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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 2, 2012 10:47:51 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 2, 2012 23:05:19 GMT
Pope Shenouda has promoted a revival of monasticism among Copts in recent decades - that's the background to this article.
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Post by Paula on Feb 7, 2012 17:39:48 GMT
Conservative MP Edward Leigh is concerned Catholics could be at risk should Bashar al-Assad be toppled. The claim is that Christians have found "an oasis of relative calm" in Syria, which has no doubt been affected by the ongoing butchering it's own people by the autocratic regime.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 7, 2012 21:12:53 GMT
Actually, there is some basis for Leigh's claim. The Syrian regime is dominated by Alawites, a branch of Shi'ism so heterodox that many don't regard it as Muslim, so it draws for support on other minorities including Christians. The current Syrian army chief of staff is an Orthodox Christian. If you have read William Dalrymple's travel book FROM THE HOLY MOUNTAIN you will find him remarking that Christians seemed much freer in Syria than in Turkey, even though Syria is a dictatorship (he was writing in the early 90s). Admittedly Dalrymple has his own axes to grind (he is very hostile to the Israelis and the Lebanese Maronites, for example) but I wouldn't dismiss his view out of hand. This doesn't mean we should support the Assad regime, but it is quite possible that its fall might be followed by the sort of unpleasant consequences for Syrian Christians that Iraqi Christians experienced after the fall of Saddam. There are well-authenticated reports of opposition demonstrators chanting "Christians to Lebanon - Alawis to the grave".
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 7, 2012 22:22:00 GMT
Here, alas, we see the radtrads at Rorate Caeli rushing in where angels fear to tread, proclaiming their support for Assad on the grounds that he is a protector of Christians, and blaming opposition to him on "neocon propaganda". rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/02/russia-china-unlikely-friends-of-middle.html#more For good (or rather bad) measure, some of them add that we should have supported the Christian ethnic cleansers of Serbia against the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosova. This is one reason why I am a bit wary about discussing the subject of this thread - it can very easily turn into a proclamation that all Muslims are evil, all Christians are good, and anything is justified to protect Christians from Muslims. (I am NOT mentioning anyone on this thread - I am thinking of posts I have seen on American sites.)
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Post by shane on Feb 7, 2012 23:29:50 GMT
But surely if the fall of the Assad regime would inaugurate something worse for the Syrian people then it would indeed make sense to support it? Not unconditionally of course...
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 8, 2012 0:47:25 GMT
My objection to the Rorate Caeli response is that at least a significant proportion of the comboxers treat it as self-evident that Assad should be supported and dismiss any view to the contrary as "neocon propaganda" in a context where it is clear they mean neocon=Jew. I don't think Syria without Assad will be all sweetness and light, but the Assads have a long and bloody record of adventurism in Lebanon and repression in Syria. Anyone who wants to convince me he's worth supporting should at least acknowledge that, and the Rorate posters by and large don't.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 8, 2012 11:38:18 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 14, 2012 22:11:19 GMT
This is good for a laugh: www.nationalreview.com/corner/293451/quit-and-dead-mark-steynEXTRACT Pamela Geller was struck by that ad The New York Times ran the other day, “It’s Time To Quit The Catholic Church“, an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics”. So she sent in her own ad, “It’s Time To Quit Islam“, an “open letter to ‘moderate’ Muslims”. Analogous artwork, same pitch, only difference being the intended target. The Times’ Senior Vice-President for Corporate Hogwash called to tell Miss Geller that – surprise! surprise! – they were way less eager to rush this one into print: Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, just called me to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in “a few months.” So I said to Mr. Christie, “Isn’t this the very point of the ad? If you feared the Catholics were going to attack the New York Times building, would you have run that ad?” Thus the courage of the secular left: If you’re going to be “provocative”, it’s best to do it with people who can’t be provoked. Pamela is right. If you want to be treated with respect by The New York Times and the rest of the multiculti establishment, make it clear you’re willing to kill them. That’s an interesting message to send. END
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Post by Paula on Mar 16, 2012 1:20:28 GMT
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Post by shane on Mar 16, 2012 19:46:22 GMT
I just discovered that Mark Steyn used to write for the Irish Times. How on earth did he manage that?
