Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian

[Detector]

Some old teachings need to go away.

People have a tendency to use extremist as an example just as people tend to interpret the bible to fit their own needs or wants. Remember the Ten commandment? The one that says Thou shalt not kill? For anyone to think the bible teaches believe in me or be killed is a good example of twisting it to fit their needs.

When the scriptures in the bible are taught as intended and understood as intended, finding anything bad is really tough. The problem is most people don't want to take the time to really understand it properly and would rather take a few writings and interpret it to fit their needs.

[Buzz]

I'd say one would have to be pretty confident in one's self to proclaim to know the true intentions of the writers of the Bible.

I believe the bigger problem is that people have a problem with letting things go. They'll hold onto cultural beliefs, whether they make sense or not, and try to rationalize their need. Or perhaps they will proclaim to know the true intentions of the Hebrew writers who lived thousands of years before they dirtied a diaper.

[Buzz]

Originally Posted by Detector

You've got me there. I went to church 3 days a week until I was age 7 and have met many many church goers and have yet to meet just one that felt the stories in the bible were absolutely true. Now I have met many that felt the values the bible teaches is true, and I agree.

I don't need a book to teach me sticking my finger in a light socket isn't a great idea either, but reading about it can help. And while I know that illustration of the guy who does, and stands on end being shock, isn't real, I still get the moral of the story.

I think a lot people misinterpret what the bible is really trying to say and come up with some really bazaar ideas of what they think it's teaching. Thats why people go to church. To have the teaching of the bible explained. Although, I will agree today some Church's do tend to teach their own interpretations. Thats also why there are so many different denominations.

I say someone writes their own book of teachings that has a little less barbarianism, a little more clarity, and a lot less moral absolutism.

[Detector]

I'd say one would have to be pretty confident in one's self to proclaim to know the true intentions of the writers of the Bible.

Or they might just be someone that has been to church a time or two. The church has been teaching the meaning of the bible since pretty much the day it was transcribed. I think they have an idea what the writers intentions were.

I believe the bigger problem is that people have a problem with letting things go. They'll hold onto cultural beliefs, whether they make sense or not, and try to rationalize their need.

Oh you mean letting go of the beliefs like Thou shalt not kill and conventing thy neighbors wife nonsense? Yeah that bible garbage is so 2000 years ago.

[lurker]

The Pope sure got his willie in the wringer recently after repeating a former Pope's words about the Koran and its believers.

Who's the group that says we need to be sensitive to them?

This is long but (by doG) READ IT!

9/11, Five Years Later: A View from Europe
By Bruce Bawer
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 14, 2006

Recently I watched Casablanca for perhaps the 20th time. Its characters include people from the U.S., Norway, Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria whose harrowing experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe have taught them a precious lesson: the value of freedom. Many seek passage to America, a beacon of liberty in a darkening world. In one stirring scene, Nazi officers at Rick’s café begin singing Die Wacht am Rhein, and the other customers respond with La Marseillaise.

Something like that sense of international unity in the cause of freedom is rather what I expected of the West after 9/11. But it didn’t happen. Why? Largely because of a failure to comprehend the nature of the enemy: Islamist terrorism continues to be characterized by many as a desperate response to poverty, oppression, and/or Western foreign policies, rather than what it is: a jihad by people who seek to conquer the West as Muhammed did North Africa, subduing infidels and imposing sharia. Only recently did George W. Bush finally confess that we were fighting “Islamic fascists” – only to revert, in the face of criticism, to the empty term “war on terror.”

Some understand the enemy, yet underestimate its capabilities. One’s comfort can be one’s downfall: just as it seemed inconceivable that the Twin Towers could be brought down so easily, so our Western civilization can feel indestructible, and the idea of having to defend it can feel like – well, something out of an old movie. There are few more telling symbols of many young Europeans’ sense of absolute security, their utter unconsciousness of any clear and present threat to their freedom, and the alienness to them of any concept of moral responsibility than the Che t-shirts and Palestinian scarves by which they play at identifying with the perceived glamour of violent revolution against their own civilization.

