Richard Dawkins's Jewish Problem

When are we going to see GGG crying saying “I have sinned”?
:-)

“5. The Holy Scriptures are Authoritative and the primary rule of faith and Christian practice.”

Is it your position that scripture is literally true?

Now the rubber meets the road...time to pop the popcorn folks!

bucket-o-poo still can’t get his infinitesimally small mind around the fact that Christianity is well defined and imparted to mankind via scripture.

Yup...anyone that believes scripture is a cultist. Anyone that understands Biblical truth, is an idolator.

Feel good cafeteria Nancy Pelosi catholicism is the standard in bucky-poo’s liberal la-la land world.

As if that’s not bad enough, he seriously thinks that 2% is in the majority on FR!

Supporting scripture please.

Supporting scripture please.

In case you didn't know, the Crusades started well after the Bible was written.

Driving native Americans off their land was due to just about everything BUT furtherance of Christianity.

Driving them off, yes, but their "management", particularly educational, once under the governments thumb in the reservation system was clearly designed to turn the savage natives (can I say that) into good little Christians. That was BIA policy, specifically to Christianise (sp?) them.

Drinking and posting are a dangerous combination, but I do understand your plight.

You had a tough day pretending to be looking for work, but you have no real skills to provide to any employer. You got home, checked your mailbox, and discovered that your ex is suing you for back alimony and child support (have you even seen your kids lately?). You enter your shoddy rental, find nothing appeling to eat, but there’s that unopened plastic 750 of cheap vodka...

You open it, take four or five swigs right from the bottle, set it down nest to the borrowed computer, fire up the dialup, and navigate to FR.

The rest is public.

And for those who feel this post is unwarranted, you are mistaken. The target regularly lies about me, and reaps what he sows.

I have found #91 a good and sufficient response to him and even that is exceedingly generous.

My advice to you: heed the wisdom of your tag line.

#91

In case you didn't know, the Crusades started well after the Bible was written.

What does that have to do with the price of eggs in China?

I'm talking about what NT scripture supports your contentions. Show me that.

The only people bothering with him now are people that haven’t been exposed to him, OR people trying to do a service to people to avoid him and not waste their time on him.

I like this comment from one of the Mods from another thread:

“Final note: Trolls, troublemakers, disruptors, forum pests, malcontents, RINOs, liberals, stalkers, et al, would continue posting to (harassing) someone after being asked to stop. Conservative FReepers would not.”

I know BW will say no one asked him not to post to them but you would think the message, like #91, would sink in after a while!

Driving them off, yes, but their “management”, particularly educational, once under the governments thumb in the reservation system was clearly designed to turn the savage natives (can I say that) into good little Christians. That was BIA policy, specifically to Christianise (sp?) them.

So my original point stands.

“Christianize”, but perhaps the word is proselytize.

And it’s a little more complicated too than a bunch of cowboys drove them off or killed them, then the women folk felt sorry for them and “educated” them to Christian/western ways.

You really need to save your energies poo...I have a feeling you’re about to need them!

LOL....it’s interesting your last comments...you really should take advice given to you countless times here and learn once and for all that this is Free Republic, not DC/DU, move0n or huff-n-stuff.

No one has lied about you, you just get called out regularly by multiple genuine conservatives and Christians because you stick out like a broken, near severed if not outright amputated thumb...forget sore.

Coming from a drunk who doesn’t know that the Crusades occurred after the bible was written, I’d consider your statement inconclusive at best.

How’s life in the cultist microcosm these days? Have you figured out that there’s a difference between politics and religion?

If you wanted a dissertation with footnotes, you should have made that clear. Christianity is perfectly compatible with both macro and microevolution.

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, Buck.

You just entered a new term in the discussion, "Macro-evolution."

Please define "Macro-evolution."

”You don't have to apologize. Simply admitting those of your religion committed immoral acts in the furtherance of your religion is enough.”

Enough for what? Enough to allow you to tell Christians that they must go over in the corner, sit down, shut up, and accept without comment any proposition put before them?

”I claim the Crusades were a combination of rightful defensive campaigns and indefensible outright slaughters of innocents.”

You claim you want an ‘uncleansed’ narrative of the Crusades and the events surrounding that period. Very well, let’s have that view. Uncleansed.

There’s antiRepublicrat, sitting at his computer, perusing the latest news and other information, verily the knowledge of the world at his fingertips. Oh, wait . . .

There were no computers in the Twelth Century. Nor any other method for the mass distribution of knowledge. In fact, very little knowledge even existed had there been a way to distribute it, and what did exist was scattered among isolated enclaves. If he lived where there was a not too distant coastline, antiRepublicrat may have learned that the world was round, like a ball, and wondered how such a thing could be. Otherwise, he may have believed the world flat, if he thought about it at all.

