can someone please tell me why you don't see Mr Ifran making comments like these:

"My Faith As an Instrument of Butchery"

Yesterday the Washington Times ran an impassioned column by M. Zuhdi Jasser, chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, calling for a counter-movement within Islam: Cancer in its midst.

During the dark days of our Revolution, Thomas Paine wrote, “That these are the times, that try men’s souls.” As an American Muslim, I feel the sentiment of these words like a red-hot brand on my brain.

I have watched horrified as assassins have read out the words from my Holy Koran before slitting the throats of some poor innocent souls. To my non-comprehending eyes, I have seen mothers proudly support their sons’ accomplishment of blowing up innocent people as they eat or travel. It shatters some part of me, to see my faith as an instrument for butchery.

It makes me hope and pray for some counter-movement within my faith which will push back all this darkness. And I know that it must start with what is most basic — the common truth that binds all religions: “Do unto others, as you would have them do onto you.” The Golden Rule.

But that is not what I am seeing taught in a great deal of the Muslim world today, and, unfortunately, in America it’s just not much better.

Night after night, I see Muslim national organizations like the Council for American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, cry out over and over about anecdotal victimization while saying and doing absolutely nothing about the most vile hate-speak and actions toward Jews and Christians in the Muslim world. It is the most self-serving of outrage.

In response to all those who see in the Christian message a "destruction of the human spirit"...

The relationships to the development of art and culture and Europe and the spread of Christianity and its infusing with reason is widely accepted. The best ones to read on this are Christopher Dawson and Roger Scruton, in my opinion.

The fact is that European civilisation's highest points, the art which is relied upon to a large degree by the secularised west in order to maintain its spiritual capital, was to a large degree a rediscription of the Christian message. What I mean by that is that art and western culture flourished when the Christian message and other cultures, such as those of Ancient Greece and Rome, or the local Christianised tribes, were combined. Modernism was a response to a new theory of the world, one which placed many as the highest thing, and only was maintained as long as what was once ascribed to God could be ascribed to man. The disillusionment caused over the last two-hundred years by the horrors committed by man prepared the ground for our current post-modern culture, which rejects that man can reach any higher understanding of the world or truth, and that everything is just prejudice: that is, modernism failed to keep the moral capital of Christian Europe going, and the subsequent abandonment of that tradition has occured of late.

Yet, the Western tradition, before and after the Enlightenment, is the greatest and most true expression of the Truth of our condition and our nature, and it is (even if not explicitly saying so), a Christian tradition. Wagner's operas are full of Christian redeptive sacrifice, the Englightenment universalism of Beethovan was intriniscally relgious ("Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium"), even surrealism, minimalism and other artistic movements first tried through obfuscation to preserve a Christian Ethos.

This is why such a large percentage of the young who now enter the churches do so via art, music, or the literature of the West, from Ancient Greece to Victorian England or Post-war Poland... they see in the western tradition a murmuring of the truth whose most near religion is that which gave it birth: the Christian religion.

It is easy to understand why the educational bureaucracy, which sees the Christian religion as a blinding, irrational and false thing, seeks to subvert the Western tradition with critical theories, because by doing so it subverts the Christian claim to a Truth about the human condition, our nature, and the means of our betterment salvation.

Atheism and agnosticism have been on the rise for 250 years, but the first movement away from this was not a movement away from the Christian worldview, but rather a lack of faith. Great agnostic artists and composers reaffirmed the Christian message because they saw it as the most true expression of our nature. The most potent example of this is Wagner's Parsifal, an opera which connects a near-Pagan consecrative religious sacrifice with the Christian vision of personal renewal and redemptive sacrifice. Wagner conceived it as "ein Bühnenweihfestspiel", not an opera... that is, "a Festival Play to Consecrate the Stage". This hints at the first birth of Tragedy in Greece, where tragedies consecrated a religious festival. Art was, from its birth, a religious expression of belief (or disbelief), and this is what the Christian tradition continued, and which post-modern "art" wishes to destroy.

The importance of the Western tradition can only be accepted if we are willing to accept that for the large part, the Christian message is not only the cornerstone of our culture, but also our art, that they are inextricably intertwined. This involves an acceptance of our tradition as a Christian tradition, whether or not we choose to believe by faith, and a willingness to let be aspects of our culture lest we tear it from its foundations, leading our society to flounder in meaningless irrelevance.

Go read a year seven History Book, the ones we pay for, and then throw it in the Garbage where it belongs.
The absolute mindless brainwashing they are expected to be programmed with is astounding and an insult to their intelligence.
Remove your kids from the Education charter of this state, (probably all states) if you want them to have some chance in the future, they will certainly not get that from the current curriculum

Sells with great respect, a good dose of CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, NT Wright et al should inoculate you against that glorified humanism you want to call Christianity.

You know very well you're a heretic, Sellism and Spongism may be true but please don't call it Christianity. Its not fair. I'm just asking you to conform to the ordinary rules we have about the meaning of words.

John Meier 'A Marginal Jew', his response to the Jesus Seminar's muddle headedness, concluded it was impossible to remove the miracles of Jesus from his historical identity.

Paul and the Gospel writers didn't invent a leader to follow. The much simper explanation is that followers taught high levels of ethical behaviour by their leader passed on his teachings. Its much more difficult to argue the NT was invented. Which is what you must do if before reading the texts you believe supernaturalism false.

Donna,

I admire your courage to critique what you felt was an insult to what performance art is about.

If I want children to experience a story I would most definitely like it to be as authentically a production as can be.

Don't be disheartened – there is a definite new religious phobia in action at all cultural levels. A distinct fear of the unknown.

One point about story telling that I find disturbing is that the fertile mind of a child can easily oscillate between facts (truth) and fiction. The danger I observe is as adults they can decide that it's "all" untrue: Santa, the Easter bunny, Jesus, Noah, Moses or David - all fantasies!

In a world where the only place a child can hear the true story of life - the Judeo-Christian story - could be the classroom and the dedication of people like yourself - let's use this platform to tell them the difference between truth and myth.