Question:

This is what’s wrong with christian faith. I thought we as christians we’re to help those in need like Jesus did. Jesus did help out the frail and the sick and the old, but today christians don’t seem to care. Do you think my mom broke her hip on purpose, I think not because she is in a lot of pain and my guess is she would choose doing papers over what she’s going thru now. All I ask for is support, prayer, letters of incoragement what ever God lays on people’s heart. Your responce is just plain evil, "tell the bat she’s on her own" ,it’s no wonder I left the calling because of people like you.

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Welcome to the Brave New World of GW Bu$h! Tell the old bat she’s on her own. (As if this ain’t a scam.)

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Welcome to the Brave New World of GW Bu$h! Tell the old bat she’s on her own. (As if this ain’t a scam.)

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I’m in desprete need of help. There is this little old lady, Mrs. Korman on very limited income, that fell and broke her hip. On Friday she recieved a new hip and is doing better, but she is discouraged because she delivers newspapers to make enough to pay her expenses, and it would be some time before she is able to return to her job. She is 77 years old and get’s $780.00 Government retirement. Her bills amount to $1500.00 a month. She should be out 3 to 6 mionths before she can return to papers providing the paper company will keep her job open. Paper carriers are self employed so they don’t get worker’s comp, disability, or unemployment. Any help or letters of encouragement anyone could provide would be a blessing. Please send help or letters of encouragement to Mrs. L. Korman, 1604-B Jersey Avenue, Fort Pierce, FL 34950 Thanks in advance.

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Question:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – ***Yada yada yada. All you bleeding heart liberals do is complain. Sheesh! THEY ATTACKED US FIRST! THEY DESERVE EVERY BOMB AND BULLET THEY GET! Who are "they?" Fucking moron. You didn’t need to sign your post, we figured it out pretty quick that you are "F’ing moron." [If "they" needs to be explained to you, then you are beyond help and should return to playing your video games or something harmless like that.]

***I think self abuse has hutrt him! <G

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***Yada yada yada. All you bleeding heart liberals do is complain. Sheesh! THEY ATTACKED US FIRST! THEY DESERVE EVERY BOMB AND BULLET THEY GET!

***Just like the Japanese after they attacked us in 1941. Nick, like Kerry, is soft on terrorism and its threat to America!

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***Yada yada yada. All you bleeding heart liberals do is complain. Sheesh! THEY ATTACKED US FIRST! THEY DESERVE EVERY BOMB AND BULLET THEY GET!

Who are "they?" Fucking moron.

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***Yada yada yada. All you bleeding heart liberals do is complain. Sheesh! THEY ATTACKED US FIRST! THEY DESERVE EVERY BOMB AND BULLET THEY GET! Who are "they?" Fucking moron.

You didn’t need to sign your post, we figured it out pretty quick that you are "F’ing moron." [If "they" needs to be explained to you, then you are beyond help and should return to playing your video games or something harmless like that.]

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- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Study: 100,000 Iraqis died in war, aftermath Science journal say coalition caused majority of violent deaths The Associated Press Updated: 11:48 a.m. ET Oct. 28, 2004 LONDON – A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months after the U.S. invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war. Although it is doubtful that Saddam kept accurate records on the iraqis he murdered before the liberation from which to make an intelligent conclusion, not that the AP article makes any effort to appear intelligent here.  

Saddam is estimated to have killed as many as 300,000 over his 30 year career.  This comes out to 10,000 per year.  (the figure above may very well be an exaggeration of course – look at the inflated figures about Serb killing of Albanians). About one year into occupation and we now have 100,000 deaths (a little over 10,000 through violence). It should also be noted that most of Saddam’s killings occurred while he was a US ally and not at the time of the war to depose him.  This is to be expected.  Clinton’s good friend Suharto in Indonesia slaughtered 200,000 Christian Timorese but was only pressured to quite long after the crime was committed. It would be doubtful that he added his murders to the death rate, might make him look like a murderer.

The figure of 100,000 was added to the expected death rate, not part of it.  It is people who would not have died had the US not invaded. regards, BM

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Study: 100,000 Iraqis died in war, aftermath Science journal say coalition caused majority of violent deaths The Associated Press Updated: 11:48 a.m. ET Oct. 28, 2004 LONDON – A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months after the U.S. invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war. There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000. As of Wednesday, 1,081 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to the U.S. Defense Department. The researchers of The Lancet report concede that the data they based their projections on were of "limited precision," because the quality of the information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors. The study, conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, is being published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet medical journal. The survey indicated violence accounted for most of the extra deaths seen since the invasion, and air strikes from coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths, the researchers wrote in the British-based journal. "Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children," they said. U.S. election The report was released just days before the U.S. presidential election. The Lancet routinely publishes papers on the Web before they appear in print, particularly if it considers the findings of urgent public health interest. Those reports then appear later in the print issue of the journal. The journal’s spokesmen said they were uncertain which print issue the Iraqi report would appear in and said it was too late to make Friday’s issue, and possibly too late for the Nov. 5 edition. An editor was not immediately available to comment on whether the early release of the survey was timed to stimulate last-minute debate before the election. Richard Peto, an expert on study methods who was not involved with the research, said the approach the scientists took is a reasonable one to investigate the Iraq death toll. However, it’s possible that they may have zoned in on hotspots that might not be representative of the death toll across Iraq, said Peto, a professor of medical statistics at Oxford University in England. To conduct the survey, investigators visited 33 neighborhoods spread evenly across the country in September, randomly selecting clusters of 30 households to sample. Of the 988 households visited, 808, consisting of 7,868 people, agreed to participate in the survey. At each one they asked how many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths there had been since January 2002. The scientists then compared death rates in the 15 months before the invasion with those that occurred during the 18 months after the attack and adjusted those numbers to account for the different time periods. Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s. Methodology The investigators worked in teams of three. Five of the six Iraqi interviewers were doctors and all six were fluent in English and Arabic. In the households reporting deaths, the person who died had to be living there at the time of the death and for more than two months before to be counted. In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the interviewers asked for death certificates in 78 households and were provided them 63 times. There were 46 deaths in the surveyed households before the war. After the invasion, there were 142 deaths. That is an increase from 5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 12.3 per 1,000 people per year ? more than double. However, more than a third of the post-invasion deaths were reported in one cluster of households in the city Fallujah, where fighting has been most intense recently. Because the fighting was so severe there, the numbers from that location may have exaggerated the overall picture. When the researchers recalculated the effect of the war without the statistics from Fallujah, the deaths end up at 7.9 per 1,000 people per year ? still 1.5 times higher than before the war. Even with Fallujah factored out, the survey "indicates that the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is more likely than not about 100,000 people, and may be much higher," the report said. Violence attributed to coalition forces The most common causes of death before the invasion of Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and other chronic diseases. However, after the invasion, violence was recorded as the primary cause of death and was mainly attributed to coalition forces ? with about 95 percent of those deaths caused by bombs or fire from helicopter gunships. Violent deaths ? defined as those brought about by the intentional act of others ? were reported in 15 of the 33 clusters. The chances of a violent death were 58 times higher after the invasion than before it, the researchers said. Twelve of the 73 violent deaths were not attributed to coalition forces. The researchers said 28 children were killed by coalition forces in the survey households. Infant mortality rose from 29 deaths per 1,000 live births before the war to 57 deaths per 1,000 afterward. The researchers estimated the nationwide death toll due to the conflict by subtracting the preinvasion death rate from the post-invasion death rate and multiplying that number by the estimated population of Iraq ? 24.4 million at the start of the war. Then that number was converted to a total number of deaths by dividing by 1,000 and adjusting for the 18 months since the invasion. "We estimate that there were 98,000 extra deaths during the postwar period in the 97 percent of Iraq represented by all the clusters except Fallujah," the researchers said in the journal. They called for further confirmation by an independent body such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, or the World Health Organization. The study was funded by the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins University and by the Small Arms Survey in Geneva, Switzerland, a research project based at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

***Yada yada yada. All you bleeding heart liberals do is complain. Sheesh! THEY ATTACKED US FIRST! THEY DESERVE EVERY BOMB AND BULLET THEY GET!

Response:

Study: 100,000 Iraqis died in war, aftermath Science journal say coalition caused majority of violent deaths The Associated Press Updated: 11:48 a.m. ET Oct. 28, 2004 LONDON – A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months after the U.S. invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war.

Although it is doubtful that Saddam kept accurate records on the iraqis he murdered before the liberation from which to make an intelligent conclusion, not that the AP article makes any effort to appear intelligent here.   It would be doubtful that he added his murders to the death rate, might make him look like a murderer. — May God Bless You Michael GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL. We make a Living by what we get, We make a Life by what we give.

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http://eroscoloredglasses.blogspot.com/2004/10/kerrys-genealogy-of-im… Eros Colored Glasses The premiere site for understanding the motivation of presidential candidate John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry, and those who support them. Thursday, October 28, 2004 Kerry’s Genealogy of Immorals by Sherry Eros, MD and Steven Eros Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. – Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3 Tidings to the contrary Are brought your eyes. – Shakespeare, Pericles, Act 2. Prologue. Sen. John Kerry’s paternal grandfather, Fred Kerry, was born Fritz Kohn, a European Jew. Kohn changed his name to Kerry and his religion to Catholic before immigrating to the United States, an auspicious choice for a family setting-up shop in America’s most Irish Catholic state, Massachusetts. In the new world Fred Kerry was successful in business and finance, later lost his fortune, started over again, failed once more and prospered all over again. Far-sightedness, perseverance and ambition, we begin to see, are prominent family traits. Living in the Boston suburb of Brookline under the Kerry name, a name happened-upon by inspecting a map of Ireland before leaving for America, it was presumed by all that grandfather Fred was Irish, and even a newspaper account took his Irishness for granted. Grandfather Fred apparently never left a hint of his Jewish origins, even to his closest friends and associates. Failing to correct false impressions, as we will see, is another of a series of less attractive but no less prominent family traits. Sen. John Kerry, grandson of Fred, claims to have learned he was one-half Jewish only in 2003 when, as a candidate for the presidency, a great deal of genealogical research was being conducted by Boston Globe reporters in preparation for a major biography. Presidential candidate Kerry’s response to the Globe’s unsealing his Jewish rather than presumed Irish heritage appeared to be wildly enthusiastic: "incredible stuff," "more than interesting," "a revelation," the senator exclaimed. For a generation accustomed to the postmodern nuances of ClintonSpeak, however, equivocal terms of this ilk are always subject to being deconstructed as less than unequivocally. What we do know is that none of John Kerry’s closest family and friends had the least suspicion of his Jewish heritage prior to the Globe disclosure. Grandfather Fred appears to have lost his fortune one last time after which he committed suicide under somewhat cloudy circumstances not yet thoroughly investigated by the intrepid Globe team; somewhat surprising given his Bostonian grandson’s presidential proximity. Using one of the unlicensed handguns to which his gun control advocating grandson Sen. John Kerry is so opposed today, Kerry’s formerly prosperous businessman grandfather, having made and then lost his fortune one too many times, shot himself in the head and died in the restroom of Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel. As indicated below, psychiatric disturbance may be one of the prominent Kerry family traits to which Fred Kerry was subject. On John Kerry’s maternal side, there is some interesting data tending to establish a pattern of aberrant character trait transmission across the generations, helping explain at least in part such disparate traits as Sen. Kerry’s proclivity for marrying heiresses of unimaginable wealth, his inclination to leave false impressions, his propensity to betray his country in time of war, his inclination to treasonously flee into the arms of enemy nations after siding with them against America and certain tendencies toward mental instability. Sen. Kerry, Sen. Edwards, their wives and their campaign team relentlessly castigate President Bush for his being agnostic during the last presidential debate concerning the putative genetic basis of homosexuality. When asked by the debate moderator whether homosexuality is a matter of choice, President Bush committed the unpardonable sin of professing abject ignorance on the question. Under the New Dogmatism of the Kerry-Edwards team, doubt as to the heritability of personality and character traits is impermissible (even though the left almost universally condemns as racist research into the genetics of intelligence). Consequently, we harbor no doubt that Sen. Kerry, Sen. Edwards and their wives, so outraged over George Bush’s wavering on the question, will concur in the notion that traits such as treachery, imposture, pathological lying, unscrupulousness, overweening ambition, not to mention the propensity to marry wealthy women, all occupy specific loci on the bad character gene. Perhaps hypocrisy as well. One very prominent ancestor of Sen. John Forbes Kerry on the maternal side, his namesake the Rev. John Forbes, the senator’s maternal great-great-great-great grandfather, served as the first magistrate to the governor of Florida in the latter part of the eighteenth century, covering the period of the American revolution. Sen. John Kerry apparently shared more than the first part of his name with the illustrious reverend. . According to the authorized Boston Globe biography of John Kerry, with whose authors the senator accordingly cooperated, there are the following parallels between Sen. John Forbes Kerry and his forebears: (1) "Marrying-up". Just as the socially, financially and politically ambitious Sen. John Kerry married the billionaire heiress Teresa Heinz (his second such marriage to an extremely wealthy woman), so did his ancestor the Rev. John Forbes marry himself an extremely wealthy wife, a Massachusetts heiress, back in the eighteenth century. (2) Sen. Kerry betrays his country and secretly meets with the enemy in Paris. Kerry and the other members of his family all opposed the Vietnam War before he joined the military. Kerry wrote of his own opposition in an article published in the Harvard Crimson. He entered the military having already formed what fellow Swift Boat commander Larry Thurlow termed a carefully crafted "master plan" for his political career. According to Thurlow, "it became apparent early on that John Kerry had a master plan that went far beyond the service in the Swift Boats, and because of the fact that he was trying to engineer a record." (a) In 1968 Kerry would enter active military service in Vietnam, thereby obtaining the political credentials necessary to credibly subvert the American effort to win the war from the inside. As the transcript of the 1971 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing demonstrates, the Kerry plan was highly effective. One of the most influential senators on the Committee, Jacob Javits of New York, remarked, "I wish to associate myself with the statement Senator Symington made when I was here as to your credentials. That is what we always think about with a witness and your credentials couldn’t be higher.. It is not as effective unless you have those credentials. The kind you have. I couldn’t think of anybody whose testimony I would rather have and act on from the point of view of what this is doing to our young men we are sending over there." (b) While in Vietnam as a Swift Boat commander, Kerry fraudulently obtained, under highly questionable circumstances, three Purple Hearts within just four months for what are now known to have been (unintentionally) self-inflicted and no-bleed band-aid quality injuries. These medals provided him on technical grounds the opportunity to request and obtain an expedited ticket out of Vietnam. As former Republican presidential nominee and severely injured WW II war hero Bob Dole observed, "three Purple Hearts and [Kerry] never bled that I know of. I mean, they’re all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you’re out [of Vietnam]." Kerry turned against his own country, lied about witnessing systemic atrocities, and denounced his fellow soldiers and veterans as drug-addicted baby-killers, sociopaths, war criminals, misfits, torturers and "monsters." (c) While still in the service of his country as a member of the Naval Reserve, and without authorization from his superiors, Kerry left his own country to secretly meet with enemy leaders overseas in time of war. (d) Kerry likened the communist leader of North Vietnam to American Revolutionary War leader, and first president, George Washington. Ancestor Rev. John Forbes flees to England. From the Boston Globe biography we learn that, just as Sen. Kerry betrayed his country during the Vietnam War, so did his maternal great-great-great-great grandfather oppose the American Revolutionary War, granting his loyalty not to his fellow Americans but to the British and, in the words of Kerry’s Globe biographers, the esteemed reverend "fled Florida in 1783 and returned to England where he died within months. Such was the inauspicious beginning of the Kerry family in America." (3) Psychiatric illness and treatment: Grandfather Fred Kerry and John Kerry . As we have seen, paternal grandfather Fred Kerry committed suicide. Since his time in Vietnam, John Kerry appears to have also suffered from psychiatric symptoms of an unspecified nature, severity and chronicity as reported in The Washington Post. According to his second wife, Teresa, John Kerry may have undergone psychiatric treatment with medication or other forms of therapy for symptoms she has personally witnessed since their marriage in 1995, putatively related to Vietnam War "trauma." Wife Teresa describes John’s violent nightmares, "I haven’t gotten slapped yet . . . but there were times when I thought I might get throttled." Sen. Kerry was instrumental in propagating the false notion that Vietnam vets are disproportionally suicidal and suffer from increased liability to a variety of mental and social pathologies, (and seems to have contributed to establishing the questionable diagnostic category known as PTSD) but … read more »

