I wonder if you realise how revealing this actually is, Peter:

"baptism initiates us into a community of faith who are freed from the death dealing powers of the world and the self so that they may be truly human..."

It's hard to imagine a more emphatic statement about how you regard the people outside your faith. We are subhuman; we are not worthy of rights or respect. We can be lied to with impunity, for our benefit or yours. You will TRY to be nice to us, as you try to be nice to your pets and domestic animals, but clearly when it comes to the crunch a subhuman can hardly expect to be treated with the respect and compassion that a TRUE human deserves.

If Donald Trump had said that Democrats weren't genuine human beings, I'm sure you would have been as outraged as anyone else. But when your religion prompts you to say something equally vile, you do so without hesitation.

The sad thing is that I'm sure you're a really nice guy underneath. That's why I keep pointing out the enormity of the attitudes which you express in the apparent belief that they appropriate to a civilised and educated human being, in the hope one day the nice guy underneath will decide he's too smart and sensible to be taken in any longer.

Good article showing how separating church and state has damaged the church. Christians need to live under a Christian government that seeks not the satiation of the self but the establishment of healthy congregations that are prepared to sacrifice some of their material comfort for greater spiritual comfort.

Peter,
Give me a secular society where the various religions have as little influence as possible in the society. Your use of the term militant atheist betrays your effort to denigrate those thinkers who can see no place for a hell or heaven in the universe.

I need no moral Authority Figure to point out to me how to live a moral thoughtful life.

I prefer the Socratic view that the un-examined life is not worth living.
The moral philosopher (and economic theorist) Adam Smith summed it up well when he wrote;

""We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them".

While you make some good points Peter, that most reasonable folk may well agree with?

It doesn't necessarily imply or infer that freedom, freedom of choice, freedom to choose, or choice is always a proffered option!? Or even being conflicted by having to chose the lesser evil, is in any way inherently wrong!

That the only thing able to be put on trial here, is individual value judgement?

Doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons? Is therefore not necessarily a essentially bad outcome?

But may even be part of a grand plan? Where those, like those self made men born in the very log cabin hewn out of the wilderness with their own two bare hands? Can go on to serve humanity?

Liberty, fraternity and equality! Such nice sounding sentiments aren't they?

Such a pity they are almost invisible as universal social justice outcomes in so called conservative ranks, marked by the complete loss of their former progressives (fair dinkum Christians) and the rise and rise of Satanic selfish ironclad individualism?

And while there isn't enough darkness in the entire world to extinguish the light of a single candle!

Too few are being lit! And too many "individualists" are blowing with all their feverish might and main to extinguish as many as possible?

And as a consequence, creating a world almost as inviting for their fellow man, as the dark side of the moon!

And a path to somewhere! Namely, a dark and foreboding barren waste! Marked by the complete absence of so much as a single drop of the milk of human kindness!? Or welcome light in a single window!

And presided over by a force so inherently evil as to terrify beyond all understanding, on contact! And without question that evil is abroad and spewing its mindless hate in our world, using who and what it can to trump our better angels?
Alan B.

@progressive pat so you want to live under a theocrazy - like the taliban only a christian one and you think it would end well do you. We got to this point for a reason.

@cobber, good point bro. Just seems like there's a lot of debt, gambling and divorces at the moment, and that's just in the Christian community lol.