Buffman

Rad

I know you like to believe this, but it's patently obvious Jefferson disagrees and you have no evidence other than your own "reason."

How does Jefferson disagree? He cut the Bible to pieces attenpting to find only the applicable ethical/moral values. I hope you aren't inferring that Jefferson had divine intervention guiding his scissors. (Muhahahahah. Wonderful! Just wonderful!)

You also make a lot of people liars,...

I don't do anything. People like you do it all by themselves without any assistance from me. However, the majority aren't liars. They are merely uniformed or misinformed. They have listened to people like you for too long rather than doing their own homework. They need to apply critical thinking skills to your propaganda in order to see just how filled with garbage it really is. That's all that Jefferson did. He used his critial reasoning skills to eliminate the wheat(ethics/moral messages) from the chaff (Christian dogma and propaganda.)

...and as usual your post drips with patronizing assertions about people's motives and relative stupidity.

I can appreciate why someone such as yourself would have to believe that.

Funny all those gang members couldn't live by any rule at all until the Holy Spirit enabled them and they got into a church which preaches original sin, salvation therefrom, the uselessness of good works, and imputed righteousness.

I can only offer you my congratulations if you have been able to turn some people from a negative path to a positive one. However, there were gangs back in the prehistoric days of my youth. Some of those members went to jail, some became preachers, some politicians, some wound up in institutions for the criminally insane, and many died continuing along the path that they did. The fact that many humans are quick to substitute the enslavement of their environments for the enslavement of their minds is hardly a new phenomena. According to your Holy Book, the down trodden masses, under the yoke of Rome, were quick to follow anyone who could provide them a free meal and a little hope for a better life...even if only after death. That sales pitch hasn't changed in several millennia.

I suppose John Newton would have just awakened one morning and said "I gotta follow the Golden Rule now because it's the right thing" and stopped slave trading anyway, without the Bible, or ever hearing a sermon.

I have no idea what caused John Newton to follow the paths that he did. I do know the following:

http://www.english.nwu.edu/llipking/18thc/slavery/

(Extract)
By the 1780s a wave of abolitionist fervor swept through Great Britain, led by the Quakers and, in parliament, by William Wilberforce (1759-1833). The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in 1787, inspired many abolitionist poets to join the campaign. A few years later the French Revolution, and the wars that followed, caused a conservative backlash in Britain. Boswell, who had earlier argued the case for slavery against Samuel Johnson (NAEL 1: 2379-80), wrote a poem advocating "No Abolition of Slavery" in 1791. But Wilberforce won in the end, and a bill abolishing the British slave trade became law in 1807. That did not, of course, put an end to illegal trade, let alone slavery itself. The conflict between boasts of liberty and the enslavement of human beings passed from Britain to America, where its consequences would be written in blood. Yet the 18th century, which witnessed the high tide of the slave trade, also gave rise to the ideals of freedom, equality, and human rights that led to its doom.
(End extract)

He was too ignorant to realize it. And the "rags of the clergy" would have just miraculously stopped abusing, misleading and oppressing people contrary to Jesus' teaching because of Voltaire's "reason" and not Luther's research. Is that correct?

Luther's research? Are you talking about this Martin Luther?

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/luther.htm

Like I said, there are things in heaven and earth not dreamt of in your library.

I will anxiously await your report after you have been there for a few days. I am still awaiting Houdini's report.

Radorth

You are begging the point, and resorting to gratuitous ad hom. When you assert that that Biblical tenets makes no real difference to people who say they do matter, you are effectively calling them liars IMO. But maybe you really believe it and are just palm reading.

I don't read "positiveatheism" any more as they consistently misquote people or remove quotes from context. Knowing their disinterst in relevant facts, I have little doubt your cite is just an ad hom on Luther's character, in order to minimize his place in history.

Rad

Radorth

You got that right anyway.

Rad

Toto

Rad:

First a little housekeeping. When you quote someone, could you attach their name to the quote? It makes things easier to follow.

Also, give some indication of what you are quoting by setting the quoted matter off in some way. vBB gives you a number of choices - not just bold, as Buffman and others do, but color . Would you object if I edited your posts to clarify that, especially where you have quoted most of Bobbie Kirkhart's speech? I don't want someone else quoting Kirkhart and thinking they are quoting you. IF YOU DO NOT OBJECT I WILL DO IT LATER TODAY.

Also - "Bobbie" is short for Roberta. That's Ms. Kirkhart. And she was talking to the choir there - the German Freethinkers Society, which might explain some of the references.

And since you seem to be unable to figure out the point, this is an address by a strict secularist talking to European secularists about the status of church-state separation in American. She is telling them that that separation was an ideal that was not always lived up to. She makes the point that many of the founders were religious, but that they still believed in strict separation. Public education was not a 1st amendment issue for the founders, because there was no federal public education in those days. The current religious right position - of providing money for faith based enterprises - is not in favor of strict separation.

I thought this might give you some perspective because you seem to assume 1) that any evidence of religion on the part of the founders supports you side, when the founders might have been religious but still favor strict separation 2) that the occasional lapses from strict separation are evidence of what the founders intended, instead of political compromises.

She mentions Catholics because the book she is reviewing here discusses anti-Catholic prejudice. Conditions have changed, of course. Bush is now trying to put all conservative religious groups under one big tent in opposition to secularists.

The questions you ask are totally off the wall and I don't know where you are getting them.

Daggah

Your attempts to rewrite history will not fly here, Radorth. You strongly implied that Luther was a force against oppression. He was well-known as a bigot. Words out of his own mouth can hardly be ad homs against him.

Daggah

Oh, and lest the "But you're misquoting Luther!" argument comes up...I guess Radorth hasn't read Luther's "On the Jews and their Lies." I guess he hasn't thumbed through the section detailing Luther's "final solution to the Jewish problem."

I don't fear context here. You can go read the entire thing here.

Luther was a bigot. This is not an ad hominem; it is a statement of fact.

Buffman

"Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people."

(Gen. Petro G. Grigorenko, samizat letter to a history journal, c. 1975, USSR *3)
[*"Lies My Teacher Told Me" pg. 319, Notes #3]

Buffman

Radorth

I don't read "positiveatheism" any more as they consistently misquote people or remove quotes from context. Knowing their disinterst in relevant facts, I have little doubt your cite is just an ad hom on Luther's character, in order to minimize his place in history.

Au contraire! My use of that list of Luther quotes exposes him for what he really was, not how some Protestants have attempted suppress his true bigotry.

So let me see if I now understand your new position. Any quotes that you use are accurate regardless of where they may have originated. However, any quotes that contradict yours must be inaccurate. Is that what you are now claiming?

Apparently I am anxious to read Barton or Federer in order to point out their accuracies or inaccuracies... with cited, verifiable, sources... while you are now refusing to read anything that might refute your propaganda and failure to provide verifiable evidence for your claims/opinions. How very Christian of you! (Like I keep advising you, you are giving sincere and thoughtful Christians a very black eye with your propagandistic approach to intelligent and mutually beneficial discussions. Evidently you hold other Christians who do not agree with your beliefs in deep contempt. How arrogant and anti-Christian.)

Daggah

As a matter of fact, Buffman, in April of 1994, the The Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America actually released a statement basically apologizing for Luther's bigotry. You can find it here.

Buffman

Thank you, Daggah. Just bookmarked it.