Response:

quoted : A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months after the U.S. invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war.

If that is true, no wonder the Iraqis are willing to use suicide attacks.  Every American killed means 100 Iraqis saved. It would truly be the deed of a martyr. "Cheney masterminded 9/11." ~ Stanley Hilton lead attorney for the 9/11 victims, Bob Dole’s advisor. — Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. See http://mindprod.com/bush911.html for details on Cheney’s crime of the century.

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http://orthodoxytoday.org/articles4/AgainWebster.shtml       OrthodoxyToday.org       Commentary on social and moral issues of the day       Thursday, October 28, 2004 – 06:06 PM President George W. Bush: Sharing and supporting issues and values of the Orthodox Christian community Pres. George W. Bush "My faith plays a big part in my life. And my faith is very personal. I pray for strength. I pray for wisdom. I pray for our troops in harm’s way. I never want to impose my religion on anybody else. But when I make a decision, I stand on principle, and the principles derive from who I am." George W. Bush, October 13, 2004 "For the President of the United States and all civil authorities, for our Armed Forces everywhere, that He will aid them and grant them victory over every enemy and adversary, let us pray to the Lord." The Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom At every Divine Liturgy, Orthodox Christians throughout America pray for the President of the United States. They ask that his decisions be guided by the highest principles and informed by sound judgment. They look for the traditional values that undergird this ancient faith community to find support and encouragement from our country’s leaders. They seek spiritual protection for the members of our armed forces who daily risk their lives for America and American values. President Bush is grateful for the prayers of Orthodox Christians in America, as he is for those of all Americans of whatever faith community to which they may belong. "I love the fact that people pray for me and my family all around the country," said the President in his last debate with Senator Kerry. "Somebody asked me one time, ‘Well how do you know?’ I said, ‘I just feel it.’" An Historic American Faith Community The millions of Orthodox Christians in America trace their origins to many lands in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They speak many languages and are racially diverse. But President Bush commends what unites them in their diversity: their dedication to America and their faithfulness to the values that connect them, whatever their ethnicity: Antiochian, Russian, Georgian, Greek, Syrian, Carpatho-Russian, Serbian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Ethiopian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Coptic (Egyptian), Alaskan Native, Albanian, Lebanese, Macedonian, or the increasing numbers of Americans who practice this ancient faith but do not belong to any of the traditional Orthodox ethnic groups. While Orthodox Christianity is not the most numerous or most well-known religion in America, it has been part of our national fabric far longer than most of our fellow-citizens might realize. The first Orthodox Greeks arrived in Florida before the American Revolution. Orthodox Christian missionaries accompanied the founding of Russia’s Alaskan colony in the late 18th century. The first multi-ethnic Orthodox Church in the continental United States was established in New Orleans in 1864 by Greek merchants; its multi-ethnic congregation included Greeks, Slavs, and Arabs, and services were held in Greek, Slavonic, and English. Between 1868-1892, similar multi-ethnic and multi-lingual parishes were founded by diplomatic personnel, foreign businessmen, and small numbers of Orthodox immigrants in San Francisco (1868), New York (1870-1883), Chicago (1888), Portland, Oregon (1890), Galveston (ca 1890), and Seattle (1892)[1]1. In short, as America grew into a great continental power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, accelerating numbers of Orthodox Christian immigrants and their descendants helped enrich their adopted country, working in mines and factories, founding businesses, raising families, and fighting in all of America’s wars. U.S. Partnership with Orthodox Nations Even today, whether they are new immigrants or American whose forebears arrived generations ago, many American Orthodox Christians maintain family ties to the lands of their ancestors. They support American policies that encourage a constructive and mutually beneficial relationships between the United States and the countries where the Orthodox Christian faith prevails in the vast area spanning the distance between the Adriatic Sea and the Bering Strait, and from the White Sea to the sources of the Nile. During the next four years, President Bush is committed to building upon the positive accomplishments of his first term with all the countries in this region: Greater bilateral cooperation in our common fight against global terrorism. Fighting religious persecution. Combating trafficking in persons. This is of special concern in Orthodox Christian countries of Eastern Europe, where women and girls are vulnerable to victimization by organized crime elements. Promoting economic development and commerce. This is especially vital to the many Orthodox lands so recently emerging from communist tyranny. Seeking equitable and lasting solutions to international crises and conflicts, such as those that continue to afflict the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. Orthodox Christian Family and Community Values Orthodox Christians are no less concerned about the values that will be reflected in America’s domestic policies during the next four years. The traditional values of work and family achievement that have been the indispensable to Orthodox Christian success will continue to be reflected in the policies promoted by President Bush. Like President Bush, Orthodox Christians know that success comes not from the government but from private enterprise and, above all, the values of hard work and dedication that are nurtured in strong families. Likewise, Orthodox Christians have a proud tradition of voluntary action centered around their church communities and heritage organizations. Among these policies that reinforce Orthodox Christian family and community values: Relief from the "Marriage Penalty" in the Federal Income tax. (Senator John Kerry voted against legislation relieving this tax discrimination against families.) Expansion of the Child tax Credit. (Senator John Kerry voted against this family-friendly tax credit.) Elimination of the federal "Death Tax," ending double taxation and preserving the achievements of one generation for the next. (Senator John Kerry voted against eliminating this tax hit on American families.) Enactment of tax reductions and increased loan programs benefiting small business. Allowing Orthodox Christian charities to participate without discrimination in federal, state, and local programs through President Bush’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative. Policies that encourage parents’ school choice, including religious education. Promoting a Culture of Life Orthodox Christians in America point to a venerable tradition of moral witness, stretching back many hundreds of years. Among these is a strong pro-life stance, which Orthodox Christians have boldly asserted in American public life, most memorably in the 1989 brief amicus curiae to the Supreme Court: "The precepts of the Orthodox Christian faith mandate the protection of innocent human life, especially that of unborn children. The Church regards abortion as murder, and as such, takes a very active role in opposing legalized abortion."2 President Bush welcomes the support of America’s Orthodox Christians in his efforts to promote a culture of life. As the most pro-life president in history, President Bush: On his first day in office, reactivated Ronald Reagan’s "Mexico City Policy," which prevents international organizations from receiving federal funds for performing or actively promoting abortion. In many Orthodox countries, abortion has contributed to demographic devastation, as noted recently by the bishops of Russia3. (Senator John Kerry has pledged that reversing the Mexico City Policy would be his first Executive Order as President.) Signed into law and is defending the federal ban on partial-Birth Abortion, a violent and brutal procedure that kills a child in the process of birth. (Senator John Kerry has voted at least six times against legislation to outlaw Partial-Birth Abortion.) Supports parental notification laws, ensuring the parents know about and are involved with the abortion decisions of their minor daughters. (Senator Kerry opposes parental notification laws.) Signed into law the Born Alive Infants Act (which protects infants who survive an attempted abortion) Laci & Connor Peterson’s Law (also the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which makes injury or death of an unborn child during an attack on a pregnant woman a separate crime). Opposes use of tax dollars for abortion. (Senator Kerry supports public funding of abortion.) Opposes human cloning. (Senator Kerry voted against legislation to ban human cloning.) Will appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will strictly interpret the constitution and laws, not legislate from the bench. (Senator Kerry’s litmus test would only permit appointment of justices who would uphold the 1972 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide and has resulted in the deaths of over 35 million unborn American children.) Supports federal stem cell research under strict ethical guidelines. (Senator Kerry would allow expanded use of stem cells from aborted unborn children for questionable prospects of medical benefit.) Safeguarding Marriage from Activist Judges Besides defense of innocent life, Orthodox Christian traditional values encompass the sanctity of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. President Bush shares the concerns of Orthodox Christians about recent attempts to undermine the traditional definition of marriage by recognizing so-called "samesex marriages." "Marriage between a man and a woman is a sacred institution," as America’s Orthodox bishops have observed, "and we pray fervently that the traditional form of marriage, as an enduring and committed union only between a man and a woman, will be honored." While Senator Kerry claims he wants to leave … read more »

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Study: 100,000 Iraqis died in war, aftermath Science journal say coalition caused majority of violent deaths The Associated Press Updated: 11:48 a.m. ET Oct. 28, 2004 LONDON – A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months after the U.S. invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war. There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000. As of Wednesday, 1,081 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to the U.S. Defense Department. The researchers of The Lancet report concede that the data they based their projections on were of "limited precision," because the quality of the information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors. The study, conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, is being published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet medical journal. The survey indicated violence accounted for most of the extra deaths seen since the invasion, and air strikes from coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths, the researchers wrote in the British-based journal. "Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children," they said. U.S. election The report was released just days before the U.S. presidential election. The Lancet routinely publishes papers on the Web before they appear in print, particularly if it considers the findings of urgent public health interest. Those reports then appear later in the print issue of the journal. The journal’s spokesmen said they were uncertain which print issue the Iraqi report would appear in and said it was too late to make Friday’s issue, and possibly too late for the Nov. 5 edition. An editor was not immediately available to comment on whether the early release of the survey was timed to stimulate last-minute debate before the election. Richard Peto, an expert on study methods who was not involved with the research, said the approach the scientists took is a reasonable one to investigate the Iraq death toll. However, it’s possible that they may have zoned in on hotspots that might not be representative of the death toll across Iraq, said Peto, a professor of medical statistics at Oxford University in England. To conduct the survey, investigators visited 33 neighborhoods spread evenly across the country in September, randomly selecting clusters of 30 households to sample. Of the 988 households visited, 808, consisting of 7,868 people, agreed to participate in the survey. At each one they asked how many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths there had been since January 2002. The scientists then compared death rates in the 15 months before the invasion with those that occurred during the 18 months after the attack and adjusted those numbers to account for the different time periods. Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s. Methodology The investigators worked in teams of three. Five of the six Iraqi interviewers were doctors and all six were fluent in English and Arabic. In the households reporting deaths, the person who died had to be living there at the time of the death and for more than two months before to be counted. In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the interviewers asked for death certificates in 78 households and were provided them 63 times. There were 46 deaths in the surveyed households before the war. After the invasion, there were 142 deaths. That is an increase from 5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 12.3 per 1,000 people per year

Question:

Jesus Himself said

Probably not much of anything given he probably never existed… — Mark K. Bilbo  -  a.a. #1423 EAC Department of Linguistic Subversion Alt-atheism website at: http://www.alt-atheism.org "Being surprised at the fact that the universe is fine tuned for life is akin to a puddle being surprised at how well it fits its hole" — Douglas Adams

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – (John 1:12 NKJV) But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: Why are you an enemy of Christ? Posting this in non-Christian groups is EVIL. Repent now! Repentance is an old English word that describes a willingness to turn from our sin towards Jesus Christ. It literally means a complete U-turn on the road of life. A change of heart and a change of mind. It means that you are willing to follow Jesus and to receive Him as your Savior and Lord. Jesus Himself said, "…repent and believe the Good News" (Mark 1:15).

