Yep, and :eek:
Whew. I hadn’t scrolled down all the way and I had a minor heart event.
Well, yes, of course you use a bag of oranges if you don’t want any visible bruising. Apples or bananas would bruise right away.
I notice that none of those criticisms are concerning outright fabrication. At most, they amount to a semantic dispute over whether a particular word means “state” as in country or “state” as in one of the US states - hardly a ringing refutation of the site.
Yes, they have bailed out on many parts of the Old Testament. Generally, Christians:
Don’t keep kosher.
Have the hats-and-hair thing all bent around.
Moved the Sabbath.
Changed the whole concept of guilt and forgiveness.
Changed shellfishness.
Threw out all the slave-owning rules.
And so on.
Large parts of it, yes. The memo is called the New Testament.
Ah, so that’s why so many of them have abandoned all that Genesis and Leviticus nonsense. Oh, hang on…
Yes, large parts of them have in fact abandoned much of that Genesis and Leviticus “nonsense,” if by “nonsense” you mean adherence to Biblical literalism.
Do you disagree with that?
By “nonsense” I do indeed mean that.
I’d say the abandonment you assert is somewhat patchy. I vaguely recall there’s the ‘working on the Sabbath’ bit in the wheat field, and an admonishment to love one another, but is it a reasonable to assert that the NT rescinds the books that went before it, which your “memo” post seems to imply?
Look, jjimm, of course the “abandonment” is patchy, but it is nevertheless there, as I think you well know. Unless you’d like to endorse Seven’s bitchy and inaccurate implication that Islam’s modern allowance of wife “correction” – so long as done “lightly” – is somehow analogous to the historical allowance of slavery by the OT, a provision followed by NO modern Christians or Jews? Are you uncertain about the extent to which the New Covenant of the NT supercedes the OT, and in good faith asking? Or are you just trying to pick a fight with me personally for some reason?
The message of Christ in the New Testament (Love thy neighbor, Judge not, lest you be judged, let he who is without sin cast the first yadda yadda…) contradicts and therefore supercedes the more authoritarian mandates of the Old Testament.
These days, I suffer plenty of witches to live. 
Well, there is also criticism that MEMRI cherry-picks quotes and clips that portray Islam in a bad light. Not that Islam needs much help in that direction. But you could do the same thing for Christianity, if you weren’t objective. (Not that I’m a big fan of Christianity either).
To an extent, but the massive vocal influence of Biblical literalists does seem to outweigh this, and highlight the tremendous patchiness of the overruling; indeed one wonders why the NT-favouring faiths repeat the vast number of superceded rules in the testament that have been supposedly overthrown. And I am genuinely interested in the large discrepancies between denominations regarding which bits have been overthrown and which remain current. Because there is a huge amount of nonsense in the OT in particular. The homosexuality and abortion provisions, supposedly derived from the OT, are particularly stark these days.
I suspect “NO” is a bit strong; look to Africa. Anyway, I don’t endorse Seven’s implication, and of course for Islamic interpretations of their book, well we know they can be utterly misguided and potentially barbaric. I watched a documentary about Shari’a courts in Nigeria two nights ago that showed the “public flogging” and “eighty lashes” for drinking alcohol were done with a small piece of cord that didn’t seem to hurt much, but still, the implications were disturbing nonetheless, and the “justice” negligible in my eyes.
I have no beef with you whatsoever. I thought your comment was a bit glib, that’s all.
But this isn’t particularly unique to Christianity.
As far as I know, my local Jewish synagogue hasn’t had a good old fashioned Wicca-roast lately. 
I dunno. Is wife ‘correction’ a whole lot worse than the view, prominent among many evangelicals and fundamentalists, that wives should be submissive to their husbands? And don’t forget that many fundamentalists still think (on the basis of OT ookiness about the wrongness of mixing different kinds) that interracial relations are wrong. Remember, if it weren’t for great public pressure on them, Bob Jones University would still be forbidding interracial dating.
ETA–Should we take bets on how long before this thread winds up in the Pit?
I don’t think the target is “Islam” in particular. The accusation is that MEMRI selectively picks the most offensive (to Western eyes) media stories and clips in order to portray Arab and Persian culture and civilization in a negative light - Islam is just a part of this.
There is no doubt some truth to this, though a visit to the site itself indicates it isn’t that simple - there are both positive and negative stories “picked”. The main focus seems to be on the relationship of Arabic & Persian culture to that of Israel and the West.
See for example their page on Egypt. This type of story does not portray Arabs or Islam in a negative light, far from it:
Sorry. You’re right. I’m wrong. REAL Christians don’t read or own the OT. Islam is bad because Allah says beat your wife and, of course, ALL Muslims beat their wifes.
A fair point. I never claimed it was unique, though.
I remember years ago I read a strip cartoon (it may have been National Lampoon) where a guy is asked by his therapist, “How is the wife beating going?”
He replies, “Not so good.”
The therapist says, “Remember what I told you, keep your left up and jab and move. Just wear her down, jab and move.”
Fair enough.
It is just that, as a Jew, you often get Christians more or less assuming that, because Jews lack the NT, they are all OT literalists.
Due sympathies. As this thread shows, you often get atheists more or less assuming that, despite Christians having the NT, they are all OT literalists.