On this I will agree with you completely. This is my point. The way the vast majority of Muslims interpret and practice the religion of Islam IS NOT what some here (e.g. you, GTech, Dead Corn) try to make out. Like with Christianity, for the vast majority of Muslims, Islam is a religion of peace that requires the search for knowledge (in all things religious and secular) and treating others (even those of different religions) with tolerance and respect. There are some who have a very violent view of Islam, but they are a VERY small minority. This is one thing that people really don't appreciate, while Islam does not look at Jesus in the same way as Christians do, Jesus is one of the very important prophets of Islam and is given a special honored status among the prophets. His teachings were taught by Mohammad and in fact the Qur'an dedicates more space to Mary mother of Jesus than does the Bible. I don't think I could live life as a good Muslim, but if one is willing to allow themselves to read about the history of Mohammad from a non-fundamentalist Christian prospective one would see that Mohammad was centuries ahead of his time in regards to human rights and women's rights. In many respects the Jewish world that Jesus lived in and the Arabian world Mohammad lived in were vastly different. At least Jesus started with a culture that was monotheistic to begin with and had some form of religious legal system. Mohammad was working with a polytheistic tribal society that was exceedingly brutal and heathenistic. Mohammad's teachings relied very heavily on Judaism and Christianity and there are many parallels between stories in the Bible and the Qur'an. One significant difference is that while Christian religion blames Eve for the original sin and thus has stigmatized women throughout the ages by forcing them to bear the burden of this original sin, Mohammad and thus the Qur'an shared the blame equally between Adam and Eve and then God forgave them such that their descendants would not have to bear the burden of Adam and Eve's sin. The problem is that the Western view of what Islam is about has been tainted by Christian teachings throughout the centuries that intentionally lied and distorted Islam so as to justify persecuting and forcing Christianity upon Muslims (e.g. the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, colonizing the Middle East, etc.). This has been exasperated by the events in the Middle East over the past twenty or thirty years. Most Muslims don't even live in the Middle East and most Muslims have lived peacefully with other religions for a millennium, but all we see in the news about Muslims are the terrorist acts precipitated by what the events and conditions in the Middle East.
That is news to me. Since when is it Eve's fault? If Adam was there longer than Eve and God told Adam not to eat of the fruit, was it not Adam's responsibilty to help her understand that? Also, you will find Adam was right there as Eve was tempted and he didn't interupt the serpent or take it and toss it away did he? The problem of the western view of Islam is that so many are willing to accept the lies without really looking at what the Koran says and what the followers follow. You will find many follow it and know they are at war. Others will deny that there is a war. The west think that the wars are Iraq and Afganistan.
re KLB: Oh brother... Even the Bible blames Adam. God put Adam in charge therefore Adam was responsible for what his wife did. Notice that God sought out Adam first. Great. You can go tell all the women that they no longer have to suffer in childbirth because the Koran says so. And, we no longer have to till the ground to eat. Fanfreakintastic. The Hindus and Buddhists know better.
Unfortunately this is not what is taught in many fundamentalist Christian denominations. During my early years of religious exploration there was a period when I regularly attended services at an Assembly of God church and all too frequently Eve was blamed for biting the forbidden fruit first and then tempting Adam. It is this original sin that they taught women must suffer the the pain of childbirth. Many Christian churches teach that the purpose of baptism is because we are born sinners and we must be baptized to cleans us of our sins. This is why it is so important to some Christians to have their baby baptized as soon after birth as possible less they die before being baptized and be damned to hell. You may be right on this. At least if there were a state sponsored religion we might be better off if Buddhists were in charge.
Did they deny that Adam sinned? That would be the strangest thing I ever heard taught from an AG church. The baby babtisms is a Catholic thing if I am not mistaken, I haven't heard any Christian churches doing that. Babtism was something commanded by Jesus, read up on what he said.
As a member of the Lutheran church I was baptized quite young, however I also needed to go through confirmation.
