Why must everyone critize christians for there faith

Originally posted by Legend Of Chibi
...I only wish Atheists will keep their negative, unfair, anti-social, absurd and hypocritical thoughts to themselves and stop taking the mic of christianity for some of the things which they do themselves.

There is more than enough hypocrisy to go around.

BTW your lack of understanding of science is way things don't make sense to you. 😄

Originally posted by Shakyamunison
There is more than enough hypocrisy to go around.

BTW your lack of understanding of science is way things don't make sense to you. 😄

lol 🙂 , science hasn't ever been my strong point...

One question, if an atheist can believe that extremely large bang can create such a gigantic universe, something of such power, why can't their be a being just as strong, and us and our souls being it's children?

Originally posted by Legend Of Chibi
lol 🙂 , science hasn't ever been my strong point...

One question, if an atheist can believe that extremely large bang can create such a gigantic universe, something of such power, why can't their be a being just as strong, and us and our souls being it's children?

I am the wrong person to ask that question too. I believe that both are correct.

The big bang was not something that an atheist came up with. Most scientists are religious people. The evidence in the universe suggests that there was a big bang, and if it was so, it is the handy work of God. 😄

the thing that strikes me as most annoying is those of you who insist to say the the bible is not fact. when in reality so many voyages have been made and so many discoveries have been made that show or shall i say PROVE that is is indeed fact.
1. the fact that they found Noah's arc
2. the fact that there is actually one day missing in history.
and of course others, that i can not think of at this moment. the simple fact is some of it has been proved to be correct.

we; meaning believers and nonbelievers are never going to agree. so i say lets just wait and see in the end. and if there is not god(which i completely disagree in) then at least i lived a wonderful life.

I dont think theres solid proof they found noahs ark. if there is post it. but i wont hold my breath

Satellite pictures taken last summer of Mount Ararat in Turkey may reveal the final resting place of Noah's ark, according to Daniel McGivern, the businessman and Christian activist behind a planned summer 2004 expedition to investigate the site.

"We're telling people we're 98 percent sure," said McGivern, a member of the Hawaii Christian Coalition. "In one image we saw the beams, saw the wood. I'm convinced that the excavation of the object and the results of tests run on any collected samples will prove that it is Noah's ark. "

McGivern wrote a list in his Bible more than 20 years ago of ten great projects. Finding Noah's ark was at the top of his list.

McGivern began his quest in earnest in 1995, when the publication of a book on the topic moved him to arrange for satellite images to be taken of Mount Ararat.

Attempts to take satellite images in previous years had been foiled by clouds, unavailability of imaging equipment, and lack of image resolution. But the attempts had helped pinpoint the location. In the summer of 2003, everything came together.

"Last year was the hottest summer in Europe since 1500; more than 21,000 people died of the heat wave," McGivern said. "The summer melt was far more extensive than it has been in years."

DigitalGlobe, a commercial satellite-imagery company, confirmed that they took the images that McGivern is using.

An international team of archaeologists, forensic scientists, geologists, glaciologists, and others is being recruited to investigate the site sometime between July 15 and August 15.

Ahmet Arslan, a professor in Turkey who has climbed the mountain 50 times in 40 years, will lead the expedition. Arslan reported an eyewitness sighting of the ark and took a photograph in 1989 from about 220 yards (200 meters) away. However, he couldn't get any closer, and the picture is not definitive.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0427_040427_noahsark.html

http://www.noahsarksearch.com/ararat.htm

It's a rock outcropping.

i don't care weather other people believe what i do, i just hate it when they get in my face for trying to live what i believe to be the right way. It really bugs.
oh and whoever siad that christians will be the end of scociety, an are a threat, and dominating, have you ever been to public school?? i mean, a kid once got kicked out of class for reading a bible during free reading. they moment you post a sign saying "mery christmas" you get tackled by about ten administrators! and did you ever hear about the ten comandments that got removed from a state capitol? Finally, it has been a repeated process in history that once a system of morals is taken from a scociety it declines, look at Rome.

Originally posted by Dwarfdude
...Its people like you that make people hate us, Napalm and Jury.

We are not all homophobic, anti-abortion, Iraq-supporting, bible-thumping, other-religion-bashing threats, Tex. Many of us are just regular people, who just want to do what they think is right.

Napalm, shut the hell up and get on with your life, and thank yourself we arent living back in the Roman Empire.

Jury, put down the non-sensical thing called the Bible and read a novel for a change.

And dont say that I'm bashing you, because I'm the son of two pastors, and trust me, I would never insult my own parents, unless they pissed me off, which is hard to do...

Those that are homophobic, anti-abortion, ect., you'll find are mostly Mormons, J.W.s, or Catholics. Us Protestants(except for maybe the Anglicans), on the other hand, I find are much more willing to listen to reason.

