Hmmm... Let's see, man tells his son to blow himself up. Is that protecting him?
Well that depends upon your point of view. I'm sure the man who sends a suicide bomber believes (rightly or wrongly) that doing so will guarantee the child's place in heaven, and is therefore doing the best thing he can. To us that is horrifying but to them that might be understandable. They also probably think that they might fall victim to an Israeli shell, missile or bullet any time, so they might as well take as many Israeli lives as they can first.
Now we don't believe that killing will get us to heaven, so that kind of action to us is crazy, but its not that dissimilar to the kamikaze bombers of WWII. Something else we thought was nuts, but hey, guess what? Not everyone thinks the same way we do, and till you understand that you're going to keep getting into trouble around the world.
Talking about WWII, doesn't the way that Israel raids the Palestinian refugee camps remind you of the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto? OK maybe its not that bad yet, but they get away with murder every day with American support. Your hand are as bloody as theirs because without US vetoing almost every UN resolution against Israel the international community could bring enough pressure to bear that things would have to change. IMHO Israel's actions against Palestinian refugees are only a relatively small step from Saddam crushing the marsh Arabs or gassing the Kurds, and those are apparently enough to justify an invasion now we can't find the WMD's. What would we have said if Russia was giving 14 million dollars a day to Saddam?
Now my bias may be transparent, but so is yours. You seem to think that Israelis attacking people in a refugee camp is OK, and trained snipers shooting children collecting washing is OK, and shooting British officials in the back is OK, and torture is OK, and beating UN workers is OK, and not only do you think these things are OK but your country provides 14 million dollars a day to one side of this conflict, and not the other.
By the way, OT I know but I just spotted this. 100,000 more civilian deaths in Iraq since the end of the war, than would be expected due to health issues. Most common cause of death? US air strike. The number could rise to 200,000 if you included Falluja, which they didn't. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 96596
I guess you do think it's OK to kill civilians, so I can hardly accuse you of hypocrisy over supporting Israel. My apologies.
Hold on one moment there cowboy. We're talking about palestinians, not egyptians, syrians or jordanians. I'm not talking about militart might, just the fact that they are a strong nation while their enemy is left throwing stones at tanks. Not very fair I'd say, so the palestinians are left with no option but to attack Israel in the only way available to them. Every nation has the right to self defence, even a nation as thoroughly occupied as palestine.
Re:what about freedom to bear arms?
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well perhaps, but I'm not sure where you get a gun from to do that, and the police are not slow to deploy swat teams if anyone is seen with a weapon. They'll kill you if they have to.
thats not being right wing, thats putting your head in the sand. New oil discovery passed production in the 70's so ever since then we've being using more than we've found. Experts now predict that in the short term demand will rise at 2-5% a year, but right now there is less that 1% slack in the system. The current oil price rise is just the beginning.
by bad I mean selfish, greedy and deciteful. I think that pretty much sums up everyone fundamentally. OK sure, we all try to be better, but if we slip, we slip towards being bad. The opposite is God who is fundamentally good and therefore would have to try really hard to be bad.
One of the big differences between Christianity and Judaism is that we believe that Jesus effectively fulfilled all the Law so that we didn't need to follow it in order to go to heaven. When we follow it it is out of love for God, not requirement. Many things in the Old testament were signs and pointers to Gods overall plan. Now that the last piece of the plan has been revealed to us, we don't need the pointers any more. One of the interesting things about the life of Jesus is how it fulfills all the ancient prophecies of the Jewish old testament but in a way which was totally unexpected by the teachers of the law, and not understood by Jewish scholars even today.
We believe in an absolute moral code, but we are all human and fail to follow it utterly, but that is the point of Christianity, we don't need to worry about it because Jesus took the punishment for us. There's a lot of subtlety about that though so that we can't sin with impunity and just so what we want, because its a sign we've not really taken it on board.
What is interesting about homosexuality in the bible is that is almost always put in the context of orgies, infidelity, and other sexual immorality. I'm not really sure that the kind of monogamous stable homosexual realtionship that is common today was considered at the time. On the other hand God created man and woman so that we can become one, each covering the failings of the other. Any other sexual activity can be used as a wedge between us and God, because it panders to our selfish desires. I'm somewhat undecided on the issue, but in the end I believe that no sin is a death sentence because we can be forgiven.
As for the trinity, even in Genesis God often talks about himeself as an "us" or "we", and this was long before God the Son and the Holy Spirit were made known to the prophets. Given that no more than one thing can be utterly perfect, this makes sense. Jesus isn't really a seperate person from God, but a different manifestation of his character. I'm slightly woolly on that issue because I've only been a Christian for a few months and don't quite understand the reasoning. He also proved, by the way that taxes may be certain, but death is not, if you believe.
I would certainly agree that civil law should not be confused with religious law in any way. Not least because there really is no religious law any more. It is up to each of us to decide how we live because sin is only a matter for you and God, not society and we shouldn't have it forced upon people. I think God wants us to choose to follow him, not be forced into it. Otherwise he would have left undeniable evidence for us so we had no choice, but that was his greatest gift to us in many ways: the freedom to reject Him, and he will respect that choice.
Maybe if Israel was not a civilised nation with a standing army and if it had no other means of defending itself. Perhaps if it was the palestinians who were refusing to negotiate with Israel rather than the other way around.
