Hi runner!

That would be the Stalin who went to a church school and trained for the priesthood in a seminary for five years, I take it? Not a terribly good advertisement for a religious education, was he?

I see we are already into the "blame God game" for the state of human behaviour. The situation is the attitudes of man who has been given a choice of behaviour. Make man accept the responsibility for bad behaviour; and must change.

Simple answer-"to hell with religion"!

Jon J,

Stalin certainly displays a similar pattern to other men when they reject the truth and are handed over to their own devices. That's why people who reject God find it so easy to sanction abortion.

There is no moral commonality between Islam and any other religion, Scott McInness. Islam is the only religion which I know in which their God and His prophet actively promote hostility and war between believers and non believers.

Your claim that the western liberation of Afghanistan from the world’s worst Islamofascists is somehow the west’s fault, indelibly marks you as just another chardonnay sucking trendy who is trying to dream up a moral scenario to justify your peculiar worldview.

As for you assertion that there is no superior culture, and that common values are passed on to generations of children by their parents and other community leaders, well you sure got that wrong. Storytellers, religious leaders, parents and community leaders may once have passed on to their children the tales, legends and myths of heroes. They did this to pass on to their kids the skills that they needed to ensure the continued survival of their people.

But today, that has all changed. Today’s mass media is no longer just a means of transmitting information, or just a medium of entertainment. It is now so influential, that it has almost completely displaced the traditional institutions which have long created and disseminated the cultural values that once guided people’s behaviour.

These new universal, media created cultural include movies which show children that criminals are heroes, who live exciting lives, with lots of money, and have very sexy girlfriends. Other Movies show the young that Real Men are violent men, who mass murder their enemies for personnel reasons. We have pop stars who sing about the joys of raping their mothers, killing other kids at school, smacking around “bitches”,and the joys of taking illegal drugs. Then we have computer games which teach young men just how much fun it is to shoot people.

Personally Scott, I don’t think that these new “international” values are going to do much for the continued existence of the human race, and I don’t think that they measure up to our former Christian ones. Many of them may appeal to Muslims, though.

runner,
Stalin remained religious all his life, especially having a moment with God while on a retreat. He re-opened churches and theology colleges in WW2, and continued to worship personally until he died.

LEGO,
"prophet(s) [who] actively promote hostility and war between believers and non believers" include Jim Wallace a few days ago, Sydney's Bishop Anthony Fraser last Easter, Melbourne's Archbishops, the Pope on his arrival in the UK six months ago, and constant sniping elsewhere.