Top Ten Ways To Convince The Muslims We're On A Crusade

[Mental]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rod ... 91308.html

[SineSwiper]

When an extremist sect of Islam in an area inhabited by mostly Muslims commits acts of terror in areas inhabited by mostly Christians, it's pretty natural for people to call it a "holy war". Not saying that it's accurate, but consider the circumstances.

[Mental]

I do not want my tax dollars spent on a tank that soldiers are going to paint "New Testament" on the side of. It's just not going to happen that I will ever want that. This whole Christian-fundamentalist-military thing we have going on these days is, like, the scariest thing I've ever seen.

[Shrinweck]

Soldiers painting stuff on vehicles and whatnot to antagonize the enemy isn't new. Honestly, if they feel like doing something like that I say let them. It isn't ideal but neither is sending tens of thousands to war.

[SineSwiper]

I do not want my tax dollars spent on a tank that soldiers are going to paint "New Testament" on the side of. It's just not going to happen that I will ever want that. This whole Christian-fundamentalist-military thing we have going on these days is, like, the scariest thing I've ever seen.

I'm more scared of the Terrorist-industrial complex.

[Tessian]

As far as I'm concerned they can paint whatever the fuck they want on the tanks; whatever they want to do to help them deal with the situation they're in. If you have that big a problem with it, feel free to enlist and go help them clean it off.

Personally I'd be more concerned about all of those soldiers still being there, not "zomg they wrote JESUS on a wall"

[Flip]

What the hell are we talking about? You pick the weirdest things to outrage over.

[Mental]

Like hell I am. I don't want Christian dominionists running my military, and if you don't know what "dominionism" means, find out before criticizing. It's not okay to do this, in fact it's HIGHLY against military regulations.

And Tess, I did enlist. That's where I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

[Mental]

Did any of you guys read the article? I don't think you'd think I was "weird" if you went through that list and saw what our troops are actually doing over there, Flip.

[Mental]

As many will remember, we couldn't have gotten off to a better start on winning hearts and minds when Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, on his speaking tour of churches back in 2003, publicly and in uniform proclaimed that the so-called war on terror was really a fight between Satan and Christians, making comments like, "We in the Army of God, in the House of God, the Kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this," saying that George Bush, who himself had ignorantly called the war a crusade, was "in the White House because God put him there," and, referring to the capture of Somali warlord Osman Atto, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

Speaking at a Rotary Club meeting in his hometown of Concord, North Carolina in December 2006, one of Boykin's supporters in the aftermath of his comments, former Congressman Robin Hayes (R-NC), pronounced that stability in Iraq ultimately depended on "spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men. ...Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the Savior."

[Kupek]

American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are not fighting a conventional war. They are an occupying force fighting an insurgency. If you forgive Replay's hyperbole, I think his point is valid. Convincing the civilians around you that you are there for their benefit and not your own agenda is just as important as fighting the insurgent forces.

If it's not possible to do both, then it's not possible to "win."

[Imakeholesinu]

American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are not fighting a conventional war. They are an occupying force fighting an insurgency. If you forgive Replay's hyperbole, I think his point is valid. Convincing the civilians around you that you are there for their benefit and not your own agenda is just as important as fighting the insurgent forces.

If it's not possible to do both, then it's not possible to "win."

Just like the War on Drugs will never be "won".

[SineSwiper]

Well, considering we are fighting yet another War on "Some Floatly Loosely Defined Word", we will never win. We'll never win the War on Drugs, or Terrorism, or Poverty, or any other concept without a strictly defined (and reasonable) scope.

[Mental]

That is because the one War that might actually help, the War on Government-Aided Gun Profiteering and Police Brutality, is nowhere to be found.

[Julius Seeker]

These people are either stupid beyond belief in not understanding their obvious situation or aiming to infuriate the people they are murdering. This is what happens when you place trash in the military.

Trash because they're effectively escalating the war so that even more people will die. They're also the type of hypocrite that their own religion frowns upon; although it is probably an incorrect assumption to assume these people are religious.

[SineSwiper]

[Mental]

http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly050504a.htm

[Mental]

I love Tim Kreider because he gets his caricatures right. I expect Jesus looked rather somewhat like the swarthy Mediterranean man on the left (if shorter - food was more scarce), and absolutely nothing like the Aryan Wal-Mart Christmas figure on the right.