Funny that. Everyone believes that their source is centrist and they are average. Globally I suspect that ALL mainstream US media is slightly right of centre at best. Globally, democratic socialism as practiced by most European nations is propably most central but even Kerry's relative lack of support for a government funded health and education system would put him on the right wing. I know Tony Blair, whilst he is leaded of a formerly left wing party is now widely considered to be more right wing than left wing.
I'm sure if the palestinians had tanks and helicopters they would prefer to use them. They are a horribly oppressed minority and they fight back in the only way they can to protect their homes and families. Which of us could say with our hands on our hearts that we wouldn't do the same. I'm not saying either side is right, but Israel has the military might and is by far the stronger of the two sides. It is a nation state and is expected to behave like one and not illegally annex land captured during war. It alone has refused to talk to palestinians and refuses to recognise their elected representatives. What we can take from this is that Israel doesn't even want to talk peace whereas the powers of Palestine do. OK maybe Hamas doesn't want to, but while there is someone to talk to they should talk, and it is Israel which is failing to do so. The very police force that Israel expects to control Hamas is very often the target of Israeli retaliatory strikes. How can it be expected to do its job in those circumstance. Israel has a policy of atacking the families of suicide bombers, which is just so blatantly immoral and illegal.
Re:Free Speech in Denmark??
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Perhaps, but only insomuch that we restrict hate speach, and we wanted that and in general think its a good thing. You can have too much freedom you know. Imagine a golfish in a bowl. It is not free, and it only has a small amount of room, but if you take it out of it's bowl and put it on the table you can declare, "See fishy, you are free! You have the whole world to explore!"
A journalist can only report what they see. No single event report is either biased or balanced, it is only when the overall picure is put, or the output of an entire agency is evaluated that an accusation of bias can occur.
Balanced does not mean 50% of this view and 50% of this view, if the two views are not equally meritious. This is where editorial power has to come, do weigh the merits of two sides of an argument and find the balance. I hear stories of Israeli's bombing palestinians and of palestinians bombing Israelis. IMHO the balance is weighted in favour of the palestinians because Israel uses tanks, F-16 and apache helicopters against stone throwing children and believe that is justifiable policing.
Which is why I love the BBC. The BBC controls the BBC (with the exception of D notices which can be challenged in court) and it gets it's money from the people. Many governments have tried to curtail it's freedom, but none have been too successful. It's one main responsibility is to report the truth in a fair and balanced manner, and has a long tradition of not bowing to pressure, and maintaining press freedom. There is always some compromise, but while the BBC is only answerable to parliment every few years, a commercial news agency is answerable to its sponsors several times an hour. I know which I prefer.
It is obvious that most of the mainstream press has a left wing slant to it.
But on a global scale, even your left wing is right wing, and your right wing is only slightly left of Mussolini.
Just because the Democrats pass for lefties in America, it doesn't mean they would anywhere else.
Re:what about freedom to bear arms?
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Are you? Most European countries have incorporated the European declaration on human rights into law, which mean I cannot be executed by my country. Can you say that?
I hate to you to task on this but we Brits have quite a good grasp of terrorism. You might have heard of a little group called the IRA? We learnt a lot about terrorism and how to balance security and liberty. At one point in the 70's I think, we had internment, which was rather similar to what is now going on in Guantanamo bay, but without the torture. We gave up on that pretty quickly though because it was clear that a) it didn't work and b) it was counter productive.
When I was growing up terrorism was an almost weekly reality in central London, and parts of Northern Ireland were as much no go areas for soldiers or English people as parts of Iraq are for Americans.
Thankfully the Irish problem is nearly over, but not because we fought and leveled large parts of Northern Ireland, (although we did some pretty nasty, normally illegal out of a state of war, type things), but because we resolutely refused to let terrorism work. We would get angry, but in the true Blitz spirit we toughed it out out tried to carry on as normal. In the end it was that which made the terrorists realise the futility of their war and that the only route to what they wanted was to bury the bullet and use the ballot box instead. 25 years, thousand dead, lives ruined.
I don't want to downplay 9/11 in terms of its impact on people and property, but its not the kind of thing to bring down a strong nation, and despite all of Osama bin-ladens rhetoric about ever more shocking actions, nothing has yet emerged after 3 years.
I agree with you about clergy actually. It a well known phenomena, and one Jesus himself knew well because he constantly accused the clergy of his time, the pharisees, of hypocrisy. But I would like to put you right on what Christianity is really about. What it is certainly NOT about is loving your neighbor, forgiving, and basically being good to people. Those are consequences of loving God. Christianity is about knowing that we are all fundamentally bad people, selfish, greedy, petty and small minded, but that God loves us so much that he sent Jesus to be the scapegoat for all that, so we can be at one with God. The consequence of that is that we love God and Jesus, therefore we do good things because the more we love God, the more like Him we become. It's really not about following rules because no amount of following rules can make us into good people. It just means you're someone who is afraid of the consequence of not following the rules. That actually is the fundamental difference between Christianity and every other religion, especially Islam. They believe that the only way to heaven is to work really hard, which is why you end up with terrorist flying into building shouting "God is Great". They believe that their sacrifice will guarantee them a place in heaven. I'm certain they are mistaken. You know, I've just realised, forgiveness is much easier if you know that God will make sure that a price is paid.
