As the issue is very old now I’ll only raise one further point about your comment #103 above. Perhaps I’ll join you on a few later threads and we can cross swords on related things.

It is just this: aside from the false equivalence you made between nasty verses in the Old Testament (OT) and nasty verses in the Qur’an (thoroughly dissected in my prior comment), I should like to object to this use of old OT quotations as if they somehow characterize Christian doctrine and teaching.

While it is quite true that the OT is part of, as you say, “the Christian Bible”, this is not because the OT provides the basis for the Christian faith. If this were so then every believing Jew would be a Christian.

The OT canon was established by a Jewish council late in the first century AD, after much discussion about what was “in” and what was “out”. In the Jewish, and also the Christian view, God speaks to mankind in what is sometimes referred to as “relational revelation” — that is, through his ongoing interaction with his people. Thus the history and inspired writings of the Israelites from the time of Abraham, are the fundamentals of the Jewish faith.

(In contrast, you should know, the Muslim faith teaches a form of revelation called “tanzil”, which means “sent down”. It is literally the words of god, with no intervention. When we see, say, the poetic, visceral hand of David in the Psalms and the Bold, declarative pronouncements of the prophet Isaiah we have no problem in accepting that each of the many writers has left his own imprint on the text — the human spirit is not regarded as a sterile vessel, but an essential part of the message; it is organic, earthy and real. The histories breath history, the poetry poetry, and honest human emotions are evident throughout. To a muslim, however, it would be sheer blasphemy to suggest that Mohammed has left even an iota of his own imprint upon the Qur’an.)

For the Christian faith, things are a little different. For, as Paul writes, “there is no other foundation than Jesus Christ” (I Cor 3:11). The Christian church is built upon the person and teaching of Jesus, and that of the “apostles” (a term that refers to those who saw the risen christ and have been commissioned by him as messengers of his gospel to the world). Thus we arrived at the NT (which took a couple of centuries of debating over what was a valid inclusion and what was not, which documents could most reliably be attributed to the apostles and so on).

But the “relational revelation” part doesn’t work very well if limited to the NT, because Jesus mission, life and teaching are so integrated into the Jewish story. Indeed, we regard it as the culmination of that story. To tell ONLY the gospel without the two-thousand-year lead-in would be like ripping out the last chapter of a Sherlock Holmes book so we learn that the butler did it, and not bothering with the rest of the story.

And so the Jewish OT was incorporated, wholesale, into the Christian canon. (A slight simplification…) It gives a frame of reference for the NT, but it does not supplant it or take priority. Rather the reverse. Consider Jesus’ repeated words “As of OLD it was said … BUT I SAY unto you …”

So just because something, like the command you quoted to avoid idolatry, is in the Old Testament, this does not characterize Christianity, and may at best only provide a useful contrast for it. When a christian reads it we say, “Hmmm, this is how God was dealing with the Jews before the coming of the Messiah”. We look for ways in which these precursor elements of our faith are “worked out” in Jesus’ life, teaching, example, and commands, and the teaching of the apostles.

As I pointed out the passage you picked isn’t particularly sinister if read carefully, you could have done much worse. How about the OT commands to stone those caught in adultery? See, for example, Deut. 22:24. Nasty stuff!

So how does the NT deal with this? in John 8:1-11 we see Jesus confronted by the Jewish leaders asking him to pronounce judgement on a woman caught in adultery. Jesus professes to uphold the Jewish law, but they believe that he hasn’t got the guts to do so, and hope to catch him up and expose him as a phony prophet.

You know the story. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone…woman where are your accusers?…Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

In the New Testament the “Law” is not written on stones, but on human hearts, breathed into life by the Holy Spirit. Jesus provides the example. The above story, as you know, is fundamental to our culture. We regard it as trite, the stuff of sundayschool, milk for babes. But so it is — we raise our children on this!

