The thing I have found most decidedly missing from religion in my life is a place that protects seekers as they go into their “crazy”. When people are examining really deep parts of themselves, it oftentimes doesn’t make sense, and the way we react to it now they have to hide it. For myself when I have gone into these deeper areas to dredge whatever in my subconcious is holding me back, I have found spiritual institutions to be more threatening than helpful. The other side of the coin ain’t a prize either, because the psychiatric establishment would rather medicate my problems away, or psychoanalyze things to death than help me come to terms with those inner parts of myself. To me that’s the most fundamental and important role of religion, to protect the seekers as they go deeply into their hearts to confront their own demons, without judging the person doing so as evil, misguided, insane, or a threat. My rule when dealing with other people seeking the light who want my help in some way is that they truly need to be seeking, I am not going to waste my time on someone who just wants some coddling, who wants to remain a drug addict and get nurtured while still remaining a drug addict. I wish that my attitude on this were more mainstream, and that there were obvious places to go for real spiritual advancement, rather than a mechanistic indoctrination.
To bring it back on topic. That’s the source of oppression I see in the real world. It’s not Christianity being outlawed or atheists being put into concentration camps, it’s people not being able to find a place that can help them answer their questions, and then being given a choice between conformity or ostracism. If this is the land of pluralism, I find it sorely lacking a lot of the time.
Sorry about the late response, I missed this post yesterday. If you actually go back and read the thread, you’ll see that it was a response to an exchange between newcrasher and kanicbird about what Christians are “called” to do. Here is the exchange, along with my own response.
I won’t bother with the rest. That was how the whole “judgement” conversation got started. It was a rhetorical discussion about how Christians should evangelize. As you can see, I did not accuse Chrisitians of “hypocrisy” and I did not accuse anyone in this thread- not even kanicbird- of being personally judgemental. You dived into the middle of the conversation and started making assumptions and hurling accusations at me without (apparently) bothering to read all the posts. Your assumptions are baseless. I am not hostile to Christians or Christianity in general and never have been.
I always saw Jesus’s being pissed in the Temple as sort of a standing up for what’s right. “Dammit, you assholes, this is supposed to be a house of worship, for people to come and connect to God, and here you pricks are, trying to cheat people out of their money! Dude, that’s just not cool!”
Wow Lisa Herdahl is a cunt. She comes into a community that works a certain way and tries to enforce some arbitrary ideal upon them out of some self-righteous sense of what is constitutional. It’s not unconstitutional for a school with a homogenous makeup in a small town to recite prayers. It’s unconstitutional for the Federal Government to make a law REQUIRING schools to recite those prayers. Now if there was a larger base in this small community of people who felt ostracized by these prayers, I would see an issue, but this woman claims they are Christian.
I’m sorry, but in this case that’s just someone coming in from the outside and expecting a functioning community to conform to her will, which is what the first amendment was supposed to prevent. That sort of rigid idealism turns the constitution into some sort of idol that must be preserved at all costs, which is far from what it is supposed to be.
That’s really repugnant. She wasn’t fighting for religious freedom, she was fighting to limit the religious freedom of a whole town, thus sowing dischord in a community she moved into as an outsider. Expecting a whole community to conform to your standards when you move into that community IS NOT the American way.
It’ll be great when our country evolves enough to realize that we can’t enforce a rigid secularism on people either, that this also violates the first amendment. It’s supposed to PROTECT people’s right to practice their religion, not limit it based upon the will of some interloper.
I was aware of the entire conversation. Newcrasher was accusing gardener of being judgemental. Your postings can be construed as supporting the “Christianity condemns judging” notion that newcrasher was using to judge (heh) gardener with. However, it’s also possible that you were merely arguing a rhetorical point not in some way related to newcrasher’s accusation, which is why I asked what your motives are.
Well to those who were forced by the ‘Gov’t’ to recite the Lord’s Prayer, I can’t see how that will change a person’s faith, I personally don’t see any benifit to daily forced repetition. Actually I think such actions dilutes it’s meaning.
