First, 'kissing the ring' is a metaphor for seeking that 'forgiveness' from the local Holy Man. You basically go there and confess what a crapweasel you've been and that you're soooo soooo sorry and won't do it again (until next time), and :::poof::: you're clean as the driven snow.

As to the premeditation, Jeffrey Dahmer committed premeditated serial murders, yet he was 'saved' before he himself paid in the same currency in prison.

And NONE of this discussed an iota of the effect of these sins/crimes on the victims. Are they just chattel in the Christian God's forgiveness scheme?

-Kerry O.

Hmm... trot on over to michellemalkin.com and read her take on it. Try the article "I Repeat: John Ensign Needs to Go Away".


It contains interesting tidbits like this:





BTW, he's a Promise Keeper.

Your comment?


-Kerry O.

That's pretty easy to say, but you weren't in my shoes and Jesus wasn't there. My relatives tried to pray away the problem and that didn't work. I was left the choice and expense of going to some real scientists and neurosurgeons for some really unpleasant or dying in agony.

-Kerry O.

Of course, it's not like 'Senior Senator' John Ensign was never involved in any 'shady deals' himself-- to wit, to hush up an extramarital affair with someone in his entourage, he offered to use his influence to help the husband obtain jobs/contracts.

The watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named Ensign to the '15 Most Corrupt Members of Congress' list. Hardly bodes well for his 'keeping her in check', now does it?

While a good argument can be made for the premise that there should be a better way to keep barnacles like Reid from attaching themselves semi-permanently to the Hulls of Government, extremists like the Tea Party and Sharron Angle are hardly the remedy.

-Kerry O.

Because your 'Lord' is an invisible dictator who cannot be reached to respond to a summons in a Court of Law seeking redress for grievances. In short, Christianity is not a representative democracy where the rights of the minorities are protected against the capricious will of the majority, and due process under those laws is right out the window.

The basis of 'the law' is not derived from the 'We the People' but from "You Must Believe As I Dictate in Holy Writ". And the process by which that 'Holy Writ' came about is totally non-transparent and surely NOT democratic. THAT'S what makes it heresay.

First and foremost, Unbelief under any circumstances is not permitted under penalty of Everlasting Death. All the other 'laws' except that one can be broken yet go unpunished if one kisses the local representative's ring and asks for forgiveness. Would you REALLY want have a government that functioned like this?


-Kerry O.

I agree. Clearly, the intent of the law was misapplied in this complaint/lawsuit-- the words 'shared living space' make all the difference. I think the suit should be dismissed on that basis. The pendulum has definitely swung too far in the other direction on this one.

It would be pretty difficult for anyone to claim they incurred damages because of an alleged discriminatory action. If anything, I would think the reverse would be true, that an atheist and a devout Christian would be miserable were they to live together.

-Kerry O.

And that 'age of accountability' goes back to what, in the case of a blastocyst, minus 9 months? You neatly dodged the point- are there proto-human souls in heaven or not? And if so, per Christian dogma that you're expounding upon here, do they get a 'free pass'? And if the DO get a 'free pass', isn't this more a matter of the dogma not wanting to look cruel, so it gets morphed into something prettier? Of making it up to explain what wasn't known at the time the book and religion were written/born?

Sure, you can rifle through Holy Writ and concoct some sort of repsonse, but how do you know it's the correct one since it's not spelled out? And most likely the reason it's not spelled out is because the ancient authors of the book were to unsophisticated to know much about the natural world. Ye olde menstrual huts were another such indicator of this, but what could one expect when the Bible was written almost entirely by men?

-Kerry O.

In other words, it's making it up as you go when presented with an intractable situation not covered by the Bible. Just more evidence it was written by men, because a Divine Being would have known about how its own creations procreate. Whereas the ancient men who penned the Bible didn't know a blastocyst from a gamete.


-Kerry O.

How can I reasonably trust an alleged Creator who gave me a potentially fatal lesion inside my brain before I was born?

Actually, the last episode did technically kill me briefly, but I knew what was happening before it got totally past the point of no return and I was in the back of an Advanced Life Support Unit ready to be airlifted to Johns Hopkins if necessary when it happened.

And I can hear it now-- God was responsible for the events that brought me back and that I'm not somehow converted by that experience must mean that Satan has it hooks in me somehow.

Don't you just love it? The way that people who have NO experience about your particular experiences with Hell on Earth offering their OPINIONS on What Really Happened?

-Kerry O., "Touche!"

I went with the conservative estimate, but either way, it begs the question: How will all those blastocysts stroll around the streets of gold and how with they interact? And since they are not self-aware, how can they have made choices such as to take Jesus Christ as their Personal Saviour? Since they have yet to develop a brain with which to think?

It's a thorny problem for Chistian dogma, to be sure and as you can see, it pretty much goes ignored everytime it's brought up.


-Kerry O.

It wasn't one Islamic General, sheesh! It was an _American_ general appointed by George W. Bush to be deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. And here are some quotes from General Boykin:

""I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

"Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army...They will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus".

"George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the US. He was appointed by God."





I guess you didn't want to research any further than that when you saw what a smoking gun it was?



That much is apparent. Again, this IS, after all, a thread discussing history.




I just report and let the reader decide. You're not the sum total of the readership, Thomas. I don't get paid to do this, but good search engines and a decent memory of historical events make it far from being my vocation. I think people do deserve to hear what the people representing their culture in foreign nations have to say about religion and to let it be known that we American are not all Far Right Fundies.