Question:

 The New York Times October 17, 2004 IN THE MAGAZINE Without a Doubt By RON SUSKIND Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ”if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.” The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. ”Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: ”This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . . ”This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,” Bartlett went on to say. ”He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.” Bartlett paused, then said, ”But you can’t run the world on faith.” Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ”I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,” he began, ”and I was telling the president of my many concerns” — concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. ”’Mr. President,’ I finally said, ‘How can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?”’ Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator’s shoulder. ”My instincts,” he said. ”My instincts.” Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ”I said, ‘Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough!”’ The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the same thing — a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action. But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect. The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush’s top deputies — from cabinet members like Paul O’Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq — have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president’s decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ”gut” or his ”instinct” to guide the ship of state, and then he ”prayed over it.” The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact- based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group — the core of the energetic ”base” that may well usher Bush to victory — believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush’s certainty — the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ”you can be certain and be wrong.” What underlies Bush’s certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent? All of this — the ”gut” and ”instincts,” the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, ”faith,” and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision — often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position — he expects complete faith in its rightness. The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush’s intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility — a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains — is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ”In meetings, I’d ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!” (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president’s re-election effort in New Jersey.) The nation’s founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe’s state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush — both captive and creator of this moment — has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith- based presidency. The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O’Neill. When I quoted O’Neill saying that Bush was like ”a blind man in a room full of deaf people,” this did not endear me to the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush’s faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they thought George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue — public servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with this article in any way. Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others focused on Bush’s substantial interpersonal gifts as a compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities. Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, are worried about something other than his native intelligence. ”He’s plenty smart enough to do the job,” Levin said. ”It’s his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles me.” But more than anything else, I heard expressions of awe at the president’s preternatural certainty and wonderment about its source. There is one story about Bush’s particular brand of certainty I am able to piece together and tell for the record. In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ”road map” for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well- trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall. ”I don’t know why you’re talking about Sweden,” Bush said. ”They’re the neutral one. They don’t have an army.” Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ”Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They’re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.” Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion. Bush held to his view. ”No, no, it’s Sweden that has no army.” The room went silent, until someone changed the subject. A few weeks … read more »

Response:

newmediapr…@yahoo.com (KC Carter) wrote in message <news:463ac52.0410232255.3c88955f@posting.google.com>…

Thanks bud, speaking of strange environments I went against lm’s best wishes and am now in Indonesia.  Nothing dangerous so far, but those TOTES let me tell you, damn those totes, pesky pesky totes.  They wanna charge me 5 times the price of a regular taxi fare?  I’ll tell you what Mr. Totey tote tote, you can take your taxi and shove it, I’m walking. So I do that, and as I walk, I’m accosted all the way by, at last count, over 200 totes!!!  Granted, it was more than a 3km walk, but the whole time I’ve never seen anything like this before.  200 and they all want to offer me taxi rides at rip-off rates.  Unbelievable! So that makes me walk all the more. Anyways, onto the post: > And I think that Bush’s life has been very sheltered, in a sense, in > that he has "achieved" so much in his life without really achieving > it: Yale, multiple oil services companies funded by Saudis, MLB owner, > governor, and now president. These were bought by other peoples’ money > and influence, not his own efforts. So you can topple a statue in > Baghdad and really believe "Mission Accomplished," because that’s how > his life has been lived.

Yes, positions have more or less ‘come up’ for Bush.  He worked fairly hard once he got into various positions, but he more or less took them for granted, and that something would always be provided for him.  So he worked hard, but didn’t take full initiative and assume full responsibility for the various positions.  This was evident when he dropped out of the board of directors role (referenced in the article) because he "wanted out of this business" or something to that effect. Even now as president he relies heavily on his speechwriter, and his debates with Kerry showed a mediocre display of initiative to say the least. I suppose you could say Bush is a "home-body" or whichever term you want to describe a person who likes to stay in one place and is attached to a particular area, i.e. his beloved Texas Ranch.  That’s where he spends an incredible amount of time, but he’s completed surrounded by other people there so he has little, if any, time alone.  Time alone is necessary for relection, contemplation, and much-needed personal initiative, all of which Bush has a pretty low regard for as the article says directly. > They don’t read newspapers or intelligence reports, they must be > reading something, right?

Let’s hope so, but I seriously doubt it!  He made a claim way back that he doesn’t have a single book in his Texas ranch or something like that. Steve

Response:

strue…@hotmail.com (Steve Ruelle) wrote in message <news:735ec89b.0410230434.37de1bfd@posting.google.com>… > That waw an ASTOUNDINGLY well-researched and pointing article, the > best and most objective critical commentary on President Bush that > I’ve ever come across.  

Or, as Bush supporters would call it, liberal propaganda. ;0 – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> The author, Ron Suskind, has examined sources > from every angle and has really hit the nail on the head here.  So in > a very ironic way, I place a lot of confidence in this research, but > the research was founded on skepticism, that is a need to question the > existing realities of the Bush Administration and the problems it > creates. > Perhaps this paragraph is the heart of the article, and the central > problem of the Bush presidency itself.  Bush never said this directly, > but his aide clearly outlined the philosophical paradigm that drives > the actions of the President: > > The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based > > community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge > > from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured > > something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. > > ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. > > ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And > > while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act > > again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s > > how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, > > will be left to just study what we do.” > What’s going on here?  Well, quite simply, this kind of talk comes > from a person who is playing God.  Bush himself may be a messenger of > God like he claims, but his actions indicate otherwise.  *He* is the > one taking on the creator role (which would constitute blasphemy in > religious terms), and has an aide who talks directly about doing > exactly that. > Moving on to a different paragraph we see the second philosophical > problem that emerges, which is really a corollary to the above: > > George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history’s great confidence men. That is > > not meant in the huckster’s sense, though many critics claim that on the > > war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some > > manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he’s a believer > > in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and > > enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching > > confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality. > Bush talks a lot about faith, but it almost seems like he worships > faith itself rather than the God who creates faith in the first place. >  This can be quite dangerous actually, because faith in faith alone > leads to the belief that you can create your own realities (as we see > in the above problem).  This is dangerous because it’s just like the > thinking of a dictator, that you don’t have to answer to anyone of > account for the consequences of your actions.  Bush has these abundant > qualities in his leadership and, quite simply, it is frightening. > It’s also accurate to note that he didn’t use to be this way, as can > be seen in his conversations with the minister who runs the > progressive Sojouners organization.  But time spent in the saddles of > power compounded by the events and reactions to 9/11 have hardened > Bush into the person he is now.  That off-cited phrase is correct > here, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." > This is an extremely significant point for me personally, because in > my late teens / early 20’s I had the same belief:  that if only I had > self-confidence, then my life would be complete.  So the next 3 years > or so, I aggressively pursued exactly that, and did all kinds of > complex and challenging personal growth projects to overcome shyness > and get the self-confidence I desired so much.  Details and write-ups > of these are no doubt still archived on this board. > The result of all this personal growth did succeed, and succeed very > well.  In the end I got the the confidence I wanted, but I still found > that something was missing. > I’m sure it was psychologist Adler that pointed it out, and to > paraphrase him, the drive to attain confidence for confidence’s sake > is a cover-up for inferiority.  The last 3 years of my life spent > overseas in Asian countries (mostly China) have really cut to the core > of deep-seated wounds in my own life that my previous confidence > projects didn’t address.  They may have acknowledged those wounds > and/or bandaged them, but didn’t really heal completely. > It may suck, but this is reality:  to properly heal wounds, you have > to first make incisions that hurt.  That’s where I am right now, in > the point where in my own development, experiences in overseas > cultures have helped uncover the wounds and begin to make incisions. > Yes, it hurts very much, but this is the only way to bring healing.

And I think that Bush’s life has been very sheltered, in a sense, in that he has "achieved" so much in his life without really achieving it: Yale, multiple oil services companies funded by Saudis, MLB owner, governor, and now president. These were bought by other peoples’ money and influence, not his own efforts. So you can topple a statue in Baghdad and really believe "Mission Accomplished," because that’s how his life has been lived. And you Steve, you’ve worked very hard at different things, you admit mistakes, you learn and grow from them, you put yourself in strange environments… all important parts of maturity. > So in the end, when a person like Bush talks about confidence like he > does, the issue at hand is pretty simple:  He has some pretty nasty > wounds and weaknesses in his own life that must be addressed. > Whether or not he will sit in the White House next term is what the > election will decide, but for his own personal life, he really should > think about what his ‘born again’ experience really means and start > dealing with these issues that he buries with the confidence claptrap. > And the chances of Bush or his assosciates actually reading this are > next to nil, but one can hope > Steve

They don’t read newspapers or intelligence reports, they must be reading something, right? KC

Response:

"Eerie Cabinets of Dr. Rodent" <zombiefreaksfromhellbo…@bushwhacked.org> wrote in message <news:Xns958A38B8811BAfkjdlkvjcxoiuarepoij@68.6.19.6>… > The New York Times > October 17, 2004 > IN THE MAGAZINE > Without a Doubt > By RON SUSKIND > And for those who don’t get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by > Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his > own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. > ”You think he’s an idiot, don’t you?” I said, no, I didn’t. ”No, you do, > all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in > southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. > You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of > America,

And that’s why Gore won the popular vote, right?

Response:

Oddly, I can’t feel scared anymore, just utterly underwhelmed by the mediocrity of affairs in the world these days. OTS "Eerie Cabinets of Dr. Rodent" <zombiefreaksfromhellbo…@bushwhacked.org> wrote in message news:Xns958A38B8811BAfkjdlkvjcxoiuarepoij@68.6.19.6… <snipped ’cause I seen it already> — Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.781 / Virus Database: 527 – Release Date: 22/10/2004

Response:

That waw an ASTOUNDINGLY well-researched and pointing article, the best and most objective critical commentary on President Bush that I’ve ever come across.  The author, Ron Suskind, has examined sources from every angle and has really hit the nail on the head here.  So in a very ironic way, I place a lot of confidence in this research, but the research was founded on skepticism, that is a need to question the existing realities of the Bush Administration and the problems it creates. Perhaps this paragraph is the heart of the article, and the central problem of the Bush presidency itself.  Bush never said this directly, but his aide clearly outlined the philosophical paradigm that drives the actions of the President: > The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based > community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge > from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured > something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. > ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. > ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And > while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act > again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s > how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, > will be left to just study what we do.”

What’s going on here?  Well, quite simply, this kind of talk comes from a person who is playing God.  Bush himself may be a messenger of God like he claims, but his actions indicate otherwise.  *He* is the one taking on the creator role (which would constitute blasphemy in religious terms), and has an aide who talks directly about doing exactly that. Moving on to a different paragraph we see the second philosophical problem that emerges, which is really a corollary to the above: > George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history’s great confidence men. That is > not meant in the huckster’s sense, though many critics claim that on the > war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some > manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he’s a believer > in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and > enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching > confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.

Bush talks a lot about faith, but it almost seems like he worships faith itself rather than the God who creates faith in the first place.  This can be quite dangerous actually, because faith in faith alone leads to the belief that you can create your own realities (as we see in the above problem).  This is dangerous because it’s just like the thinking of a dictator, that you don’t have to answer to anyone of account for the consequences of your actions.  Bush has these abundant qualities in his leadership and, quite simply, it is frightening. It’s also accurate to note that he didn’t use to be this way, as can be seen in his conversations with the minister who runs the progressive Sojouners organization.  But time spent in the saddles of power compounded by the events and reactions to 9/11 have hardened Bush into the person he is now.  That off-cited phrase is correct here, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This is an extremely significant point for me personally, because in my late teens / early 20’s I had the same belief:  that if only I had self-confidence, then my life would be complete.  So the next 3 years or so, I aggressively pursued exactly that, and did all kinds of complex and challenging personal growth projects to overcome shyness and get the self-confidence I desired so much.  Details and write-ups of these are no doubt still archived on this board. The result of all this personal growth did succeed, and succeed very well.  In the end I got the the confidence I wanted, but I still found that something was missing. I’m sure it was psychologist Adler that pointed it out, and to paraphrase him, the drive to attain confidence for confidence’s sake is a cover-up for inferiority.  The last 3 years of my life spent overseas in Asian countries (mostly China) have really cut to the core of deep-seated wounds in my own life that my previous confidence projects didn’t address.  They may have acknowledged those wounds and/or bandaged them, but didn’t really heal completely. It may suck, but this is reality:  to properly heal wounds, you have to first make incisions that hurt.  That’s where I am right now, in the point where in my own development, experiences in overseas cultures have helped uncover the wounds and begin to make incisions. Yes, it hurts very much, but this is the only way to bring healing. So in the end, when a person like Bush talks about confidence like he does, the issue at hand is pretty simple:  He has some pretty nasty wounds and weaknesses in his own life that must be addressed. Whether or not he will sit in the White House next term is what the election will decide, but for his own personal life, he really should think about what his ‘born again’ experience really means and start dealing with these issues that he buries with the confidence claptrap. And the chances of Bush or his assosciates actually reading this are next to nil, but one can hope Steve

Response:

Question:

Here’s what Jesus has to say about people like Jim: From Mathew: 7:15 Watch out for false prophets, who come to you in sheeps clothing but inwardly are voracious wolves. 20 7:16 You will recognize them by their fruit.  Grapes are not gathered21 from thorns or figs from thistles, are they 22 7:17 In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad23 tree bears bad fruit. 7:18 A good tree is not able to bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree to bear good fruit. 7:19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 7:20 So then, you will recognize them by their fruit. <snip AC

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Here’s what Jesus has to say about people like Jim: From Mathew: 7:15 Watch out for false prophets, who come to you in sheeps clothing but inwardly are voracious wolves. 20 7:16 You will recognize them by their fruit.  Grapes are not gathered21 from thorns or figs from thistles, are they 22 7:17 In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad23 tree bears bad fruit. 7:18 A good tree is not able to bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree to bear good fruit. 7:19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 7:20 So then, you will recognize them by their fruit. <snip AC

