soulsurfer wrote:Sorry that your encounters with Christians have been less than admirable. I still stand on 'ppl are ppl' regardless of philosophy/religious beliefs. If we're all honest, we've all failed our own expectations...I have failed my own bar so-to-speak...and I know that everyone has.
lowering the bar doesn't count. perfection is the only way to go. and no one can claim that. All have failed miserably. No one is perfect, "no not one". (while we're [mis]quoting) romans 3:23.
Because if we aren't shooting for perfection, then someone is going to be left behind, or hurt or whatever...then someone has it right and someone has it wrong. The only way to go is absolute perfection.
Otherwise, we all get to argue our point of view. no one's beliefs are better than the next for all of them will leave someone hurt. get it?
BTW, in the old testament if you misquoted 'the word' , you got stoned. regardless of your point. it made it a lot easier to find those that would pervert the law. the problem with that point of view is one gets the 'letter of the law' right, but misses the 'heart of the law'. Which is the whole reason to have rules to begin with.
madryan, you have to allow EVERYONE's point of view if you are going to demand that yours be followed.
And there-in lies the problem. Whose 'rules' or values or philosophy or religion or whatever gets followed?
I can't vote on YOUR personal views. It doesn't work that way. However, you ARE going to vote on your personal views because that IS how it works.
You don't have to bend your convictions to meet mine...nor do I have to compromise my beliefs to meet yours. That doesn't make sense.
Pedophiles and murders would get to vote against my beliefs...oh-wait...they DO get to! Well holy fuck-a-duck, bestiality has just become legal.
That doesn't mean you have to agree with it...nor does it mean you have to shut up about it. it just means that some fuckwad gets to marry his pet lizard until the law is repealed or not. I don't have to like it either. But on it does. Lizards get raped.
BTW, that's my new band "molested lizards"
It's not Christianity. It's all religion.
Religion doesn't belong in the public political sphere.
See, when you're making "Christianity" or whatever part of your public identity it automatically assigns a set of standards to you. Those standards are going to be completely different depending on whomever you encounter, which is why it has no place in political life. If you're an NGO or a church or whatever, or even a business then fine, but if you're a publicly funded endeavor then leave the religion out of it. Leave the sanctimonious bullshit out of your speeches, and leave the bronze age "morality" out of policy and laws which you enact.
Ironically, given my military background I have zero problem with Muslims and some of my best friends are Muslim because without fail, every Muslim I've ever encountered has lived by the letter of their religion. Where Muslims and I start having issues is when they feel the need to force, as in with the threat of death, their neighbors, families, etc. to follow the same sheet of music.
It's a weird conundrum with me. Despite being an agnostic I was on the board of a church for several years. I saw several churches which we were partnered up with, not only from the side that the parishioner sees, but from the business side. I saw the books, I sat in on policy meetings. Our church was an experiment which some friends of mine who were Christian tried to get going to help out the Homeless. It was a separate satellite mission whereby we acted as a church they could attend, a clearinghouse of sorts to help them find local services such as dentists who provided free services for the homeless, counseling and medical care for free for the homeless, and of course, we were affiliated with all the big drug counseling and mental health organizations. The affiliation with the bigger churches came because in one case, we were using their abandoned building which we turned into a church, and another church we were getting our guys to help out in their soup kitchen and whatnot.
So our little project went on and was actually quite successful. It required lots of time and effort. I was onboard because as I've mentioned before my dad had lived and died homeless. I was probably spending 20 hours a week completely without any sort of pay as were the 4 or 5 of us who were really making it work.
Then our pastor, who was the only paid member needed to retire because his wife was sick.
So we started looking for a new pastor. After looking for about 6 months we finally found a guy who looked like a good fit. Seemed to be excited about the mission, etc.
Within 4 months he was complaining that we had no tithing base. wanted to get rid of the homeless guys and get more "normal" families so we could become a more mainstream church.
Within 6 months he'd packed the board with 3 more members who would do anything he wanted and started voting him pay raises.
Within 8 months He started pushing for the Worship team, which we'd always used to play at the local shelters to get the word out about our services to be exclusive to our church only and setting up all sorts of neighborhood gigs for us. All the sudden I was spending the same 20 hours a week managing the worship team and all that but we never left the parking lot.
At about 10 months the 4 or 5 of us who were really doing all the work all along and had been doing the Homeless mission for years were down to me and my buddy Bob. We both drafted our resignation letters and left.
Couple of observations:
Bob and I acted as liaisons with our landlords and parent church. Several times in order to keep from being evicted we had to beg to keep using our building because they wanted to expand and sell it for office space. The only reason we managed to stay as long as we did was twofold. 1) the real estate market was sluggish at the time and 2) we threatened to bring our congregation of homeless guys up to their $5.6 Million dollar brand new church on the east side. That freaked them out lol.
The pastor and adjunct pastors were making 6 figures or very close in virtually all cases at not only the church we were partnered with but several other large churches in the area. WTF?
I've been around alot of churches and spent 5 years working for a company which identified as a "Christian" company. There's any number of different types of "Christian" but here's my take on them. Most Christians fall into a couple of different groups which correspond with society (no surprise there)
1) The awesome folks. These people are just great folks. They happen to believe in God and probably think they're doing what they should but they'd be that way regardless.
2) The misguided folks. These people are easily led. They're not naturally curious so they latch on to an ideology and believe what they're told, usually whatever "feels" right. This is the politicians bread and butter. Churches are built on these people. They can be great, they can be complete dicks but the problem is they don't understand the why or the how.
3) The dicks/Sociopaths. These are the folks who are truly evil. They'll use any handy ideology to justify it, but really they're just dicks. Lots of them become politicians.
Note, understand that in itself, Christianity isn't the problem. People are the problem. But that doesn't mean any religion, no matter how benevolent has any place at all in my government.
), Jamie Diamond, Ben Bernanke, and the rest of the banker cronies who tried to make us believe that perpetual exponential economic growth is possible.
- yea thats extreme! 