Well, the crusades have different campaign; but you must realize that in a span of 300 years, the muslim faith had shown-up at the bottom of the steps of Europe (mostly by force). The Pope felt that his Christian breathens were being occupied by a religion that was eager to swallow the whole of Europe. He felt it was his duty to liberate his Christian breathens. You sound a bit to eager to defend Islam. It's not that I find the whole crusades thing a nice thing to be done; but on some level I could understand the reaction. Well, the media does focus a bit too much on the bad...on almost anything. But muslim terrorism is far more broad than the middle east. It's in almost any region of the world, and often has little to with the middle east. I try not to ignore both sides, because they're both present. Not every muslim wants me dead or harmed or oppressed....but there are many.
Here's the problem, it was less about about "liberating" the holy lands and more about killing as many non-Christians as possible. http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_cru1.htm On the way to the Middle East, they decided that only one of their goals was to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. A secondary task was to rid the world of as many non-Christians as possible - both Muslims and Jews. The Crusaders gave the Jews two choices in their slogan: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed as the first Crusade passed through. Some Jewish writers refer to these events as the "first holocaust." Once the army reached Jerusalem and broke through the city walls, they slaughtered all the inhabitants that they could find (men, women, children, newborns). After locating about 6,000 Jews holed up in the synagogue, they set the building on fire; the Jews were burned alive. The Crusaders found that about 30,000 Muslims had fled to the al Aqsa Mosque. The Muslim were also slaughtered without mercy. The Roman Catholic church taught that going to war against the "Infidels" was an act of Christian penance. If a believer was killed during a crusade, he would bypass purgatory, and be taken directly to heaven. By eliminating what might be many millennia of torture in Purgatory, many Christians were strongly motivated to volunteer for the crusades. .... These mass killings were repeated during each of the 8 additional crusades until the final, 9th, crusade in 1272 CE. .... By the end of the crusades, most European Christians believed the unfounded blood-libel myths -- the rumor that Jews engaged in human sacrifice of Christian children. A long series of Christian persecutions of the Jews continued in Europe and Russia into the 20th century. They laid the foundation for the Nazi Holocaust. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/crusades.htmlThe first mass killing of the Jews was carried out by the so-called People's Crusade, which attached itself to the army of knights and followed on behind them ... . They came largely from Flanders. [But] they proceeded down the Rhine, where there had been large Jewish settlements, ever since Roman times, the oldest Jewish settlements in Europe. And they were really destroyed by these hordes, who felt that as a necessary preliminary to the Second Coming, it was necessary to kill all Jews. This was not the official Church doctrine. The official doctrine was that all Jews must be converted to Christianity before the Second Coming. But one way of settling this matter was to kill them, and there would be no unconverted Jewish left. And that's what they did, in very horrible massacres. This wasn't warfare of liberation, this was genocide done with the blessing of the Church, and there is no other way to describe this. It was not a noble act; it was an act of spreading religion via the sword and an effort to exterminate all non-believers. It wasn't just non-Christians in Palestine that were executed either. Jews by the thousands were killed throughout Europe by the Crusaders on their way to Palestine. There was nothing redeeming about the acts that took place during the Crusades at the behest of the Pope and the Christian Church. Furthermore they laid the foundation for centuries of persecution, expulsion and murder of Jews throughout Europe. Continued from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/crusades.html I think the motivation for the massacres is really tied to the sense of "us" and "them." And if Christians were going off to reconquer the Holy Land from Islam, seen as the enemy of Christianity, it was a very easy but terrible step to take that any enemy of Christianity therefore was in the way, and should be destroyed.Have we learned nothing from history? It is from the spreading of fear and hatred about other religions that we continue to cycle through one war after another and one religious group or another suffers the horrors of persecution and genocide. As I keep saying, we must break the cycle of ignorance, fear, hatred and violence. This means people must stop spreading hatred and fear about Islam. There is nothing noble, understandable or redeemable about the Crusades. They are some of the most heinous acts ever committed in the