The Muslims are the ones who began using this [“clash of civilizations”] expression. The Muslims are the ones who began the clash of civilizations. The Prophet of Islam said: "I was ordered to fight the people until they believe in Allah and His Messenger." When the Muslims divided the people into Muslims and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they believe in what they themselves believe, they started this clash, and began this war. In order to stop this war, they must reexamine their Islamic books and curricula, which are full of calls for takfir and fighting the infidels.
My colleague has said that he never offends other people's beliefs. What civilization on the face of this earth allows him to call other people by names that they did not choose for themselves? Once, he calls them Ahl Al-Dhimma, another time he calls them the "People of the Book," and yet another time he compares them to apes and pigs, or he calls the Christians "those who incur Allah's wrath." Who told you that they are "People of the Book"? They are not the People of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking. What gives you the right to call them "those who incur Allah's wrath," or "those who have gone astray," and then come here and say that your religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of others?
Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs.
The Jews have come from the tragedy [of the Holocaust], and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. Fifteen million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.
The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results.
The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.
On May 18, 1927, the Barth Community School in Michigan was rocked by an explosion which leveled one-third of the
building housing three hundred students.
As rescuers searched for survivors, they discovered a second bomb armed with 500 pounds of dynamite and a timer.
Fortunately, this bomb was dismantled without harm.
Soon afterward Andrew P. Kehoe, a school board member, arrived at the scene and motioned the superintendent of schools
over to his pickup truck. Kehoe pulled a shotgun and fired into the truck's backseat detonating a stash of dynamite
killing himself as well as the superintendent along with several bystanders.
Kehoe was upset with the rising taxes for the five-year-old school. So he offered to help the school with electrical
wiring to save money. His “wiring” included setting up explosives throughout the building. Only an electrical
short prevented the entire building from exploding.
When police went to Kehoe's home, they found his home and all outbuildings destroyed by bombs set to go off
after he left for the school. His murdered wife was found among the rubble.
You only need to turn on so-called "Christian" TV to hear the "health and wealth" perspective, but here are some
of the opposing views presented in the article:
Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life has outsold Osteen's [book, Your Best Life Now]
by a ratio of 7 to 1, finds the very basis of Prosperity laughable. "This idea that God wants everybody to be
wealthy?", he snorts. "There is a word for that: baloney. It's creating a false idol. You don't measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn't everyone in the church a millionaire?"
Ben Witherington, an influential evangelical theologian at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky, thundered that "we need to
renounce the false gospel of wealth and health--it is a disease of our American culture; it is not a solution or
answer to life's problems." Respected blogger Michael Spencer--known as the Internet Monk--asked, "How many young
people are going to be pointed to Osteen as a true shepherd of Jesus Christ? He's not. He's not one of us."
Osteen is an irresistible target for experts from right to left on the Christian spectrum who--beyond worrying that
he is living too high or inflating the hopes of people with real money problems--think he is dragging people down
with a heavy interlocked chain of theological and ethical errors that could amount to heresy.
Most start out by saying that Osteen and his ilk have it "half right": that God's goodness is biblical, as is the
idea that he means us to enjoy the material world. But while Prosperity claims to be celebrating that goodness,
the critics see it as treating God as a celestial ATM. "God becomes a means to an end, not the end in himself,"
says Southwestern Baptist's [Ben] Phillips. Others are more upset about what it de-emphasizes. "[Prosperity] wants the
positive but not the negative," says another Southern Baptist, Alan Branch of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
in Kansas City, Mo. "Problem is, we live on this side of Eden. We're fallen." That is, Prosperity soft-pedals the
consequences of Adam's fall--sin, pain and death--and their New Testament antidote: Jesus' atoning sacrifice and the
importance of repentance. And social liberals express a related frustration that preachers like Osteen show little
interest in battling the ills of society at large. Perhaps appropriately so, since, as . . . [Milmon]
Harrison, [author of the book Righteous Riches], explains, "philosophically, their main way of helping the poor is encouraging people not to be one of them."