Had he the misfortune of being an eastern Christian living in, for instance, Nicaea or Antioch, antiRepublicrat might, depending on the timing, have lived in constant dread of being attacked and slaughtered by Moslem hoards, just as they had done in so many other places in Asia Minor (now called Turkey). Had he the worse misfortune of ancestors who lived in the Christian homelands of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, anywhere along the coast of North Africa, or in Majorca, Sardinia, or the Iberian Peninsula, antiRepublicrat might not have ever been born to witness (or to hear about) the horrible Crusader massacres of thousands of innocent peace-loving Moslems.

If he was fortunate to survive childbirth and the various diseases and accidents to which children were particularly susceptible, like antiRepublicrat, YHAOS could look forward to a short, rather brutish forty years, or less, of life (assuming he wasn’t struck down by those same hazards in adulthood). But, had he survived and there was a crusade during the prime of his life when he could be pressed into service by his liege lord, then he would be subject to the same rules of engagement as every other crusader soldier with respect to the treatment of civilian populations, the treatment of besieged cities, the taking of booty, and the treatment of prisoners. If he was most fortunate, YHAOS might have returned home only somewhat the worse for wear and possibly somewhat the richer. Why would he question the commonly accepted rules of warfare of that day? Whence might come the impetus for such reflection?

But not antiRepublicrat. Despite a paucity of knowledge and instruction, without the benefit of the ideas and research of Hugo Grotius, Johannes Gratian, Thomas Aquinas, Joannes de Legnano, Baron Pufendorf, Emmerich de Vattel, Honoré Bonet, Franciscus de Victoria, and St. Isidore (to name a few of the more important), he knew instinctively that The Crusades were evil incarnate to such an extent that he eschewed any association with them and went off to form his own moral order, which to this day remains the only human system formed by its adherents without a single misstep or lapse in righteous practice. Do not mistake these remarks for sarcasm. They are designed for a larger point.

In the Philosophy of History there resides the theory, first proposed by Robert Flint (1834-1910 -Professor of Divinity, Edinburgh University 1876-1903), that any academic discipline will, at a comparatively late stage in its development, assume an independent form, thereby definitively separating itself from related fields of knowledge. This is a perception of such simpleness and directness that it seems almost self-evident, yet it requires someone to articulate it before we can benefit from the understanding it brings. The man of genius (as Flint describes him) who comes to be generally recognized as the founder of such a new discipline, usually achieves that distinction by a scholarly and insightful act of uniting its previously scattered elements into an integrated whole of sufficient breadth to permit it to stand on its own.

So it was in this manner that the Law of Nations was established in 1625 when Hugo Grotius published his epochal opus De jure belli ac pacis (the Laws of War and Peace). Although not greeted with universal approbation, the Vatican banning it from consideration until 1901, Grotius’ work was such a monumental accomplishment of compilation, organization, and integration of the disparate elements of the ethics of how nations should treat with one another, that it quickly gained general acceptance as the definitive authority on the subject.

True to Flint’s theory, in producing his work Grotius had drawn on an extensive body of writings whose beginnings dated back to approximately the middle of the Twelfth Century (remarkably, shortly after the start of The Crusades). The range of the philosophical and legal inquiries conducted by theologians, canonists, and other scholars, was quite broad, including questions of when war might be lawful, the origins of war, on the avarice and cruelty of war, treatment of prisoners, when the right of conquest and the claiming of the spoils of war are just and when they are not, the rights of discovery and the treatment of native peoples, the securing of peace as the prime objective of war, issues of maritime law, redress for injuries, restitution of property and recompense for wrongs done, and the laws of embassy and envoys.

Numbered among the writers of these works were many of the most illustrious names from those times. A few examples:

Johannes Gratian, generally regarded as the true founder of the science of canon law, whose major work appeared between 1139 and 1150.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Born 1225-27 - died 7 March, 1274, whose great work Summa totius theologiae occupied the last nine years of the author's life. Therein he devoted the fortieth question of the Secunda secundae to four great issues of the law of war.

Joannes de Legnano, a jurist of note and a professor at Bologna, where he died in 1383. The author of the treatise De bello this writer had on several occasions been charged with diplomatic missions.

Honoré Bonet. His work l'Arbre des batailles is thought to have been composed about 1384. Therein he devotes 132 chapters to various issues on the Law of Nations. This work was reproduced in exquisite manuscripts and graced the library of many a great prince.

Franciscus de Victoria, died 1546, held the chair of theology at Salamanca for twenty years, restoring a high quality of theological teaching in Spain. A teacher and lecturer, Victoria was not a writer, but, following his death, many of his lecture notes were published by his students, including De Indis Et De Ivre Belli Relectiones, which, as the title suggests, deals with the issue of native peoples and the law of war. Prior to Victoria, there had been a long legacy of Spanish inquiries on the Law of Nations dating as far back as St. Isidore, Bishop of Seville from 596 to 636, who included in his work Etymologiae, a description of the Roman ideas “jus gentium”and “jus militare” which correspond closely to our modern concepts, respectively, of the Law of Nations and of the Law of War.

