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Aug 15, 2014 at 2:04 pm
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and remember to be decent to everyone
all of the time.
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Sad though. Rough way to go through life, asserting your beliefs on other people, and then reacting with anger when that doesn't end up being true. Because the angry ones are the ones living with the anger and rage.. they are the ones generating all that anger from within themselves... not a healthy thing to do to yourself, in the long run.
Oh well.
Then there's the issue of "group-think, where majority silence assumes that the "proper behaviour" espoused by just a vocal few is actually what everyone believes, when it really, really isn't...
You do know who's to blame for the Christians and Muslims, right? The Jews.
I struggled with their inclusion in my blanket condemnation of Monotheism, because Judaism often tips over into an ethnicity.
I think we can all agree that, at the root, it's Abraham's fault.
@6: Finally, something that we can actually be blamed for!
Jesus, protect me from your followers.
Love is when you look upon another to discover a different expression of your true self and have compassion for their life and struggle as you would your own.
Hate is when you look upon another and reject without compassion the part of you that you see in them.
All hate is personal, regardless of how it is expressed.
Of course, you cannot give to another what you would not give yourself. Neither can you accept from another what you would not give yourself.
Compassion, acceptance and love begin with you.
So does hate.
Dear Christians, you cannot love one another (all of humanity, not just fellow club members), which is the great teaching, and hold hate in your heart toward any or all of the same simultaneously. Science has proven decisively that apart from severe mental illness the human mind cannot disassociate their hate for a part of someone and express their love for the whole of them at the same time. You either hate or love a person, you cannot do both simultaneously. No, you cannot. So, hate or love, which are you creating more of in this world, which is your legacy?
I am a Christian. Jesus came to us because God loved us. That is truth. Hate is not a characteristic of the one true God.
-Beeching was already "out" among her fellow evangelicals as an advocate for marriage equality, and had been rejected already by bigots for that reason. She was never an anti-gay activist of any kind. In the independent interview, she mentions having at times booked music events at churches that turned into pro-prop-8 rallies after the fact and sometimes playing in churches that then gave anti-gay sermons. She didn't speak out in those cases, and didn't feel she was in a position to do so.
- She's gotten lots of support from Christians, and has said that most of the post-interview reaction from Christians was actually positive. The evangelical writer Rachel Held Evans and the UK's Greenbelt Festival both tweeted very quickly in her support, and those tweets have been very widely, and very quickly, passed on and retweeted, for example.
This is a big deal, since in the US, she's mostly known as a "praise and worship" songwriter (her songs are played in church, rather than on Christian pop radio), while in the UK she's known more for her Oxford theology degree and her news commentary. In both cases, she's a strong and specifically Christian voice. That's why the attacks on her by idiots like Lively have mostly focused on her being "deceived". They just can't get away with attacking her as a fake Christian, the way they attacked Jennifer Knapp, for example.
"What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn."
And then of course there are the Likudniks, the right-wing party currently in power in Israel. I guess we're so damn used to being outsiders that, once we are the ones in charge, we don't remember how to run a country with justice and mercy. According to the book of Exodus, Moses and the Israelites wandered in the desert of Sinai for forty years before reaching the Promised Land. The traditional explanation for this protracted journey is that it allowed a changeover of generations; when the House of Israel reached their destination, they would be led by people who were born into freedom and did not have the still-shackled mindset of a slave.
Maybe in a few decades a new cadre of leaders, free of the old worldview of oppression, will bring peace to the Holy Land. Next year in Jerusalem, next century, whatever.
@13: Excellent writing.