still more resonations. Sometimes, they just die down and dampen out with barely a whimper. Sometimes, things continue nothing quite like before but still in imporant or interesting ways. I don't necessarily think it is right to dump a blanket on the process, merely out of some 'organizational' instinct that wants nice categories, neatly divided in rows. That a thread has wandered, doesn't alone seem enough to say that it should end. That said, if the resonations are to stop then they do and I'm fine with that, too.

Everything is good to me.

Jon

LOL, "True Christian". Im a "true scientologist", all the rest are bloody heathens! Kill them all!

I find it extremely annoying when people push their religious beleifs on me you aren't going to make friends this way.

I can't be religious because in my mind it isn't logical to say God's there or not until you're dead.

My strong expression came from the fact that God doesn't use force [He draws people to Him], so someone with His spirit abiding within wouldn't use force either. You're so right about there being a difference between forcing and encouraging.