name of Christianity. The Crusades show one massive difference between the Muslim and Christian conquests of Palestine. When the Muslims invaded, Christians and Jews were allowed to stay and were not slaughtered indiscriminately. When the Christians invaded, they slaughtered all of the Jews and Muslims they possible could. The Crusades and the word "crusade" should not be held up in any form of positive light and in fact the word "crusade" should be held on the same understanding of meaning as the word "holocaust". For the Jews, the Crusades are remembered as the first holocaust. Terrorism is broader then the Middle East, but to try and blame it on or tie it to the religion of Islam is a fundamental failure to understand the nature of terrorism and Islam. Terrorism doesn't come about because of a religion. It comes about because of the desperation caused by poverty and oppression. This isn't to justify terrorism, it is simply to say we can not control or eliminate terrorism until we eliminate the political, social and economic conditions that breed terrorists. We can not blame the conditions in the Middle East on Islam because it was not Islam that created the conditions. Rather it was Western imperialism after World War One and the exploitation of the imperial powers in the Middle East, the careless way the Middle East was broken up into countries when the imperial powers decided they wanted to leave and the installation and support of corrupt and often times brutal monarchies and dictatorships by the imperial powers that laid the seeds for the violence we see today. There may be many, but they are not the majority. They are a tiny minority and this is what people need to understand. The Muslim that lives down the street from them is not their enemy. The enemy is oppression and poverty. We must cease our support of brutal dictatorships like in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. We must find alternative sources of energy so that we are not dependant upon Middle Eastern oil such that we can extract ourselves from the Middle East and allow them to find their own solutions, because every solution we try to impose on the area only makes things worse. In the war on terror we are fighting the wrong enemy.
You are mistaken. I was baptized as a baby in the Methodist church, it is also practiced in the Episcopalian and Russian Orthodox church. I believe in fact that most Christian denominations practice baby baptisms. I think it is primarily it is the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (e.g. Baptists, Assembly of God, etc.) that delay baptism until later in life.
Nothing in the Bible about baptising babies. Episcopalian and russian orthodox have a lot in common with the catholic church from what I have seen. Methodist churches in my area don't really believe much in the Bible from what they preach, it is a pick and choose type of system. They use only what is comfortable and what matches today's culture here in America. Anyone else want to chime in on this? I don't trust KLB's view on this subject, I would if we were talking about HTML.
As a Catholic, it has always been my understanding that Baptism was something the Catholic Church did in order to cleanse the new born soul of original sin, ie., Adam and Eve's first sins. The reason Catholics do it for children is they tend to believe you need to be cleansed of this original sin before you die, or you cannot get into heaven. So it is done as soon as possible, usually when the child is still an infant. Then around 4th/5th grade (depending on if you go to Catholic School, or public school), you get confirmed. At baptism it is your parents who make the decision to raise you in the Catholic Church, and make the decision of baptism itself for you. Confirmation is your opportunity to chose for yourself if you will continue on that way, ie., with the teachings of the Catholic Church. I was baptized Roman Catholic, and have God Parents. One of my God Parents is dead. I am a Godfather myself to my sister, who also is baptized Roman Catholic. My sister got confirmed. I chose not to get confirmed. I had some difference with the church. That said, I still consider myself Catholic, and am still considered to be baptized. As for my son, I have not yet made the decision for him. Mainly because it takes two to do this, and a firm commitment to raise your child in the Catholic Church. 1. My wife is not Catholic 2. I still have some difference with the church which needs to be overcome As a Catholic however, if GOD FORBID, it came to it, I could or anyone actually could baptize my son, even with their own spit, if it was a life or death emergency. This whole baptism thing in the Catholic Church should give many a good perspective on why many Catholics are so vehemently against abortion. They believe that is a soul that will not be baptized and as such will not make it into heaven. Myself, I just think its killing a baby... Anyway I digress.
I was under the impression that in the Catholic Church there was belief that unbaptized babies went to purgatory and could have indulgences or prayers made in order to get them into heaven. Is this incorrect?
