Talk about being ignint and the stereotypical parochial religious intolerant.

No Jews or Christians can give respect to God by not naming him in vain, oh no, we can’t have that now can we.

3. very limited or narrow in scope or outlook; provincial: parochial views; a parochial mentality.

God save us from the righteous, since pacifism sure as heck ain’t going to.

What is wrong with Earl referring to God as G-d?

It’s just helen’s wraparound method of trying to chip away at arguments from Earl she didn’t like reading.

Some high intensity emotion filtered through where it wasn’t supposed to go, you may say.

What is wrong with Earl referring to God as G-d?

In context, this text is prohibiting us from judging another person’s standing with G-d, something we are incapable of knowing. Remember that “man looketh on the outward appearance, but G-d looketh on the heart.” If you think, as I allowed myself to do some years ago, that there are occasions when we can be sure of G-d’s rejection of some particularly awful person, just remember Bernard Nathanson. if his name rings no bells, get his book The Hand of G-d (it’s at Amazon) and see how far G-d will go for His children, and what He can do if there is confession of sin followed by repentance. Inspiring story.

Anyhow, to construe this text to mean that I can’t say “Killing an unborn child is evil” is to contradict the Bible itself, which specifically says that we are to judge actions, our own as well as others, and to communicate our judgment, so that our brothers/sisters can come back to the right path. But we are not allowed to judge the sinner as beyond G-d’s power to save - something that’s still hard for me in certain cases of particular sins committed over long periods.

It’s a dereliction of Christian duty not to identify the killing of innocents as evil, and worse, to suggest that there is ANYthing that justifies such activities. My understanding of the Jewish perspective (and I’m certainly open to correction on this) is that it’s roughly “You are what you do”, so that if you’re a wife-beater, you’re an evil man. I personally have no trouble with that - the only thing I’m saying is that the text at issue indicates that we have to leave the door open to G-d’s mercy in cases where true repentance occurs. And if Bernard Nathanson was still on G-d’s list, then I suppose Osama must be, too……difficult as it is for me to imagine!

Which means they have changed their religion and the way people believed in it.

This can be done either through the Reformation of the Catholic Church or creating your own version of it via Lutheranism and Protestantism.

Islam is just as capable of reform as was Christianity

Christianity embraced the Enlightenment. Islam hasn’t. To say that the two are equivalent in terms of capability would be to equate Enlightenment principles with the same efficacy as human misery in making things better for the world.

I see few to no voices within current Islam that advocate reform.

When they actually act on their beliefs and do what Martin Luther did, then we’ll see what happens. Until then, they’re just Erasmuses. And they operate under far more chains than Erasmus and his satire ever did.

I reject Robert Spencer’s claim that Islam is, by its very nature, the root of the problem. I will use a comparison here between Christianity and Islam that some will claim is moral equivalency.

It was not that long ago in the USA that Biblical quotes were used (selectively) to justify and uphold slavery. These quotes were used by politicians and by preachers. There are many other verses in the Bible that would curl your hair if you knew about them! But the ciritical point is this: All of these verses have been reinterpreted over time. The verses are now thought to be contextual - of THAT certain time in THAT certain place; or else the verses have simply been repudiated and ignored.

The problem today is with the form of Islam that is ascendant. Islam is just as capable of reform as was Christianity. But reform is not inevitable. I see few to no voices within current Islam that advocate reform. Jihadist Islam is ascendant and winning the internal argument within the Muslim world. If there are “good Muslims” they are quiet. Mostly it is apostates, and under assumed names, that speak out against current Islamic thought.

The *current form* of Islam is mostly evil and must be resisted. If Islam cannot reform itself, the result will be quite bloody in the end.

That should have been “one or more”, by the way. I am a lousy editor…what can I say?

Which would then not be evil, since they were committed in defense of your children…