When Will Conservative Christians Relent On The Gays?

Found on  God Hates Protesters.

Tom Krattenmaker has a piece up on USA Today where he asks what conservative Christians should do: "On gay rights, keep fighting or adapt?"

You get the sense, observing the shifting cultural landscape, that we've reached a point on gay rights that is similar to that moment in a football game, or an election, or a relationship, when you know it's over even though it's not over.

It appears increasingly obvious that social acceptance of gay men and lesbians and insistence on their equal rights are inexorable.

It certainly looked over for Maggie Gallagher, National Organization for Marriage and her financial benefactors from the Mormon and Catholic Churches in New Hampshire and Maryland this week. But would the conservative Christian industry ever willingly euthanize the goose laying the golden eggs?  READ MORE

Tucker Carlson: 'Christianity Is The Reason We Don't Have Slavery In The World Today'

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Sunday declared that all slavery in the world had been eradicated thanks to the Christian faith.

At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, conservatives accused President Barack Obama of comparing Christianity to the Islamic terrorist group ISIS when he observed that many religions had been used to justify violence throughout history.

"So we're responsible for the Crusades a thousand years ago?" Carlson complained. "Who's 'us' anyway? And by the way, who ended slavery and Jim Crow? Christians. The Rev. Martin Luther King. Christians."

"Christianity is the reason we don't have slavery in the world today," he added. "I mean, talk about ahistorical."

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt said that Obama's remarks were "completely inappropriate" because there were many evangelical Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast.

"Know your audience," she recommended. "No one expected the Inquisition to be mentioned at the National Prayer Breakfast."

"What's so striking though is his mention of the Crusades as a way to make the point, 'Before you judge ISIS, keep in mind that that Christians did it too,'" Carlson asserted. "The Crusades is a fixation among jihadis. There's not a press release from ISIS or from al Qaeda that doesn't call us Crusaders."

"And so for the president to use that specific word, aping the language of the jihadis is ominous and bizarre."

According to the 2014 Global Slavery Index, there are an estimated 35.8 million slaves in the world.
Late last year, leaders of the largest religions in the world -- including Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths -- met to sign a declaration of commitment to end slavery by 2020.
At the time, Pope Francis called slavery an “atrocious scourge present on a large scale throughout the world." READ MORE

FOX NEWS: Only Muslims have ever killed anybody in the name of religion

So Erik Bolling, of Fox News says zero people have ever been killed in the name of any religion, except for Islam. Bolling said:

Reports say radical Muslim jihadists killed thousands of people in the past few months alone. And yet when you take Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, whatever, their combined killings in the name of religion––well, that would be zero.

This is all in the context of Obama's remarks at the nation prayer breakfast. I am a freelance journalist and medieval historian. I wrote about this for the Guardian. I wrote, among other things:

It’s a mistake to believe in Christian exceptionalism – the idea that Christianity alone has solved its problems – while other religions are still “medieval”. One of history’s lessons is that any ideology, sacred or secular, that divides the world into ‘us versus them’ can and will be used to justify violence.

But when we talk about the past, we’re often really talking about ourselves. In my scholarship, for instance, I look at the ways in which medieval people developed stories about holy war as a response to contemporary problems – which often had little to do with the Crusades.  READ MORE

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Don't get me started.  It never seems to fill my mind with wonder about how,  while religions have killed heretics for things like blasphemy and refusal to honor their ideas,  ideals and scriptures,  seeking to wipe out any and all opposition,  even from scientists who can prove what they claim.  While scientists, have never killed anyone,  allowing everyone to believe whatever they choose to believe.  Have never taken over from superstitious.

Scientists have successfully spread their beliefs without arresting,  imprisoning,  torturing or executing a soul.  While the "Sacred Words of Love Everlasting" has needed to spread it's fare by dint of force of torture,  fears of death and war.  You'd think that the peaceful scientists would have won out by now,  but,  as we can see,  that is far from the case.  

What Kind of Christianity Is This?

Former Sen. Rick Santorum's bellicose rants against Iran
and the 'Marxist cancer' he sees in the Americas have
made him a fan-favorite among Evangelicals,
05/19/11. (photo: AP)

By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News

28 January 12

rom time to time, I read about condemnations of religion coming from non-religious groups, especially concerning the all-too-common violence perpetrated in the name of religious gods. Indeed there is plenty to condemn.

Altogether too many religions sects of both major and minor religions, despite verbally professing a desire for peace and justice in the world, are actually pro-war, pro-homicide and pro-violence in practice (or they may be silent on the subject, which is, according to moral theology, the same as being pro-violence).

Obvious examples include those portions of the three major war-justifying religions of the world: fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity.

I use the term fundamentalist in the sense that the religious person, who ascribes to a fundamentalist point of view, believes, among other dogmatic belief, that their scriptures are inerrant and thus they can find passages in their holy books that justify homicidal violence against their perceived or fingered enemies, while simultaneously ignoring the numerous contradictory passages that forbid violence and homicide and instead prescribe love, hospitality, mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation. 

READ MORE