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Gary Patton

Jesus thinking on Homosexuality - 0 views

www.redletterchristians.org/esus-think-about-homosexuality

bible scripture Jesus christianity religion homosexuality

shared by Gary Patton on 28 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • What does Jesus think about Homosexuality?
  • Regardless of where we stand on the rightness or the wrongness of being gay, none of that matters much when people are dying. We can argue over what the Bible says about homosexuality, but one thing is utterly clear: Jesus clearly teaches us to love people, not to hate them, not to make them feel hated, and not to stand by while that is happening.
  • Jesus was especially known for loving the very people that the religious people of his time had condemned and cast out
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Is homosexuality a sin?
  • “The law commands that she should be stoned to death, what do you say?” Jesus bends down and draws with his finger in the dirt, and then says to them “Let the one who is without sin throw the first stone.”
  • So again, even if we think homosexuality is wrong, we know what Jesus would do in our shoes. He has drawn a line in the sand, and we need to decide what side of that line we will be on. Will we be on the side of Jesus and the one who is being condemned and threatened? Or will we stand with the religious accusers on the other side of that line?
  • Jesus never says a word about homosexuality, but there was one kind of sin that he spoke out against all the time. There was one kind of sin that got Jesus really mad. This was the sin of religious people who shut out those in need of mercy.
  • What this all comes down to is we, as Christians, acting like Jesus. It’s about discerning what Jesus would want us to do right now, and the answer is clear: We need to change our priorities and focus on the critical issue of communicating love and acceptance to people–especially the very people our society so often ostracizes, condemns, and rejects. Because that is exactly what Jesus did.
  • Because as long as our priority is in looking moral rather than in showing compassion and grace to those on the outside, we simply do not have the priorities of Jesus.
  • Now you may have noticed that I didn’t ever say what I thought about whether homosexuality was wrong or right. I didn’t say because this is not about me and what I think. It’s about us as Christians learning to care about what Jesus cares about. This is not about gay rights. It is about about human rights, and that starts with the least. It is about us having the courage to stand with those who are vulnerable. It is about us saying “no” to hate, even when it is done in the name of God–no, especially when it is done in the name of God. It’s about having the guts to draw that line in the sand like Jesus did. Even when that means facing that mob ourselves.
  • Gary Patton on 28 Apr 12
     
    Jesus may never spoke about the issue of homosexuality. He never spoke about the "man at the Gate Beautiful, either. But He died so the both he and homosexuals might be healed. Jesus didn't speak about homosexuality. But as Immanuel, He knew what the Old Covenant clearly stated. Nonetheless, this article raises some challenging issues for religious people who lean to justice rather than love. gfp (2012-04-28)
Gary Patton

Andrew Sullivan: Christianity in Crisis - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...an-christianity-in-crisis.html

