At Sat, 20 Feb 1999 18:39:05 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Joe:
>>Would MemeFundie be better?
>
>Sure. How about "Rabid frothing egomanical memeturd"?
>
>>People can be "helped" in spite of themselves. One of
>>xtianity's tenets has been that they have Divine license
>>to scourge your mortal body in order to save your
>>immortal soul.
>
>I don't think that is part of modern Christian doctrine.
>Other that the Old Testament, which is largely metaphorical,
>can you point to evidence to support this claim? I'd especially
>be intersted in anything 1950's or later..and from a
>well established and respected Christian sect or order.
>Be careful, though, there a white-supremicists that claim
>Christian support for thier vile doctrines. Becuase someone
>calls themselves a Christian doesn't mean they know anything
>about Christ..Christ is a celebrity, everyone claims he
>supports their cause.
Apparently you're familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, the Christian Identity movement, the Christian Reconstructionists, the KKK (which consider themselves a christian denomination), the Assembly of God and the Southern Baptists (both of which I've had personal experience with) the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses, not to mention the Moonies, the Jim Jones People's temple, Elizabeth Claire Prophet's Church Universal and Triumphant, and the Koreshis. They certainly respect themselves more than they do anyone else (or anyone else's rights), and that's precisely the point.
>>Dominican priests baptized Native American babies in the
>>17th & 18th centuries, then swung them by their heels and
>>smashed their skulls into stone walls in order to "save their
>>souls" from being raised in a pagan faith.
>
>That wouldn't be in keeping with Christian faith, as I understand
>it. It sounds really vile, insane. I suspect most Christians
>would think so, too. Those missionaries must have been in
>some incredibly perverse conditions..Completely out of
>contact with their homes, families, countries..and ocean,
>a year, away from their world. Can you imagine trying to
>preach peace and love to the natives? For the natives, peace
>was a hot harmony, a vibrant contest with nature. It must
>have looked pretty bloody and vile to the eyes of an aesetic.
>Living in that kind of isolation, no feedback..Yes, I'm
>sure they went completely mad.
It was an institutionalized practice which persisted for many years and was carried out by many acolytes, and they considered themselves to be Christians. Please allow me to humbly submit that you do not possess the Divine right, based on your own approval or disapproval of their actions, to decide for others whether they belong to a particular religion or not. A Christian (or a Bhddhist or a Taoist or a Muslim or a Jew or...) is a person who says they are with sincerity, belief and conviction.
>It would make a good movie, don't you think? You could
>trace the honest, bright beginnings of the fresh evangelist
>though the challenges of isolation, fear, and finally culminate
>in the crecendo where the madman is gleefully dashing the
>children against the stones raving about how he is saving
>them. I think it would make a powerful message.
>
>The lesson I would draw from this example is that contact,
>feedback, a sense of union with people, is a critical
>element to sanity. If one doesn't open themselves to the people
>around them, lunacy is inevitable. None of us is stable enough
>to know it all alone, forever. Each of us might glimpse the
>light, catch a moment of enlightenment, and feel a fleeting
>peace. But, you can trust the world to push you off that high.
>Our only defense is each other. And when we find ourselves
>in the dark tunnel, we have to have faith that there are people
>who will love us on the other side. So we talk to ourselves
>when no one will speak to us, and we try to make our way.
>
>But there is no principle that is so important that it should
>separate us from people. Some people are really nuts, and
>we need to avoid them..and some are violent, and so forth.
>But the moment we start saying "X principle is so important
>that if you don't think X I can't talk to you", then you are
>mind fucking yourself. That was the problem with all those
>missonaries..their masters told them that the idea was more
>important that the person..and then sent them into a world
>where nobody spoke their language. They cracked, and
>their insane gibbering presence contaminated the church.
>And, like any organism, the Church didn't recognize the
>cancer growing within it until it was almost too late, and it
>took quite a lot of effort to excise that hatred.
uite a Christian apologist you are; Sir Thomas More and C.S. Lewis would be proud. However, what about all the native Pagans they drowned, hung and burned in Medieval Europe (not to mention the Crusades, the anti Catharite campaign, the Pelagian massacres, and on and on and on...when part and parcel of someone's memeset is that they have the right, nay, the duty to either convert you to it or kill you, that that rabidly intolerant submemeset is one of the few things that tolerant people cannot tolerate if they and their freedom of thought are both to survive.
>That is a narrative: it gives the raw facts meaning. Many
>people simply make statemtents like "Self-declared Christians
>kill in the name of God, thus Christianity is bad in general."
>I think that is too simplistic. I'm not saying the story I've
>woven is TRUE.
Why should lies work simply because they're happy ones?
When I volunteered as a clinic escort, I had fundies gather in prayer circles and beg Jesus to take me, by name, Right Then. I had my car sabotaged and my home vandalized, received death threats by mail and telephone, and had my college records broken into in an attempt to learn something that could be used against me. I live in Pensacola. We've had three people gunned down in the street in the name of Sweet Jesus, so don't you DARE try to tell me these bastards are benign!
I do claim that I can communicate the
>same idea which you want to get across in a way that
>Christians will applaud. They will weep a little, and perhaps
>squirm with discomfort during to gory parts. But in the end,
>when we re-establish what Christ *really* stood for, then the
>lesson takes on universal meaning: we must be careful to
>love our brother as ourself..and liberal about who we call
>brother. Who could argue?
They can. They can insist that you be the convertee rather than the converter, and be not only willing but also eager to murder in Jesus' Holy Name for the Greater Glory of God, or taste their sword across your throat. At least our contemporary Torquemaadas, the militant antiabortion underground, populated by the likes of William Robert Rudolph (the Olympic park, lesbian bar and abortion clinic bomber) and Michael Bray (author of the murder-for-jesus tome "A Time to Kill") would be only too happy to restrict you to the modern equivalent of the above choices, and firmly believe they were piously pursuing Yahweh's righteous jihad in doing so. It has always been an us/them system, and only the us's get the brotherly love; the rest get the rack (or as close to it as they can legally get away with, and to a growing few, not even legality matters). Milleniallism is exacerbating an already present tendency inherent in the thought-structure.
>But you can't do that if you paint Christians with the bloody
>brush. Do you understand? Most "Christians" are just people
>like you and me, caught in lives we sometimes wish were
>more satisfying, and trying to do right by other people without
>getting stabbed in the back. Like us, they don't really know
>exactly what they want, or precisely what they think. My
>way of thinking says: why pick fights when you don't have to?
Just this mode of thinking, and the lack of resistance born of it, doomed six million Jews.
>Instead of attacking Christians for hypocricy, why not hold
>them to their higher standards? If God is Love then these
>things you've described are inconsistent with that. Ask a
>Christian priest, what does God stand for? Why did this
>happen? Is the Church, as a whole, sorry for these things?
>How is that remorse expressed?
A local Catholic priest Rev. Trosch, has also publicly advocated the murder of abortion doctors, actually going so far as to draw a cartoon of the assassination of abortion doctors by Good Christians and submit it for publication in a local newspaper.
>For your average Christian on the street, though, why pick
>fights? I'm sure most of them have never herd of these
>things and wouldn't think they were good if they did.
>
>In short:
>Talk to people about good ideas, don't talk to ideas about bad people.
>Reed
>
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> Reed Konsler konsler@ascat.harvard.edu
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Joe E. Dees
Poet, Pagan, Philosopher