-Kerry O.

And if you follow Christian dogma that a soul is created at conception, 10% of the future inhabitants of heaven will be unborn embryoes. Because that's how many pregnancies Mother Nature herself spontaneously aborts.


-Kerry O.

Paper Satan, eh? Given his alleged enviroment, wouldn't that be like Frosty the SatanMan? Besides, much as I'd like to (being the first one to mention it in these forums), I can't take credit for it-- it was coined by one Bishop Spong, and Episcopalian if I recall correctly.


-Kerry O. "Rock, Paper, Scissors anyone?"

I'm pretty sure Douglas MacArthur was NOT an atheist, and if you check, you can verify that he wanted to go after the Communists in the Korean War era. Truman had to finally yoke him in for insubordination, or he probably would have made good on his threats. Who knows if that one would have gone nuclear.

Too, many of us grew up hearing about how nuts the Russians were and how THEY were a 'direct threat to our way of life.' Then, just as now, Bible Thumpers like Joe McCarthy were exploiting the 'Red Threat' to obtain power and choke off dissent.

And one still gets an undertow of that slander that Unbelievers are quislings in league with Communists and All Things Foul by some elements of the Christian majority that holds the reins of power in this country. Recently, they even went so far as to try to disqualify atheist candidates, in a more that is a BRAZEN contravention of the Constitution of the United States.

To be sure, the militant Christians don't parade the Cross around the Halls of Governance.

But they sure wrap it in the flag when they want to cut the minority who are Unbelievers from the rest of the herd. Like their court cases, they usually don't last very long on these forums, but those sentiments that the U.S. is a Christian Nation are expressed so often here. And that if atheists don't like it, they can expatriate.

Sounds pretty Un-American to me.




Can I quote you that?





Oh, I don't have to do much digging to come up with that comment from a top general in Iraq saying that 'his God was bigger than Saddam's God'. Nor to find reports where Christian missionaries were given leading roles in rebuilding the country by the Bush Administration in much the same manner that the Carpetbaggers exploited the Antebellum South in the 19th century.


-Kerry O.

It's just another face of proselytism. "If you can't convert them, pronounce 'em crazy." I had this happen so much in my family. Funny thing is, the ones that have the most emotional problems are the ones who espouse this theory most vigorously.

I'm quite sure a relgious conversion has indeed cured many a drunk. On the other hand, getting away from Fundamentalist family members who drilled fire and brimstone into my young mind with unrelenting precision did wonders for MY mental hygiene.

The most peaceful thing about the whole ordeal is that after puzzling it over for a lot of years, I realized that had no clue what they were doing. Since there was no malice involved, it makes it a lot easier to just detach and assume a Live and Let Live posture.

But I'm not convinced that Fundamentalists don't see malice in Unbelievers. And that's why I think they act they way they do towards them sometimes.


-Kerry O.

Gee, maybe because that's exactly what this thread is all about? You know-- HISTORY?? The root of 'historical'?

I ask again-- how many people have to be killed before it's wrong? Especially when it's done on the marching orders of 'loving God'?



So, just do it and get it over with. Vaporize a few million souls with nukes and tell your God they deserved a first strike. Maybe it will hasten Armageddon and the fulfillment of Revelations. Wouldn't that be nice?

Maybe he didn't believe in a God, but Stalin also sought to do away with the people who he thought were a threat to him with extreme prejudice.

BTW, isn't it funny how the WMDs were never found in Iraq, and THAT one was surely not started by an 'atheist nation.'

Nor was Viet Nam.

If you really knew the history of warfare, you'd be on the lookout for the people who are more like the Mongols, who pretty much decimated Islamic nations back in the middle ages. The Baath party regulars were amateurs compared to them.


-Kerry O.

Wow, they ripped off Wikipedia's look, but one can bet that Conservapedia will NOT allow any objective editing of their articles. So I guess it can't be said they stole the format lock, stock and barrel.

That's the mark of a propagandist, NOT an objective community of seekers of truths.

Usually people that commit suicide are hurting in some form or another, and really badly. I think it's pretty low to use that for propaganda purposes. Unless they've been in that kind of pain, there's no real reason to believe that what these people say has any value whatsoever. You know what they say-- doctors make the worst patients.

-Kerry O.

Isn't it interesting how that site has things for sale? And it all disses Unbelievers? Makes one wonder about their motives, not to mention their objectivism.

It looks to me like it takes the Pontius Pilate approach to religion and war-- " I find no evil and I wash my hands of it."

I guess my question is how many times can you look the other way in the face of the Old Testament genocides and things like the Spanish Inquisition since the New Testament's been out. How many deaths do there have to be before it's wrong? There are a LOT of Far Right Christians in the U.S. who are all for nuking Iran.


-Kerry O.

I think the word you're looking for is 'television'. Harlan Ellison called it "The Glass Teat" and the fact that one version of it is a free service paid for by brainwashers who know some will rent their minds to its talking heads to do all their thinking for them says it all.

-Kerry O.

No better proof that inconsistencies exist in Christianity than by the fact that there are so many sects of it saying different things about different aspects of it. It's a veritable Tower of Babel in its own right.

Just getting on the Internet and posting "There are no inconsistencies" over and over and over again is not proof, it's preaching to the Choir. On the Internet, Anyone can say Anything and to paraphrase Edward R. Murrow, just because your voice on the Internet can be heard around the world doesn't make it any more informed or correct than if it only reached to the end of the bar.


-Kerry O.