I think that schools should teach about religions however, and perhaps have such a prayer in a lesson - as it is a important part of Christanity. But the Gov’t can’t create faith in a person, just make someone aware a religion.
I do accept this, I beleive my words were God is not just love or something like that.
The OT does appear to have much more on the ‘Wrath of God’ then the NT, destroying cities, plagues, flooding a planet and the like.
Perhaps that was tough love?
I would tend to agree with this. To me a Christain is one who accepts that he is not able to live a life in a way to be worthy to be in the Kindom of God - AND - Who accepts the gift that was given by God to all men by the sacfrice that was made by Jesus, the son of God / God, which will pay that ‘unworthyness’ and allow him to enter the kindom of God.
The moneychangers weren’t doing anything dishonest or illegal. They were a necessary part of the Temple’s function. They weren’t cheating anyone. Basically all they were doing was making change. People came to Jerusalem at Passover in order to sacrifice at the Temple and be forgiven for their sins. The major purpose of the Temple was that it was the one and only place where Jewish people were permitted to offer sacrifice (which was the only way they believed they could be forgiven for their sins). Only Hebrew shekels were acceptable as currency in the Temple (coins with the images of Emperors or other human faces could not be accepted as currency) so people from outside Jerusalem had to exchange their Roman currency, etc. for Sheckels in order to buy animals to sacrifice. The moneychangers were essentially just making change. They did so at a slight profit but it was not an usurous profit and it was not an occupation which was regrded as dishonest or unethical.
The reason for Jesus’ assault on the moneychangers is somewhat mysterious in light of the fact that (by Jewish standards) they were doing nothing wrong. For this reason, many scholars (both Christian and secular) believe that Jesus was eneacting a symbolic attack on the practice of sacrifice itself and particularly on the Temple as an instutution which had set itself up as the sole avenue to seek forgiveness from God. It probaly wasn’t the moneychangers themselves that Jesus was pissed at, but the whole idea that people could not be forgiven without sacrificing at the Temple.
It wasn’t A Temple, it was The Temple. Unique. And the only location anywhere where the jews could make their sacrifices as directed in the Torah. By throwing out the moneychangers, Jesus basically prevented a number of devout jews from carrying out their religious duty. That day, anyway.
Jesus’ actions certainly seemed to clash with the established sacred rituals of the time, if the accounts from both Old and New Testament are given credence.
There’s a longstanding tradition that the moneychangers were in fact usurious, and also that they were surrounded by vendors selling animals for sacrifice. And all this, according to the same information, took place in the Court of the Gentiles – the only place, according to Jewish Law, that ethnically non-Jewish “God-fearers” could properly worship the God of Israel, the one true God of all mankind according to Jesus. Imagine if the only church you were permitted to attend to do your duty to God according to your beliefs were situated in the area where a supermarket bank branch had been permitted to be established: tellers dealing with bank clients’ accounts, however honestly, and surrounded by the clamor of a row of supermarket checkouts.
Whether this is historical fact, I don’t have any proof. But to report it as a traditional explanation of what Jesus was angered at, is certainly acceptable.
Well, you appear to be wrong in your belief of what is constitutional since Ms. Herdahl won her lawsuit and the Potonoc County schools have failed to get that decision reversed.
As to the rest, you are simply venting spleen that the majority in a small town cannot run roughshod over any minorities in the way that you would like. Why should her Christianity be less important that that of her neighbors, since (despite your error), her neighbors were, in fact, violating the law? Why should only people of other faiths be allowed to comment on Christian behavior?
The other villagers share your views, of course, harrassing her kids with name-calling and beatings and vandalizing her home to the point where she actually had to move out of her first house. All that prayer certainly enhanced those Christians’ behavior.
I disagree with the court’s decision. I do not believe the courts to be the end all be all of constitutionality, and there are many things that are done “legally” that I find disagreeable.
