Boaz, left that out because thought there was no need. Reckon you need to study true Christianity, mate. Such things as revenge is sweet, was never mentioned by the Nazarene Jesus. Please re-read the Sermon on the Mount.

You should get among a few more philosophers, Boaz, then you will find much talk of the above forgiveness, even as Mandela, a non-Christian gave proof of by not calling for the slaughter of all the Arparthaidists.

Forgiveness by the West is so much needed in today's Middle East, Boaz, because we are the real culprits, just carrying on with the same imperialistic colonisation.

Scallawag, the term you gave, can also be a term for a very active journalist, who sometimes gets into trouble for trying to bring a bit of truth and decency into the matter.

Would say even, that if something is not done about offering a few apologies to Islam for Western imperialist penetration into the Middle East since the end of WW2 a time when our troops talked much about ending colonialism.

PAL.. sorry. I'm not aware of what I need to do regarding your letter to the Sallys.. I'm a bit loathe to give out email addy's here as it can turn into death threats from 'youknowwho'.....

If you post it to a new discussion in the general area I can have a peek.

I have had similar experiences re Churches responding to important issues. You are not alone.

George... your counsel is wise and helpful. I am indeed guilty of some of the things you suggest.. "patronizing"..yep..I'm working on it :)

A point though for you and PAL... I use the Biblical idea for 'other gospels as used by Paul in Galatians 1 "If anyone preach to you a differnent gospel, let him be eternally condemned" He actually says this twice for extra impact. Paul took the truth of the Gospel seriously, and spoke accordingly.

The reason I am adamant that it is the 'religion' of Islam rather than 'all Muslims' that is the problem, is that (please note this) it is faith which cannot exist apart from either a State or.. the aspiration to become a State.(within other states if need be).

The growth of Islam, from the Hijrah (migration) of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina was the beginning of the Islamic Caliphate and State.
All decisions by Mohammad from that time, were based on the idea of an Islamic state. (including his genocide of the Jews of Banu Qurayza and his invasions of the Khayber Jews and the exile of others)

I use the word 'abhorrent' because it is a fact. (Ask the Almighty next time :) Hinduism and Buddhism.. are also 'abhorrent' in Gods eyes, but given that there is no New Testament concept of 'earthly Christian STATE... the practioners of such faiths are safe from earthly punishment or vengeful Christians. "Love your enemies" but don't hide the truth about their faiths.

I don't worry about any non Christian faith EXCEPT those which aspire to 'Statehood' (i.e. Islam)

David
Ok You must have forgot I guess. Not a good sign Davo me mate buddy etc.
I will post another thread.
I am calling it Open letter to the Salvos-
We have been waiting on you. Taryn and Antje and myself we quite excited and very grateful to you.
Anyway to refresh your memory -I wrote to you about the Salvation Army`s Armys Drought appeal.

As we have a lot of contact with farmers we understand what they want.
Not through a crystal ball either just simply by listening and talking with them.

They need hay and water for stock. If they get that they can pay their own phone bills and grocery bills and also keep their pride.


I guess people just naturally assume that a drought appeal- or farm hand appeal is going to help farmers get feed and water to stock.

We have had contact with the Salvos and at first they said nobody had ever requested feed for stock.

When we proved to them that was not correct by producing a letter THEY had written in reply to just such a farmer they then said Peter Costello wont let them.

Now their adds on TV say. ' Anybody Can Feed Sheep"??
Yeh thats right . Anybody can feed animals 'IF' they have hay and grain water.

Their head person told me she had never even THOUGHT about it Before?
I ask you David what type of person could visit farms and watch Gods Creatures dying SLOWLY of starvation and thirst on not think about it?
All this while they say the are counciling people not to kill them selves
Anyway we want to write an open letter on OLO asking

Even The Muslims in Australia David have plenty to say about God including the most innconent in the farm appeal.

We need to give farmers a choice of what they want and they need to listen because its the publics money!

'So, it is their movement (not to mention their almost mind-bending rudeness) I am speaking against. I say that the empiricist creed that I outlined earlier, that prompted our discussion, can be true only on non-empiricist grounds. I don’t consider that statement I offered as circular, as you described it. It’s a lot tighter than yours (the OED’s), but no tighter than the language of Dawkins and posters like TR. (I don’t know where you stand, but perhaps you will say?)'

The whole issue is a lot more simple than you think. For reasons best known to themselves Muslims and other religious people have belief as there default position. However, there is no practical reason for this to be the case.

Indeed, disbelief should be the default position on everything! In other words, belief in something should only occur when there is sufficient reason to do so.

Which brings me full circle. The dodgy history of the Bible or the Koran/Hadith is NOT sufficient reason to believe in pregnant virgins, angels, or resurrected corpses.

“I use the word 'abhorrent' because it is a fact.”
No, David, it is not a fact, it is an adjective which does not even describe a fact but an opinion. “What happened on 9/11 is abhorrent” and “The Muslim faith is abhorrent” are two opinions, although many more people will share the first one with you than the second one. As I said before, if somebody stabs you, you should condemn that deed not the knife and religion that he used as his physical and mental tools respectively. I can agree with you in condemning the way SOME contemporary Muslims put their faith into practice, but we must not forget that Christians have also misread their sacred books, and some still do. And if you believe (as I do) that the New Testament gives a better account of God “the Merciful, the Compassionate" than the Koran, then you must also find Christian distortions of His will more regretful than the Muslim ones, irrespective of their different manifestations, frequencies and gravity.

goodthief,
People who get excited about what we DO, might be right or wrong, and that is a problem we have to decide about; people who get excited about our FAITH as such have a problem of their own, and we could only try to understand them. If I may enter your dispute with Pericles et al., axioms as they are understood today (e.g. in mathematics) are not something “self-evident” only something you assume at the beginning of a discourse, theory etc. Euclid had his five axioms of geometry and he saw them as self-evident that did not need verification. Later people thought his fifth axiom was not at all an axiom, and tried to derive it from the other four, until Lobachevsky (and others) came with the construction of a geometry where the fifth axiom did not hold. This gave rise to non-euclidean geometry that Einstein found so useful, and the five axioms of Euclid became the five axioms of EUCLIDEAN geometry only. So calling something held as self-evident an axiom could be misleading. (ctd)

(ctd)The English language has a very useful term “common sense” absent in some other languages, and people often call something logical or self-evident that should have been called common sense. However, the term "common sense" is also misleading: e.g. common sense would have said that something cannot be a particle and a wave at the same time, but quantum physics defies this; much about time and space in relativity theory seems to defy common sense, etc. People in the Middle Ages not only thought that the existence of God was common sense you did not have to verify, but also that the Earth could not be round, because people would fall off it, etc.

So today we must be careful with the term “common sense” as well: neither belief in a God who created (actually still creates through evolution), sustains and explains the material world (the monotheist’s creed in a nutshell) nor belief in a self-explanatory and self-sustaining material world that did not have to be created (the empiricist’s creed as I understand it) can claim to be self-evident, not even common sense. They are two belief systems that are, in my opinion, on equal footings.

Where an e.g Christian is different from an atheist (or a sitting-on-the-fence agnostic) is his/her FAITH, which is the CREED described above, that you can try to explain to an outsider, plus SOMETHING ELSE that turns a belief system into a faith, and that is very, very hard to explain to an outsider.

By the way, continental languages that I know cannot distinguish between “faith” and “belief”` which causes all sorts of problem when translating religious material between these languages and English. On the other hand, the English word “experience” can mean two different things (e.g. in German “Erfahrung” and “Erlebnis”). This I could explain only in 24 hours.