Anyway, despite our obvious religious differences our positions do seem close. Perhaps one day people will rise to power in our countries that have similar views, and then the world will be a safer place.
It seems a strange position to say you that don't believe in God because of the way some of the people who do claim to believe in him behave. There are many (more?) christians (and other religious people too for that matter) who are constantly selfless in doing good works for the communities they live in and the world in general. Wouldn't the be a better example of what religion triggers rather than a few nutters who get it all wrong.
There is room for all kinds of views in religion. For myself I would consider my self an evangelical Christian who support darwin, string theory for the origin of the Universe, and the fact that certain things are sinful, and not in our best interests. Having said that I would also say that in a secular nation laws should not reflect a religious view of sin. People should be free to do what they want so long as it doesn't infinge on other people too much, but at the same time it is the right of religious people to try and persuade people to choose God over hedonism. In the end what you do in life is a matter for your own concience, and is between you and your maker.
As for abortion, I mostly consider abortion murder, and the later the worse it gets, HOWEVER, it is still an issue between the woman and her maker and not really my business.
You're right, Satanism wouldn't exist without belief in Satan, who can't exist unless God exists too. The philosophy is pretty similar to that of the Marquis de Sade who was an atheist who decided that because there was no God then there is no absolute moral code and you are free to indulge any desire, limited only by the force you can exert.
I've just realised I forgot to outline what it is about America they hate, and it's not the people or even the military power. It's not exactly your freedom, just how you choose to express it. What they can't stand is how obsessed western society is with sex, alcohol, violence and wealth. They see our decadence and know that through holywood and American TV those values are being spread to their homes. I can sympathise with that view. Islam, like Christianity, teaches against sexual immorality, but that is all they see America to embody as a consequence of its ideological promotion of individualism, which is incidently the core belief of Satanism. That is why they call you the Great Satan.
Personally I can't argue with any of their points, which can be applied almost as well against Britain, where I live, but I certainly don't agree that their methods are either justified or will work.
The reality of terrorism is low tech weapons (box cutters?), not WMDs. The risks involved in handling and creating WMDs are just too great, and terrorists really don't want to be detected so they tend to keep their heads down.
In order to understand the threat of terrorists you have to examine what they are trying to achieve and how they tend to go about it. What they mostly want to do is terrorise, not kill for the sake of killing. OK sure there is killing involved, but it is a means to an end, not the end itself. The end goal of terrorism is not the defeat of America as a nation, but to strengthen islamic nations against the percieved moral vacuume that western individualism promotes. The irony is that is exactly the same goal as the Straussians have, and a very similar (if more pro-active) method for achieving it.
9/11 was by far the largest single terrorist attack in history, but lets get real here, ten times as many people die on American roads every year. In the grand scheme of things 9/11 was a little more than a bee sting, and the terrorists have about as much chance of inflicting serious damage upon a nation as a bee has of kiling you. But the parallel doesn't end there, because people do die of bee stings, but it's not the bee's sting which does the work but the body's over-reaction causing anaphylactic shock. That is exactly the kind of panic driven over-reaction that the terrorists are trying to provoke, and the politicians are far too happy to encourage. I don't exclude Kerry from this by the way; I'm sure he is playing the security card as much as Bush.
Let us consider what might have happened since 9/11 if Bush had been a real Christian leader and turned the other cheek. Support and respect for the US in the middle east and the rest of the world would be sky high. How many can rise above such an outrage and steer a true course in the face of such provocation? Only the truly great can behave that way. Our freedom and our rights would still be intact, and most importantly perhaps, we would not have fallen into the trap set for us by the terrorists, and they would have lost almost all their support. In many ways doing nothing would have been the hardest thing to do, but the hard path is often the right path.
There is no proof of Iraqi involvement. Doesn't mean there's no involvement, just no proof.
I see. So because there is no proof that aliens live among, that must mean that they do!!!
This tool of reasoning that the less evidence for something there is, the more it is really true has tremendous potential!
It also works in reverse too! There is great evidence for evolution, but because there is so much and it is so good, it MUST be evidence that it was planted by God!
In the end, I support President Bush not because he's always right - of course he's not - but because he is steadfast and resolute when confronting our enemies.
I can think of another George in American history who was steadfast and resolute when confronting his enemies. General George Armstrong Custer.