Most unnerving for Osteen's critics is the suspicion that they are fighting not just one idiosyncratic misreading of
the gospel but something more daunting: the latest lurch in Protestantism's ongoing descent into full-blown American
materialism. After the eclipse of Calvinist Puritanism, whose respect for money was counterbalanced by a horror of
worldliness, much of Protestantism quietly adopted the idea that "you don't have to give up the American Dream.
You just see it as a sign of God's blessing," says Edith Blumhofer, director of Wheaton College's Center for
the Study
of American Evangelicals.
You can join in on the discussion at
Anne Graham Lotz: I say God is also angry when he sees something like this. I would say also for several
years now Americans in a sense have shaken their fist at God and said, God, we want you out of our schools,
our government, our business, we want you out of our marketplace. And God, who is a gentleman, has just
quietly backed out of our national and political life, our public life. Removing his hand of blessing and
protection. We need to turn to God first of all and say, God, we're sorry we have treated you this way and
we invite you now to come into our national life. We put our trust in you. We have our trust in God on our
coins, we need to practice it.
America has indeed "cast God away behind their backs with contempt and thus never acknowledged the fear of God."
That
quote is attributed to a Muslim who was describing why Osama bin Laden so hates the United States!
While Americans view Osama bin Laden and his followers as evil personified—and he and they arguably are—it is
sobering that they view America as evil for allowing abortion,
alcohol, the breakdown of families and
pornography.
Rather than the pleas of "God bless America" (which will inevitably conclude every speech today),
our prayer ought to be "America, bless God." And may we turn from
our wicked ways (2 Chronicles 7:14).
1. The terrorist attacks were obscene. While having lunch with a friend at the paper we both wrote for,
I sighed, "What the hell are we going to write?!" If you know me, I've only used that word in the theological sense,
but on September 11, it seemed the only way to express my horror and helplessness at what we had witnessed that morning.
2. This was a unique, historic situation.
The attacks
were nothing short of obscene! To "bleep" out the reactions to the attack from witnesses, law enforcement, and
firefighters would seem unnatural.
3. That said, I am opposed to gratuitious profanity. If I used "hell" every day of
the week, it would lose its meaning. And I especially oppose people using [bleep] [bleep]
[bleeping] words in every other sentence. What are they going to say to express one-of-a-kind outrage (like 9/11) if they use this
language in daily conversation?! People who use profanity regularly have a very small vocabulary, very few social skills
and very little—if any— creativity! This is particularly true of TV writers and comedians! So I support keeping the
current FCC rules on obscenity with very few exceptions: this being one of them.
4. TVs have "off" switches and VCRs have filters for obscenity. If you don't want yourself or your children exposed to it,
don't watch it or tape it for viewing after the kids are in bed.
Shiites believe that only those in the bloodline of Mohammed can be in leadership.
Sunnis, who make up 90 percent of Muslims, believe that the leader (imam) of the Muslim community should be selected on the basis of the leader's individual merits and communal consensus regardless of lineage.
The split occurred after Mohammed's death in 623 AD when community leaders elected a close companion of the prophet named Abu Bakr to become the first Caliph (Arabic for "successor"). Although most Muslims accepted this decision, some supported the candidacy of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law. Ali's supporters, now the Shiites, assassinated the third Caliph in 656 AD and made Ali the Caliph. Then, what are now the Sunnis, assassinated Ali in 670 AD, and the deadly division was solidified.
Early in the week, the Associated Press reported, and I quote, "Praying for other people to recover from an illness
is ineffective, according to the largest, best-designed study to try to examine the power of prayer to heal strangers
at a distance. The study of more than 1,800 heart bypass surgery patients found that those who had other people
praying for them had as many complications as those who did not. In fact, one group of patients who knew they were
the subject of prayers fared worse." (See post below.)
Doron Nof, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University, thinks he found an explanation of Jesus walking
on water: Jesus walked on ice. Although there is no record of the Sea of Galilee ever freezing, Nof claims temperatures
were much colder during the time of Christ.
It's curious to me that the beliefs of orthodox Christianity seem to be under attack. But never is
Scientology
(which believes we are disembodied spirits of space aliens that were incinerated in volcanoes by the evil galactic
dictator Xenu), Mormonism (whose so-called history is regularly disproven), and any other non-Christian belief system
put under the media microscope.