Thanks for that excellent reminder, Al.   I’m so glad to see you quoting from the Scriptures! I know that just recenly you had no use for the Bible or for anything Christian.  I’m hoping that you’ve been making progress.  As you say, mortal men are not to be trusted or followed.  But Jesus Christ our Lord can be trusted in every way.  Praise God! Here’s the story that you left out of your response — Down to the Sea For Patito, walking up the mountain was difficult.  Even though countless feet had already gone this way, forming a trail of sorts, there were still many obstacles for a little boy to face. There were the rocks that were always sliding and rolling down the slope. And there were patches of loose dirt where small feet and short legs could not get purchase.  There were also the weeds, here and there, that reached with long thorns to grab a boy’s pants and shirt, while poking at his eyes and scratching his face. The first few steps were pretty easy, way down at the bottom.  However, as he went higher and higher, Patito grew very tired and wanted to go back home.  Yet he knew that he must go all the way up to the top, and then across, through the trees and great rocks up there, and then all the way down the other side into the small valley that would lead him to the sea. This was not the first time he had made this journey.  And it would not be the last. He leaned forward into the climb and walked as fast as he could, wanting to put this part of the trip behind him.  He tried to take bigger steps but every effort he put into going faster seemed to cost him, both in energy and in injuries.  He often slid or stumbled.  So he decided to just keep a steady pace. The mountain was very big, especially for a small boy.  It towered high over the village, up almost into the clouds themselves.  And now he was going all the way up and over the mountain and out to the sea.  He needed to make the long journey in a very short time, and this was the shortest way. He prayed as he made his way up the steep trail.  "Jesus, God of my father and mother, please help me to get to the sea and back home again in time to help my grandfather.  He’s very ill, You know.  He needs the medicine so he can get well again.  Please help my feet to go very quickly.  Please help me to stay strong and to have good courage.  Thank You, Lord of my father." The boy did not know very much about God.  But he had heard that God could hear the prayers of even a small child.  A priest had come to their village in the years before he was born, and had told the people about the God who made everything.  Unlike the gods that the people had known before, the priest had said that the great God of the sky and of the earth and of the stars in heaven — the great God of everything — had come down to visit the earth long years ago. The priest told the village people that this God loves all people so much that while He was here, He went around everywhere doing good things.  He healed sick people, and made the blind to see again, and even made the dead people alive again. The boy’s mother and father had been happy to learn about the great God called Jesus.  And then they had wept when they heard about how He had died on a wooden post.  But then they had been very glad to hear that He did not stay dead in the ground.  They were so happy to know that He was now alive forever, up in the heavens above the stars. The priest had told the people many wonderful things, and had wanted to teach the people how to read and write.  But he had died after just a year or two in the village.  And no one had ever come to take his place.  No one had even come to see what had happened to him.  So his body is still buried on the side of the mountain, in a place surrounded by many flowers and wild birds. After the priest died, some of the people returned to the old gods they had always known.  But others had continued to believe in the Jesus who loves all people.  Patito’s father and mother believed in the great God, Jesus. So the boy would sometimes pray to Jesus, the God of his father and mother. And at other times he would ask the other gods to help him. But today Patito needed to be sure that he did well.  His father was away in the deep woods with the other men, hunting for food and cutting trees.  And his mother had to stay home and take care of the garden, and his baby sister, and Patito’s sick grandfather.  So it was up to Patito to go to the small port on the sea where the medicine place was.  And he must hurry because it was a very long way. And so today, he prayed to the very great God, Jesus. But the journey up the big mountain was very hard.  And his knees were hurting from the many times he had already fallen.  One of them was bleeding.  But Patito was very brave.  He pushed on, step after step. After a long, long time, he was finally nearing the top.  And he thought of stopping under a small tree by the trail to rest.  The sun was very hot overhead.  And the boy had not brought any water with him.  A water jug would’ve been too heavy for him to carry up the mountain.  So he was very tired and very sore from the long walk up the side of the mountain. But then he heard children’s voices above him.  They were laughing and talking and playing.  And so he went on, making his way to the top to see who was up there.  Maybe they would have some water.  Maybe they would give him a cool drink. Even though he was very close to the top, the rest of the trail up the slope was hard going, and took all his strength.  Patito’s little legs were aching by the time he finally reached a level place where he could see across the top of the mountain. Stopping and looking, the boy saw big rocks that were taller than trees, and he saw the shrubs and trees and high grasses that grew across the top of the mountain.  But he saw no people, no children.  So he went on, moving faster now, hoping to catch up with the voices he had heard on the trail just below.  The going was much easier now, and the boy’s legs began to feel better as he ran through the tall grass and between the rocks and trees. Patito did stop by a small spring in a cool shade of some giant trees.  He flopped down on his belly to drink some of the cold water there.  It tasted so good, and felt so good on his face, that he jumped right into the middle of the pond and splashed in the water for a few minutes, allowing the wonderful cold to sooth his scrapes, cuts and his sore feet. But he did not forget his mission.  Soon he was up and going again. Refreshed by the water in the spring, Patito made good time crossing the top of the mountain.  Suddenly, he stood looking down at the beautiful green valley below.  And beyond that, Patito could see the sparkling water of the sea.   But as he looked down the long slope, he saw no signs of other people, no children running and playing. He started down.  This side of the mountain was so much greener than the other side, where Patito’s village was.  And the pathway was easier, too. So he ran some of the distance, and then settled into a brisk walk down the slope to the beautiful valley. It was late afternoon when Patito finally arrived at the port.  It was a small town, but people were coming and going all around him.  He was so tired that he barely noticed the sparkling blue water to his right, that stretched out as far as the eyes could see.  He was determined to get to the medicine place without delay. Finally, he saw it just ahead: a small red building on the water’s edge.  He ran the rest of the distance and then up the steps to the door. Inside, the first thing Patito saw was a large yellow cat, curled asleep on an oval rug near an opposite wall.  Then he saw the woman behind the desk. It was the nice doctor lady who had helped him before. Doctor Brindle looked up from the report she was reading and saw the small boy as he entered.  She recognized his little face at once and smiled. "Hello, Patito!" she said.  Then she took another look at Patito and saw how exhausted he was.  "Here, come sit in this chair.  I’ll get you something to drink." Patito fell back into the big soft chair.  It felt so good to finally sit down!  When the lady returned with a soft drink, he thanked her for it and then he tried to drink all of it at once.  He did manage to drink half without stopping fr air. She waited patiently while he gulped down the soda, and then Doctor Brindle asked if he had come for medicine again.  Patito told her about his grandfather and the fever that would not go away. The doctor asked the boy more questions, deciding what kind of medicine the grandfather might be needing.  And then she went into another room again, and soon returned with a sandwich for the boy.  He took it and ate it hungrily. Dr. Brindle’s office was only a small clinic.  There was no hospital in the small port town.  But there was one in the city, about 50 miles away.  While Patito ate his sandwich, the doctor arranged to have one of her assistants, young man, return with the boy over the mountain to his village. "Patito, this is Alberto," Dr. … read more »

Response:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Here’s what Jesus has to say about people like Jim: From Mathew: 7:15 Watch out for false prophets, who come to you in sheeps clothing but inwardly are voracious wolves. 20 7:16 You will recognize them by their fruit.  Grapes are not gathered21 from thorns or figs from thistles, are they 22 7:17 In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad23 tree bears bad fruit. 7:18 A good tree is not able to bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree to bear good fruit. 7:19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 7:20 So then, you will recognize them by their fruit. <snip AC Thanks for that excellent reminder, Al.  I’m so glad to see you quoting from the Scriptures! I know that just recenly you had no use for the Bible or for anything Christian.

Now you are lying again. It’s your twisted religion that *claims* to be based on the teachings of Jesus that I have no use for, and you know it. Or you really *are* blind. "None are so blind as those who will not see." I’m hoping that you’ve been making progress.

Fortunately, I have not been making anything that *you* would call ‘progress’.  As you say, mortal men are not to be trusted or followed.

I’ve never said that. I’ve merely pointed out the obvious fact that *you* cannot be trusted.  But Jesus Christ our Lord can be trusted in every way.

Except that *you* get to interpret everything He taught. And *you* get to decide which of His teachings are important. (or so you believe, in your twisted little mind)  Praise God!

Not the creepy false god that *you* worship. It’s made in your image and is, not suprisingly, an ignorant and impotent jerk. Another one of the things that you don’t allow your closed mind to comprehend, is that God doesn’t need your praise. God is not some insecure, ignorant, and neurotic human being. God creates universes. Once again, Jim, I invite you to insert your sick and twisted perversion of the teachings of Jesus up the same hole that you post from. And anyone who reads your idolatrous and fearmongering verbal diarrhea knows just what hole I am referring to. Prattle away, Jim. But if you bring your spiritual poison anywhere near the children I am responsible for, you will find yourself in the local hospital in a blink, and then facing criminal trespass charges. Yes, those signs mean what they say. Any loser can post anything on the Usenet. The real world is quite a different place. Which is why you avoid it like the plague. Here’s what Jesus has to say about people like you: From Mathew: 7:15 Watch out for false prophets, who come to you in sheeps clothing but inwardly are voracious wolves. 20 7:16 You will recognize them by their fruit.  Grapes are not gathered21 from thorns or figs from thistles, are they 22 7:17 In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad23 tree bears bad fruit. 7:18 A good tree is not able to bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree to bear good fruit. 7:19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 7:20 So then, you will recognize them by their fruit. AC

Response:

RE: Jim’s comments — I know that just recenly you had no use for the Bible or for anything Christian. Now you are lying again. It’s your twisted religion that *claims* to be based on the teachings of Jesus that I have no use for, and you know it.

Well, Al, you can say whatever you will.  But these newsgroups are all archived.  Anyone can do a search under your name in the Google groups archive, for example, and see exactly what you’ve said about the Bible and about Christian faith.  There are also other sites that also pick up Christian newsgroups for archiving. You’ve denied that Jesus is the Christ, that He is Lord, and that He is God’s eternal Son.  You’ve denied the God of Scripture as the one true God. These and all the other things you’ve said in your responses to Christian believers on these newsgroups are all a matter of public record.  I remember telling you about that a long time ago, Al.  I guess you forgot. You say that you believe in a Jesus of some kind.  I urge you to press forward in your faith.  Be willing to see Jesus for who and what He truly is.  The church may very well have let you down.  And religion may not have worked for you.  But Jesus Christ will never push away anyone who comes to Him.  He will not turn you away if you turn to Him now. Whatever your fears or scars or terrors, Al, Jesus is the answer. I’m praying for you to be kept and rescued by the Lord.  And I know that others who read your posts are doing the same. Whatever you’ve said or done, I know from personal experience that the God who sent Jesus (the God of the Bible) will forgive you and make you clean and whole.  Many Christian believers have been where you are right now. Trust completely in Jesus, Al.  He’s the answer you’ve been looking for. Jim

Response:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – RE: Jim’s comments — I know that just recenly you had no use for the Bible or for anything Christian. Now you are lying again. It’s your twisted religion that *claims* to be based on the teachings of Jesus that I have no use for, and you know it. Well, Al, you can say whatever you will.  But these newsgroups are all archived.  Anyone can do a search under your name in the Google groups archive, for example, and see exactly what you’ve said about the Bible and about Christian faith.  There are also other sites that also pick up Christian newsgroups for archiving. You’ve denied that Jesus is the Christ, that He is Lord, and that He is God’s eternal Son.  You’ve denied the God of Scripture as the one true God. …

Question:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – The Pillars of Unbelief — Freud PETER KREEFT Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers who’ve had an enormous impact on our everyday life. They have also done great harm to the Christian mind. Their names: Machiavelli, the inventor of "the new morality"; Kant, the subjectivizer of Truth; Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"; Freud, the founder of the "sexual revolution"; Marx, the false Moses for the masses; and Sartre, the apostle of absurdity. The articles in this series constitute background to help us understand the main personalities, and those ideas they advocated, which have led us to the secular society. Sigmund Freud He was the Columbus of the psyche. No psychologist alive escapes his influence. Yet, along with flashes of genius, we find the most bizarre ideas in his writings — e.g., that mothers cuddle their babies only as a substitute for their desire to have sexual intercourse with them. Sigmund Freud’s most influential teaching is his sexual reductionism. As an atheist, Freud reduces God to a dream of man. As a materialist, he reduces man to his body, the human body to animal desire, desire to sexual desire and sexual desire to genital sex. All are oversimplifications. Freud was a scientist, and in some ways a great one. But he succumbed to an occupational hazard: the desire to reduce the complex to the controllable. He wanted to make psychology into a science, even an exact science. But this it can never be because its object, man, is not only an object but also a subject, an "I." Man is only an "I " as long as the "I" is in control. There are always means to subvert the "I".

Ah, but which "I" is the real one ? As Gurdjieff pointed out, man is made up of a multitude of "I"’s, all competing for control. — Jez ‘Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often led to accept, without much questioning, someone else’s version of what that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be skeptical of someone else’s description of reality.’- Howard Zinn Skype  callto://hellward

Response:

The Pillars of Unbelief — Freud Yet, with all his faults, Freud still towers above the psychologies that replaced him in popular culture.

Old demagogic ploy: claim that the guy you’re attacking is the best there is. Then, when you’ve finished attacking him, your fellow-believers will think there’s nothing to worry them anywhere else in that particular field… Despite his materialism, he explores some of the deeper mysteries of the soul. He had a real sense of tragedy, suffering and unhappiness.

Oh, and how the Christain gallows-junkie *loves* to dwell on people’s ‘tragedy, suffering and unhappiness’…!! Christains: The Pornographers of the Soul! Honest atheists are usually unhappy; dishonest atheists happy.

Not true, of course — in fact, it’s not even a formulation that *means much*; but couldn’t you just tell, reading it, what a great *hard-on* the asswipe got when he wrote it down and saw it in front of him? How he enjoyed fantasizing all that *extra* unhappiness for those nasty ‘honest atheists’ to suffer? As for Freud’s own suffering, it has to be said that to spend 16 years battling a massive intraoral cancer, with 30 operative procedures and while enduring daily manipulations of a cumbersome and painful maxillofacial prosthesis, worn to replace a resected jaw and palate, will put a crimp in *anyone’s* day. — And here’s the best bit: I wrote that up in some detail because I knew that *thousands* of Christains around the English-drooling world would use the extra time it gave them to stop and think "Serves him right, the nasty atheist! God was punishing him for his unbelief! Ha ha ha!!". (Go on, credulous filth: admit it!) Like I said: Pornographers of the Soul… Freud was an honest atheist. Where does he claim to be an atheist? Examples please.

Letter from Freud to Oskar Pfister, 1918: "Quite by the way, why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did one have to wait for a completely godless Jew?" Got that? ‘Completely godless’. Freud’s greatest work is certainly "The Interpretation of Dreams."

Morons like you only say that because it has *the most pages*… Investigating dreams as a printout of the subconscious seems obvious today. But it was utterly new to Freud’s contemporaries.

Absolute fucking bollocks: whoever wrote this horse-shit should be horse-whipped. (i) Freud’s book does not treat dreams as ‘a printout of the subconscious’: that is a grave misrepresentation of what he’s about; (ii) no-one who knew anything about psycho-analysis would use the word ’subconscious’, which has no definition and no meaning within the discipline; (iii) such investigations DO NOT ’seem obvious today’ – large numbers of investigators and huge numbers of people now have radically different views about dream formation, irreconcilable with Freud’s; and on top of that, Freud’s actual views are not well known anyhow; (iv) it was not even ‘utterly new to Freud’s contemporaries’: the very first chapter of ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ – which, quite clearly, you have never even *seen*, you pathetic, dishonest bag of shit – is a *168-page discussion* of the previous literature on the topic, from which you would have discovered that Freud’s central contention that dreams have hidden or suppressed meanings was by no means ‘utterly new’. The rest of this sub-undergraduate piss I’m not even going to comment on: as a ’summary and evaluation’ of Freud’s work, it is bad even by Christain standards, and utterly beneath contempt. You know, you people astound me: you can’t touch anything without *polluting it* with inaccuracy, incomprehension, and the droppings of your own unreasoning hatred. You are the scum of the earth, and you and every other person who joins the massive and evil industry that pumps out this manipulative misinformation should be tied to the back of a fucking truck. In the meantime, go kill yourself. Philippic.