bibliolatry bible religion christianity politics

shared by Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Not the supernatural claims that, fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms, reformations, and counterreformations
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      I'm not so sure the Bible documantation of Jesus' miracles are responsible for the horrors Mr. Sullivan seems to attribute to them.
  • What does it matter how strictly you proclaim your belief in various doctrines if you do not live as these doctrines demand?
  • And more intensely relevant to our times. Jefferson’s vision of a simpler, purer, apolitical Christianity couldn’t be further from the 21st-century American reality.
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      Is using Matthew 5:13-16 to justify spending one's time in so-called "social action" really Biblical? Are we wise attempting to get worldly people to obey what they cannot and do what only Jesus Followers are commanded? Does it not seem a waste of time and energy better spent "making disciples" (Matthew 28:18-20) ...one on one (2 Timothy 2:1-2)... God's clearly commanded plan?
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • evangelical Protestants who believe that religion must consume and influence every aspect of public life
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      Please note my questions in the e-Sticky Note above in this paragraph.
  • The crisis of Christianity is perhaps best captured in the new meaning of the word “secular.” It once meant belief in separating the spheres of faith and politics; it now means, for many, simply atheism.
  • you’ll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas Jefferson when he was 77 years old.
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      Some would argue that President Jefferson was the R-E-A-L founder of the current "Jesus Movement" of Bible reductionists. Or a kndred spirit of the "Red Letter Christians".
  • Christianity has been destroyed by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists. Ignore them, writes Andrew Sullivan, and embrace Him. 
  • Christianity in Crisis
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      "What does it matter how strictly you proclaim your belief in various doctrines if you do not live as these doctrines demand? ", the writer asks. That's about as difficult a question as one can ask a so-called Christian. gfp (2012-04-11)
  • the unilateral prohibition of the pill
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      Given the Catholic "Doctrine of Infalibility", "unilateral" is the right word and one all Catholics are expected to obey.
  • The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up, an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children.
  • Inequality, poverty, even the torture institutionalized by the government after 9/11: these issues attract far less of their public attention.
  • the mainline Protestant churches, which long promoted religious moderation, have rapidly declined in the past 50 years. Evangelical Protestantism has stepped into the vacuum, but it has serious defects of its own.
  • many suburban evangelicals embrace a gospel of prosperity
  • Others defend a rigid biblical literalism
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      If an omnipotent, supernatural God cannot keep His own words to humankind accurate over time, is He really a God that should be worshipped by Mr. Sullivan? There is a great deal of documented proof for the accuracy of the Bible with Scripture documents available from a time when the eye witnesses to what Jesus said and did were alive and active. Does Mr. Sullivan really believe that the first Apostles and early Christians agreed to be tortured and killed, horribly, for lies in forged documents as they were for most of the 270 years after Jesus died? And if you feel the documents were forged after the eye witnesses died, please reflect on my opening question.
  • Still others insist that the earth is merely 6,000 years old—something we now know by the light of reason and science is simply untrue.
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      Is Mr. Sullivan really calling as witnesses the same science and it's so-called experts at proving their theories by replicating them that hasn't been able to produce one single shred of evidence for its sacrosanct "Theory of Evolution". Is he really criticizing estimates of the earth's age on the basis of Biblical dating by calling geologists as testamentarians who use the dating of fossils by archeologists to date their rocks when those same archeologists often date their fossils from the rock layers in which they are found. Some science that, eh?
  • Evangelical Christians
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      I agree that torture is unBiblical and something a Jesus Follower should NEVER condone to be used under any circumstances ...never mind the proven fact that it is a totsaally unreliable way to get accurate information. However, Jesus isn't yet finished conforming me to His character as well as His likeness any more than He is the people who support this barbarism. But, I have the promise of the loving, living God that He is doing so in His way and His timing documented in Romans 8:28-39! Any so-called Christian who's not seeing him/herself becoming more like Jesus "as time goes by" is probably not one!
  • Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery.
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 11 Apr 12
       
      Jesus doesn't have to speak on every moral issue condemned in the Old Covenant and He did say He had come to fullfill it! Does Mr. Sullivan really see Jesus condoning the homosexual behaviour that is rampant now on TV while He still loves and died for the sin nature and sins of it's practitioners? How can Mr. Sullivan suggest the antiviolent God-man who deplores murder is not appalled by abortion ...let alone the malevolency of "Partial Birth Abortion" that is practised by so-called healers all over Canada and in many U.S. States.
Gary Patton

"Eurabia" : National Review Online - 0 views

old.nationalreview.com/...comment-yeor100902.asp

islamism immigration Europe oil Islam islamization hate genocide anti-semitism persecution