While the ecclesiastics, jurists and academics of Western Civilization were working through the ethical and legal issues involving the relations between nations and the moral conduct of war, the temporal rulers had not been exactly idle either. Besides attending with some considerable interest the labors of the learned community within their respective societies, these rulers were themselves developing ideas and theories about a society of nations based on the developing philosophies of Natural Law and Natural Rights. Europe was forming itself into an association of republics, principalities, city-states, and kingdoms, taking the first tentative steps in the creation of what was to be a society of nations, and they were beginning to look upon their community of nations as functioning very similarly to how a society of individuals operates.

Influences from Byzantine institutions, from the sultanates along the coast of North Africa and the Moorish kingdoms of Spain, and borrowings from Greek and Roman antiquity, all played their part, according to most historians, but the major impetus seemed to be coming from within Europe itself. An important event in this process had occurred in 962 when Pope John XII crowned Otto I of Germany as the first Emperor of a newly formed Holy Roman Empire. While this new empire never attained the level of power or influence that had been exerted by the old Roman Empire, and its vigor steadily diminished over the centuries until it finally expired completely at the beginning of the Nineteenth, it nonetheless served to help solidify the idea of a Western society of nations.

When some European states turned to commercial interests over other interests (the rise of “Merchant States”), the flourishing of commercial enterprises, benefiting most from a harmonious intercourse between states, influenced European nations towards closer relationships. Moreover, the nations shared a common religion, and Latin, being the language of their church, their legal and academic institutions, their literature, and of their statecraft, provided them with a common language with which to communicate. Their growing close association came to be known as Respublica Christiana, and, at its height, allowing for some considerable variance in degree of independence, its membership came to an estimated number close to two thousand. This circumstance made supremacy difficult to attain. Any nation which attempted to achieve dominance, found an almost instant league of other states arrayed against it, which tended to dampen its enthusiasm for conquest, and which, in turn, tended to cause the states to admit to a certain level of equality amongst all its members.

Amazingly, through this period of time, right up to the present, it is the nations of Western Civilization that have most scrupulously sought to adhere to the laws of nations and the laws of war (waterboarding notwithstanding).

Though a milestone of considerable proportions, the work of Grotius was but a step in a continuing process. There were important writers to follow:

Samuel Pufendorf. The Law of Nature and of Nations, published in 1674. Further development of Natural Law as it applied to ideas of justice and the Law of Nations.

Cornelius van Bynkershoek, Questions of Public Law, published in 1737. Expanded on the work of Grotius and Pufendorf on questions of the Law of Nations and Constitutional Law.

Emmerich de Vattel. The Law of Nations, published 1758. Basing constitutional and civil law on the Law of Nations, Vattel’s effort became perhaps the most often quoted work on state matters with regard to the Law of Nations. A favorite of Jefferson’s.

By the time the United States declared their independence from the United Kingdom, the epoch treatise of Grotius had been known and referenced for 150 years, and his work, along with the subsequent works of several other authorities, had provided the states of Western Civilization with what amounted to a series of organized protocols to which they could refer in the conduct of their foreign affairs.

Whenever we undertake to study historical events or the acts of historical figures, we are "privileged" (as the historian Bernard Bailyn describes it) to know of subsequent events and outcomes, of which those earlier figures had no more than a glimmer, if even so little as that. If we study and judge events and human actions out of the context of their particular historical time and not on their terms, then it must lead either to error, or the examination, from the beginning, was intended to lead to a self-serving preordained conclusion.

From its inception, Western Civilization seems to have been blessed with an instrument of self-correction. That instrument resides in the idea of the Perfectability of Man. Having both a secular history and a religious history, we may nonetheless surmise its roots originate from our culture’s Judeo-Christian tradition going back some five thousand years. The idea does not necessarily imply the notion that Man can achieve perfection, rather that he is capable of bettering himself and his condition; that, indeed, his very nature impels him to seek an elevation of himself and his condition. It is this idea that allows Western Civilization to correct its faults and liberate its virtues, and with increasing force, as its elements come to be better articulated and more accurately applied.

Exhibiting a degree of perverseness that can only be regarded as deeply pathological, much of our present Intellectual Community, which is almost uniformly Marxist, has sought to reverse the process of self-correction, using our culture’s discarded faults as weapons with which to attack and destroy its virtues. Raised and schooled in Western Culture environs, they can hardly plead ignorance as an excuse for their miscreant behavior. It looks like you’ve bought into their con.

You didn’t know the Bible was written before the crusades?

Maybe antiRepublicrat was thinking of you when he was fixated on eggs in China.

Exhibiting a degree of perverseness that can only be regarded as deeply pathological, much of our present Intellectual Community, which is almost uniformly Marxist, has sought to reverse the process of self-correction, using our culture’s discarded faults as weapons with which to attack and destroy its virtues. Raised and schooled in Western Culture environs, they can hardly plead ignorance as an excuse for their miscreant behavior. It looks like you’ve bought into their con.

Hook line and sinker. Another NEA indoctrination, lazy scholarship success story.