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To: onedoug

Christians deserve the credit for founding this great country. That is not the point. The point is non-christian countries are also doing good economically, socially, and with violent crime.

Israel was the first country to have a female head of state, India was the 2nd country to have a female head of the largest democracy in the world. So even women have progressed faster in non-christian countries.

Moral of the story is there is good in other religions.


19 posted on 07/31/2011 8:44:33 PM PDT by repub4ever1 (Capitalism is not perfect, but it beats all other systems hands down.)
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To: repub4ever1
Moral of the story is there is good in other religions.

¨God had suffered the heathens to worship the sun, moon and stars as a stepping stone to a higher stage of religious belief. That worship of the heathen nations thus forms part of God´s guidance for humanity.

But as for the Israelites, God had given them first hand knowledge of Him through the medium of Revelation. It is for this reason that idolatry was for them an unpardonable offence; and everything that might seduce them from that Divine Revelation was to be ruthlessly destroyed.

Hence the amazing tolerance shown by Judaism of all ages towards the followers of other cults, so long as these were not steeped in immorality and crime. Thus the prophet Malachi declares even the sacrificial offering of heathens to be a glorification of God (Mal 1:11).

Equally striking is the attitude of the Rabbis toward the heathen world. War had been declared against the Canaanites not because of matters of dogma or ritual, but because of the savage cruelty and foul licentiousness of their lives and cult. But the Rabbis never regarded the heathens of their own day as on the same moral level with the Canaanites. Their contemporary heathens in the Roman and Persian Empires obeyed the laws of conduct which the Rabbis deemed vital to the existence of human society, the so-called ´seven commandments given to the children of Noah´. They wisely held that in their religious life these heathens merely followed the traditional worship which they had inherited from their fathers before them, and they could not therefore be held responsible for failure to reach a true notion of the Unity of God. Such followers of other faiths – they taught – were judged by God purely by their moral life. ´The righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come,´ and are heirs of immortality, alongside the righteous in Israel. A later midrash proclaimed: ´I call heaven and earth to witness that, whether it be Jew or heathen, man or woman, freeman or bondman – only according to their acts does the Divine spirit rest upon them. And in the darkest days of the Middle Ages, Solomon ibn Gabirol, the great philosopher and Synagogue hymn writer, sang

´Thou art the Lord, And all beings are thy servants, Thy domain;
And through those who serve idols vain
Thine honor is not detracted from,
For they all aim to Thee to come.´

This is probably the earliest enunciation of religious tolerance in Western Europe.¨

--from ¨The Pentateuch and Haftorahs¨, Dr JH Hertz, CH, Late Chief Rabbi Of The British Empire 

21 posted on 07/31/2011 10:12:09 PM PDT by onedoug (If)
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To: repub4ever1
Moral of the story is there is good in other religions.

I think you are mixing up religion and society. While the two are mostly inter-linked, there is not a definite one-to-one correlation

Golda Meir was the third woman to be leader of a country (after Sri Lanka and India), but was it Jewish religion that made her PM or Israeli culture (which, let's face it is heavily "westernised" even if they have many Jews from Yemen, India, etc.)

India's first female PM was Indira Gandhi. Indian society though culturally Hindu has accepted influences from around the world. Don't get me wrong -- it was Hindu culture that made her PM, but not necessarily Hindu religion. She was also the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first PM of India who ruled the country for 18 years.

There are good deeds by people from other religions, but this case of electing politicians is not an example of such.

24 posted on 08/01/2011 1:58:43 AM PDT by Cronos ( W Szczebrzeszynie chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie I Szczebrzeszyn z tego slynie.)
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