Response:

The Pillars of Unbelief — Freud     PETER KREEFT Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers who’ve had an enormous impact on our everyday life. They have also done great harm to the Christian mind. Their names: Machiavelli, the inventor of "the new morality"; Kant, the subjectivizer of Truth; Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"; Freud, the founder of the "sexual revolution"; Marx, the false Moses for the masses; and Sartre, the apostle of absurdity. The articles in this series constitute background to help us understand the main personalities, and those ideas they advocated, which have led us to the secular society. Sigmund Freud He was the Columbus of the psyche. No psychologist alive escapes his influence. Yet, along with flashes of genius, we find the most bizarre ideas in his writings — e.g., that mothers cuddle their babies only as a substitute for their desire to have sexual intercourse with them. Sigmund Freud’s most influential teaching is his sexual reductionism. As an atheist, Freud reduces God to a dream of man. As a materialist, he reduces man to his body, the human body to animal desire, desire to sexual desire and sexual desire to genital sex. All are oversimplifications. Freud was a scientist, and in some ways a great one. But he succumbed to an occupational hazard: the desire to reduce the complex to the controllable. He wanted to make psychology into a science, even an exact science. But this it can never be because its object, man, is not only an object but also a subject, an "I." At the basis of our century’s "sexual revolution" is a demand for satisfaction and a confusion between needs and wants. All normal human beings have sexual wants or desires. But it’s simply not true, as Freud constantly assumes, that these are needs or rights; that no one can be expected to live without gratifying them; or to suppress them is psychologically unhealthy. This confusion between needs and wants stems from the denial of objective values and an objective natural moral law. No one has caused more havoc in this crucial area than Freud, especially regarding sexual morality. The modern attack on marriage and the family, for which Freud set the stage, has done more damage than any war or political revolution. For where else do we all learn the most important lesson in life — unselfish love — except in stable families who preach it by practicing it? Yet, with all his faults, Freud still towers above the psychologies that replaced him in popular culture. Despite his materialism, he explores some of the deeper mysteries of the soul. He had a real sense of tragedy, suffering and unhappiness. Honest atheists are usually unhappy; dishonest atheists happy. Freud was an honest atheist. And his honesty made him a good scientist. He believed that the mere act of raising up some repression or fear from the hidden darkness of the unconscious into the light of reason would free us from its power over us. It was the faith that truth is more powerful than illusion, light than darkness. Unfortunately, Freud classified all religion as mankind’s most fundamental illusion and materialistic scientism as his only light. We should distinguish sharply among three different dimensions in Freud. First, as an inventor of the practical, therapeutic technique of psychoanalysis, he’s a genius and every psychologist is in his debt. Just as it’s possible for a Christian philosopher like Augustine or Aquinas to use the categories of non-Christian philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, it’s possible for a Christian psychiatrist to use the techniques of Freud without subscribing to his religious views. Second, Freud as a theoretical psychologist is like Columbus, mapping out new continents but also making some serious mistakes. Some of these are excusable, as Columbus’ were, by the newness of the territory. But others are imply prejudices, such as the reduction of all guilt to pathological feeling and failure to see that faith in God could ever have anything to do with love. Third, Freud as a philosopher and religious thinker is strictly an amateur and little more than an adolescent. Let’s explore these points one by one. Freud’s greatest work is certainly "The Interpretation of Dreams." Investigating dreams as a printout of the subconscious seems obvious today. But it was utterly new to Freud’s contemporaries. His mistake was not to overemphasize the subconscious forces that move us, but to underemphasize their depth and complexity, as an explorer of a new continent might mistake it for simply a large island. Freud discovered that hysterical patients who seemed to have no rational cause for their disorders were helped by what he called "the talking cure," using "free association" and paying attention to "Freudian slips" as clues from the subconscious. In a word, the thing worked despite the inadequacies of the theory behind it. On the level of psychological theory, Freud divided the psyche into the id, the ego and the super ego. This seems at first to be quite similar to the traditional and commonsensical division into appetites, will and intellect (and conscience) that began with Plato. But there are crucial differences. First, Freud’s "super-ego" is not the intellect or conscience, but the unfree, passive reflection in the individual’s psyche of society’s restrictions on his desires — "thou shalt nots." What we take to be our own insight into real good and evil is only a mirror of man-made social laws, according to Freud. Second, the "ego" is not free will but a mere facade. Freud denied the existence of free will, he was a determinist and saw man as a complex animal-machine. Finally, the "id" ("it") is the only real self, according to Freud, and it’s comprised simply of animal desires. It is impersonal; thus the name "it." Freud thus is denying the existence of a real personality, individual I-ness. Just as he denied God ("I Am"), he denies God’s image, the human "I." Freud’s philosophical ideas are most candidly expressed in his two most famous anti-religious books, "Moses and Monotheism" and "The Future of an Illusion." Like Marx, he dismissed all religion as infantile without seriously examining its claims and arguments. But he did come up with a detailed explanation of the supposed origin of this "illusion." It has basically four parts: ignorance, fear, fantasy and guilt. As ignorance, religion is a pre-scientific guess at how nature works: If there is thunder, there must be a Thunderer, a Zeus. As fear, religion is our invention of a heavenly substitute for the earthly father when he dies, gets old, goes away or send his children out of the secure home into the frightening world of responsibility. As fantasy, God is the product of wish-fulfillment that there’s an all-powerful providential force behind the terrifyingly impersonal appearances of life. And as guilt, God is the ensurer of moral behavior. Freud’s explanation of the origin of guilt is one of the weakest parts of his theory. It amounts to the story that once, long ago, a son killed his father, the head of a great tribe. That primal murder has haunted the human race’s subconscious memory every since. But this is no explanation at all; Why did the first murderer feel guilt? Freud’s most philosophical book was his last, "Civilization and its Discontents." In it he raised the great question of the summum bonum — the greatest good, the meaning of life and human happiness. He concluded as Ecclesiastes did, that it is unattainable. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," he says in effect. Instead, he promised to move us through successful psychotherapy, "from unmanageable unhappiness to manageable unhappiness." One reason for his pessimism was his belief that there’s a contradiction inherent in the human condition; this is the point of his title, "Civilization and its Discontents." On the one hand, we are animals seeking pleasure, motivated only by "the pleasure principle." On the other hand, we need the order of civilization to save us from the pain of chaos. But the restrictions of civilization curtail our desires. So the very thing we invented as a means to our happiness becomes our obstacle. Toward the end of his life, Freud’s thought became even darker and more mysterious as he discovered thanatos, the death wish. The pleasure principle leads us in two opposite directions: eros and thanatos. Eros leads us forward, into life, love, the future and hope. Thanatos leads us back to the womb, where alone we had no pain. We resent life and our mothers for birthing us into pain. This mother-hate parallels the famous "Oedipus complex" or subconscious desire to murder our father and marry our mother — which is a perfect explanation of Freud’s own atheism, resenting Father God and marrying Mother Earthiness. As Freud was dying, Hitler was coming to power. Freud prophetically saw the power of the death wish in the modern world and was unsure which of these two "heavenly forces," as he called them, would win out. He died an atheist but almost a mystic. He had enough of the pagan in him to offer some profound insights, usually mixed up with outrageous blind spots. He calls to mind C.S. Lewis’ description of pagan mythology: "gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility." What raises Freud far above Marx and secular humanism is his insight into the demon in man, the tragic dimension of life and our need for salvation. Unfortunately, he saw the Judaism he rejected and the Christianity he scorned as fairy tales, too good to be true. His tragic sense was rooted in his separation between the true and the good, "the reality principle" and happiness. Only God can join them at their summit. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Kreeft, Peter. "The Pillars of Unbelief — Freud" The National … read more »

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Question:

The Pillars of Unbelief — Sartre     PETER KREEFT Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers who’ve had an enormous impact on our everyday life. They have also done great harm to the Christian mind. The articles in this series constitute background to help us understand the main personalities, and those ideas they advocated, which have led us to the secular society. Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre may be the most famous atheist of the 20th century. As such, he qualifies for anyone’s short list of "pillars of unbelief." Yet he may have done more to drive fence-sitters toward the faith than most Christian apologists. For Sartre has made atheism such a demanding, almost unendurable, experience that few can bear it. Comfortable atheists who read him become uncomfortable atheists, and uncomfortable atheism is a giant step closer to God. In his own words, "Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position." For this we should be grateful to him. He called his philosophy "existentialism" because of the thesis that "existence precedes essence." What this means concretely is that "man is nothing else than what he makes of himself." Since there is no God to design man, man has no blueprint, no essence. His essence or nature comes not from God as Creator but from his own free choice. There’s profound insight here, though it is immediately subverted. The insight is the fact that man by his free choices determines who he will be. God indeed creates what all men are. But the individual fashions his own unique individuality. God makes our what but we make our who. God gives us the dignity of being present at our own creation, or co-creation; He associates us with Himself in the task of co-creating our selves. He creates only the objective raw material, through heredity and environment. I shape it into the final form of myself through my free choices. Unfortunately, Sartre contends that this disproves God, for if there were a God, man would be reduced to a mere artifact of God, and thus would not be free. He constantly argues that human freedom and dignity require atheism. His attitude is like that of a cowboy in a Western, saying to God as to an enemy cowboy: "This town ain’t big enough for both you and me. One of us has to leave." Thus Sartre’s legitimate concern with human freedom and his insight into how it makes persons fundamentally different from mere things lead him to atheism because (1) he confuses freedom with independence, and because (2) the only God he can conceive of is one who would take away human freedom rather than creating and maintaining it — a sort of cosmic fascist. Furthermore, (3) Sartre makes the adolescent mistake of equating freedom with rebellion. He says freedom is only "the freedom to say no." But this is not the only freedom. There’s also the freedom to say yes. Sartre thinks we compromise our freedom when we say yes, when we choose to affirm the values we’ve been taught by our parents, our society, or our Church. So what Sartre means by freedom is very close to what the beatniks of the `50s and the hippies of the `60s called "doing your own thing," and what the Me generation of the `70s called "looking out for No. 1." Another concept Sartre takes seriously but misuses is the idea of responsibility. He thinks that belief in God would necessarily compromise human responsibility, for we would then blame God rather than ourselves for what we are. But that’s simply not so. My heavenly Father, like my earthly father, is not responsible for my choices or the character I shape by means of those choices; I am. And the fact of my responsibility no more disproves the existence of my heavenly Father than it disproves the existence of my earthly father. Sartre has a keen awareness of evil and human perversity. He says, "We have learned to take Evil seriously…Evil is not an appearance…Knowing its causes does not dispel it. Evil cannot be redeemed." Yet he also says that since there is no God and since we therefore create our own values and laws, there really is no evil: "To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil." So Sartre gives both too much reality to evil ("Evil cannot be redeemed") and too little ("We can never choose evil"). Sartre’s atheism does not merely say that God doesn’t exist, but that God is impossible. He at least pays some homage to the biblical notion of God as "I Am by calling it the most self-contradictory idea ever imagined, "the impossible synthesis" of being-for-itself (subjective personality, the "I") with being-in-itself (objective eternal perfection, the "Am"). God means the perfect person, and this is for Sartre a contradiction of terms. Perfect things or ideas, like Justice or Truth, are possible; and imperfect persons, like Zeus or Apollo, are possible. But the perfect person is impossible. Zeus is possible but not real. God is unique among gods: not only unreal but impossible. Since God is impossible and since God is love, love is impossible. The most shocking thing in Sartre is probably his denial of the possibility of genuine, altruistic love. In place of God, most atheists substitute human love as the thing they believe in. But Sartre argues that this is impossible. Why? Because if there is no God, each individual is God. But there can be only one God, one absolute. Thus, all interpersonal relationships are fundamentally relationships of rivalry. Here, Sartre echoes Machiavelli. Each of us necessarily plays God to others; each of us, as the author of the play of his own life, necessarily reduces others to characters in his drama. There is a little word which ordinary people think denotes something real and which lovers think denotes something magical. Sartre thinks it denotes something impossible and illusory. It is the word "we." There can be no "we-subject," no community, no self-forgetful love if each of us is always trying to be God, the one single unique I-subject. Sartre’s most famous play, "No Exit," puts three dead people in a room and watches them make hell for each other simply by playing God to each other — not in the sense of exerting external power over each other but simply by knowing each other as objects. The shocking lesson of the play is that "hell is other people." It takes a profound mind to say something as profoundly false as that. In truth, hell is precisely the absence of other people, human and divine. Hell is total loneliness. Heaven is other people, because heaven is where God is, and God is Trinity. God is love, God is "other persons." Sartre’s tough-minded honesty makes him almost attractive, despite his repellant conclusions like the meaninglessness of life, the arbitrariness of values and the impossibility of love. But his honesty, however deep it may have lodged in his character, was made trivial and meaningless because of this denial of God and thus of objective Truth. If there is no divine mind, there is no truth except the truth each of us makes of himself. So if there’s nothing for me to be honest about except me, what meaning does honesty have? Yet we cannot help rendering a mixed verdict on Sartre, and being gratified by his very repulsiveness — for it flows from his consistency. He shows us the true face of atheism: absurdity (that’s the abstract word), and nausea (that’s the concrete image he uses, and the title of his first and greatest novel). "Nausea" is the story of a man who, after arduous searching, finds the terrible truth that life has no meaning, that it’s simply nauseating excess, like vomit or excrement. (Sartre deliberately tends toward obscene images because he feels life itself is obscene.) We cannot help agreeing with William Barrett when he says that "to those who are ready to use this [nausea] as an excuse for tossing out the whole Sartrian philosophy, we may point out that it is better to encounter one’s existence in disgust than never to encounter it at all." In other words, Sartre’s importance is like that of Ecclesiastes: He asks the greatest of all questions, courageously and unswervingly, and we can admire him for that. Unfortunately, he also gives the worst possible answer to it, as Ecclesiastes did: "Vanity of vanity, all is vanity." We can only pity him for that, and with him the many other atheists who are clear-headed enough to see as he did that "without God all things are permissible" — but nothing has meaning. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Kreeft, Peter. "The Pillars of Unbelief — Sartre" The National Catholic Register, (January – February 1988). To subscribe to The National Catholic Register call 1-800-421-3230. THE AUTHOR Peter Kreeft has written extensively (over 25 books) in the areas of Christian apologetics. He teaches at Boston College in Boston Massachusetts. Peter Kreeft is on the Advisory Board of the Catholic Educator’s Resource Center. http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0013.html

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The Pillars of Unbelief — Sartre

you forgot Feuerbach

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The Pillars of Unbelief — Sartre

<etc. … Just another post-and-run troll.