"The study of more than 1,800 heart bypass surgery patients found that those who had other people praying
for them had as many complications as those who did not. In fact, one group of patients who knew they were
the subject of prayers fared worse."
Of course prayer is ineffective in double-blind scientific studies! Here's why . . .
In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus tells us to pray to God, "Your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 5:10). Not our will, but His will!
"We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps" (Proverbs 16:9, NLT).
"Now listen, you who say, Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that" (James 4:13-15).
Saint Paul, who at times healed the sick and raised the dead, himself, was not healed physically.
"Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong"
(2 Corinthians 12:8-10).
The whole premise of attempting to scientifically prove the power of prayer, shows that the researchers are the ones who are
"double-blind" in their understanding of prayer itself.
I think you have posted some comments about attempts to do blind studies
to scientifically determine whether prayer is effective. TIME magazine
has an interesting short piece in the Dec 4, 2006 issue, page 87, on such
studies. The article notes that "The doctors and clergy who ran the study
had no control over whether friends and family were also praying for the
patients -- and they certainly couldn't have forbidden personal prayers
even if they knew about them. Beyond that, the prayers said by strangers
were provided by the clergy and were all identical. Maybe that prevented
them from being truly heartfelt. In short, the possible confounding
factors in this study made it extraordinarily limited."
Perhaps the only comment to add to this insightful analysis is that no
experiment, blind or double-blind, can control for the presence of God. Siarlys Jenkins
Fortunately, these "latest studies" won't bother anyone whose
epistemology [the study of origins, nature, and extent of human knowledge] does not depend upon science.
Though I feel sorry for all
the preachers who were touting the last set of studies (some 10 years
ago) that "proved" how prayer helps the sick. Like those who live by the
sword, we were once proud of our "evidence" that prayer is effective and
now, ten years later, our evidence has been turned against us.
Now we will have to adjust our epistemology to say that science is only
one way of knowing anything; that there are others that are equally as
valid; that science itself may be the most invalid since it has long
resisted the claims of all the others. steve.deneff@collegewes.com
Interesting! There are between 1 and 10 percent of Americans who consider themselves gay or lesbian, yet 40 percent
of the Oscar nominations are for homosexual themed films. Hmmm? Is this simply art immitating life? Or is this
a not so subtle attempt for art to influence life?
G- and PG-rated films make 12 times more money at the
box office than R-rated films. But, Hollywood produces 11 times more R-rated than G-rated films. To quote Andy
Rooney, "Is there something here I don't understand?"
Also, there are somewhere between 1 and 10 percent of the
American population who call themselves homosexuals, but 40 percent of the recent Academy Award nominations were for
gay-themed films.
Forty percent is also the number of people claiming to be "born again" Christians, yet not one major
nomination was for a Christian-themed film. The Chronicles of Narnia, which has made nearly five times
more money than Brokeback Mountain, received only three technical awards for achievement in makeup,
sound mixing and visual effects. The Exorcism of Emily Rose also beat Brokeback Mountain at the
box office, but not a single nomination. Again, is there something here I don't understand?
It seems Hollywood producers would rather makes statement than make money producing films the majority of America wants to
see (which explains why movie theater attendance has dropped for the past several years). No other business has
such intentional disregard for their market.
Good point, Jim, but unfortunately, there are still Christians who are stuck in the Old Testament with their views on
war, capital punishment, treatment of women, etc. rabid_riter@hotmail.com (February 2006)
The solution? Moderate Muslims have to shout down the radicals. The bombers and beheaders and Wahabists are
currently firmly in control of how the world sees Islam. For the world to start treating Muslims with respect,
they have to learn to control and PUBLICLY denounce the lunatic fringes of their faith. When some nutcase bombs an
abortion clinic, or Pat Robertson puts his foot in his mouth, Christians are always among the first to decry
those actions. But the most prominent figures in the American Muslim community didn't issue their fatwas against
terrorism in general and Bin Laden in particular until years after 9/11. Kenny Hitt at TenNapel.com
(February 2006).
SPEAKER
