<OT> <TID> Re: Noteworthy News Item

[Joel Hammer]

Opps. This does do on for a while. There is nothing worth reading here.

I don't judge Christians as harshly as I used to, now that I am more
aware of the the nature of our world. For example, most people I know
who are scornful of Christians are also the last persons you would
see working as volunteers (not to use that awful word "missionaries")
in some African hell hole. Not that all good people are Christians (and
not all Christians are good people), but, good people don't scorn people
with moral principles, even if they disagree on some points.

After the Third Reich, I don't really think that people who are willing
to defend human rights, even those of the unborn, are totally screwy.
After all, the Nazis started out with the terminal ill, handicapped,
retarded, and others who were seen as a burden. Then it was political
opponents, including many Churchmen. Finally the Jews and Gypsies, and
other subhumans.  At the end, Hitler wanted to kill all the Germans, too,
because they had failed him. It was too bad that Hitler had removed from
his inner circle anybody with strong moral principles and a willingness
to stand up for them.

So, people with strong ethics and a willingness not to look the other way
do not worry me nearly as much as people who will go along with whatever
is the most recently announced moral standard, enunciated by those elites
who claim to have that duty, whether university academics or dictators.
For example, when a 15 yo girl can get a free infertility workup at
a university hospital (having unprotected sex since age 9) I think we
have descended a long way.  However, the hospital ethics committee didn't
see anything wrong with this, so, I guess nine yo old girls having sex
is OK. After all, that committee has professional ethicists on it. I had
better update my ethics.

I also think when Christians are judged so harshly, we are really judging
them for the Dark Age mentality in part. The Christians certainly
did their part to help create and maintain the Dark Ages, but, they
weren't the only problem. And, I think nobody remembers how helpful those
Renaissance Italian Popes were in encouraging the arts and sciences. The
Popes were after all educated men.  They did keep the general population
in ignorance though, but so do our politicians and schools today.

People also forget that the Christians were not the only people to
persecute others. The Christians got their start as a heavily persecuted
religious sect, after all. The Christians have certainly been abused by
the Muslims (Think Muslim conquest of the Middle East and North Africa,
which was once the heart of the Christian world, the Ottoman Empire
with its Christian slave army and invasion of Christian Eastern Europe,
the conquest and occupation of Spain for hundreds of years by the Moors,
and the extensive slave trade in castrated Christians carried on by the
Muslims for centuries.)

Another situation is the persecution of Christians in the Far East. For
example, in Japan, in 1642, the year of Isaac Newton's birth, the last
Catholic priest was crucified. About 500,000 Japanese Christians were
extant prior to the crackdown. There were essentially none left when the
persecution was done. In one city alone, 37,000 Christians were butchered.

So, you can't really condemn Christians too heavily, since they are no worse
than, and a lot better than, some other types of people.

Joel

P.S. Mark Twain was a very unhappy, bitter man for many years.  The death
of his daughter left him heart broken, and he refused to accept her death
as God's will. He must have believed in a God, because he seemed to think
that her death was someone's fault, that he had been betrayed.  Why else
would he be bitter and resentful over a misfortune? Why would anyone
ever feel resentful in a universe they acknowledged to be ruled only by
impersonal physical laws and chance? But, that is another argument!