I agree with your post, and liked the wikipedia link although I'd like to mention a TV programme i saw last week called "The Power of Nightmares", which is shown on BBC2 on british tv, but may not make it make to the US, which was about the politics of fear beeing used to manipulate people. It was mostly concerned with the ideas of Leo Strauss as being behind neo-conservative thinking. Those ideas are extremely machiavellian and suggest that the way to prevent the moral collapse of 50's america into increasing nihlism was to focus on an external threat, and to give the American people a higher mission. The higher mission he suggested was to spread democracy and values of freedom and liberty to the evil places in the world (everywhere else), while the political elite didn't need to believe the FUD. In the 1970's Donald Rumsfeld (a student of Strauss) started to accuse the USSR of a massive arms build up, despite no evidence to support this theory, on the basis that they were evil, and therefore that is what they MUST be doing. They then set up a group called Team B to review existing CIA intelligence, with the addition of a belief that the USSR was incapable of not building up its weapons for an attack on the west. This it did, and in the absence of evidence of the new weapons they took the belief that the USSR must be doing something and decided that the new weapons must be so advanced that they simply could not be detected. In 1976 a new group called The Committee on the Present Danger published the results of that report in a alarming video to reignite the cold war at a time when relations were slowly improving. They claimed that they were simply highlighting the dangers of totalitarianism, but in reality they were spreading FUD in order to control the liberal drift of America.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, what the programme will suggest is that the threat of Al Qaeda is vastly overblown, and that it doesn't really exist as a global terrorist network in quite the way as it is often portrayed. Connections between various terrorist cells are ad-hoc most of the time and Osama bin Laden isn't really the mastermind behind attacks so much as a figurehead or spiritual leader. It all suits the power hungry elite nicely though. They can instill fear into the plebs and get support for their totalitarian crack down on civil liberties all in the name of fighting the very thing which gives them the power in the first place.
Just think, who benefits from the fear of terrorism? If Bush gets re-elected on an anti-terror platform, then he does, and so does Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, all three of whom are former students of Leo Strauss.
cui bono. To whom the good?
1. the legal principle that the responsibility for a certain act is likely to lie with one who had something to gain as a result of that act.
So you are saying that you knew better than every Congressman on the intellgence committee, the CIA, British Intelligence, and the UN Weapons Inspectors?
Given that in the end I was proven right, and they were proven wrong, it does look that way doesn't it.
To be fair I give most of the credit to the BBC because in the run up to the war they had some expert on who said that the last time anyone actually saw WMD's in Iraq was over 10 years ago and these things have a shelf life of much less than that. In effect he was saying that if they had chemical and biological weapons that had somehow escaped both the weapons inspectors and U2 spy planes (which I considered actually pretty unlikely) they would be either unusable or just too dangerous to store, and therefore they would have had to get rid of them.
I think that at the time my feeling was that I believed that the US and British government were making unreasonable and impossible demands of Iraq to try and prove that they had no WMDs. This is not something that you can prove to someone who already is convinced of your guilt and dishonesty. I, on the other hand, was fairly convinced that the documents the Iraqi's had handed over to the UN probably were the vast majority, if not all of the information available to the Iraqi government. After all, this was a poor country under heavy sanctions and administration probably was not their strong suit. Call me gullible and over trusting if you like, but that's just my nature, and I think my trust has been justified after the fact.
Then there is the issue of the imminence of the threat posed by Saddam. This was a country whose army had been decimated in the Gulf War I and then had been under sanctions, air bombardment, and close monitoring since 1991. We knew of their weapon programmes to build missiles with ranges longer than 150km and we forced them to shut down. Saddam was of no real threat to regional or global stability and sanctions and the policy of containment were, for the most part, working as advertised.
Lastly we come to terrorism. Saddam had no links to Osama-Bin-Laden, in fact Osama-Bin-Laden hated Saddam almost as much as he hates America because Saddam's Iraq was secular and Saddam was not a good Muslim. OK there were contacts but it would seem that nothing actually came of them. Ansar-Al-Islam, which is a terrorist group inside Iraq both before the war and today and is linked to Al-Qaeda was violently against both the PUK faction of Iraqi Kurds and Saddam, and was probably supported by Iranian groups, so the only known Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq was Anti-Saddam, not working with him.
In the end the Iraq war has resulted in tens of thousands of dead, mostly civilians, a dangerously unstable country and more militant anti American and anti British Muslims. It has made the world much more dangerous to us in our own countries and has resulted in the loss of our own civil liberties and consequently damaged our democracies. Our soldiers are being bogged down in a new Vietnam. This was always going to happen and many people shouted as loudly as they could before the war that it was going to be an expensive mistake, but were ignored. OK Saddam was an evil man and his regime was cruel and oppressive, but there are many like him the world over and we don't spend billions to overthrow each one. It was pretty obvious to me that the unseemly rush to war was driven by domestic political expediency rather than any desire to liberate the people of Iraq. Governments just don't spend that kind of money unless they expect to get something in return, whether it be power, control or money etc.
If you read the report from the Iraq survey group you will see that they found no evidence of any ongoing research or weapons program, nor any actual evidence that Saddam had a realistic plan to resume research once sanctions had been lifted. The only "evidence" they brought regarding his intention to resume building WMD was heresay and conjecture about what Saddam would like to happen. This is in the realm of thought crime and not substantive evidence of anything at all. How would like to found guilty of rape just for looking at a woman in a bar?
But didn't you know that all etch-a-sketch's since 1986 have had built in pattern recognition and reporting capabilities so the government can monitor for early onset liberalism and issue corrective education via the drawing panel?
I'm confused by this flip flop mantra that republicans keep chanting. Surely changing your position on an issue in the face of new evidence is a "Good Thing". It implies an open mind and critical thinking, whereas sticking doggedly to a position that has since been shown to be wrong is just stupid.
For example, on the Iraq war vote, Kerry voted for the war on the basis of the evidence made available by Bush. We now know that the evidence for war was wrong, incomplete and selectively chosen by a broken system. If you believed the evidence that was presented at the time then voting for war was the only option (as it happens I didn't believe the evidence, but that is a freedom a popularly elected official doesn't really have if he wants to be re-elected). In the light of new evidence it appears that the case for war was not based in fact, but speculation (if you're feeling generous towards Bush), or greed (if you're being less generous). Faced with the new information I would be deeply concerned if someone did not change their point of view. It is a deeply valid thing to do.