Incidentally, there is a similar story in the Islamic canon about a Jewish woman caught in adultery. Mohammed asks the Jews to pronounce judgement by reading from their own law. He observes the Rabbi’s hand over part of the passage…it is the part about stoning. He forces them to read that part of the passage against their will, and then has the woman stoned “according to your own Law!”

Interesting contrast between the two “prophets”, wouldn’t you say?

In Palestine, small children are taught in public schools to hate the Jews with an undying hatred, to desire to become a “shaheed” (suicide bomber) as their highest ambition in life. They memorize Qur’an verses that are so holy, down to the letter, their meaning must not be tampered with or interpreted. No progression of revelation here, the Qur’an is valid for all times! “Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them!”; “The Jews are those who have earned Allah’s wrath, and the Christians are those who have gone astray…”; “Strike terror into the hearts of your enemy and the enemy of Allah!” etc.

In publicly funded Islamic schools throughout North America and Europe small, impressionable Muslim babes are taught that one of the most important aspects of the good muslim life, most pleasing to Allah, is called “al Wala’ wal Bara’”, which is loosely translated “the love and the hate”. Read about it in detail at an islamic site here. Briefly, it is a strict formulation that muslims may BEHAVE in loving, collegial ways toward unbelievers but must inwardly harbor hatred to them, love everything of Islam and Muslims, and hate everything that is not Islam and non-Muslims.

If you wish to compare Christian teaching to Islamic, then I challenge you to find anything like this in the NT.

Try in the OT too. You will find some time-limited commands to slaughter PARTICULAR people, but nothing about hating people simply because they don’t believe the Jewish faith. Indeed, in the OT there is no dichotomy between “believers” and “unbelievers”. It is an idea foreign to the book. The dichotomy occurs often in the NT, but you won’t find commands about hating the unbelievers. You will find commands to “love your enemies”; creedal formulations like “For God so loved THE WORLD” (i.e., EVERYONE, regardless of faith, race, gender, etc.); “In Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free…”; and “God demonstrates his love for us in this, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”.

Hopefully. But either way:

“When I say that the Obamanauts are about to enter a world of pain, I mean that they will eventually know the dark side of the wave of fantasy upon which they are riding. ..

“…it has been estimated that fewer than ten percent of the American public are reliably in Piaget’s highest cognitive developmental stage of formal operations thinking. And even then, one cannot escape the cosmic law of bs in –> bs out. ..”

Fewer than 10% of the American puplic are reliably in the Formal operational stage:

The formal operational period is the fourth and final of the periods of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory. This stage, which follows the Concrete Operational stage, commences at around 12 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. It is characterized by acquisition of the ability to think abstractly, reason logically and draw conclusions from the information available. During this stage the young adult is able to understand such things as love, “shades of gray”, logical proofs, and values.

…The important point is that the fantasy precedes the reality, and will look for conditions in external reality to support it, identical to the manner in which the paranoid mind operates. According to deMause, the state of the group fantasy is what national opinion polls actually capture. That is, they take a snapshot of the “mood of the country,” which mostly consists of “gut feelings” that have varying degrees of connection to actual conditions, and more to do with the shifting nature of the group fantasy.
Remember, the bulk of the population is not thinking logically, so it doesn’t matter how many cognitively mature individuals there are at the margins of a poll. That the economic downturn was largely caused by Democrat regulation (the Community Reinvestment Act), that we have won the war in Iraq, and that President Bush kept us safe for seven years, are inconsequential. In contrast, FDR was able to sustain a unifying group fantasy despite economic polices that aggravated and extended the Great Depression for years.
Likewise, job one for Obama will be to forge and sustain a unifying fantasy, not to deal with reality. This is one of the reasons the Democrats will be unable to let go of President Bush, because they desperately need him as a “poison container” in order to keep the toxins out of Obama (more on which below).

To continue reading, click “show original post” HERE

Either way:

“When I say that the Obamanauts are about to enter a world of pain, I mean that they will eventually know the dark side of the wave of fantasy upon which they are riding. ..

