I think the Russell quote sums it up quite nicely. Conservative evangelicals have been opposed to every major significant move towards rights for minorities and other aggrieved parties in recent history. Protestants are just as prone to oppression as any other religious sect. It's about power, not the particular religious doctrine (well, most, if not all, religions say some vile things, but the more rational believers recognize old documents were written within social realities). The only difference between "us" and "them" is we're lucky enough to not have a theocracy.

Such intolerance.

And was it I who disrupted the Muslim intolerance thread? Seems to me, that it was someone else who posted such a long amount of garbage that no one is now able to download the entire thread. I simply pointed out the ringing emptiness of people who don't mind bigoted oppression of rights when its based on Christianity complaining about another religion's bigotry. Get your own house in order, I say.

Is this Dumas' equivalent of a meltdown?

Apparently, 45% of Americans believe that God created the earth 10,000 or fewer years ago.

Apparently, many Americans have no problem with "Intelligent Design" or "Creationism" being taught in the public schools.

Kansas is discussing changing the definition of "science" to allow for the teaching of the above-named religious precepts as part of its science curriculum.

I do not believe that "most" evangelical Christians are necessarily religio-political fascists, although a significant percentage of them certainly are.

However, even those who see themselves as "open-minded" do our nation harm when they support such cock-eyed notions as the teaching of religious superstition in schools.

If you have religious faith, teach your children those precepts in Church, the proper forum for it. Public schools serve kids from all sorts of backgrounds, and the proper function of schools should be the teaching of "reading, writing and arithematic," as the saying goes, essentially, the capacity to think logically and functionally.

(I have never heard any proponent of school prayer explain just why it is so necessary to recite a prayer in school, and neither have I ever heard those who blame the lack of school prayer for the depredations of presumably godless youth explain how, assuming the families of youthful offenders gave their children religious grounding, the lack of a one minute or so rote recitation of prayer in school can possibly have any deleterious effect on those youths. If the families of youthful offenders have NOT provided their children with religious teaching, it is certainly not the role of the public schools to inculcate in children religious thinking which the families have not seen fit to do. Moreover, one must hold responsible for any "godless" behavior of young people their families who raised them, not their teachers who are charged only with teaching them to read and think.)

Oof ... that's gotta burn something wicked.

K

[img]http://www.bradthegame.com/jones/laughing-kids.jpg[/img]

Meltdown? No. I'm just pissed.

Thanks, Madget for helping to explain the insult.

Okay, I followed the link. Does anybody have anything more recent than 1780?

How about allowing for the possibility that we Protestants have mellowed out over the last 225 years?

The Puritans were pretty awful.

However... it's not like Christians are still putting people in stocks and throwing rotten food at them for spitting on the ground on a Sunday or burning witches.

Reece, instead of responding to the ever-growing list of charges against Islam over on that other thread, you made several statements about why you think Christianity is just as bad...

... which is more than a little insulting when there is an imam who just recently supported the idea of stoning people for adultery and we start comparing and contrasting the Protestant church with all the examples drawn from Islam.

It doesn't take much digging to find some incredibly fucked up shit going on in the Muslim world at this very moment ranging from female circumcision to throwing people in jail just for having a Bible.

Your stubborn insistence that contemporary Christians are just as bad doesn't make it true.

It's not religion that's keeping fundamentalists from acting barbarous, but all the stuff such theocrats constantly stand against. Theocrats just have more sway in Islamic countries right now, but ideologies could change.

Glad to know you have your priorities.

So, let me see if I'm following you. If Christians could overthrow the American government like a freaky radical sect did in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale", we would go back to the days of maiming Quakers and looting Catholic churches?

That's about eight different types of crazy.

Now, if you were to say something a little more plausible like, say, a Christian theocracy would repeal Roe vs. Wade and gay marriage laws... then you would have a case worth discussing.

But this assumption you seem to have that the Constitution is the only thing keeping Christians in this country from adopting the principles of jihad is nuts on so many levels that it's almost funny.

Instead, you speak in broad terms about "christofascists" and repealing freedom and justify it with a bunch of variations on "No, you started it."

Give me a break.

The vast majority of today's Christians believe in freedom, equality, liberty and respecting government institutions. We are not as much of a threat to your way of life as you say we are.

You try to hide blind hatred behind a thin veneer of scholarly tendencies and "tolerance", but all that does is make you a hypocrite.

At least Cisco Bunny is up front and honest about his irrational biases.

You've told me there are a few Christian theologians you respect, so save it.

Your occasional willingness to admit that there are some "good" Christians out there (in other words, ones you can tolerate more) is about on the same level as a homophobe trying to deflect criticism by using the cliched line "Hey, some of my best friends are gay."