Opps. This does do on for a while. There is nothing worth reading here. I don't judge Christians as harshly as I used to, now that I am more aware of the the nature of our world. For example, most people I know who are scornful of Christians are also the last persons you would see working as volunteers (not to use that awful word "missionaries") in some African hell hole. Not that all good people are Christians (and not all Christians are good people), but, good people don't scorn people with moral principles, even if they disagree on some points.
After the Third Reich, I don't really think that people who are willing to defend human rights, even those of the unborn, are totally screwy. After all, the Nazis started out with the terminal ill, handicapped, retarded, and others who were seen as a burden. Then it was political opponents, including many Churchmen. Finally the Jews and Gypsies, and other subhumans. At the end, Hitler wanted to kill all the Germans, too, because they had failed him. It was too bad that Hitler had removed from his inner circle anybody with strong moral principles and a willingness to stand up for them. So, people with strong ethics and a willingness not to look the other way do not worry me nearly as much as people who will go along with whatever is the most recently announced moral standard, enunciated by those elites who claim to have that duty, whether university academics or dictators. For example, when a 15 yo girl can get a free infertility workup at a university hospital (having unprotected sex since age 9) I think we have descended a long way. However, the hospital ethics committee didn't see anything wrong with this, so, I guess nine yo old girls having sex is OK. After all, that committee has professional ethicists on it. I had better update my ethics. I also think when Christians are judged so harshly, we are really judging them for the Dark Age mentality in part. The Christians certainly did their part to help create and maintain the Dark Ages, but, they weren't the only problem. And, I think nobody remembers how helpful those Renaissance Italian Popes were in encouraging the arts and sciences. The Popes were after all educated men. They did keep the general population in ignorance though, but so do our politicians and schools today. People also forget that the Christians were not the only people to persecute others. The Christians got their start as a heavily persecuted religious sect, after all. The Christians have certainly been abused by the Muslims (Think Muslim conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, which was once the heart of the Christian world, the Ottoman Empire with its Christian slave army and invasion of Christian Eastern Europe, the conquest and occupation of Spain for hundreds of years by the Moors, and the extensive slave trade in castrated Christians carried on by the Muslims for centuries.) Another situation is the persecution of Christians in the Far East. For example, in Japan, in 1642, the year of Isaac Newton's birth, the last Catholic priest was crucified. About 500,000 Japanese Christians were extant prior to the crackdown. There were essentially none left when the persecution was done. In one city alone, 37,000 Christians were butchered. So, you can't really condemn Christians too heavily, since they are no worse than, and a lot better than, some other types of people. Joel P.S. Mark Twain was a very unhappy, bitter man for many years. The death of his daughter left him heart broken, and he refused to accept her death as God's will. He must have believed in a God, because he seemed to think that her death was someone's fault, that he had been betrayed. Why else would he be bitter and resentful over a misfortune? Why would anyone ever feel resentful in a universe they acknowledged to be ruled only by impersonal physical laws and chance? But, that is another argument! _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