On 9/11 (as now), I was a New Yorker living in Oslo. Yet that day I realized I’d never left home – for this was, I knew, an attack not only on my hometown but on the free world. Clearly, we were at war – not only with terrorists, but with their philosophical allies in the West. I already knew a bit about the latter: in 1999, living in Amsterdam’s Oud West, I looked around me and realized I’d failed to notice a key piece of the European puzzle – namely, the rise of Muslim communities that weren’t transitional phenomena (like the now-vanished Polish neighborhood in Manhattan where my father grew up) but the beginnings of a fast-growing, self-segregating European Islamic society that was becoming ever more confident and assertive in its rejection of Western values. The celebrations in the streets of Ede and elsewhere on 9/11 affirmed my sense of the grim possibilities these enclaves represented.

In the wake of 9/11, European leaders felt obliged to join America in invading Afghanistan. But the initial show of solidarity by politicians and intellectuals (“we are all Americans”) quickly gave way to declarations that the U.S. – by supporting Israel, buttressing Arab dictators, fostering globalism, etc. – had asked for 9/11. But not Europe. Europe was the Muslims’ friend. Muslims knew this. Hence Europe was safe. This soon became Western European orthodoxy. Only days after 9/11, Norwegian author Gert Nygårdshaug sneered at the idea that there might soon be an attack on “Oslo or Rome or Copenhagen.” He was far from alone in his mockery.

Then came Madrid, London, Bali, Beslan, Mumbai. Van Gogh was butchered; Muslims rioted in France; their coreligionists in Denmark rampaged over newspaper cartoons of Muhammed. The Western European elite played down, even denied, any connection among these events. Yet year by year the truth has become increasingly clear: though the U.S. was the target on 9/11, the front line of the war with Islamism is Europe.

It is a war, moreover, in which the enemy’s most powerful weapon is not bombs but demography. Muslim immigration levels remain high; so do reproduction rates. Yes, only a tiny percentage of European Muslims are terrorists; but many more – who get their “news” from satellite channels such as Al-Jazeera and who feed one another’s animosity toward the West in mosques, in community centers, and on Internet message boards – find European culture intolerably decadent and share the jihadist goal of a European caliphate governed according to Koranic precepts. Recent polls show that at least 40% of Muslims in the U.K. would like to see Britain under sharia law, and that at least one in four approved of the 7/7 attacks. European-establishment rhetoric to the contrary, poverty and ignorance aren’t the explanation: the most intense anti-Western sympathies are nursed not by illiterate immigrants from rural Arab villages but by their well-educated, European-born children who live well and drive BMWs.

In all of Europe, only the Danes have taken remotely serious actions to halt the advance of what the scholar Bat Ye’or has called “Eurabia.” The results: immigration to Denmark is down, integration improved. Yet even in Denmark, death threats against cartoonists have made the free word less free. Elsewhere, too, sharia is on the march. Belgian law now forbids “Islamophobia”; similar legislation was passed by Britain’s House of Commons last year, but nixed by the Lords. In Norway, you can now be imprisoned for “insulting” someone’s religion (and the burden of proof is on the accused). A grim foretaste of Europe’s future was provided last February in Oslo, where, at a state-sponsored press conference, editor Velbjørn Selbekk – who, after reprinting the Muhammed cartoons, had defied death threats for weeks – did a sudden about-face, apologizing abjectly to the largest assemblage of imams in Norway’s history. The Norwegian government hailed this capitulation, calling it a “reconciliation”; later an official delegation visited Qatar to beg Muslim leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s forgiveness, too.

What of America? No question, Bush’s arrogance, incompetence, inarticulateness, deafness to criticism, and tolerance of torture have (in Andrew Sullivan’s words) “managed to muddy the moral high ground against the evil of Islamism” – thereby polarizing Americans and helping alienate Europeans at a time when unity is crucial. (The U.S. military’s dismissal of desperately needed Arabic-language experts for being gay testifies to the endurance of an absurd bias that I thought, on 9/11, would fade in the face of a real and deadly foe.) In the U.S., as in Europe, politicians and journalists who should know better continue to repeat the ludicrous mantra that Islam means “peace,” jihad means “inner struggle,” and extremists are “hijacking Islam.”