So her right to practice her religion outweighs that of a functioning community that was working that way happily for years? Sowing dischord in the name of a shallow ideal is something that is desirable to you? She came and disrupted many people’s lives, infringing upon THEIR RIGHT to practice their beliefs. A public school is not a federal entity. The federal government did not make any laws that favored the practice of one religion over another, even if an entity that received federal funds did.
Well their behavior aside, it’s a lot simpler than that, it’s not about some intellectual ideology, it’s about people’s rights to live and build their community as they like it. I personally don’t want every town in teh country to be exactly the same suburb. I don’t want a world where every town on the map is exactly the same as all the others. The basic fact is that she came in and managed to destroy a piece of that town’s cultural heritage based upon a self-righteous intellectual ideal, and I find that repugnant.
No one was stopping her from being religious or believing what she believed. SHE stopped people from practicing their religion in the way that they wanted to. She was the one that wanted to modify people’s behavior. She even admitted to being a Christian, so what’s the big deal? I think it’s disgusting. You of course are allowed to think that it’s some great victory for whatever, but it didn’t help the cause of pluralism, it hurt it, and I hope that one day you’ll understand why.
While I don’t think it’s right for a newcommer to expect a community to change because of her, but the community may have been very consensating and insulting to her children:
Making their children wear hearing protection during the prayer
Making their children leave the room before the prayer.
The story didn’t mention how these ‘rules’ came about however. If Lisa was so afraid that her children could not even hear a prayer, then it didn’t leave the school any choice, if she just didn’t want her children to say the prayer and the school mandated those rules then I would blame the school.
Actually I think it would be a great teaching oportunity to go into some aspects of differing religions and other belief or ‘non-beleif’ systems. What a shame that went to waste.
Well, my religion is based on the triple foundation of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. And it goes contrary to my religion to permit the sort of BS you’re promulgating above in the name of your own egocentric right to think yourself superior to the courts of the nation and a community’s right to trample on the views of a resident, to be perpetrated on a board that claims to be Fighting Ignorance. So, to protect my religious faith, you must shut up, and never post on religion again. And that right is, as you “proved,” constitutionally protected.
Well let’s see, I don’t see where it says in Scripture that they shouldn’t pray at school. Tradition, well she sure came in and shat all over their tradition now didn’t she? Reason, what does reason have to do with it? This is a power struggle, it’s not a matter for reason. She wanted it one way, she wanted it another, she got her way over the wishes of the entire community to which she was a newcomer, and I bet she probably has very few friends in that community which she enforced her will upon.
So how exactly does your holy triumverate have anything to do with what she did? She impinged upon a whole communities right to be a community in the manner in which it was.
I hope she enjoys her hollow over-intellectualized victory, because I bet she’s known as the town bitch now, whereas she could have come in and happily assimilated instead of destroying that community’s TRADITION.
It may be American, TRADITION to stomp on the way of life of the previous inhabitants of wherever we go, but that doesn’t mean I have to think that’s a good thing.
I don’t think that I am superior to the courts of this nation. I don’t have to agree, that’s the absolutely wonderful thing about that first amendment thingy that you, Miss Herhdahl, Tomndebb and the courts of Mississippi are abusing for your OWN particular self-interested motive. You are certainly welcome to think that my view is more ego-centric than your own, but it’s not, it’s a simple power struggle between beliefs.
kanicbird I’d be interested to see what kind of heel Mrs. Hehrdahl was when addressing this issue before she took it to the court. Expecting a community you just moved to, to immediately conform to your wishes, generally doesn’t make you well liked in that community, no matter what tenuous hyper-intellectual idealistic holy ground you might think you stand on. The courts may agree with her, but this thing called reality is probably busy teaching her a lesson about what it REALLY means to be civic minded.
Don’t go into a community shit on their way of life and then cry victim when they lash back. Well, you can do that, but you’re a fucking idiot if you actually believe you are some kind of victim.