Lord & Lady help me, I’m about to defend FoGgy. Btw, FriendofGod, I think the nickname of Foggie, from your screen-name here is cool. Hope you’re not offended, it’s not meant in malice.
Talk about sticking your head in the sand and screaming “I can’t hear you!”**
And Ben added:
FoG, do yourself a big favor and get an ISP that treats you like an adult.
Foggie is probably using one of the ISP set up by the So. Baptist for screening out objectional material. All considered, it’s a great idea. They object to certain material on the Net, rather than try to close down the “offending” site, they set up an ISP that blocks such material, but only for them, not anyone else. You have to admit, it’s a pretty good solution to problem.
To follow up on David’s observation about Sunday’s episode of The Practice, on both Ed and The West Wing last night, religious faith in general–and Christianity in particular–were portrayed in an overtly positive light.
And The West Wing’s one of them damn socialistic shows, too! :eek:
Well, it’s a better solution than trying to shut down the sites you don’t like, but it is far less ideal than just ignoring them altogether. There is something infantile about asking someone else to decide what you can and can’t look at. It’s not as if FoG has opened a site and thought “Ick. I’ll block that in case some link takes me there in the future.” He has settled for someone else’s ideas of what is fit for him to view.
Maybe, but c’mon. I suspect that he and his ISP would agree in about 99% of all cases.
Foggy doesn’t want to be tempted to look at sites that offend his moral code. That he’s willing to essentially hire someone to avoid this particular pitfall doesn’t seem unreasonable. I think we should cut the guy some slack on this particular point.
Just a quick FYI, I do plan to get on here sometime this weekend and try to catch up on questions or comments aimed my way. Satan if I actually missed one of yours I’ll go back and find it. Remember it might be in the bottom of page 4 which doesnt show up on my screen.
Thanks for those of you who see where I’m coming from on the porn-screening thing. Someone said it best, it’s much easier to ‘hire someone’ to do the work, and indeed in 99% of the cases my ISP and I agree.
Okay I’m going to try to catch up to some responses here. I’d like to give one or two general comments on “sexual sin in media” and the depiction of Christians in media. On the first topic, I did find an MSNBC article about the increase in sex in the media:
See it’s not just the crazed fundamentalists who see this :). I will say this, I find research like this a monumental waste of time and money, simply because the conclusion they drew is so darned obvious anyway that they didn’t need to do the study! But I thought you guys would like to see the story.
As for Christianity in media … irony of ironies, last night on ER they portrayed Christianity in a positive light! I was actually quite impressed. Dr. Kovach looks like he’s practically about to get saved. The dying priest said some excellent things on the show last night (‘faith comes and goes, but that’s us, not Him. He’s always there’). It was all about Kovach facing the hatred he has for those who killed his family, and realizing that despite what happened, God is still very real and very loving.
Of course this somewhat confirms my earlier contention that if Christians are portrayed positively, it’s always in a Catholic context. But hey I’ll take what I can get ;).
I hope the tide is turning. The LA Law season with the BAC woman was to Christians what Ellen’s final season was to gays. Hopefully the beginning of a turnaround. Some of you in this thread have mentioned other exceptions which is encouraging. There are little positive signs everywhere.
Okay, on to your posts: Ben, you said among other things:
So wait, I don’t get this: you’re saying the reason Christians get martyred is because we want to get martyred? I’ve had conversations with probably hundreds of Christians over the past few decades on this very topic. Not one of us wants to go through persecution, torture, and death for our faith. What we all hang on to is this: we believe that God gives you grace for today, not tomorrow. I’m not facing death and persecution today, so I don’t really have the grace to face it. But if it were to come today, I believe there would be grace available to me from God to face it courageously.
Well, it’s not an either-or thing Ben. Homosexuals, prostitutes, born again Christians … there are many groups who face persecution here in the good ole USA, although nothing like in some countries. People in other countries laugh when we talk about persecution. Some of my friends in college literally lived in countries where, if you publicly declared your faith, you could be jailed. We don’t face anything at all like that yet.
Read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It’s been around for centuries and is basically a book full of heroes.