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Question:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Rolling Stone The evolutionary pseudo Christian claims that the geological column was layed down over millions/billions of years by natural uniform means.  This gives credence to the long times necessary for evolution to take place by chance and accident and is the very foundation of their evolutionary theory(read  opinion).  The god they worship could not have caused this all to happen in a short time by supernatural means they claim. When you ask these same people if they believe that Christ was resurrected after three days and three nights in the tomb they will most assuredly tell you "yes" because they know that this is the very foundation of the Christian faith and without it there is no basis whatsoever. Yet they fail to see that natrual forces did not move the stone that covered the entrance to the tomb in which the Lord Jesus Christ was placed after His crusifixition. If God can, and did, move this stone by supernatural means why could He have not moved all other stone by the same means?<

God can do anything, any way He likes; He could have done just that thing. It is just that, in the view of many, if not all, He did not.

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God can do anything, any way He likes; He could have done just that thing. It is just that, in the view of many, if not all, He did not.

And part of his methodology is – of course evolution In evolution we are witnessing one of the mechanisms of the Divine. To deny evolution in this generation is to deny God and to replace him with a fascist myth based on prejudice and denial

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Rolling Stone The evolutionary pseudo Christian claims that the geological column was layed down over millions/billions of years by natural uniform means.  This gives credence to the long times necessary for evolution

Depends what you mean by "natural uniform means."  What geologists mean by it today is that the laws of physics remain the same now as back when the sediments were laid down. to take place by chance and accident and is the very foundation of their evolutionary theory(read  opinion).  The god they worship could not have caused this all to happen in a short time by supernatural means they claim.

First of all, God could have done anything He wanted to do.  That’s never been a subject of debate with me.  The question is, then, what DID He do.   And you propose to answer that question by misinterpreting ancient myth and allegory, while I propose to answer it by looking at what He did. When you ask these same people if they believe that Christ was resurrected after three days and three nights in the tomb they will most assuredly tell you "yes" because they know that this is the very foundation of the Christian faith and without it there is no basis whatsoever.

Of course. Yet they fail to see that natrual forces did not move the stone that covered the entrance to the tomb in which the Lord Jesus Christ was placed after His crusifixition. If God can, and did, move this stone

I never said they did. by supernatural means why could He have not moved all other stone by the same means? Wrong thinking seems to be the hallmark of these poor lost souls does it not?

I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t see God moving stones around helter skelter all day long.  He only seems to do it during those events we have come to call special miracles. Now, taken as a whole, the creation might be termed a special miracle, I suppose.  But its details–what we call nature–ARE what God created and trying to tell me that He created something totally different from what He manifestly DID create is pretty silly, don’t you think? Have you worked out why the GULO gene is in the condition it is in in humans and chimps?  Can you tell me the YEC explanation for this? — Dave Oldridge+ ICQ 1800667 A false witness is worse than no witness at all.

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Rolling Stone The evolutionary pseudo Christian claims that the geological column was layed down over millions/billions of years by natural uniform means. Actually, this was first discovered by Christian geologists. RS

Be so kind as to supply a reference to this, please.

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Rolling Stone The evolutionary pseudo Christian claims that the geological column was layed down over millions/billions of years by natural uniform means.

Actually, this was first discovered by Christian geologists. RS

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– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Rolling Stone The evolutionary pseudo Christian claims that the geological column was layed down over millions/billions of years by natural uniform means.  This gives credence to the long times necessary for evolution to take place by chance and accident and is the very foundation of their evolutionary theory(read  opinion).  The god they worship could not have caused this all to happen in a short time by supernatural means they claim. When you ask these same people if they believe that Christ was resurrected after three days and three nights in the tomb they will most assuredly tell you "yes" because they know that this is the very foundation of the Christian faith and without it there is no basis whatsoever. Yet they fail to see that natrual forces did not move the stone that covered the entrance to the tomb in which the Lord Jesus Christ was placed after His crusifixition. If God can, and did, move this stone by supernatural means why could He have not moved all other stone by the same means? Wrong thinking seems to be the hallmark of these poor lost souls does it not?

So you are saying god rearranged all of the earth’s layers to purposefully fool modern science? — Read the Bible, because we need more atheists.

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– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Rolling Stone The evolutionary pseudo Christian claims that the geological column was layed down over millions/billions of years by natural uniform means.  This gives credence to the long times necessary for evolution to take place by chance and accident and is the very foundation of their evolutionary theory(read  opinion).  The god they worship could not have caused this all to happen in a short time by supernatural means they claim. When you ask these same people if they believe that Christ was resurrected after three days and three nights in the tomb they will most assuredly tell you "yes" because they know that this is the very foundation of the Christian faith and without it there is no basis whatsoever. Yet they fail to see that natrual forces did not move the stone that covered the entrance to the tomb in which the Lord Jesus Christ was placed after His crusifixition. If God can, and did, move this stone by supernatural means why could He have not moved all other stone by the same means? Wrong thinking seems to be the hallmark of these poor lost souls does it not?

The sad fact is that the resurrection accounts are very unlikely in their Biblical form.  Belief in their historical authenticity is more based on a particular superstitious attitude to the Bible than on the reasoning of the free intellect, which otherwise is held up as the gift of God to man. There are obvious discrepancies in the Gospel accounts between Gospels which would seem to indicate that the story evolved over the first century of Christianity to the form in which we have it today It is highly unlikely that the body of a potential martyr would have been handed over to "Joseph or Arimathea" and equally unlikely that Joseph even existed.  It is far more likely that both Joseph and Judas are fictional characters that developed out of a need to give a backdrop to Pauls invention – the Eucharist – through which the nature of Jesus is exploited by Paul in a Roman pagan fashion and Jesuses teachings virtually ignored. What is far more likely is that Jesus was thrown by his Roman executors into an unmarked criminal’s grave, but that the disciples, initially dispersed, to Galilee came to the conclusion that somehow he had indeed survived death and thereby validated his teachings. Jesuses teachings have survived all this smokescreen because they are far more powerful than Pauline rubbish about his "nature"

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Rolling Stone The evolutionary pseudo Christian claims that the geological column was layed down over millions/billions of years by natural uniform means.  This gives credence to the long times necessary for evolution to take place by chance and accident and is the very foundation of their evolutionary theory(read  opinion).  The god they worship could not have caused this all to happen in a short time by supernatural means they claim. When you ask these same people if they believe that Christ was resurrected after three days and three nights in the tomb they will most assuredly tell you "yes" because they know that this is the very foundation of the Christian faith and without it there is no basis whatsoever. Yet they fail to see that natrual forces did not move the stone that covered the entrance to the tomb in which the Lord Jesus Christ was placed after His crusifixition. If God can, and did, move this stone by supernatural means why could He have not moved all other stone by the same means? Wrong thinking seems to be the hallmark of these poor lost souls does it not?

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Question:

Ayn Rand: The Ayngriest Roguette A Missive on the Ayngry Prophetess of Objectivism "Safari Man" In Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things the author briefly mentions that at one time in the United States the influence of the writings of Ayn Rand was second only to the Bible. I can well believe this statistic because Ms. Rand’s writing has unquestionably had a tremendous influence in my own life. It is no accident that her best-selling works have often been written and spoken of in biblical proportions. To my perspective, Rand’s books can serve to temporarily fill the void in the life of a person who has rejected religion, as I did when I was an atheist years ago. The Webster’s World Encyclopedia 2000 (Multimedia Edition) ironically refers to Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged as "the bible of her Objectivism [philosophy]." Ms. Rand was somewhat of a heroine of mine in my college days and I recall quoting bits and pieces of her writing back then as if they were scripture verses. Although Shermer goes on to asseverate in Weird Things that Ms. Rand manipulated her reverent "disciples" in much the same fashion that modern day religious cult leaders have, I do not wish to cover this subject in great detail in this paper. Nor do I wish to comment very much on her political views or to dissect her economic views on capitalism. It would be impossible to thoroughly analyze her ideas without mentioning a few of her political and economic views, but I intend to focus primarily on those elements of Ayn Rand’s famous philosophy of Objectivism which are inimical to some of the core attitudes and beliefs of the Christian faith. In keeping with the humorous spirit of Tekton Apologetics, I have taken to impishly referring to Ayn Rand as The Ayngriest Roguette. Back when I was in college, a clever fellow who worked for the campus newspaper once remarked to me after I had been ranting effusively about Ayn Rand that if I had read her smaller books first I wouldn’t have needed to read her bigger books. To my chagrin, I soon discovered that he was absolutely right. If one has read Rand’s small non-fiction works such as The Virtue of Selfishness or For The New Intellectual, her massive fictional works The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged can be blithely ignored without missing out on a great deal of her philosophy. While I was at the bookstore recently, my heart sank as I realized just how elephantine Atlas Shrugged actually is. The paperback is 1,074 pages long!! After I made my purchases of this and some of Rand’s smaller works I trudged away thinking, What have you gotten yourself into? Whatever else one might say about Ms. Rand, she was forcefully articulate in her writing. Despite her atheism, her inflamed rhetoric was similar in effect to that of a modern day prophet with commandments set in stone. Her work has been practically canonized by her admirers. She tended to treat all opposing viewpoints in her path like a solitary intellectual juggernaut, deeming the best of them to be completely worthless and crushing all of them mercilessly. Rand’s fictional saints of Objectivism all walked the moral high road with a palpably fatalistic air, while the lesser denizens of society merely wallowed in the muck by the wayside. The ethical sinners in Rand’s universe were never content with their miserable lot; no, they were also hell-bent on corrupting the virtue of her paragons of righteousness. Rand’s selfish heroes and heroines always seemed to be lean, angular, and nattily dressed while running about being brilliant capitalists; her altruistic rogues, on the other hand, always seemed to be weak-chinned, slovenly, or spineless jellyfish carelessly sabotaging the human race with their incompetence. I can’t really fault her for making use of complimentary physical descriptions to describe her champions and unappealing physical descriptions to describe her villains– Hollywood has made an industry out of doing as much, after all. But the overall impression that Ms. Rand gave me in her writing was that "her kind of people" were right and everyone who disagreed were wrong. | Selfishness is Good, Altruism is Evil Ayn Rand is not quite as popular today as she once was. Even among atheists the late Ms. Rand has become a bit of a pariah. Perhaps it is because of the cult allegations swirling around Objectivists, or perhaps it is because people who are looking for a namby-pamby relativistic moral and ethical system will not find one in Ayn Rand’s writing. Her ethical philosophy was couched in absolute terms and she presented it as starkly as a fist in the face of a society she viewed as ethically bankrupt. In an essay entitled "The Cult of Moral

One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bank- ruptcy of today’s culture, is a certain fashionable attitude towards moral issues, best summarized as: "There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays." (1) In other words, Rand argued that in order for there to be shades of gray, black and white MUST exist in matters of right and wrong. In this regard, Ms. Rand theoretically stands in agreement with Christian morality. But practically speaking, there is a big difference between Christianity and what Rand accepts as absolutely moral. In Atlas Shrugged, for example, Ms. Rand appears to have a peculiarly relativistic view of adultery. Among brilliant and passionate industrialists extramarital sex is perfectly excusable but among everyone else it is tawdry and contemptible. In The Fountainhead, Ms. Rand even comes dangerously close to sanctioning rape. Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism is complex and wide-ranging, and this paper is not intended to be a complete treatment of it. Ms. Rand once summed up the essence of her philosophy, called "Objectivism," while standing on one foot: Metaphysics: Objective Reality Epistemology: Reason Ethics: Self-Interest Politics: Capitalism The very first component to understand about the Objectivist ethics which is inimical to Christianity is that selfishness, or "rational self-interest" as she would put it, is a virtue. "Greed is good… Greed works," was the sentiment of the villainous trader played by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street; but in the topsy-turvy ethical framework of Objectivism, such blatant avarice becomes understandable and even admirable. In the beginning of The Virtue of Selfishness Ms. Rand began with a defense of the title of her book by saying: In popular usage, the word "selfishness" is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures up is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratifi- cation of the mindless whims of any immediate moment. Yet the exact meaning and the dictionary definition of the word "selfishness" is concern with one’s own interests. This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interest is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions. (2) I do not know which dictionary Ms. Rand used for the definition of "selfishness" here. But assuming for a moment that there was only one dictionary with only one definition for "selfishness," is it not apparent that the brute in Rand’s illustration is at least excessively selfish at the expense of others? If so, such an analysis would indeed involve a judgement based on ethical considerations. One can haggle over the semantic usage of the word "selfish" in the popular or unpopular mind ad infinitum, but most reasonable people would agree that this particular brute has gone too far to further his own interests and is indeed selfish. But Ms. Rand argued vociferously that it was not a semantic issue at all and that the popular definition besmirched the purity of the concept she wished to convey. Ms. Rand might view this "modern-day" definition of "selfish" as a corruption of the simplistic one from her dictionary given above but I offer this entry from Webster’s World Encyclopedia 2000 (Multimedia Edition) to the reader for consideration: selfish "deficient in consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure; actuated by self-interest." In the Christian hierarchy of moral service, serving one’s fellow man and serving God are considered higher virtues than merely serving one’s own self. But the higher can not exist without the lower; thus, serving one’s own interests selfishly does have value and can be put in its proper place at the lowest rung of the ladder. According to this view, the morally (some would say spiritually) advanced Christian practices serving one’s own interests while being constantly mindful of the needs of one’s neighbors– and vigilantly springing into action to help whenever possible. In doing so, the Christian also believes that such moral service towards others is also serving God by extension. Meeting one’s own needs thereby becomes a virtue insofar as it is done so with an overall attitude of service to others. Preferably one does not remain at the lowest rung of the ladder forever. But Ms. Rand would have none of this. Such an attitude was in her eyes the product of savages and wild-eyed mystics and therefore thoroughly contemptible among so-called rational men. As Dagny Taggart, her heroine in Atlas Shrugged, put it "I’m not interested in helping anybody. I want to make money." Such a criteria of behavior, taken alone, would make no distinction between being Vice President of a railroad and or a drug dealer selling heroin. To be fair, Dagny Taggart would never do this in Ayn Rand’s eyes because her heroine would never do anything which furthers the destruction of another individual. But an unwillingness to harm others is not quite the same as a willingness to help others; such an individual has a foot halfway between the rung of service to … read more »

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Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. You know you’re doing something right when you generate that much hate.