Yet for all America’s missteps, the European elite’s charge that the U.S. is the world’s #1 menace has been obscene and self-destructive – as has that same elite’s tireless whitewashing of the real menace. On 9/11, I would never have imagined that five years later, a man who refuses to condemn the stoning of female adulterers would be respected as the leading voice of “moderate” European Islam; that European governments would still be funding within their borders mosques and Muslim schools that teach contempt for democracy, Jews, gays, and sexual equality; that Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen would argue for accepting the oppression of Muslim women in the West; and that Britain would still be sheltering radical clerics, Queen Elizabeth knighting the likes of Iqbal Sacranie (who calls homosexuality “unacceptable”), and London mayor Ken Livingstone praising as “progressive” the above-mentioned al-Qaradawi (who has defended suicide bombers and the execution of gays). The delusion endures: in August, the AP reported that Germans were “stunned” by news of a planned train bombing in their country because they thought their “opposition to the Iraq war would insulate” them from terrorism; and Britain’s “Communities Secretary,” following the arrest of “English lads” who’d planned to blow up London-to-U.S. flights, promised to consider a proposal by Muslim leaders to pacify would-be domestic bombers by introducing sharia law in immigrant areas.

I would never have believed on 9/11 that in 2006, most Europeans would still be surprised to learn – to pluck two examples at random – that over seven in ten immigrant women in Sweden (according to an EU study) are affected by “honor-related violence” and that Jewish children (according to a French government report) “can no longer get an education” in France because of abuse by Muslim classmates. Some law-enforcement authorities have already thrown in the towel: in 2004, Swedish police admitted they “have no control over the situation in Malmö,” a city plagued by Muslim rapes and robberies; this August, after a Muslim gang shootout in Oslo, police said they were “reluctant to crack down on the gangs out of fear for their own safety.”

On 9/11, the free world was powerfully reminded of its freedom. In Europe, alas, that day’s spirit has been steamrollered by an establishment that – apparently having already accepted the inevitability of Europe’s Islamization – routinely turn the truth on its head, representing aggressors as victims and self-defense as inflammatory. That upside-down picture needs to be set aright, and the spirit of 9/11 resurrected. For the bottom line is simple: if we don’t cherish our liberties with the fervor that the jihadists treasure their faith, we’ll lose.

[lurker]

Welp, wordy's right in his thinking that we should fear a religion. His playbook's writers fear continued GOP Leadership in Washington when they should be retracting their Fundie mentality and concentrating (a task for them, no doubt) instead on the world wide threat from the Islamist movement.

Somali cleric calls for pope's death
September 17, 2006

A HARDLINE cleric linked to Somalia's powerful Islamist movement has called for Muslims to "hunt down" and kill Pope Benedict XVI for his controversial comments about Islam.

Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin urged Muslims to find the pontiff and punish him for insulting the Prophet Mohammed and Allah in a speech that he said was as offensive as author Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.

"We urge you Muslims wherever you are to hunt down the Pope for his barbaric statements as you have pursued Salman Rushdie, the enemy of Allah who offended our religion," he said in Friday evening prayers.

"Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim," Malin, a prominent cleric in the Somali capital, told worshippers at a mosque in southern Mogadishu.

"We call on all Islamic Communities across the world to take revenge on the baseless critic called the pope," he said.

Reached by telephone on Saturday, Malin confirmed making the remarks that were echoed in less strident form by other senior clerics in the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS).

Another SICS executive member, Sheikh Ahmed Abdullahi, vented similar anger at the pope's "barbarous criticism" but stopped short of calling for his murder.

"He must apologise because he has offended the most honorable person who ever lived in the world," Abdullahi said.

The German-born leader of the Roman Catholic Church has been condemned in the Muslim world for comments he made at a Tuesday lecture, in which he implicitly denounced links between Islam and violence, particularly with reference to jihad, or "holy war."