Making a decision on the best available information is a good thing. Making a decision on ideological grounds and the selecting evidence to support your position is not a good thing.
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Now we don't believe that killing will get us to heaven, so that kind of action to us is crazy, but its not that dissimilar to the kamikaze bombers of WWII. Something else we thought was nuts, but hey, guess what? Not everyone thinks the same way we do, and till you understand that you're going to keep getting into trouble around the world.
Talking about WWII, doesn't the way that Israel raids the Palestinian refugee camps remind you of the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto? OK maybe its not that bad yet, but they get away with murder every day with American support. Your hand are as bloody as theirs because without US vetoing almost every UN resolution against Israel the international community could bring enough pressure to bear that things would have to change. IMHO Israel's actions against Palestinian refugees are only a relatively small step from Saddam crushing the marsh Arabs or gassing the Kurds, and those are apparently enough to justify an invasion now we can't find the WMD's. What would we have said if Russia was giving 14 million dollars a day to Saddam?
You ask why Tibetans don't blow themselves up, well two reasons. One they are largely pacifists and second the Dalai Lama is saying that Tibet might be better of inside China http://people.news.designerz.com/dalai-lama-says-
Now my bias may be transparent, but so is yours. You seem to think that Israelis attacking people in a refugee camp is OK, and trained snipers shooting children collecting washing is OK, and shooting British officials in the back is OK, and torture is OK, and beating UN workers is OK, and not only do you think these things are OK but your country provides 14 million dollars a day to one side of this conflict, and not the other.
By the way, OT I know but I just spotted this. 100,000 more civilian deaths in Iraq since the end of the war, than would be expected due to health issues. Most common cause of death? US air strike. The number could rise to 200,000 if you included Falluja, which they didn't. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
I guess you do think it's OK to kill civilians, so I can hardly accuse you of hypocrisy over supporting Israel. My apologies.
Hold on one moment there cowboy. We're talking about palestinians, not egyptians, syrians or jordanians. I'm not talking about militart might, just the fact that they are a strong nation while their enemy is left throwing stones at tanks. Not very fair I'd say, so the palestinians are left with no option but to attack Israel in the only way available to them. Every nation has the right to self defence, even a nation as thoroughly occupied as palestine.
well perhaps, but I'm not sure where you get a gun from to do that, and the police are not slow to deploy swat teams if anyone is seen with a weapon. They'll kill you if they have to.
thats not being right wing, thats putting your head in the sand. New oil discovery passed production in the 70's so ever since then we've being using more than we've found. Experts now predict that in the short term demand will rise at 2-5% a year, but right now there is less that 1% slack in the system. The current oil price rise is just the beginning.
by bad I mean selfish, greedy and deciteful. I think that pretty much sums up everyone fundamentally. OK sure, we all try to be better, but if we slip, we slip towards being bad. The opposite is God who is fundamentally good and therefore would have to try really hard to be bad.
One of the big differences between Christianity and Judaism is that we believe that Jesus effectively fulfilled all the Law so that we didn't need to follow it in order to go to heaven. When we follow it it is out of love for God, not requirement. Many things in the Old testament were signs and pointers to Gods overall plan. Now that the last piece of the plan has been revealed to us, we don't need the pointers any more. One of the interesting things about the life of Jesus is how it fulfills all the ancient prophecies of the Jewish old testament but in a way which was totally unexpected by the teachers of the law, and not understood by Jewish scholars even today.
We believe in an absolute moral code, but we are all human and fail to follow it utterly, but that is the point of Christianity, we don't need to worry about it because Jesus took the punishment for us. There's a lot of subtlety about that though so that we can't sin with impunity and just so what we want, because its a sign we've not really taken it on board.
What is interesting about homosexuality in the bible is that is almost always put in the context of orgies, infidelity, and other sexual immorality. I'm not really sure that the kind of monogamous stable homosexual realtionship that is common today was considered at the time. On the other hand God created man and woman so that we can become one, each covering the failings of the other. Any other sexual activity can be used as a wedge between us and God, because it panders to our selfish desires. I'm somewhat undecided on the issue, but in the end I believe that no sin is a death sentence because we can be forgiven.
As for the trinity, even in Genesis God often talks about himeself as an "us" or "we", and this was long before God the Son and the Holy Spirit were made known to the prophets. Given that no more than one thing can be utterly perfect, this makes sense. Jesus isn't really a seperate person from God, but a different manifestation of his character. I'm slightly woolly on that issue because I've only been a Christian for a few months and don't quite understand the reasoning. He also proved, by the way that taxes may be certain, but death is not, if you believe.
I would certainly agree that civil law should not be confused with religious law in any way. Not least because there really is no religious law any more. It is up to each of us to decide how we live because sin is only a matter for you and God, not society and we shouldn't have it forced upon people. I think God wants us to choose to follow him, not be forced into it. Otherwise he would have left undeniable evidence for us so we had no choice, but that was his greatest gift to us in many ways: the freedom to reject Him, and he will respect that choice.