shared by Gary Patton on 19 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • eptember 11, 2001 was for millions worldwide a day of sorrow, pain, and profound sadness; a day of solemn solidarity, self-sacrifice, and prayer.
  • For others it was a day of rejoicing, a revengeful exultation, a long-awaited triumphalism born from the death and suffering of thousands of innocent victims.
  • For iniquity engulfs those who hate, who kill — and not the hated victim. It is those who hate who are sick: sick from envy; sick from the frustration of having failed to achieve an absolute, pathological domination; sick from a schizophrenic lust for power.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Terrorism is not a consequence of poverty. Many societies are poor, yet they do not produce an organized criminality of terror.
  • America should not choose European ways: the road back to Munich via appeasement, collaboration, and dhimmitude.
  • After the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil blackmail in 1973, the then-European Community (EC) created a structure of Cooperation and Dialogue with the Arab League. The Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD)
  • Over the years, Euro-Arab collaboration developed at all levels: political, economic, religious and in the transfer of technologies, education, universities, radio, television, press, publishers, and writers unions. This structure became the channel for Arab immigration into Europe, of anti-Americanism, and of Judeophobia, which — linked with a general hatred of the West and its denigration — constituted a pseudo-culture imported from Arab countries.
  • The interpenetration of European and Arab policies determined Europe's relentless anti-Israel policy and its anti-Americanism. This politico-economic edifice, with minute details, is rooted in a multiform European symbiosis with the Arab world.
  • The EAD was the vehicle for legitimizing the propaganda of the PLO, procuring it international diplomatic recognition, and conferring on Arafat's terrorist movement honor and international stature by supporting Arafat's address to the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 13, 1974 .
  • Through the labyrinth of the EAD system, a policy of Israel's delegitimization was planned at both the EC's national and international levels.
  • The cultural infrastructure of the EAD allowed the traditional cultural baggage of Arab societies, with its anti-Christian and anti-Jewish prejudices and its hostility against Israel and the West, to be imported into Europe.
  • Strategically, the Euro-Arab Cooperation was a political instrument for anti-Americanism in Europe, whose aim was to separate and weaken the two continents by an incitement to hostility and the permanent denigration of American policy in the Middle East .
  • The EAD was the mouthpiece which diffused and popularized throughout Europe the defamation of Israel. France, Belgium, and Luxembourg were then the most active agents of the EAD.
  • Europeans adopted the Arab-Islamic conception of history.
  • Europe's pathological obsession with the Arab-Palestinian conflict, has obscured the criminal ongoing persecution of Christians and other minorities in Muslim lands worldwide, and the sufferings and slavery of millions from jihad wars in Africa and Asia.
  • The cogs created by the EAD led the EC (later the European Union) to tolerate Palestinian terrorism on its own territory, to justify it, and finally to finance Palestinian infrastructure — later to become the Palestinian Authority — and hate-mongering educational system. The ministers and intellectuals who have created Eurabia deny the current wave of criminal attacks against European Jews, which they, themselves, have inspired.
  • The EAD, which had tied Arab strategic policies for the destruction of Israel to the European economy was the Trojan horse for Europe's inclusion into the orbit of Arab-Muslim influence.
  • With the support of parliaments and ministries, the EAD concealed behind the Arab-Israel conflict the global jihad being perpetrated on all continents.
  • Arab-Israel conflict in international affairs. It could have been solved from the start by the integration of about 500,000 Arab-Palestinian refugees into the Arab League countries, foremost into the Emirate of Transjordan — created by Great Britain in 1922 from 78 percent of the total League of Nation mandated area of Palestine, the historical Holy Land on both sides of the Jordan river.
  • the leaders of their countries looked the other way and pretended that Israel was responsible for the violent aggressions against Jews in Europe by Arab-Muslim immigrants.
  • brought responsible politicians to their senses. They had been blinded by a Palestinian fantasy
  • The suppression of intellectual freedom imported from undemocratic Muslim countries, attached to a culture of hate against Israel, has recently led to the exclusion and boycott of Israeli academics by some of their European colleagues.
  • the desperate move to save Arafat
  • Over 50 years ago the Shoah was the response to Zionism. Today, diaspora Jews and Israel would do well to foresee a possible vengeful reckoning after Saddam Hussein falls and Arafat is marginalized
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 19 Feb 12
       
