Caught this editorial over at cnn.com:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/04/martin.jesus/index.html

I thought it was a really great read.

That was very good. I've been thinking that sort of thing for a long long time.

Would Jesus post at Massassi? If so, what would he post? Who would he ban?

Would Jesus play JK? What would be his favorite? Would he use the forces of nature to punish LEC for JO and JA?

That is very true.



"What did Jesus do?"

JO wasn't that bad.

But the article does raise some good points. There seems to be alot of hate in the world under the name of "religion." What certain people don't understand is that hate is hate no matter under any "set" of beliefs. And certain people are too occupied trying to stop gay marriages, protesting against Harry Potter or whatever to care about what values they should really follow.

The thing is, for the vast majority of "christians" this is not new information.

It's easier to look outside of the church and say condem everyone else and ignore sin inside the church in the name of "love".

Even this article fails to address the real problem. Saying that the church should help the homeless or world hunger (not that helping those things is bad), but there's a far more imediate need that should be addressed.
And that problem is the fact that so many churchs completely overlook Matthew 18.

What tends to happen in the church today is that someone falls into sin, for example adultry. Others in the church find out about it, and rather than confronting the adulterer as matthew 18 clearly says we are supposed to do.
They keep it quiet under the FALSE impression that they are being loving. All the while this situation continues and begins to be spread around as gossip and eventualy the familes involved are torn apart in a big publuic scandal and often results in people being "gossiped out" of the church.
Non christians outside the church see this and not only are the names of the people involved dragged through the mud but the name of the church and of God aswell.

That example is depressingly common.
It happened in a church that I was apart of alittle less than 10 years ago.

The first priority of the church should be to each other.
CHristians should look after each other, build each other up, do everything in our power to stay on course so that our lives would line up with the scriptures.

What we do now is find the sins which none of our friends are openly commiting and protest against them so we can go home and say that the sin in our own lives is not nearly as bad, or that we've somehow made up for them by protesting against all these other things.

It's just a magic show.
Creating distractions in the hope of our own sin vanishing.

What's the "armour of God" again? I remember it has something to do with the Bible from Christian school, but not much other than that.

Figurative armor for spiritual warfare against demons, withstanding life, and such. Like faith is a shield, salvation is a helmet, the Holy Spirit a sword, and so on and so forth. Explicitly stated its not for physical warfare against flesh and blood :P. That was a good read.

Jesus is ded lololol

Lol!

I pretty much agree with what this guy is saying, but many community churches DO address poverty and homelessness etc. For example, there's a group at my college that gets together every Friday to distribute food to homeless people in Boston. My home church takes up a special collection for the needy once a month. I think that ut's not that Christians aren't doing anything it's just that the loudmouths are drowning us out.

blah blah blah, we need excuses to be good, blah blah blah

That's really the medias' fault. They just up-play things they think will be controversial, and end up giving a very limited perspective of what just a few Christians or at least people who say they're Christians think. So yeah, CNN, no kidding.

Seriously, most "average Christians" I know, and I know plenty living in Oklahoma, think that abortion and homosexuality are wrong, but it's nothing like the media makes it look like. The most they'll do is protest abortion, but even that is very rare. Seriously for every "fags must die!!" kook, there are thousands of professing Christians who spend their time and energy working in outreach ministries and missions, and more often, especially among evangelicals, "Spirituality Seminars" and the like.

Not really. I come from two states in the bible belt, and in both states those are the two topics that I hear about from christians...that's it. It's a fairly accurate representation.

You need to get out, get some fresh air, and meet some new people. Honestly, I swear you only know about 5 or 6 people and get your opinions about humanity/society from said people.

That kind of doesn't make up for the fact that fear of homosexuals and abortion is pretty god damn retarded.

Gay people are scary.

Especially Isuwen.

From the comments:

R. J. Peters, Mena, Arkansas
"Roland Martin's attack on Pro-Life Christians was really uncalled for. How can a Christian NOT be concerned while little babies are brutally MURDERED every day by Abortion? Mr. Martin, as long as innocent babies are allowed to be killed, the life issue will be our #1 issue!"

This person:
A) Completely missed the point.
B) Used hyperbole that bothers me. What is so "brutal" about aborting foetuses?

Damn you Americans are nuts.

This is just as much a bunch of stereotyping bigotry as when someone hates on homosexuals.

Calling an entire category of people bigots is bigotry.

Supposably, chemical abortion is pretty 'humane', if murder can be called such a thing. But lets look at the other methods.

-A giant needle is stuck into the mother, injecting poison into the fetus.
-An implement is inserted through the birth canal and used to physically damage the fetus, killing it.

Or, the very worst : The mother goes through labor, but before the head is free of the birth canal, a hole is drilled in the baby's head. Or, the head is birthed completely, and the baby's spinal cord is severed by using scissors on the back of it's neck. Or, the baby is birthed completely, and simply killed before the umbilical cord is cut.

Some people actually argue that you can abort a baby right up until the moment when the cord is cut. It could be out and crying. Doesn't matter - long as that cord is there, it's not a person.

The real question about abortion is Why? What good does it do?

I live in the UK. I recently started going properly to a church numbering maybe 800 in total or so. I've obviously not talked to everyone in the church but I have met a lot of people from there, and I have never yet heard either of those two topics come up. I've heard a lot about getting involved in the community, making people feel welcome, trying to be a better person, helping the homeless etc etc etc.