Maybe if Israel was not a civilised nation with a standing army and if it had no other means of defending itself. Perhaps if it was the palestinians who were refusing to negotiate with Israel rather than the other way around.
Funny that. Everyone believes that their source is centrist and they are average. Globally I suspect that ALL mainstream US media is slightly right of centre at best. Globally, democratic socialism as practiced by most European nations is propably most central but even Kerry's relative lack of support for a government funded health and education system would put him on the right wing. I know Tony Blair, whilst he is leaded of a formerly left wing party is now widely considered to be more right wing than left wing.
I'm sure if the palestinians had tanks and helicopters they would prefer to use them. They are a horribly oppressed minority and they fight back in the only way they can to protect their homes and families. Which of us could say with our hands on our hearts that we wouldn't do the same. I'm not saying either side is right, but Israel has the military might and is by far the stronger of the two sides. It is a nation state and is expected to behave like one and not illegally annex land captured during war. It alone has refused to talk to palestinians and refuses to recognise their elected representatives. What we can take from this is that Israel doesn't even want to talk peace whereas the powers of Palestine do. OK maybe Hamas doesn't want to, but while there is someone to talk to they should talk, and it is Israel which is failing to do so. The very police force that Israel expects to control Hamas is very often the target of Israeli retaliatory strikes. How can it be expected to do its job in those circumstance. Israel has a policy of atacking the families of suicide bombers, which is just so blatantly immoral and illegal.
Perhaps, but only insomuch that we restrict hate speach, and we wanted that and in general think its a good thing. You can have too much freedom you know. Imagine a golfish in a bowl. It is not free, and it only has a small amount of room, but if you take it out of it's bowl and put it on the table you can declare, "See fishy, you are free! You have the whole world to explore!"
Freedom can be dangerous.
A journalist can only report what they see. No single event report is either biased or balanced, it is only when the overall picure is put, or the output of an entire agency is evaluated that an accusation of bias can occur.
Balanced does not mean 50% of this view and 50% of this view, if the two views are not equally meritious. This is where editorial power has to come, do weigh the merits of two sides of an argument and find the balance. I hear stories of Israeli's bombing palestinians and of palestinians bombing Israelis. IMHO the balance is weighted in favour of the palestinians because Israel uses tanks, F-16 and apache helicopters against stone throwing children and believe that is justifiable policing.
Which is why I love the BBC. The BBC controls the BBC (with the exception of D notices which can be challenged in court) and it gets it's money from the people. Many governments have tried to curtail it's freedom, but none have been too successful. It's one main responsibility is to report the truth in a fair and balanced manner, and has a long tradition of not bowing to pressure, and maintaining press freedom. There is always some compromise, but while the BBC is only answerable to parliment every few years, a commercial news agency is answerable to its sponsors several times an hour. I know which I prefer.
Just because the Democrats pass for lefties in America, it doesn't mean they would anywhere else.
Are you? Most European countries have incorporated the European declaration on human rights into law, which mean I cannot be executed by my country. Can you say that?
I hate to you to task on this but we Brits have quite a good grasp of terrorism. You might have heard of a little group called the IRA? We learnt a lot about terrorism and how to balance security and liberty. At one point in the 70's I think, we had internment, which was rather similar to what is now going on in Guantanamo bay, but without the torture. We gave up on that pretty quickly though because it was clear that a) it didn't work and b) it was counter productive.
When I was growing up terrorism was an almost weekly reality in central London, and parts of Northern Ireland were as much no go areas for soldiers or English people as parts of Iraq are for Americans.
Thankfully the Irish problem is nearly over, but not because we fought and leveled large parts of Northern Ireland, (although we did some pretty nasty, normally illegal out of a state of war, type things), but because we resolutely refused to let terrorism work. We would get angry, but in the true Blitz spirit we toughed it out out tried to carry on as normal. In the end it was that which made the terrorists realise the futility of their war and that the only route to what they wanted was to bury the bullet and use the ballot box instead. 25 years, thousand dead, lives ruined.
I don't want to downplay 9/11 in terms of its impact on people and property, but its not the kind of thing to bring down a strong nation, and despite all of Osama bin-ladens rhetoric about ever more shocking actions, nothing has yet emerged after 3 years.
I agree with you about clergy actually. It a well known phenomena, and one Jesus himself knew well because he constantly accused the clergy of his time, the pharisees, of hypocrisy. But I would like to put you right on what Christianity is really about. What it is certainly NOT about is loving your neighbor, forgiving, and basically being good to people. Those are consequences of loving God. Christianity is about knowing that we are all fundamentally bad people, selfish, greedy, petty and small minded, but that God loves us so much that he sent Jesus to be the scapegoat for all that, so we can be at one with God. The consequence of that is that we love God and Jesus, therefore we do good things because the more we love God, the more like Him we become. It's really not about following rules because no amount of following rules can make us into good people. It just means you're someone who is afraid of the consequence of not following the rules. That actually is the fundamental difference between Christianity and every other religion, especially Islam. They believe that the only way to heaven is to work really hard, which is why you end up with terrorist flying into building shouting "God is Great". They believe that their sacrifice will guarantee them a place in heaven. I'm certain they are mistaken. You know, I've just realised, forgiveness is much easier if you know that God will make sure that a price is paid.