The pope also quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said innovations introduced by the Prophet Mohammed were "evil and inhuman."
Edit: I incorrectly attributed this to a "former Pope" in the prior post... Going from my memory doesn't always work as well as I'd like.

Somalia, a Horn of Africa nation of some 10 million mainly moderate Muslims, has been wracked by instability for the past 16 years but has recently seen the rise of fundamentalist Islamists who seized the capital in June.

If you're gunna hate or distrust a religion, then PLEASE look for one that's bent on converting or killing us....that's U.S.

OK?

[Detector]

What I think make the bible so interesting is while it reads like a set of instructions for life, it reflects the individual readers thoughts. This is how we end up with groups like the Phelps. Even the people that transcribe the bible have done so in their own interpretation, which may or may not reflect what the original writer intended. Interpretations often reflect ones inner thoughts.

[Buzz]

Originally Posted by Detector

Or they might just be someone that has been to church a time or two. The church has been teaching the meaning of the bible since pretty much the day it was transcribed. I think they have an idea what the writers intentions were.

I've spent more time in church than most, my mother even went to bible school. Church was not a once a week event. I lived Christianity. You say the church has been teaching Christianity since day one, but fail to comment on the multitude of translations and denominations that have sprung up. Their intentions must have been crystal clear for that to happen.

The church teaches their version of what they think the intention was for whichever Hebrew writer they are speaking of. Some parts are more cut and dry than others but many discrepancies still remain. If someone is the type to go to church "a time or two" and believe they know about the Christian theology they might also be the type to believe everything they hear without any research into the matter. A well made decision for said person would be to understand the context of the Hebrew's writings, and what really coerced this Hebrew to say such things. Where did his beliefs come from? Are they truly his own?

Originally Posted by Detector

Oh you mean letting go of the beliefs like Thou shalt not kill and conventing thy neighbors wife nonsense? Yeah that bible garbage is so 2000 years ago.

Without the Bible no one would have any idea that killing another or coveting someone's wife is bad news. A case for the Bible isn't found there within. People have this tendency to think that every moral idea and story came from the Bible. These morals existed before the Bible, as anyone who has studied history knows full well. Biblical stories such as the Flood (and many more) were passed down by word of mouth from the Mesopotamians whom the Hebrews lived in close proximity to. Of course, one would have to study history to learn these things-and that's where we lose most everyone isn't it? Back to the subject at hand, intentions that is, I believe you must take an objective and holistic approach to Christian theology to begin to understand where these Hebrews are coming from.

Again we are back to the same question: Why do you believe the Bible is so special?

[Buzz]

Originally Posted by Detector

What I think make the bible so interesting is while it reads like a set of instructions for life, it reflects the individual readers thoughts. This is how we end up with groups like the Phelps. Even the people that transcribe the bible have done so in their own interpretation, which may or may not reflect what the original writer intended. Interpretations often reflect ones inner thoughts.

Do you exclude you own interpretations from that rule?

[Detector]

Let me guess, self-proclaimed theologists? Those people crack me up. There are people that have spent a lifetime studying the bible that will tell you for sure. The bible is many things to many people. Yet these wannabe theologists can read a few pages and tell the whole story.

I'm not sure if you just like to argue or have a hard time understanding a simple answer, but here it is again.

For the most part the bible is a good source for teaching good values to children. Yes thats right, I believe it's stories are written for children. The values are good for young and old, but written to be read by adults to their children.

Some people have such a hatred for religion they're blind to all but it's most radicals.

Just yesterday I had two of those kids in white shirts, black ties and on ten speeds come to my door asking if they could talk to me about the lord. I told them I didn't have time because I was in the process of moving. You know, without a seconds hesitation, what their answer was? They asked me if I would like some help. You know,I've been offered help by lots of people but there was no doubt in my mind these people would of genuinely been happy to help.

I also have no doubt had I told them I was tearing off my roof or painting my house they would have been just as eager to help and they only thing they would have asked in return was a little of my time to talk about the good book. Their hopes are that they can get me to understand what the bible is saying with the results being making the world a better place.

All I'm trying to say is the bible is a good book when understood.