      The "Shoah" (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "catastrophe"; Yiddish: חורבן, Churben or Hurban, from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, throughout Nazi-occupied territory. Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds perished.
  • anti-Jewish hysteria in Europe was an advertisement to neutralize diaspora Jews, and the Israeli self-defense mechanism against Palestinian terror,
  • the European Union continues to caper to new Arab-Islamic tunes, now called "occupation," "peace and justice," and "immigrants' rights" — themes which were composed for Israel's burial. And for Europe's demise.
  • the majority of Europeans, who are not antisemitic, are totally unaware of most of the EAD's policy, since its key deliberations are unrecorded.
  • Eurabia
  • Gary Patton on 19 Feb 12
     
    Bat Yeor is an Arab, Jewis historian from Egypt. I discovered this article by her some years ago after reading one of her books. Some of the facts in this short article are now dated. Her compelling, scary and well-documented thesis is not! Here, Ms. Yoer explains her thesis regarding the stealth jihad strategy engineered by Arab Islamists which is behind the Muslim immigration that's threatening to overwhelm European culture. (I believe her thesis applies worldwide.) Here she also explains the hateful, demonic root underpinning the revival and resurgence of anti-Semitism throughout Europe. Elsewhere, Ms. Yeor also documents how the Islamists have expanded on their own dissimilitude, called a-taqiyya in Qur'anic Arabic, by using "lie-fare" & "law-fare". They learned the former from those who drove Joseph Goebels' Nazi propaganda campaign and who fled to the Middle East after WWII. They learned the latter from the brialiant but sad successes of the homosexual lobby in this field.
Gary Patton

Prime Minister of Canada Eid Greetings - 0 views

www.pm.gc.ca/...media.asp

Islam Islamists islamism academia media press release minister

shared by Gary Patton on 07 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • the following remarks
  • the moderate, benevolent, true face of Islam
    • Gary Patton
      Gary Patton on 07 Jan 12
       
      Mr. Harper mis-speakes when he says this. This is simply not true about the R-E-A-L Islam (Real-Enervating-Abysmal-Loathsome). "There are moderate Muslims but no such thing as moderate Islam!" ~ Ibn Warraq, Pakistani author ("Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995)) The "true face of Islam", as one who was raised as and lives with Muslims says above, is not "moderate" (nor can be as you'll understand better reading on). It is definitely not "benevolent" or "just" or peaceful, as some try to argue. The "true face of Islam" is anyone can discern quickly by skimming through an English version of the Arabic Qu'ran. The face portrayed of Islam in the a-Hadith is even more brutal. Islam's true face is the way women and religious minorities are being treated in countries around the world where Shari'ah Law i.e., Islamic law is brutally enforced ...often by Religious Police, as In Saudi Arabia or the military in countries like Egypt or Pakistan. Which Muslim-dominated country in the world believes in and protects the equality of women? The equality, tolerance of, and state protection from wholesale murder for members of non-Muslim religions? The freedom to change or leave one's religion without being stoned or otherwise murdered for apostasy? Where a homosexual or even an effeminate man will feel safe? Or an evangelist for any other faith except Islam? Not one of them. Islam and its Shariah Law is incompatible with traditional, moral Western values of democracy, diversity, freedom and tolerance. gfp (2011-11-24)
  • Gary Patton on 07 Jan 12
     
    This statement reads to me like an apology to Muslim Canadians after the Prime Minster received considerable "blowback" for earlier, public remarks that he made about Islam. The earlier uproar came after his speaking truth on 2011-09-07 in an interview with the CBC for the 10th Anniversary of 9/11. (See a video of his talk with Peter Mansbridge, OC (1948- ) Canadian broadcaster & CBC news anchor at http://diigo.com/0koug.) During that interview when asked about the biggest threat to Canada's national security, Mr. Harper responded it was "Islamism" (He inadvertently mispronounced it "Islamicism" a non-word). That blowback came from leftist academics, liberals, and supporters of violent jihad, disguised as Islamic clerics, scholars and jurisprudents both from within and outside Canada. Therefore, he adopted a politically-correct stance in his "Greetings" to the assembled Muslim and other dignitaries at "Eid on the Hill" in Ottawa on 2011-11-23 . But he goes to far in his pandering and spoke untruth as I note in my e-Stick Notes attached to the Press Release attached. gfp (2011-11-24)
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