Cervaise said:
Read The Humanist Manifesto. Written in 1973, it lays out very specifically a plan for humanity. If you read it, you will see how very successful humanists have been in implementing their agenda. And yes, Christians are fighting back and winning in some cases.
Satan said, in response to a Bible quote about not adding to the Bible:
Yup, Revelation. Is this the question you wanted me to get to?
…Which confirms my earlier suspicion that you completely ignore many posts that provide evidence which contradicts your world-view. Several of us have cited shows –The Practice, The West Wing, Ed–which have portrayed non-Catholic Christians in an extremely positive light.
No, he’s saying that you take secondhand stories about people supposedly not being allowed to read the Bible at work and elevate them to the status of Justin Friggin’ Martyr.
Let’s see . . . one of your cronies just got elected President, so I can see how tough it is for the poor, poor, persecuted Christians. Wow, how do you face each day? The horrible things you go through. :rolleyes:
Incidentally, that you would dare cast your lot with the homosexuals that your kind denounce from the pulpit every day of every year sickens me. Your hero, Dr. Dobson, never misses a chance to tell us all how perverted and lost homosexuals are. It just goes to show how low you will sink in your disingenuity. The Fundies and the gays, fighting hand in hand against persecution in the U.S. of A.? Give me a break.
OTOH, I see some of your other cronies just got their church confiscated by Federal agents because they owed $6 million in back taxes. Apparently, they refused to withhold FICA taxes from employee payroll checks because they claimed to be subject to God’s laws and not man’s laws.
And you never will, thanks to a little thing called the First Amendment, which protects you from me as much as it protects me from you.
The lighting/directing/cinematography was straight out of the 70’s. I couldn’t believe I was watching a new movie.
Most of the acting was OK. The actors playing Rayford, Chloe, and Bruce were halfway decent. Not top notch, but passable. Kirk Cameron and Chelsea Noble were gawd-awful. The guy playing the freaked out conspiracy theorist was horrible too.
The plot? Well… same as the book, pretty much. The only thing that interests me about the LB series is how they translate Biblical prophecy into modern-day occurrences. Not that I agree with the majority of it, but I find it interesting, at least. The rest of the story is boring. The characters are shallow and have no chemistry, etc.
Do you think this is isolated? I’ll bet things such as this happen a hell of a lot more than a Christian is persecuted - certainly at the level this professor was - in this country.
I have never seen a case of a Christian being held hostage by institutional discrimination such as this in this country. Ever. Feel free to enlighten me if I am uninformed.
The only stories I hear about how “persecuted” Christians are in this country is when someone or some organization (such as the ACLU, gay activists or Planned Parenthood to use just a few examples) tries to avoid similar institutional discrimination that breaches into the right to be free of religion in certain aspects of their lives, and when the “liberal media” and “secular humanist-owned courts” actually have the audacity to AGREE that prayer in schools is unconstitutional or other similar issues, that is what is decried as “persecution of Christians.”
Bullsh*t. [Self-censorship so FoGgy’s gestapo ISP allows him to read this.-Satan]
This guy and his family were persecuted. And if similar treatment happened to a Christian in the USA, you don’t think that everyone would go nuts about it?
Save the martyrdom for people who deserve it. You’re no martyr, Cassie from Columbine didn’t say yes, and people who believe in Jesus decided to make this guy’s life HELL because he didn’t.
These are facts. I realize that you’re not too strong when it comes to backing your beliefs up with them, but there you go.
Feel free to continue to live in a world where they don’t matter. I don’t plan on joining you there, however.
It’s been around for centuries?! Then it cannot possibly be about Fundamentalist Christians. Fundamentalism is a relatively recent phenomenon (1-2 centuries old, max.). If Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has been around for centuries, it probably deals with the martyrdom of (gasp!) Catholics.
First of all, I’d like to apologize for that little spelling mistake in my last post and the fallout that it caused. I had to use an internet connection at school for 3 years before my parents finally got our computer connection, and the schoolss connection was patrolled by Cyberproxy, which was a major annoyance, but that’s another rant for another time.
http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?0190524
Anyway, here’s the link to the user comments page for the movie on IMDB. As you can see, it’s about evenly divided between fundies and people who saw the film for what it was.