In addition to this, I have been brought up in a Christian home and have met a lot of Christians. I've never seen any of them so completely focused on those two issues. Yes, most of them think that homosexuality and abortion is wrong, but theres no focus on hating or fearing either of these two things.

I think its easy to take Christians saying, "homosexuality is wrong" as "omg die gays." While I accept there are some extremists out there who slur the image of the rest of us, the majority of Christians don't want to try and make gay people straight or stop people from having abortions. All we can do is offer our opinion, and apply those principles into our own lives, before trying to fix everyone elses.



I can assure all Christians, including myself, have lots of areas of sin they need to be rid of.

By the way I did used to be for abortion then I researched it for my French oral presentation in my AS level. It shocked me how 'brutal' the methods were.

But in the article, he doesn't state that this is what the "average" Christian believes in or anything like that. The man isn't crying out how wrong a typical Christian is or something like that. The only time he does make a generalization is when he says that "many people believe we are engaged in a holy war. And we are." At best, he's aware that many people don't fall under this stereotyping and actually call out to them to make a difference, proclaiming that "if you concur, it's time to stop allowing a chosen few to speak for the masses. Quit letting them define the agenda."

Tell me about it. I'm in Missouri, where 90% of people are "Christians", but out of all the things I hear about (or when I went to a church), it's "zomg abortion", "zomg cloning", "zomg homosexuallls!!!!!!!!!11".

Never hear anything about starving people in any poor/third world countries, providing homes for said countries, or anything that is deemed good for the world by their faith, unless they are missionaries...in which when they return, they feed off the ego boost by telling everyone "I'm a missionary! I converted thousands of people into Christianity! I build homes and fed a bunch of homeless poor people that are 1/10th my size! Praise ME!"

I actually do not mind Christianity in the general sense. It provides protection for those who need comfort for an afterlife. It provides a system of morals and respect for each other. It provides the desire to live good!

However the very aspects in which I do not mind Christianity is also a negative as well: It deceives those from the truth of not knowing any afterlife. It shallows thought and feeds zealous mindsets, and eventually an ego boost. It allows them to live well for theirselves, but not for the right reasons, and often times this allows them to forget the laws their faith is built on altogether.

I don't think you can rightly say that Christianity is the only thing that does this. Hell, politics seems to do most of the things you listed here.

(Also, did you say that one of the negative aspects is that it's not true?)

kudos! couldnt have said it better myself!

I apologize that what I implied here is that Christianity is the only thing. What you say is true, that it is not in reguards to just Christianity, but these are my beliefs of everything as a whole.

Hell, one could argue that some of the things I argued could be used against me. Oh well.

The question you asked puzzles me honestly. So I will remain silent on it

Good lord. Well, color me ignorant. I had no idea it could be that bad.

Check out that dude's friggin forehead

He's obviously smart if he's got a melon like that.

In the article, he nevered referred to all Christians as bigots. So where is the stereotyping bigotry?

I have never heard of them waiting that long. That logic doesn't make sense at all. Is it because the child is still dependant upon the mother? I don't want to start a whole new discussion but maybe somebody can enlighten me on the thought process behind that...

hes got a reversed widows peak!

Nicholas, I can't speak for the thought process behind that, because I don't agree with it. Just know that there are people on the other extreme too, for every person you see throwing Molotov cocktails at an abortion clinic there's some women looking at a completely birthed baby as the doctor ritualistically kills it.

I'm personally against all abortion. The only circumstance where I think it can be at all justified is if the mother will die if she goes to term, and the baby will definitely die as well. Yes, I'd let the mother die if the baby would live. And there's enough gray area in that definition that I wouldn't feel all that bad if we tried to bring the baby to term, and they both died. In all other cases it's murder, and nothing will ever convince me otherwise. Even in that case I outlined it's murder, and a sin, but I feel it's a justifiable one. Life is nothing but a series of choices between sins.

Also, really, wtf is up with that man's head? And his poor mother squeezed that thing out! Wow!

I do agree that Christ wouldn't get caught up in just a few issues, but help people live every principle relating to the kingdom of heaven.

I'm sorry to derail this thread into an abortion debate (I've not seen one on Massassi is years it seems like), but the article I found on the subject was simply too interesting to pass up. Should I start a different thread? Let me know, Wolfy.

Is Heaven Populated Chiefly by the Souls of Embryos?
"Between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed."
For Christians who claim that embryos are people with souls and that abortion is murder, this problem should be much, much more pressing than abortion.

"If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined," declared Michael Sandel, a Harvard University government professor, also a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

Yet people do nothing about it. Shouldn't anti-abortion Christians being campaigning like crazy for a law requiring the rescue of millions upon millions of "unborn babies" being menstruated out every year? Of course not, because they would sound absurd.

An interesting thought experiment put forth by the article for people who believe that embryos are full-persons with souls:
A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?

Even though the article isn't new by any means, it brought to my attention some really, really interesting points.

I couldn't care less where a non-Bohemian-Rhapsody thread ends up.

What color are the babies? [/bush]

On Wiki, in the article about abortion, there's a photo of a bas-relief with the inscription, "A visual representation of an abortion caused by pounding a woman with a mallet at Angkor Wat." You should probably mention that too.