And after getting dicked around by the world and the Romans and watching the horrors of the time, by the end I bet the psychotic left eye (reminds me of the way the actor playing Christ looked at Barabbas in "The Passion") was in full effect. I think WAY too many "Christians" have forgotten the harsher aspects of His story.

[Mental]

I also think "Render Unto Caesar What Is Caesar's, And Render Unto God What Is God's" could use another go-round in the modern era.

That's what "dominionism" ISN'T - dominionism is a strange mutation of Christianity that posits that keeping churches free of the tainting secular influence of the state and vice versa actually *isn't* a good idea after all. Dominionism holds that humans are responsible for attempting to convert all existing states into Christian apparati in order to bring about the Second Coming by helping foster the conditions necessary to usher certain later books of the Bible into being...at least, the more extreme variants do. And that's why those folks scare me, because most rational Christians actually manage to take a look at "Render Unto Caesar" once or twice in their lives and realize that Earthly governance and heavenly governance are not and should not be synonymous, so to speak, at least in the sense that we as humankind "govern" this planet.

[Mental]

I have had it with the fucking Christians. And you know who I'm talking about. Not the Good Christians, who actually believe in, like, helping people-feeding the hungry, aiding the sick, housing the homeless, fighting injustice-but the ones in the news and in power these days, who are so keen to judge and punish and so suspiciously obsessed with sex. The ones scheming to overturn Roe v. Wade. The ones downplaying the effectiveness of condoms to teenagers. The ones preaching abstinence in Africa. The ones who believe in Creationism and want prayer in the schools and think George W. Bush is "a godly man." The born-again, angel-believing, fag-hating, eighth-grade dropout Evil Christians.

(...)

Drawing the "real" Jesus turns out to be tricky. The image carries a lot of baggage. We have absolutely no contemporary physical description of the man at all, and for some reason it's very important to everyone what he looked like. He has to be knowing, wise, compassionate, kind, stern, and humorous, all at once. Of course he ended up looking like Gandalf. My depiction is somewhat indebted to Chester Brown's characterization in his adaptation of the book of Mark in Yummy Fur-Christ as a fierce, high-browed, hatchet-faced desert prophet. In a moment of possibly misguided inspiration I gave him one blind eye, in imitation of Modigliani, who in his later portraits painted subjects he admired with one eye blank, turned inward, to suggest inner sight. Of course Christ wouldn't really have had a blind eye, or any other serious injury or deformity, because, duh, he could've healed it himself. The book of John, especially, is full of stories about Christ being mocked and chased away by crowds, so I'm sure we would've heard about the obvious contradiction if he'd had any physical infirmities.

[Mental]

Was it really ever given as fact in the Bible that Jesus could heal himself? I'm not sure that goes without saying, in fact it seems likely given how the story went that he was not resistant to physical damage or capable of healing Himself in any significant way before the Resurrection, and I thought that was supposed to not be His doing alone, but that of the entire spirit of the Trinity. Or something like that.

[Julius Seeker]

On the historical look of Jesus: He wasn't a historical figure, he was a mythological one. It is common for regions to make their Gods appear as they look. Jesus was more the personification of ideas for people to follow. During the era of Constantine, hundreds of years later, they wrote Jesus into history.

Julius Caesar before he was Imperator (Emperor) and the richest most powerful person in Rome, he was Pontifex Maximus - the leader of the religions of Rome. Caesar was the equivilent of today's Roman Catholic Pope. Also tied to his house was the ruling house of the Jews, they were family. His House ever after held the same titles. Julius Caesar himself was deified and his cult was strong in the middle East at the time of Jesus. There were also Helenized Jews, a contemporary of Jesus was Philo who we have hundreds of thousands of words from today. Being a Helenized Jew, Philo had knowledge of the mystery religions and his thoughts were very simlar to those of the Christians.

The one thing that the House of the Julii and Philo have in common is that they mention nothing of a new Jewish King who performed miracles and altered nature. No mention of Jesus. You would think they would be the types of people who would be most interested in that sort of person.

For the earliest Jesus worshippers, he was a figure who walked in their hearts, but not on their earth.