What a good philosophy. In any case, it’s not actually Rand that "generates the hate" — she’s just another nutcase who worked out her personal issues in public, but hey we can all ignore her, she’s dead. The real problem is her zombie followers, many of whom try to not be ignored, and apparently consider being _mind bendingly annoying_ a valid technique to this end; if you’ve ever been a college sophomore, you’ll probably have met some of them.  Granted, they’re no worse than the jesus freaks (at least the randroids don’t usually have acoustic guitar sing-alongs in public; …shudder…). [Working out my personal issues in a public forum,] -Miles — Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.

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Ayn Rand: The Ayngriest Roguette

Adam Smith thinks that freemarket solution is the best solution 95% of the time, that the Church are run by a bunch of morons. and had he been Rynd comtemporary, would have regarded her as a complete loonie. Where does he fit in your pictuer?   —– Yang a.a. #28 AthD (h.c.) conferred by the regents of the LCL a.a. pastor #-273.15, the most frigid church of Celcius nee Kelvin EAC Econometric Forecast and Sorcery Division Proudly plonked by Lani Girl and Crazyalec The Bush ‘balanced’ budget:             1.2 trillion and worsening The Bush ‘economic’ policy:             -3 million jobs and counting The Bush Iraq lie:                      -1028 GIs, one friend’s co-worker’s son and mounting Having Bush fuck up my country:           Worthless

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What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. I’ve never read any Rand, so I’m not familiar enough with her writings to hate her.  I can truthfully say that I am supremely indifferent toward her.  Does that count?

Shorter Ayn Rand: "capitalists" like Ken Lay are gods: they never do anything wrong- thy’ll never pollute rivers, manipulate the market, or cheat people. Who needs laws? —– Yang a.a. #28 AthD (h.c.) conferred by the regents of the LCL a.a. pastor #-273.15, the most frigid church of Celcius nee Kelvin EAC Econometric Forecast and Sorcery Division Proudly plonked by Lani Girl and Crazyalec The Bush ‘balanced’ budget:             1.2 trillion and worsening The Bush ‘economic’ policy:             -3 million jobs and counting The Bush Iraq lie:                      -1028 GIs, one friend’s co-worker’s son and mounting Having Bush fuck up my country:           Worthless

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- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. You know you’re doing something right when you generate that much hate. I personnaly having read Ayn Rand don’t really know what is the big deal there, it’s all about common sense. I can’t say I "hate" Ayn Rand, but as a writer, she’s excruciating (IMO), and her philosophy is as untenable as Marxism or any other "-ism" that ignores how humans actually behave in the real world.

I’m an atheist and I don’t adore her or hate her, but I do hate her turgid, heavy-handed writing style.    And, having read some biographical info on her, I found her to be an ego-maniacal control freak.  I much rather read Mark Twain. BK AA#1992

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- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. You know you’re doing something right when you generate that much hate. I personnaly having read Ayn Rand don’t really know what is the big deal there, it’s all about common sense. I can’t say I "hate" Ayn Rand, but as a writer, she’s excruciating (IMO), and her philosophy is as untenable as Marxism or any other "-ism" that ignores how humans actually behave in the real world.

I remember reading Rand in college and laughing at how cardboard her characters were, how utterly propagandistic and unrealistic her ideas were and how corny she was.  All in all, piss poor. Silly utopian SF at best. I have never been able to take Objectivists seriously since then. — Kerry – two medals a silver and bronze star. Bush? Well they don’t give medals for going AWOL, missing your medical and getting grounded or falling off of a bar stool. Kerry – a hero, Bush – a zero Cheerful Charlie

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– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. You know you’re doing something right when you generate that much hate. I personnaly having read Ayn Rand don’t really know what is the big deal there, it’s all about common sense. I can’t say I "hate" Ayn Rand, but as a writer, she’s excruciating (IMO), and her philosophy is as untenable as Marxism or any other "-ism" that ignores how humans actually behave in the real world.

Hmm sure Atlas shrugged is bloated but the Fountainhead is far from excruciating. As for her philosophy it isn’t all that untenable as far as I can tell (at least not at the level of untenability of say Catholism).  Some humans actually behave the way she describes, they are not the masses off course but then again that’s not what she strived for (some form of excellence in the human spirit in action). Exceptionnal artists, business men, atheletes still however exist in this mediocre world.

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Next time, please point out that you have changed the followup. Original newsgroups restored. I also notice that you removed the context of the paragraph quoted. In spite of what theists imagine, being atheist at whatever level isn’t anger at a deity they don’t believe in anyway, irrational hatred for the truth, etc. The vast majority of attempts by theists to describe atheists, are based on premises that don’t even apply to them which is why they keep getting it wrong. In site of what some atheists imagine, not all theists believe that being atheist is anger at a deity they don’t believe in. Your attgempt to describe theists is based on premisses that don’t apply, which is why you got it wrong.

Yet so many of them tell us to our faces, and theists who speak out against this are conspicuous by their absence. One can only assume that they tacitly agree because they don’t speak out. It is very rare, because it is a rare theist who is able to think outside the box of his/her religion. Try putting away your prejudices and stereotypes, and deal with what people actually say, rather than something you imagine they might have said.

What "prejudices and stereotypes"? It’s a conclusion from observation.

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In spite of what theists imagine, being atheist at whatever level isn’t anger at a deity they don’t believe in anyway, irrational hatred for the truth, etc. The vast majority of attempts by theists to describe atheists, are based on premises that don’t even apply to them which is why they keep getting it wrong.

In site of whjat some atheists imagine, not all theists believe that being atheist is anger at a deity they don’t believe in. Your attgempt to describe theists is based on premisses that don’t apply, which is why you got it wrong. Try putting away your prejudices and stereotypes, and deal with what people actually say, rather than something you imagine they might have said. — Steve Hayes Web: http://www.geocities.com/hayesstw/stevesig.htm      http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/books.htm

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– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. You know you’re doing something right when you generate that much hate. I personnaly having read Ayn Rand don’t really know what is the big deal there, it’s all about common sense.

I can’t say I "hate" Ayn Rand, but as a writer, she’s excruciating (IMO), and her philosophy is as untenable as Marxism or any other "-ism" that ignores how humans actually behave in the real world.

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What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know.

You know you’re doing something right when you generate that much hate. I personnaly having read Ayn Rand don’t really know what is the big deal there, it’s all about common sense. I’ve never read any Rand, so I’m not familiar enough with her writings to hate her.  I can truthfully say that I am supremely indifferent toward her.  Does that count? Yes!  So should most folks be, if they’re rational and have any notion of social reality.

What an enlightened view…. it’s so refreshing. To sum up if you are rationnal don’t read Ayn Rand and also (for the religious kiddies) please don’t eat from the tree in the middle of the garden.

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What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. I’ve never read any Rand, so I’m not familiar enough with her writings to hate her.  I can truthfully say that I am supremely indifferent toward her.  Does that count?

I’m in the same boat as you. — Robyn Resident Witchypoo #1557

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Ayn Rand: The Ayngriest Roguette <snip I have as little regard for Rand as you do, no doubt for different reasons. How is that relevant to atheism? The morons imagine that atheists need prophets, leaders etc to tell us how to think. It projects how their religion tells them what to think.

Also their reasoning works something like this. Josef Stalin was a Communist and all Communists are atheists. Therefore all atheists must be Communists and just like Josef Stalin. "Most illogical." as Mr. Spock would say. — John Hachmann aa #1782 -The ability to change one’s mind, ideas, and opinions when confronted with new facts is the sign of the rational and intelligent. The inability to do so is the hallmark of the dimwitted and the fanatic. This applies not only to science and philosophy, but also to politics.-

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What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. I’ve never read any Rand, so I’m not familiar enough with her writings to hate her.  I can truthfully say that I am supremely indifferent toward her.  Does that count?

Yes!  So should most folks be, if they’re rational and have any notion of social reality. — Crow

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Ayn Rand: The Ayngriest Roguette <snip I have as little regard for Rand as you do, no doubt for different reasons. How is that relevant to atheism? The morons imagine that atheists need prophets, leaders etc to tell us how to think. It projects how their religion tells them what to think.

Too true.  I was an atheist long before I encountere AR, because of simple common sense — a rare commodity, alas. — Crow

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What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. I’ve never read any Rand, so I’m not familiar enough with her writings to hate her.  I can truthfully say that I am supremely indifferent toward her.  Does that count?

Me too.  Never even heard of her before that episode of South Park where the policeman learns to read, but decides never to do so again after reading her book.  I was quite surprised to find out she was an atheist.

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I can not accept any philosophy which elevates the wisdom of man above the wisdom of God

It seems to me that Ayn Rand and the Pope (plug in the religious leader of your choice) both claim the same impossible goal-CERTAINTY. There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer. Gertrude Stein Or, Once we have solved all the problems of Science, Philosophy and Religion we will still be left with the problems of life.   Wittgenstein                  

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[...] In Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things the author briefly mentions that at one time in the United States the influence of the writings of Ayn Rand was second only to the Bible.

Woo hoo. So it wasn’t quite as weird as the Bible? Is that any surprise? Not what you meant? Try reading the Old Testament sometime. Weird as hell. [...] This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need, but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3:16-18)

Love, love, love. Jesus, love, blah, blah. Your tithe pays mostly for the upkeep of the church that serves you as a sort of country club on Sundays. So you say Jesus came and died to make up for the Original sin of Adam and Eve? Huh? No one believes in Adam and Eve anymore. It is a childish fairy tale. Human evolution was a long and slow process. Why don’t you grow up and put the fairy tales aside?

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Ayn Rand: The Ayngriest Roguette <snip I have as little regard for Rand as you do, no doubt for different reasons. How is that relevant to atheism? The morons imagine that atheists need prophets, leaders etc to tell us how to think. It projects how their religion tells them what to think. Also their reasoning works something like this. Josef Stalin was a Communist and all Communists are atheists. Therefore all atheists must be Communists and just like Josef Stalin. "Most illogical." as Mr. Spock would say.

So perhaps one needs something like the distinction between Mislims and Islamists for atheists as well. In Stalin’s time the League of Militant Atheists was very big. But just as not all Muslims are militant, so not all atheists are militant. I’m sure most atheists are atheists by default, and just happen not to have a God or gods in their lives, but couldn’t care less whether anyone else does. The militant atheists are another matter. I’m not sure whether Ayn Rand was a militant atheist, though. She claimed to be an atheist, it is true, but put a great deal of time and energy andf effort into promoting the cult of Mammon. And her followers seem to have had the creed "There is no god but Mammon, and Ayn is his prophet." ObBook: "Drawing down the moon", Adler. The Church of All Worlds.          Source: Adler 1979:269.     "The Church of All Worlds has been called everything from ‘a   sub-culture science-fiction Grok-flock’ to ‘a bunch of crazy   hippie freaks.’ But the real origins of CAW lead back to a   small group of friends who, along with untold numbers of   middle-class high school and college students in the late   1950s and early 1960s, became infatuated with the romantic,   heroic, compelling right-wing ideas of Ayn Rand. It is a sign   of the peculiarity of North American consciousness that   thousands of young students, at one time or another, have   become possessed by her novels – Atlas shrugged, The   Fountainhead, and Anthem. Jerome Tucille, in his witty,   tongue-in-cheek tour of the libertarian right, ‘It usually   begins with Ayn Rand’, could not have been more precise in his   choice of title. He noted that Rand’s works were particularly   appealing ‘to those in the process of escaping a regimented   religious background.’ Despite the author’s rigid philosophy   of Objectivism, she stirred a libertarian impulse, and ‘Atlas   shrugged’ became a ‘New Marxism of the Right’." Objectivism and ecology.          Source: Adler 1979:270.     "The novels of Ayn Rand were seeds that sprouted and have   many strange fruits, most of which must have horrified her.   CAW <Church of all Worlds is an example. It is a religion,   and Rand has consistently been intensely atheist. It has long   considered ecology the supreme religious activity and study,   and the harmony of human beings in the biosphere the goal of   highest priority. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, has praised   pollution as a sign of human progress. Her heroines have wept   with joy at billboards and saluted smokestacks, regarding them   as a sign of the human struggle against nature. She calls   people concerned about ecology ‘antilife’ and ‘antimind’, and   condemns Native Americans as ’savages’. She has even called   smoking cigarettes a moral duty that aids the capitalist   system." — Steve Hayes Web: http://www.geocities.com/hayesstw/stevesig.htm      http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/books.htm

Response:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Ayn Rand: The Ayngriest Roguette <snip I have as little regard for Rand as you do, no doubt for different reasons. How is that relevant to atheism? The morons imagine that atheists need prophets, leaders etc to tell us how to think. It projects how their religion tells them what to think. Also their reasoning works something like this. Josef Stalin was a Communist and all Communists are atheists. Therefore all atheists must be Communists and just like Josef Stalin. "Most illogical." as Mr. Spock would say. So perhaps one needs something like the distinction between Mislims and Islamists for atheists as well. In Stalin’s time the League of Militant Atheists was very big. But just as not all Muslims are militant, so not all atheists are militant. I’m sure most atheists are atheists by default, and just happen not to have a God or gods in their lives, but couldn’t care less whether anyone else does. The militant atheists are another matter.

The vast majority of so-called "militant atheists" are merely reacting to the negative actions of theists towards them, who can’t live and let live. But you have to understand the reason so many of the soviets were atheist: the Russian Orthodox Church had been one of the tools used to keep the peasants under control in a feudal society. It gave them a reason to hate it. A natural human reaction that was nothing to do with atheism per se. In spite of what theists imagine, being atheist at whatever level isn’t anger at a deity they don’t believe in anyway, irrational hatred for the truth, etc. The vast majority of attempts by theists to describe atheists, are based on premises that don’t even apply to them which is why they keep getting it wrong. We’re simply people who aren’t theist, for whatever reason, and that is pretty much all we have in common. There are no doctrines or any of the other things theists who can’t think outside their own paradigm attribute to us. We don’t decide to be atheist. Some of us are born that way. Others realise they are when they no longer believe in the deity they used to. Neither do we have leaders who tell us what to think. We’re individuals who happen not to be theist. But it’s very hard to get believers who project themselves, their community, their religion or ideology, their doctrine that their god exists and everybody knows this, etc to accept this. I’m not sure whether Ayn Rand was a militant atheist, though. She claimed to be an atheist, it is true, but put a great deal of time and energy andf effort into promoting the cult of Mammon.