Anyway, despite our obvious religious differences our positions do seem close. Perhaps one day people will rise to power in our countries that have similar views, and then the world will be a safer place.
It seems a strange position to say you that don't believe in God because of the way some of the people who do claim to believe in him behave. There are many (more?) christians (and other religious people too for that matter) who are constantly selfless in doing good works for the communities they live in and the world in general. Wouldn't the be a better example of what religion triggers rather than a few nutters who get it all wrong.
There is room for all kinds of views in religion. For myself I would consider my self an evangelical Christian who support darwin, string theory for the origin of the Universe, and the fact that certain things are sinful, and not in our best interests. Having said that I would also say that in a secular nation laws should not reflect a religious view of sin. People should be free to do what they want so long as it doesn't infinge on other people too much, but at the same time it is the right of religious people to try and persuade people to choose God over hedonism. In the end what you do in life is a matter for your own concience, and is between you and your maker.
As for abortion, I mostly consider abortion murder, and the later the worse it gets, HOWEVER, it is still an issue between the woman and her maker and not really my business.
You're right, Satanism wouldn't exist without belief in Satan, who can't exist unless God exists too. The philosophy is pretty similar to that of the Marquis de Sade who was an atheist who decided that because there was no God then there is no absolute moral code and you are free to indulge any desire, limited only by the force you can exert.
I've just realised I forgot to outline what it is about America they hate, and it's not the people or even the military power. It's not exactly your freedom, just how you choose to express it. What they can't stand is how obsessed western society is with sex, alcohol, violence and wealth. They see our decadence and know that through holywood and American TV those values are being spread to their homes. I can sympathise with that view. Islam, like Christianity, teaches against sexual immorality, but that is all they see America to embody as a consequence of its ideological promotion of individualism, which is incidently the core belief of Satanism. That is why they call you the Great Satan.
Personally I can't argue with any of their points, which can be applied almost as well against Britain, where I live, but I certainly don't agree that their methods are either justified or will work.
The reality of terrorism is low tech weapons (box cutters?), not WMDs. The risks involved in handling and creating WMDs are just too great, and terrorists really don't want to be detected so they tend to keep their heads down.
In order to understand the threat of terrorists you have to examine what they are trying to achieve and how they tend to go about it. What they mostly want to do is terrorise, not kill for the sake of killing. OK sure there is killing involved, but it is a means to an end, not the end itself. The end goal of terrorism is not the defeat of America as a nation, but to strengthen islamic nations against the percieved moral vacuume that western individualism promotes. The irony is that is exactly the same goal as the Straussians have, and a very similar (if more pro-active) method for achieving it.
9/11 was by far the largest single terrorist attack in history, but lets get real here, ten times as many people die on American roads every year. In the grand scheme of things 9/11 was a little more than a bee sting, and the terrorists have about as much chance of inflicting serious damage upon a nation as a bee has of kiling you. But the parallel doesn't end there, because people do die of bee stings, but it's not the bee's sting which does the work but the body's over-reaction causing anaphylactic shock. That is exactly the kind of panic driven over-reaction that the terrorists are trying to provoke, and the politicians are far too happy to encourage. I don't exclude Kerry from this by the way; I'm sure he is playing the security card as much as Bush.
Let us consider what might have happened since 9/11 if Bush had been a real Christian leader and turned the other cheek. Support and respect for the US in the middle east and the rest of the world would be sky high. How many can rise above such an outrage and steer a true course in the face of such provocation? Only the truly great can behave that way. Our freedom and our rights would still be intact, and most importantly perhaps, we would not have fallen into the trap set for us by the terrorists, and they would have lost almost all their support. In many ways doing nothing would have been the hardest thing to do, but the hard path is often the right path.
I see. So because there is no proof that aliens live among, that must mean that they do!!!
This tool of reasoning that the less evidence for something there is, the more it is really true has tremendous potential!
It also works in reverse too! There is great evidence for evolution, but because there is so much and it is so good, it MUST be evidence that it was planted by God!
I can think of another George in American history who was steadfast and resolute when confronting his enemies. General George Armstrong Custer.
I agree with your post, and liked the wikipedia link although I'd like to mention a TV programme i saw last week called "The Power of Nightmares", which is shown on BBC2 on british tv, but may not make it make to the US, which was about the politics of fear beeing used to manipulate people. It was mostly concerned with the ideas of Leo Strauss as being behind neo-conservative thinking. Those ideas are extremely machiavellian and suggest that the way to prevent the moral collapse of 50's america into increasing nihlism was to focus on an external threat, and to give the American people a higher mission. The higher mission he suggested was to spread democracy and values of freedom and liberty to the evil places in the world (everywhere else), while the political elite didn't need to believe the FUD. In the 1970's Donald Rumsfeld (a student of Strauss) started to accuse the USSR of a massive arms build up, despite no evidence to support this theory, on the basis that they were evil, and therefore that is what they MUST be doing. They then set up a group called Team B to review existing CIA intelligence, with the addition of a belief that the USSR was incapable of not building up its weapons for an attack on the west. This it did, and in the absence of evidence of the new weapons they took the belief that the USSR must be doing something and decided that the new weapons must be so advanced that they simply could not be detected. In 1976 a new group called The Committee on the Present Danger published the results of that report in a alarming video to reignite the cold war at a time when relations were slowly improving. They claimed that they were simply highlighting the dangers of totalitarianism, but in reality they were spreading FUD in order to control the liberal drift of America.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, what the programme will suggest is that the threat of Al Qaeda is vastly overblown, and that it doesn't really exist as a global terrorist network in quite the way as it is often portrayed. Connections between various terrorist cells are ad-hoc most of the time and Osama bin Laden isn't really the mastermind behind attacks so much as a figurehead or spiritual leader. It all suits the power hungry elite nicely though. They can instill fear into the plebs and get support for their totalitarian crack down on civil liberties all in the name of fighting the very thing which gives them the power in the first place.