Why do people bash us? I'll tell you why. Because our entire theology is based on the teachings of a book written by unknown people, claiming that a one holy supreme being who lords over all the earth is speaking through them. If I didnt have two pastors for parents, I'd have resigned to Buddism a long, long time ago. It is hard for people that were not brought up in a Christian family to accept....let alone believe. And the people that have "bashed", in your eyes, Christianity have had some pretty damn good points! Did you even read the posts? Its not just "cristions r so stoopid", they type out why they think our religion is wrong, and invite for rebuttle.

And WindDancer, I wouldnt preach the 1st Amendment to him. He's a Bush supporter, I doubt he knows what the Constitution is. But then again, nor does Bush.

wow, it's wierd that you guys complain about us bashing you and then sit here and spit venom at us.
I don't believe in being anything to anyone becuase of their religion, thats what you guys are mad about and thats what your doing.
i don't get you.
And just becuase i believe something is wrong and vote against it doesn't mean i'm evil, thats kinda what our country is about.

BTW I am a bush supporter and i do know the constitution.oh and bush is not an idiot because he has an accent, (jsut becuase you dissagree with what he does does not make him an idiot either) thats like calling someone dumb just becuase they have a speech impediment.

AND, I am mormon, but that does not mean i hate the people that do what i see to be wrong, i disslike what i believe to be wrong, not the person who does it. And i won't be treated like an iddiot because i believe in something i feel to be true. I believe in God and i'm a 4.0 student.

And the christian faith has not been scientifically proven wrong, darwins theory is just that, a theory, even scientists agree it is not a proven or faultless fact. have you ever looked up the deffinition of science, i have, and it states that what it says it is not necisarily factual, just a very specific, tested way of explaining things. That is what my religion is, a way i explain things.

In my view scientists do not know everything, heck they don't even know exactly what evergy is, just that it can't be created or destroyed, and that it effects everything, how do you know that energy is not Gods power (i'm not sayin it is, just proving a point).

again, i don't hate, or dissagree with all science just becuase i am christian. (yes mormons are christian. and if you've ever herd a mormon bash you, as in, be rude to you, not just dissagree, they are not doing what they are taught, we are not told to hate, or be rude to anyone, especialy just becuase they are not mormon. though i am not perfect, none of us are, we just try to do what we are taught. Odds are if someone mormon disslikes you you have been rude to them.)

sorry i know that was a while ago, but i had to get that reply off my back.

Dang!! srry about the double post/ rant. 😮

~dorkerina~ I know what you mean. I think they don't see just how hypocritical they are. I always say, "how you treat others is how you feel about yourself". If you think about that one, you will realize that most people go around pointing out their worst qualities that they see in other people.

Thats sad...

but true. 🙁

does it bug you that people are sooo consened about us being so dominant that they try to supress our rights to be christians, is it right to give one person rights by suppressing anothers?? ❌

Originally posted by ~dorkerina~
does it bug you that people are sooo consened about us being so dominant that they try to supress our rights to be christians...

"Discrimination Against Christians?" by Tom Flynn © 2005 The Council for Secular Humanism

As I write this, 2004’s year-end holidays are winding down. They were marked by a surprisingly vigorous Religious Right campaign opposing the secularizing of the season. “Don’t say ‘Happy holidays,’ say ‘Merry Christmas,’” majority Christians demanded. Implausibly accusing minority non-Christians of discriminating against them, protesters offered this refrain: “It’s time the Christian majority stopped letting minorities push it around.”

To be sure, this agitation targeted so-called political correctness as much as secularism, properly defined. Still its intensity was noteworthy, and it merits our continued attention even though the winter holidays are past. We can expect to hear similar rhetoric all through 2005 as Christian conservatives defend intelligent design, school prayer, gay marriage bans, public Ten Commandments displays, God in the Pledge of Allegiance, and other “culture war” issues.

What’s really going on when majority Christians shout, “It’s time we stopped letting minorities push us around”?

To begin unpacking “We’re the majority,” I begin with an irreverent fable. I trust its relevance will shortly be clear:

Once upon a time, white Christian males dominated the American South. This majority arrogated to itself a stunning array of privileges, not least that of owning other humans and appropriating the fruits of their labor. For white Christian Southern males, especially those who owned plantations, life was sweet. But time passed, mores changed, and other Americans started thinking the life of white Christian Southern males might be too sweet. Increasingly, many of their privileges came to be recognized as illicit, improper, and morally repugnant.

And so it has happened that America spent the last hundred and eighty years, give or take a few, taking privileges away from white Christian Southern males – privileges which, unsurprisingly, said males viewed as their birthright.