Michael Shermer describes objectivism as the most unlikely cult of all. She was an atheist, or a good facsimile thereof. Like all atheists, she simply didn’t have deity in her worldview to consciously or deliberately leave it out of her philosophy. Although to explain things to believers you often have to mention it – but they invariably get the wrong end of the stick because they replace it with their own meaning of the word including the presumption that it exists in the real world outside their religion. And her followers seem to have had the creed "There is no god but Mammon, and Ayn is his prophet."

Except of course that they don’t think it is a god; if they say it at all it is as a sort of in-joke.

Response:

What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know. -Miles — Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.

Response:

What a fucking loser (you, I mean). Most of us atheists hate Ayn Rand too you know.

I’ve never read any Rand, so I’m not familiar enough with her writings to hate her.  I can truthfully say that I am supremely indifferent toward her.  Does that count? Liz #658  BAAWA They all agree on what their god wants.  Each theist will tell you that what the only true god wants, and what he, himself, wants, are exactly the same.  – Al Klein

Response:

Ayn Rand: The Ayngriest Roguette A Missive on the Ayngry Prophetess of Objectivism "Safari Man" without mentioning a few of her political and economic views, but I intend to focus primarily on those elements of Ayn Rand’s famous philosophy of Objectivism which are inimical to some of the core attitudes and beliefs of the Christian faith. In keeping with the humorous spirit of Tekton Apologetics, I have taken to impishly referring to Ayn Rand as The Ayngriest Roguette.

Quite humourous indeed… Back when I was in college, a clever fellow who worked for the campus newspaper once remarked to me after I had been ranting effusively about Ayn Rand that if I had read her smaller books first I wouldn’t have needed to read her bigger books. To my chagrin, I soon discovered that he was absolutely right. If one has read Rand’s small non-fiction works such as The Virtue of Selfishness or For The New Intellectual, her massive fictional works The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged can be blithely ignored without missing out on a great deal of her philosophy. While I was at the bookstore recently, my heart sank as I realized just how elephantine Atlas Shrugged actually is. The paperback is 1,074 pages long!! After I made my purchases of this and some of Rand’s smaller works I trudged away thinking, What have you gotten yourself into?

As opposed to the Bible which is such a quick read…. Then again we all know that the longer the book, the worst it is…. Whatever else one might say about Ms. Rand, she was forcefully articulate in her writing. Despite her atheism, her inflamed rhetoric was similar in effect to that of a modern day prophet with commandments set in stone.

???? Her work has been practically canonized by her admirers.

If you mean that her admirers admire her work… well yeah … duh ! fictional saints of Objectivism all walked the moral high road with a

There are no saints in Objectivism, that should be plain enought to the most idiotic life form. palpably fatalistic air, while the lesser denizens of society merely wallowed in the muck by the wayside. The ethical sinners in Rand’s universe were never content with their miserable lot; no, they were also hell-bent on corrupting the virtue of her paragons of righteousness.

And you are proof positive of that my dear. Rand’s selfish heroes and heroines always seemed to be lean, angular, and nattily dressed while running about being brilliant capitalists; her altruistic rogues, on the other hand, always seemed to be weak-chinned, slovenly, or spineless jellyfish carelessly sabotaging the human race with their incompetence. I can’t really fault her for making use of complimentary physical descriptions to describe her champions and unappealing physical descriptions to describe her villains– Hollywood has made an industry out of doing as much, after all. But the overall impression that Ms. Rand gave me in her writing was that "her kind of people" were right and everyone who disagreed were wrong.

And how is that wrong anyway ? Ayn Rand is not quite as popular today as she once was.

I think she is dead too by the way. everyone else it is tawdry and contemptible. In The Fountainhead, Ms. Rand even comes dangerously close to sanctioning rape.

Sure she does. Virtue of Selfishness regarding altruism: Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value–and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes. (3) Since Ms. Rand did not specifically give a dictionary definition for altruism here (if she gives it anywhere in this book I missed it and I apologize) I must conclude that she is giving an explication of the popular definition of altruism–with all of the built-in ethical

Well God forbid she would use the popular definition when writing a book ….. "package-deal" that she decries in the definition of "selfishness." Again, drawing my handy Webster’s World Encyclopedia 2000 (Multimedia Edition) I offer the following definition: altruism is a "regard for others as a principle of action." and "unselfishness; concern for other people." I submit here that nowhere in this definition is it implicit that as long as the action is taken for the benefit of someone else, anything goes. Regard for others is "a" principle, not "the only" principle to be guided by. Giving money to a male heroin addict, for example, might benefit him if he chooses to buy food with it; however, it would be wiser to give food rather than giving him money, wouldn’t it?

Helping him get a desintoxication might be a lot more helpfull. It might be wiser still to refuse giving anything to the heroin addict at all until he has taken some very drastic measures to kick his destructive habit. Would refusing to give money or food be selfish or altruistic? I submit it would be altruistic

Well sure, not doing anything for someone is altruistic allright …. in bizaro world. if such a refusal is based not on a miserly attitude, but on a desire to see the addict rehabilitate himself.

Desires do not matter, actions do. So I must here chop this assumption that "anything goes" off at the knees. It is necessary to do so because the entire book is based on angry assumptions such as this one; reasonable people can see that they are unfounded.

Screw you buddy, you haven’t made your point. The notion that to disagree with you means being unreasonable is laughable. Rand’s violent hatred of altruistic morality is difficult to

As opposed to the kinder gentler hatred we all know, opinion as the Kantian view of altruism. At least in the Christian view of altruism, whenever a man or woman sacrifices something of material value for his or her neighbors they expect to eventually receive a reward of some kind from God. But in the Kantian view of altruism, one should expect no reward at all. To Rand’s way of thinking (and, I confess, to mine) giving up things which are valuable to you without expecting to receive something of equal or greater value is almost senseless. Almost senseless, I say. Even if I did not believe God existed, I could imagine wanting to give food or money to someone in need simply because that person was in need, even if I expected to receive no value in return. Why? Because I believe that helping others is oftentimes its own reward. This is because, unconsciously or otherwise, I have accepted the Golden Rule which states that I should do unto others as I would have them do unto me.

Ok so your reward is that you hope they will do nice things to you in return…. why not skip the middle man then and do nice things to yourself directly ? Conclusion I have always disliked the attempts by some theists to label atheism

You’re pretty good at it, not very good but OK. as a religion. But in some cases I wonder if the shoe fits.

It doesn’t.  For an atheist, Ms. Rand displayed a knack for appropriating religious

Well sure it’s not like she believes in nothing, she believes in the capabilities of the human mind (even when there are people like you running around aimelessly).

Response:

Ayn Rand: The Ayngriest Roguette

<snip I have as little regard for Rand as you do, no doubt for different reasons. How is that relevant to atheism?

Response:

Ayn Rand: The Ayngriest Roguette <snip I have as little regard for Rand as you do, no doubt for different reasons. How is that relevant to atheism?

The morons imagine that atheists need prophets, leaders etc to tell us how to think. It projects how their religion tells them what to think.

Response:

Question:

<snip Although I think we have reached an impasse, I would like to interject a thought. I support the spirit of love the Aaron brought to the discussion even if he might have made some specific remarks that seemed either "politically incorrect" or perhaps overzealous pertaining to certain scripture. I’m not here to judge that and I’m sure neither are you.

I appreciate what you’re saying.  I’m not here to judge *people*.  Aaron’s probably a well-meaning person who just hasn’t thought through his uncharitable beliefs.  I shudder to think what I’d believe if I had been raised like him.  But the welfare of the world requires that we judge ideas. I don’t consider that intolerant, do you?  (Though I admit I could have fumed less at Aaron and made it less personal). – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – If interolerance of others beliefs was easy then it wouldn’t be much of a virtue, would it? I think intolerance has to span into areas of the world where we might personally, due to our own values, find an expressed belief abhorrent or reprehensible. One important reason for the need for this depth of intolerance is because those we might find "shocking" in their expressed beliefs are themselves refining and evolving in their quest for truth over the course of their lifetime. You might catch them at a certain moment in time where their expression of their heartfelt beliefs not only fails to gel with your own values and beliefs, but seems so inhumane that you want to condemn them. A year later they might have refined their beliefs and values based on their ever expanding knowledge to the extent that you might not even recognize them! For example a year from now it is possible that Aaron will develop his Christian faith to where he expresses his beliefs differently or accentuates other aspects of his beliefs to where, if he were to reply to a similar topic such as this one, you might say to him (not knowing it was the same person as before), "I’m amazed that you have such a balanced view toward life that I’ve heard from few Christians! I recall ‘Aaron’ a year ago who is the exact opposite to you!" When in fact, you didn’t realize you were speaking to Aaron from a year earlier who is posting perhaps under a chosen screen name, and further, you don’t realize his fundamental Christian beliefs and values in relation to the Bible have not substantially changed.

This is of course possible.  But like YS said, I’m not going to give up on denouncing his beliefs and exposing them for being dangerous.  People like him have got to learn their lesson, or what you describe will never come to pass.  I’m sorry that I’m not better and more mature at it. I hold the view as do other Christians I know that the atrocities chronicled in the canon of the Bible’s Hebrew scriptures in various books, pertaining to the abuse and murders of men, women and children, were not promoted by God. It would require a massive post to even scratch the exegesis of these accounts in order to place them in their true context, historical reality and relationship to God’s allowing these things in His grand scheme to save (not destroy) humanity.

Save us from what?  A fate that religionists with political power invented to scare people into obeisence.  Mental gymnasitics cannot excuse God.  He obviously could have made his Bible a little clearer.  You are in the position of having to defend the idea that God repeatedly made his word to appear to say the opposite of what he meant, and failed to make the context of his meaning clear, and this is exactly what has caused the kind of strife we’re dealing with here. I’m glad your view of Christianity is so enlightened as to not accept the atrocities of the Bible as God’s will.  But I’m sorry to say I can’t comprehend how you can do so without being fundamentally at odds with God’s purported word.  Personally I would be unable to deal with the cognitive dissonance. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Last but not least I must comment on a remark you made to Aaron in a separate post reply you gave to Aaron in this topic on 09/05/2004 at 11:50 PM as follows: You wrote in this topic on 09/05/2004 at 11:50 PM: The only thing that could save this line of "reasoning" is to say that your rejection of God would inflict infinite pain on God, every bit as much as eternal damnation would cause you infinite pain–then God might be justified in damning you.  But this is obviously not the situation we’re in, is it? How does anyone on Earth know if this is the situation?

Are you trying to say that you or I might possibly have infinite understanding of God’s desires?  You snipped out that part, but it was integral to my argument.  Even if we could inflict infinite pain on God (which is preposterous), if we’re not perfectly aware that we’re doing so, then damnation is still unjust. It might very well be the situation in a sense no human or angel will never fully comprehend. The Bible is silent on whether God will suffer a form of "emotional damnation" (to paraphrase your words) for eternity, as part of the price He will forever pay for saving mankind (the other part of that price the initial pain and suffering God had to endure in seeing his Son give his life in redemption for mankind).

His payment is finished.  Jesus isn’t suffering anymore; he only did so for a couple of days, was dead for only three, and is now glorified.  From an eternal perspective, one day on a cross is not that bad. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Perhaps God’s own Son, Jesus Christ, who was so close to his Father that in a sense they were one in spirit, can give a glimpse into the pain and anguish that God is feeling over the terrible human suffering that has occurred over that past millenniums. Long after those precious children are resurrected who died horribly in the past, long after they are fully grown adults living happy productive immortal lives in God’s kingdom in the distant future, God will bear the emotional torture stake that his own Son carried to his death a very long, long time ago. Although Jesus Christ could bring the dead to life during his life on Earth, the Bible shows that even the temporary loss of life and suffering from loved ones broke his heart and made this grown man cry. Like Father, like Son?

"it is believed by everyone that when he was in heaven he was stern, hard, resentful, jealous and cruel, but that when he came down to earth, he became the opposite… sweet, gentle merciful, forgiving. He was a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament… Meek and gentle? By and by we will examine that popular sarcasm by the light of the hell which he invented."         —Mark Twain – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -In the following scriptures from the New Testament Greek canon, in the book of John, we see a glimpse of how God might feel forever more about the suffering He has allowed to occur for the greater eternal salvation of mankind. (John 11:30-37) 30 Jesus had not yet, in fact, come into the village, but he was still in the place where Martha met him. 31 Therefore the Jews that were with her in the house and that were consoling her, on seeing Mary rise quickly and go out, followed her, supposing that she was going to the memorial tomb to weep there. 32 And so Mary, when she arrived where Jesus was and caught sight of him, fell at his feet, saying to him: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." 33 Jesus, therefore, when he saw her weeping and the Jews that came with her weeping, groaned in the spirit and became troubled; 34 and he said: "Where have YOU laid him?" They said to him: "Lord, come and see." 35 Jesus gave way to tears. 36 Therefore the Jews began to say: "See, what affection he used to have for him!" 37 But some of them said: "Was not this [man] that opened the eyes of the blind man able to prevent this one from dying?" The Jews were moved by the deep love Jesus expressed in letting go of his emotions, but they were puzzled at the same time. They reasoned that if Jesus could resurrect the dead, what did it matter that they experienced terrible suffering leading to their death? It mattered! Perhaps Jesus Christ’s Father could very well suffer in a spiritual sense a form of the eternal "damnation" forever on account of the terrible human suffering occurring for so many millenniums – even though this is a "blip" in relation to eternity!

This is impossible to cognize.  Either it’s forever, or it’s not. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – (John 11:38-44) 38 Hence Jesus, after groaning again within himself, came to the memorial tomb. It was, in fact, a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39 Jesus said: "TAKE the stone away." Martha, the sister of the deceased, said to him: "Lord, by now he must smell, for it is four days." 40 Jesus said to her: "Did I not tell you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?" 41 Therefore they took the stone away. Now Jesus raised his eyes heavenward and said: "Father, I thank you that you have heard me. 42 True, I knew that you always hear me; but on account of the crowd standing around I spoke, in order that they might believe that you sent me forth." 43 And when he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice: "Laz