We may not agree on other aspects, but our understanding of this issue is the same. It was what I was taught growing up. It is the whole original sin thing (which as an adult I find kind of stupid but I digress).
Original sin simply means you are born capable of (and with a disposition to) sin. Not that you are personally responsible for what Adam and Eve did.
Actually, as I was taught, it was called "limbo". Purgatory is something else.. But, yes... you can get out of purgatory -- to either heaven or hell. I read somewhere that the Catholic Church was going to do away with limbo at some point. Anyway, limbo, unlike purgatory is permanent. Well, I'm just repeating what I was taught... No opinions, no facts, no source... Just life's experience as I was raised. There's no better truth or fact than that. Actually original sin is the first sin that Adam and Even committed, and Catholics believe you are born with it. Not with the "disposition" or capability of sin, but with the actual hereditary sin from Adam and Eve.
History of and what led up to the Crusades: http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/11/the_truth_about_islamic_crusad.html Christians fought back. And they will again. islamic apologists and recent converts cannot sweep history under the carpet. No one has more experience in occupying other's lands than islam.
I would not be surprised if people kept telling the various leaders that it was just a small minority and that Islam really was a religion of peace. That may help explain the 400 years of doing nothing.
I don't agree with the above, because it's blanket statement about a huge conflict. There was many campaign and some were centralized but a great deal of them were just led by independent organization. To just make a blanket statement about the whole crusades/crusaders which spanned hundreds of years...is not appropriate. It's like saying world war I is the same as world war II, even though that was obviously different and spanned only a short distance of time from one and other. One has to isolate the instance and context of the rather large event in history. The Jews were killed by some crusaders, but this was immediately spoken against by ....... The first crusades were vastly unorganized (no real leaders, no detailed strategy), and one can't paint a perfect picture of intent...just similiar cause. But one can definitely say that the church didn't wholly suscribe to the idea of killing jews wholesale at that period in time. There was a valid threat. Obviously this wasn't the only intent, but it's not one to ignore. To say there wasn't a valid threat would be a lie. Is the method perhaps wrong? Sure there were many things done wrong...but that doesn't make the whole history of the Crusades purely immoral. In my opinion, they had to fight back at one point. Now the method may differ wildly, but were judging a separate point in time...when we've (ie Americans) done far worse things in world wars than can ever be conceived in the Crusades. Curious...how do you see the nuking of Japan and the carpet bombing of Germany? Mass killing, indeed.... Barely anyone complains about that. Do you find nothing wrong with 300 years of war to be at the neck of europe (and in Europe). It just seems like your making Islam to be the victim, as though the first 300 years of it's existence it was merely innocent in the conquest of whole regions. It's not like one really has to fear about that now-a-days. Only mass immigration wise, but frankly there's no huge muslim military threat. Iran may find itself in trouble, but there's no huge movement of Islam through force at this time. But I wouldn't say the people behind Islam in it's first 300 years were innocent. No. No threat? 300 years and whole regions swallowed-up through violent wars. Therefore the whole idea of the Crusades is void because there was no threat? Poverty....Bin Laden's rich. Half of these assholes are well-off. I'm not saying poverty and oppression aren't a factor, but it's not wholly that. I'd say it's mostly the financial donations to extreme muslim teaching. Most often this money comes from oil-rich nations. But historically Islam has been surrounded by violence...so there's something more to it than pure circumstance. Blame everything but Islam? Fine. But atleast blame extreme muslim teachings. Does this also explain the violence in the Philliphines, India, Africa, and Europe. At one point the child grows-up and you got to blame him. That's too simplistic. http://www.angelfire.com/ny/dawahpage/hist.html http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/history/chronology/ Just read through their initial history and you get a sense that this religion was destine to be intepereted in a violent way. Way too much violence at the get-go. Well, we actually get most of our oil from Mexico and Canada. But the reserves in the middle east are much larger. We do have to go to alternatives, but technology really has to catch-up.