“…it has been estimated that fewer than ten percent of the American public are reliably in Piaget’s highest cognitive developmental stage of formal operations thinking. And even then, one cannot escape the cosmic law of bs in –> bs out. ..”

Fewer than 10% of the American puplic are reliably in the Formal operational stage:

The formal operational period is the fourth and final of the periods of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory. This stage, which follows the Concrete Operational stage, commences at around 12 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. It is characterized by acquisition of the ability to think abstractly, reason logically and draw conclusions from the information available. During this stage the young adult is able to understand such things as love, “shades of gray”, logical proofs, and values. HERE

One example of the behavior that reveals the cognitive development of those who fall into the 90 percent-plus catagory (of the pre-adolescent, “Concrete Operational Stage” is shown HERE

…The important point is that the fantasy precedes the reality, and will look for conditions in external reality to support it, identical to the manner in which the paranoid mind operates. According to deMause, the state of the group fantasy is what national opinion polls actually capture. That is, they take a snapshot of the “mood of the country,” which mostly consists of “gut feelings” that have varying degrees of connection to actual conditions, and more to do with the shifting nature of the group fantasy.

Remember, the bulk of the population is not thinking logically, so it doesn’t matter how many cognitively mature individuals there are at the margins of a poll. That the economic downturn was largely caused by Democrat regulation (the Community Reinvestment Act), that we have won the war in Iraq, and that President Bush kept us safe for seven years, are inconsequential. In contrast, FDR was able to sustain a unifying group fantasy despite economic polices that aggravated and extended the Great Depression for years.

Likewise, job one for Obama will be to forge and sustain a unifying fantasy, not to deal with reality. This is one of the reasons the Democrats will be unable to let go of President Bush, because they desperately need him as a “poison container” in order to keep the toxins out of Obama (more on which below). …”

To continue, click “show original post” HERE

Thank you! I was reading the comments and was going to make that very point if I hadn’t seen it made by someone else.

His false premise was the first thing I noticed reading dmoon’s commentary.

Like Attack, many of these lively additions to the political scene favour party emblems that slyly evoke swastikas while bending the prongs in different directions just enough to maintain deniability. Other than that, they don’t have a lot in common with their colleagues in the no-bloc bloc. I don’t just mean in the sense that the leader of the Slovak National Party said a couple of years back, “Let’s all get in tanks and go and flatten Budapest,” which presumably is not a policy position the Hungarian nationalists in Jobbik would endorse. But there are broader differences, too. The SNP is antipathetic to homosexuals, whereas Krisztina Morvai, the attractive blonde Jobbik member just elected to the Euro-parliament, is a former winner of the Freddie Mercury Prize for raising AIDS awareness. I can’t be the only political analyst who wishes that, instead of a victory speech last Sunday, Doktor Morvai had stood on the table in black tights and bellowed out, “We Are The Champions.” http://www.aipnews.com/talk/forums/printer-friendly.asp?tid=5490&mid=

I see nothing that is untrue and certainly not as subversive as the article that is condemning him. In fact, maybe you can read Steyn’s actual article (see link) and point out what is factually untrue? Maybe a bit politically incorrect in how he says it but nothing untrue that I can see.

The writer Paul Wells looks at Geert Wilder’s film and shows how Steyn can stretch a fact to fit his needs. The same way he stretched the truth in his summary of the Euro elections.

“In his film Fitna, Wilders displays a bar graph that shows 54 million “Muslims in Europe.” The number comes from the Central-Institute Islam Archive in Soest, Germany, which notes that only 14 million of those Muslims are in the European Union. Another 25 million are in Russia and 5.9 million in Turkey. When asked whether he wants Turkey in the EU, Wilders said, “No. Not in 10 years, not in a million years.” Yet he’s eager to put Turkey’s Muslims in his bar graphs. No wonder Steyn likes him. They’re both sloppy counters.”