One flashpoint came the early 1860s, when the rest of America took away white Christian Southern males’ privilege of owning other humans. That was such a big project, it took a civil war. White Christian Southern males bitterly resented this loss, and their reaction was, well, reactionary: they imposed Jim Crow laws, formed the Ku Klux Klan, established picture postcards of lynchings as a new folk art genre, and so on. The rest of America sort of looked the other way.

More time passed. Mores changed further. At last it dawned on the rest of America that the privileges white Christian Southern males had been allowed to hang onto were pretty noxious too. This occasioned another big project, though not quite another civil war. America spent the middle decades of the twentieth century taking away white Christian Southern males’ privileges to block African Americans from voting, to bar them from water fountains and lunch counters, to send their own children to all-white schools, to have the front of the bus to themselves, and on and on.

Did white Christian Southern males resent this? You bet. When they complained that their historical privileges were being taken away, were they speaking truth? Absolutely. So why did their, um, plight command so little public sympathy? The rest of America was confident that the privileges taken away from white Christian Southern males were privileges they never should have had in the first place. They were privileges, but never rights: they were illicit, and their removal was imperative to bring about a more just and equitable society.

Did white Christian Southern males ever shout, “we’re a majority and it’s time to stop letting a minority push us around”? Of course they did, time after time – but the rest of America had the wisdom to recognize this for the caterwauling of bigots bemoaning their loss of ill-gained favor.

Okay, end of fable. What insights can it offer us about present-day Christians’ complaints that their rights are being trampled to coddle the sensitivities of minorities?

Unsettling parallels connect the Southern whites of decades past and today’s majority Christians. Both groups enjoyed a former period of dominance during which they amassed privileges whose propriety would later come into question. So broad were the privileges acquired by majority Christians that they gave rise to de facto, and sometimes de jure, discrimination against all Americans who were not Christian. Those privileges included releasing students from public schools during class hours for religious education, ended by Supreme Court decisions in 1948 and 1952; compulsory teacher-led prayer and Bible reading, likewise ended in 1962 and 1963; and school-sanctioned prayer at public school graduations, likewise ended in 1992. Less formal privileges – say, harassing Jewish pupils by making them fasten the star to the top of the school Christmas tree – were largely abandoned by social consensus. But majority Christians retain many other historic privileges that are no less questionable: “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, “In God We Trust” on U.S. money, the National Day of Prayer, closing public schools and government offices on religious holidays (coming soon: Good Friday, for some reason a legal holiday in fourteen states), paid legislative chaplains – then there’s that presumptuous notion that all of America should close on December 25 while Christians hold their birthday party. (Of course, these are only partial lists.)

Majority Christians accurately foresee that their present-day privileges may one day go the way of teacher-led Bible reading. Just as Southern whites did after the Civil War, majority Christians are reacting in ways that are, well, reactionary. We’ve seen brazen efforts to create new categories of Christian privilege. Government funding for faith-based organizations has blossomed, based in part on the astonishing idea that government’s previous reluctance to fund faith groups (you know, the separation of church and state) amounted to state discrimination against religion. Attacks on teaching evolution and efforts to reinstate school prayer increasingly portray majority Christians as victims. And, of course, there was last year’s eagerness to turn back the clock on “Happy holidays.” Taken together, these initiatives could move the country back toward de facto discrimination against both the nonreligious and all those who are religious but not Christian.

Clearly, majority Christians are getting a lot of mileage out their claims of discrimination. So it’s time to ask some blunt questions.

Are majority Christians being discriminated against? No.

Are they being treated unfairly? No.

Is anyone trying to take their rights away from them? No.

But are majority Christians the targets of a reform movement that seeks to take privileges away from them? Emphatically yes. Many of those privileges are illicit, and their removal will help to bring about a more just and equitable society.

Like Southern whites in the Jim Crow years, today’s Christian Americans have been made to give up only some of the illicit privileges they accumulated in the past. The unfairness of the privileges they retain grows more odious with time, as the nation becomes more religiously diverse. “Judeo-Christian” practices that seemed acceptable when Christians and Jews dominated debates over religion in public life are transparently unacceptable today, when Christians and Jews share the nation with atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, neo-pagans, and so on.

Majority Christians may object that some of these minorities are tiny. But limiting majority prerogative for the protection of minorities is a bedrock American principle; John Stuart Mill reminds us that tyranny of the majority is “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression.” That’s why we have a Constitution, after all.

In addition, some non-Christian minorities aren’t all that small. American Muslims may already outnumber American Jews, while the U.S. Buddhist and Hindu communities number around one million each. Then there’s the real elephant in the living room; the number of Americans with no religious preference (including secular humanists and atheists, but a lot of other folks besides) has doubled in the last ten years to 16 percent. That’s forty-seven million people, making “Nones” more numerous than any single faith group except Roman Catholics.