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 16, 2012 19:48:26 GMT
The Garton Ash piece is interesting - of course the point about Christians supposedly being dominant and therefore more legitimately open to criticism/ridicule omits the dominance of the secularist worldview which aims at excluding religion for the public square altogether. (Let us suppose that a Christian university professor repeatedly and publicly said that atheism had done nothing but harm, that it inevitably led to violence and tyranny, that atheists were not entitled to have their views on public policy taken into account, that atheists might say they were atheists but they were really Christian even if they didn't know it, and that it would be a good thing if atheism disappeared - in short, said about atheism what Richard Dawkins said about Christianity. Would he be treated as intellectually serious, as Dawkins still is? Would he get the same media exposure? Or would he be reported to the police a la Bishop Boyce.) Similarly, the reason why the DOONESBURY cartoon on abortion provoked such outrage is not that we pro-lifers are all hysterics as Martyn Turner insinuates, not just because the cartoon is on the wrong side and justifying murder, which it is , but because the strip is also justifying tyranny - it is proclaiming that pro-lifers are akin to rapists and should be excluded from all public influence - and "respectable" society treats it as a perfectly respectable view. John J Reilly has a good discussion of this (the context is why so many orthodox/fundamentalist Christians are drawn to depictions of an approaching endtime in which we will be persecuted by Antichrist) www.johnreilly.info/eots.htmEXTRACT The key to what has these good people agitated, as well as why the current fin de siecle has a nastier edge to it than the last time around, may perhaps be found be in Stephen L. Carter's Massey lectures of 1995, recently published in book form as "The Dissent of the Governed" (1998). The lectures were given in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. It is the best attempt I have seen to understand the cultural disorders that occasioned that terrible act, without in any way condoning what happened. Canadian patriots may go ballistic when they see how American is the model I am about to apply to a book set in British Columbia. They may have a point, but I would suggest that US and Canadian legal culture are increasingly convergent, particularly under the new constitution, and that the elite attitudes Carter discusses are no less common in Toronto than they are in the neighborhood of Boston. The starting point for Carter's analysis is a novel reading of the Declaration of Independence. What drove the colonists over the line from dissent to revolt was not the new imperial taxes or the high-handedness of unelected officials. Rather, in the words of the Declaration, it was that "Our repeated Petitions have been met only with repeated injuries." The King (and his ministers) not only gave his subjects no hearing, but responded to their complaints with outrages. This behavior, according to Carter, drove a critical mass of American colonials from protest about perceived injustices to "disallegiance" from a political structure that systematically excluded them and their concerns. Carter suggests that American constitutional law has been acting more and more like King George's government since at least the 1950s. Part of the problem was that the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. the Board of Education was not only right, it also made the Court wildly popular among the nation's elites, a somewhat novel situation. The judiciary began to believe that, quite literally, it could do no wrong. Having set itself to altering the nation's ingrained cultural patterns as they pertained to race, the Court became open to reforming other aspects of American culture. What later came to be called the "culture wars" may have been inevitable, but the mischief was greatly exacerbated by the fact that, from quite early on, the courts were pretty clearly on one side. Stephen Carter has discussed the hostility to religious arguments in the public square in his book, "The Culture of Disbelief." The question of the level of piety among the nation's elites, or indeed what an elite might be, is too large a subject to take on here. Still, he does have a point when he says that modern constitutional practice has succeeded in making a "forbidden ontology" of what is the most important thing in the world to a very large fraction of the people. The problem is no so much that religiously motivated persons do not get their way on issues like abortion, or prayer in public schools, or on the control of pornography. The problem is that, as religious people, their arguments cannot even be heard. Somewhat alarmingly, Carter goes so far as to suggest that the linkage of reformist liberalism with the extraordinary level of deference demanded by the modern judiciary is quite literally totalitarian. It criminalizes forms of dissent that in other contexts would enjoy a large degree of toleration. Indeed, it speaks to the people in a rhetoric of tolerance that in practice usually means legally mandated homogenization. Of course, even the most uppity federal judge does not have a fleet of black helicopters at his command. Still, if Carter is right, then in the fictional apocalypse of "Eclipse of the Sun," we see a popular intuition that is not without foundation. end
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 16, 2012 19:53:12 GMT
Another example of radtrad lunacy. RORATE reports the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia calling for the destruction of the churches which have been built in some of the Gulf states to cater for tourists and Christian guestworkers on the grounds that this contravenes the reported saying of Mohammed that no religion other than Islam should exist in the Arabian peninsula. About half the trad-Catholic posters in the combox praise the Mufti and wish the Church would advocate the same sort of persecution of non-Catholics! Talk about people who don't realise what they are advocating would led in short order to their own persecution (richly deserved I might add). Let them go and live in Afghanistan if they like that sort of society. rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/03/grand-mufti-of-saudi-arabia-destroy-all.html
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Post by vocoprotatiano on Apr 11, 2012 8:26:33 GMT
Let us get down to basics. The Quran specifically states that Jesus is the Messiah in several places. If you want chapter and verse, I will search, and quote. That Islam understands 'Messiah' differently from us is irrelevant. We understand the word differently from Jews. The word means in its basic form, 'The Anointed One', but that word, transcribed into Greek, is CHRISTOS. So by their own writings, and definitions, Islam is a CHRISTIAN religion, albeit, more than somewhat heretical. As for Christians, specially, the more 'fundamentalist' varieties, which, for the most part do not know what the real fundamentals are, They promulgate more hate than love. We need to find more that joins us that separates us. We need to build bridges, not tear them down to build walls. In our translations, we tend to misunderstand old words. 'Comprehend', did not mean understand, but to grasp, as in seizing by arrest. Apprehend would be better, but Even that now has the same sort of meaning as comprehend. Beget is even worse, the concept of sexual fathering is a side definition. It simply means to bring into existence by personal effort. By that definition, We are ALL BEGOTTEN of G_D, so what does the special phrase mean, used by King David, and in the Gospels? Well, there is, and was among the Children of Israel, a tradition, that when the father of a son, whether by nature, or by adoption, presents the son to the congregation, he used the words: "This is my son, this day have I begotten him." Here the word means LITERALLY, ACKNOWLEDGED. King David was acknowledged in a personal dream. Our Lord was acknowledged PUBLICLY THREE times. No-one has been so acknowledged before, or since. So, in that sense Our Lord is the ONLY BEGOTTEN SON of G_D. What the Muslims object to is the idea that there was some kind of sexual encounter between G_D and the B.V.M.. Unfortunately, too man ignorant 'evangelists' have promulgated this sort of idea based on their ignorance of the older usage of the word 'BEGET'. Remember: Arab, and Hebrew are the SAME word, just using slightly different characters and spelling. Allah, and Elohim are grammatically identical equivalents of the SAME NAME. And: Muslim means PEACEMAKER. These people are our brothers/sisters in faith. We need, that is, both us, and them, to understand this.
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Post by vocoprotatiano on Apr 11, 2012 16:01:40 GMT
Typo in above. Unfortunately, too MANY ignorant 'evangelists' have promulgated this sort of idea based on their ignorance of the older usage of the word 'BEGET'.
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