Just think, who benefits from the fear of terrorism? If Bush gets re-elected on an anti-terror platform, then he does, and so does Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, all three of whom are former students of Leo Strauss.
cui bono. To whom the good?
1. the legal principle that the responsibility for a certain act is likely to lie with one who had something to gain as a result of that act.
Given that in the end I was proven right, and they were proven wrong, it does look that way doesn't it.
To be fair I give most of the credit to the BBC because in the run up to the war they had some expert on who said that the last time anyone actually saw WMD's in Iraq was over 10 years ago and these things have a shelf life of much less than that. In effect he was saying that if they had chemical and biological weapons that had somehow escaped both the weapons inspectors and U2 spy planes (which I considered actually pretty unlikely) they would be either unusable or just too dangerous to store, and therefore they would have had to get rid of them.
I think that at the time my feeling was that I believed that the US and British government were making unreasonable and impossible demands of Iraq to try and prove that they had no WMDs. This is not something that you can prove to someone who already is convinced of your guilt and dishonesty. I, on the other hand, was fairly convinced that the documents the Iraqi's had handed over to the UN probably were the vast majority, if not all of the information available to the Iraqi government. After all, this was a poor country under heavy sanctions and administration probably was not their strong suit. Call me gullible and over trusting if you like, but that's just my nature, and I think my trust has been justified after the fact.
Then there is the issue of the imminence of the threat posed by Saddam. This was a country whose army had been decimated in the Gulf War I and then had been under sanctions, air bombardment, and close monitoring since 1991. We knew of their weapon programmes to build missiles with ranges longer than 150km and we forced them to shut down. Saddam was of no real threat to regional or global stability and sanctions and the policy of containment were, for the most part, working as advertised.
Lastly we come to terrorism. Saddam had no links to Osama-Bin-Laden, in fact Osama-Bin-Laden hated Saddam almost as much as he hates America because Saddam's Iraq was secular and Saddam was not a good Muslim. OK there were contacts but it would seem that nothing actually came of them. Ansar-Al-Islam, which is a terrorist group inside Iraq both before the war and today and is linked to Al-Qaeda was violently against both the PUK faction of Iraqi Kurds and Saddam, and was probably supported by Iranian groups, so the only known Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq was Anti-Saddam, not working with him.
In the end the Iraq war has resulted in tens of thousands of dead, mostly civilians, a dangerously unstable country and more militant anti American and anti British Muslims. It has made the world much more dangerous to us in our own countries and has resulted in the loss of our own civil liberties and consequently damaged our democracies. Our soldiers are being bogged down in a new Vietnam. This was always going to happen and many people shouted as loudly as they could before the war that it was going to be an expensive mistake, but were ignored. OK Saddam was an evil man and his regime was cruel and oppressive, but there are many like him the world over and we don't spend billions to overthrow each one. It was pretty obvious to me that the unseemly rush to war was driven by domestic political expediency rather than any desire to liberate the people of Iraq. Governments just don't spend that kind of money unless they expect to get something in return, whether it be power, control or money etc.
If you read the report from the Iraq survey group you will see that they found no evidence of any ongoing research or weapons program, nor any actual evidence that Saddam had a realistic plan to resume research once sanctions had been lifted. The only "evidence" they brought regarding his intention to resume building WMD was heresay and conjecture about what Saddam would like to happen. This is in the realm of thought crime and not substantive evidence of anything at all. How would like to found guilty of rape just for looking at a woman in a bar?
But didn't you know that all etch-a-sketch's since 1986 have had built in pattern recognition and reporting capabilities so the government can monitor for early onset liberalism and issue corrective education via the drawing panel?
I think you'll find it's "Faux News Channel"
I'm confused by this flip flop mantra that republicans keep chanting. Surely changing your position on an issue in the face of new evidence is a "Good Thing". It implies an open mind and critical thinking, whereas sticking doggedly to a position that has since been shown to be wrong is just stupid.
For example, on the Iraq war vote, Kerry voted for the war on the basis of the evidence made available by Bush. We now know that the evidence for war was wrong, incomplete and selectively chosen by a broken system. If you believed the evidence that was presented at the time then voting for war was the only option (as it happens I didn't believe the evidence, but that is a freedom a popularly elected official doesn't really have if he wants to be re-elected). In the light of new evidence it appears that the case for war was not based in fact, but speculation (if you're feeling generous towards Bush), or greed (if you're being less generous). Faced with the new information I would be deeply concerned if someone did not change their point of view. It is a deeply valid thing to do.
Making a decision on the best available information is a good thing. Making a decision on ideological grounds and the selecting evidence to support your position is not a good thing.