It’s also worth noting that in what Religious Right activists love to call “a Christian nation” and “the most devout industrialized country on Earth,” fully forty percent of the population belongs to no church, temple, synagogue, or mosque.

In closing, consider the words of, church-state separation attorney, Ronald A. Lindsay:

What is going on here is whining: whining by individuals and groups who have been deprived of the truly privileged position they once enjoyed. For most of this country’s history theism, in particular Christianity, has enjoyed favor. … The courts have put an end to some, but certainly not all, of this collaboration between church and state. In doing so, the courts have upset many who assumed that this was the proper way of doing things … and who did not see anything coercive, let alone unconstitutional, about such practices. Not unnaturally, they have interpreted the courts’ action as an attack on religion, when in reality they were simply an attempt to put an end to the privileged position that religion enjoyed.

ok i kinda am ticked here first of all i simi agree with dorkerina about the dawen point it dose not contredict any of the religes teaching in the bible but stereotyping the christen faith is wrong. christens have varied opinions on religion there bible tells them they must convert others into there faith to save them from eternal damnation. christens who trash other religions are probably the most caring of them all. they beleve by showing you that your religion is wrong that they can save your soul from hell. i don't care if you don't beleve in there teaching but you got to amit they do try to help others. the ones who don't trash religion may not be as obvious about it but they are trying do convert others if they can. the ones you start stereotyping them with are just the most straight forward of them all.

Originally posted by kidwhothinks
ok i kinda am ticked here first of all i simi agree with dorkerina about the dawen point it dose not contredict any of the religes teaching in the bible but stereotyping the christen faith is wrong. christens have varied opinions on religion there bible tells them they must convert others into there faith to save them from eternal damnation. christens who trash other religions are probably the most caring of them all. they beleve by showing you that your religion is wrong that they can save your soul from hell. i don't care if you don't beleve in there teaching but you got to amit they do try to help others. the ones who don't trash religion may not be as obvious about it but they are trying do convert others if they can. the ones you start stereotyping them with are just the most straight forward of them all.

Conversion efforts can be accompanied with a lack of respect for other' s beliefs, leading to harassment. It' s not surprising that people may want to share their religious beliefs with others, but sharing shouldn' t cross over the line into active proselytization.
Believers are welcome to ask questions which will make one think, they are also welcome to ask questions about what one thinks and the doubts you have. But they are not given the license to be disrespectful to what one believes or to act as if one were some sort of target for evangelization.

Originally posted by Storm
Conversion efforts can be accompanied with a lack of respect for other' s beliefs, leading to harassment. It' s not surprising that people may want to share their religious beliefs with others, but sharing shouldn' t cross over the line into active proselytization.
Believers are welcome to ask questions which will make one think, they are also welcome to ask questions about what one thinks and the doubts you have. But they are not given the license to be disrespectful to what one believes or to act as if one were some sort of target for evangelization.

Suppose I have an apple. If I offer you half and you accept, then I have just shared with you. But if you say to me, “No thank you, I have already eaten,” and I continue to insist that you take half of the apple until you give in to my pressure, this can hardly be called sharing. I may call it “generosity,” “love,” or “sharing,” but it is really just bad manners, rude, and selfish.

Originally posted by Adam_PoE
Suppose I have an apple. If I offer you half and you accept, then I have just shared with you. But if you say to me, “No thank you, I have already eaten,” and I continue to insist that you take half of the apple until you give in to my pressure, this can hardly be called sharing. I may call it “generosity,” “love,” or “sharing,” but it is really just bad manners, rude, and selfish.

So basically what you are stating is that the person who continues to offer the apple..is the one that embodies selfishness..while the person who rejects it..is the one who embodies selflessness? 😕

Personally..I would like having a friend who continues to offer me "love"..despite the fact that I continue to reject and admonish all the "love" that they have freely given.

Love is about "acceptance"..and not "rejection." At some point, Love stops attempting to give to those that will not gracefully receive it..and accepts them as they are...which then allows them to travel down a path that leads to the product of their selfish desires.

Originally posted by whobdamandog
So basically what you are stating is that the person who continues to offer the apple..is the one that embodies selfishness..while the person who rejects it..is the one who embodies selflessness? 😕

If I continue to insist that you take half of the apple even though you have explained to me that you have already eaten and are not hungry, then I am not offering you half of the apple for your sake, e.g. to assuage your hunger, but for my own selfish reasons. This is not sharing, it is coercing.

Originally posted by Adam_PoE
If I continue to insist that you take half of the apple even though you have explained to me that you have already eaten and are not hungry, then I am not offering you half of the apple for your sake, e.g. to assuage your hunger, but for my own selfish reasons. This is not sharing, it is coercing.

Good analogy.. 🙂