Unless we want a life in which we only hear things we agree with, we’re all going to have to put up with being proselytised by someone or other, aren’t we? TV ads, spam, billboards, bus and tram stop shelters, opinion columns in newspapers, religious writers, atheist writers. Someone’s always trying to sell us something.

The problem, I think, is the way selling happens. It can be hard or soft sell. It can be respectful of the listener’s freedom to buy, or not. It can use reasoning or just push emotional buttons (like greed, conceit, fear, guilt).

Christians generally regard themselves as being under instructions to spread the word – so, they’re really not going to stop. And, when you consider that they (we, I mean) really believe other people will benefit from this, the activity will always be high-energy. But, we are also under instructions to love our neighbour. There are plenty of hard-sell, button-pushing Christians who should roll these ideas together, and realise they are evangelising their neighbour, so that their method has to be loving (respectful etc).

And I’m still waiting to read an atheist book by an author with the slightest notion of manners. They really need to calm down a little.

Anyway, I don’t see proselytism itself as the problem. We all just need to be more respectful of each other.

Christians and Muslims are rivals. Jews don’t proselytise (closed shop) and I’ve never noticed much sales talk from other religions. Atheists never used to proselytise, but now they do and so far they seem to have decided on the hardest sell imaginable, where you abuse the people you’re trying to convince: hard to see it working, but time will tell.

I think the competition between Muslims and Christians is a problem, as each is recommending a different approach to God. Still, they can agree on ground rules. As just mentioned, the Christian position provides an ethic, but I don’t know enough about Islam to know if a comparable ethic is available.

Pax,

Special for Danielle.

Hi mate :) *waves*

You went to considerable effort there to outline your case.
Sorry for the late response.

Just want to address a couple of points.

ONE.
'Official proclamation' of a "dogma" does not suggest it was not previously believed or taught. Regarding the virgin birth, I'm fairly sure that was a fundamental of the very early Church.

As to the Papal pronouncement that she was 'Immaculate' I find no support whatsoever for that in Scripture, and in that particular instance of what occurred increasingly in the Roman Catholic tradition "human" views and romantic ideas became 'dogma' apart from direct support in the Bible.

TWO.

The 2 communities 'Jerusalem' and 'Gentile/Pauline'

Yes..I've seen quite a bit written about this, but I think it fails the test of scriptural foundation. Of course there were the incidents of the Circumcision party, but that was resolved at the first council of Jerusalem referred to in Acts 15.

I think the conflict was more between the 'radical Jewish circumcizers' and the 'Apostolic founders' in Jerusalem itself.

I find it a rather uncomfortable 'square peg in a round hole' kinda fit to say there were 2 hostile and competitive communities between the Pauline and Jerusalem traditions. The hostility was between the Circumcizers and the rest.

The common ground most needed between Muslims and Christians will be found when Muslims depart from 'Hating what Allah hates' (Christians/Jews/infidels) and embracing the Christian idea

"God so LOVED the world,(Arabs, Jews, Gentiles) that He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life"

blessings.

The latest from Pat Condell on "Appeasing the Muslims"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9dXGJ2rYdA

In terms of historicity, Danielle would be closer to the truth. There is little doubt, Jesus came from the ancient religious tradition of his own people, he would have been circumcised and later, a devout follower of the Jewish Torah and teaching. For example, the Lord's prayer was a combination or selection of formulas of prayer in circulation among the Hasidæan circles -there is nothing in it expressive of the Christian belief that the Messiah had arrived in the person of Jesus.To understand him we have to read more than the Gospels. We have to become aware of both Jewish life in the first century and what is now called the Old Testament. (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6951#107297)

Rabbi that he was, Jesus had no interest in introducing a new law, in fact he insisted that "not even one jot or tittle” of the old one was to be abrogated. He spun out parables and told stories to demonstrate the present reality of something close to the heart or the Jewish tradition called the “reign of God": which mosrt Jews at the time believed would begin only with the coming of the Messiah.

Interestingly, in 1901German scholar and rabbi Leo Baeck wrote that there had been a moment 1900 years before when the time was ripe for a ‘God-sent personality”. The time had come for the pagans to learn and absorb Israel’s values. Baeck believed that the Jewish people did respond to this moment, and that the response was in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. The Gentiles early entry into this religion adopted this mantle but also fused this with their pagan beliefs (e.g. the 'virgin birth' adoption).

There is a borderline between the conscious and unconscious, where imagination and the mundane mingle, where myth and history intersect. Muslims and Christians certainly share similar myths - but what divides is more the hard-line belief that God's reign or covenant with an ancient people must reveal itself to the world through their own particular form or image.

Danielle/Boaz,

Still-off thread but for the record, there were in fact three main early churches, those of Paul, those of the Gnostics, and the Jewish-Christians sometimes called Ebionites.

The doctrines of Christianity come mostly from the teaching of Paul, who rejected his Judaism and converted to his vision of Christ, thereby writing or influencing most the books chosen for the New Testament.

According to scholars all the gospels were written AFTER Paul's writings, there are no originals.

Paul's visions were of the Jesus whom he had never met in the flesh.

The church fathers preferred the Jesus of Paul and not the Jesus of James because it offered an "easier route" to salvation.

James and the other apostles were in fact bitter enemies of Paul.

The first followers of Jesus, under James and Peter, founded the Jerusalem Church after Jesus' death. (Nazarenes).

Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity as a new religion which developed away from both normal Judaism and the Nazarene variety of Judaism.

In this new religion, central myth was that of an atoning death of a Divine being. Paul alone was the creator of this amalgam - any many of the details and stories were "borrowed" from all other religions of the time and never existed in earlier writings.

(Cont)

(Cont)

A source of information about Paul is a group called the Ebionites, whose writings were suppressed by the Orthodox Church.

The Ebionites testified that Paul converted to Judaism in Tarsus, came to Jerusalem when an adult, and attached himself to the High Priest as a henchman. Disappointed in his hopes of advancement, he broke with the High Priest and sought fame by founding a new religion.

The Ebionites were stigmatized (later purged and victimised) by the Orthodox Church as heretics who failed to understand that Jesus was a Divine person and asserted instead that he was a human being who came to inaugurate a new earthly age, as prophesied by the Jewish prophets of the Bible.

Moreover, the Ebionites refused to accept the Orthodox Church doctrine derived from Paul, that Jesus abolished or abrogated the Jewish law. Instead, the Ebionites observed the law and regarded themselves as Jews.

The Ebionites were the authentic successors of the immediate disciples and followers of Jesus, whose views and doctrines they faithfully transmitted, believing correctly that they were derived from Jesus himself. They both spoke and wrote in the same language as Jesus himself - not the Greek translations that were often used by the modern Church.

They were the same group that had earlier been called the Nazarenes, led by James and Peter and who had actually known Jesus during his lifetime. They were likely to be in a far better position to know his aims than Paul, who met Jesus only in dreams and visions.

Perhaps, like the VHS/Beta and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray battles for market dominance, one side won (with the assistance of Constantine) and the other was delegated to obscurity (although the Ebionites still exist today).