I have been wanting to type the following for a long time. I just hope that I can compose the next few lines properly.

Shooting some one who stands no chance, no proper chance, in being given the option to defend themselves is the most base definition of cowardly. This goes for all things, most especially unmanned drones, and suicide bombings.

The days of a killer seeing what they have wrought are over. They have no understanding of how a persons dies. To actually see the wounding, the subsequent expulsion of vital fluids, the dilation of the victims pupils, and the contortions of pain, should be enough to know that killing any one is a complete waste.

If you cant get along in the collective then keep it to yourself. The sentence before this was typed by an individualist, secular humanist, and a Libertarian.

Violence does not solve any thing. Compromise, Education, and understanding is what the Republic was founded on. So that the "Crazies" could be heard. To the murderer, Fuck you for stifling free speech.

>> ^NetRunner:

Officers are put on administrative leave and an investigation is launched by the very cops that work the force. Don't for a second believe Internal Affairs Division isn't run by the same people who work the force, because it is. Those investigating the police are also police officers. Read the independent Christopher Commission report on the LAPD after Rodney King and the Rampart incident...

It is alarming, therefore, that no outside review, including our own, has found the operations of internal affairs divisions in any of the major U.S. cities satisfactory. cited

internal investigators conducted group interviews of the police involved. As the Christopher Commission noted, this allowed officers under investigation to "get their stories straight." cited

Internal Affairs divisions are often reluctant to push for criminal prosecution of fellow police personnel... cited

So, I think this sort of behavior, although probably frowned upon by the department, won't be treated with sufficient punishment (i.e., expulsion, jail time).

M'eh. The Iranian election was as predictable as the sunrise. The extremists who are in charge wanted "The Shrimp" re-elected and that's exactly what happened. Aslan can talk about diplomacy all he wants, but it is meaningless. Diplomacy with Iran has very little to do with whichever bozo gets the gig after their so-called 'elections'.

Proof positive in the pudding... Isreal. Netenyahu pretty much spiked any chance of a treaty with just ONE simple, reasonable little phrase... "Recognize Isreal as a Jewish state..." The hubub in the circles of 'diplomacy' is that such a pre-condition makes any hope of an agreement absolutely and unequivocally impossible. The only solution that will be accepted by the political world of the Middle East is the annihilation of Isreal as a state and the expulsion of all Jews from the region.

Now – how do you engage in ‘diplomacy’ with a position that is so extreme? Obama can make all the pointless speeches he wants, and a few eggheads like this guy might think he’s brilliant. They are all missing the point completely, which is sadly not atypical when this topic comes up. The point is that militant Islamists are the ones in charge and there is no possible way to successfully negotiate with a pack of half-insane, religious extremists whose only desired outcome is annihilation.

0:25-0:26 I see a hand going a naughty place. It certainly looks close to rape even if it's not full on.

Expulsion, juvy.. they'll pay good.

I had a acquaintance in college get nailed with a false rape charge. Apparently his ex-girlfriend got jealous that he was dating another girl and decided to accuse him of rape (at a party were a lot of his friends could verify his location). Despite the fact that the case was dismissed in court the student still lost his student apartment and had to fight his expulsion when the Dean of admissions decided to make an example of him.

Sad thing is after 6 years I would still hear rumors that he had gotten away with raping someone.

>> ^messenger:
Question: Did you upvote without having watched the video?
>> ^enoch:
question.
how can a biological entity survive a year without the conversion of plant or animal matter to energy?the intake of oxygen?expulsion of waste gas?
without a receptical(sp?) for food,water or even air death would be imminent.


enoch's head must've been cut off too.

>> ^enoch:
question.
how can a biological entity survive a year without the conversion of plant or animal matter to energy?the intake of oxygen?expulsion of waste gas?
without a receptical(sp?) for food,water or even air death would be imminent.


they say that they dropped food and water into its throat opening

Question: Did you upvote without having watched the video?

>> ^enoch:
question.
how can a biological entity survive a year without the conversion of plant or animal matter to energy?the intake of oxygen?expulsion of waste gas?
without a receptical(sp?) for food,water or even air death would be imminent.

question.
how can a biological entity survive a year without the conversion of plant or animal matter to energy?the intake of oxygen?expulsion of waste gas?
without a receptical(sp?) for food,water or even air death would be imminent.

i just googled the word 'queef'.

just in case i'm not the only unedumacated person around here...

'an expulsion of wind from the vulva during coitus; a vaginal fart'

please, please. don't thank me.

bcglorf: "Your insistence that it was just a series of murderous rampages initiated by Zionists against friendly Arab Palestinians is what's been exposed here."

I never make that claim. Did you even read the article on Benny Morris?

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil … The native is declared insensitive to ethics … the enemy of values. … He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it … the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from "The Wretched of the Earth"). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

...

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization..."


...

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

"Is Israel not simply a response to outright hostile actions purported by the States of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon?"

The short answer is, no. Israel is a classic settler nation with all the existential attributes and brutality of a colonial ruler.

Sometimes an article deserves reprinting in full.

(copyfree)

Date : 2004-01-29
''Diagnosing Benny Morris: the mind of a European settler''

By Gabriel Ash - YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)

Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949" is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Haaretz - ( http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/380986.html,
Hebrew original at
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/objects/pages/PrintArticle.jhtml?itemNo=380119). The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil … The native is declared insensitive to ethics … the enemy of values. … He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it … the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from "The Wretched of the Earth"). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an "Arabenrein Palestine," he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Haaretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book "Righteous Victims," Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to…Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. … At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state…[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. … Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two…" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Haaretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and cliches. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, there is the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Haaretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. Most of what he says hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to rule the Middle East from behind tall walls and barbed wire.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel.

Of course it's being blown out of proportion. The establishment media Villagers don't like to be called-out on their collective bullshit.

I'm glad Obama said it. He could've said a lot more. He could've told the Moonie Times reporter that his question about stem cells during an economic clusterfuck, on the day that there is a massive banking plan rolled out, is grounds for expulsion from the press pool.

The idea that Jesus is fully human and fully God simultaneously is patently ridiculous on its face. That is simply doublespeak so that theists can try to win arguments such as this one. If he was fully God (even if he was also somehow fully human), he would not have feared the pain and death he knew was coming. I think that's all the proof anybody needs that Jesus was not divine. This is one of many cases where theists will twist words into unintelligible pretzels and come out of the argument claiming "faith" that their statements are true somehow trumps the logic that crushes their beliefs.

But let's set that aside for a second. Let's accept that Jesus feared pain and death, and that his crucifixion was as horrible to him as it would be to anyone else.

How exactly does that lift any burden off my shoulders? How can that absolve me of any portion of my guilt for sins against my fellow man? Of course, it's not supposed to be about my sins against my fellow man, but rather my sins against God.

(And the entire concept of a "sacrifice" is simply a throwback to a society that believed they had to "appease the gods". They pretended to assert some form of control over weather and natural disasters, which of course was pointless. That, of course, developed in the human world where a tribe would have to send a portion of their crop to the nearby dictator or risk being trampled by his army. And since their concept of God was simply an even more powerful dictator, they did the only thing they could think of that might make him happy: hurting themselves to show supplication.)

As I understand it, Christians claim that Jesus was the sacrifice that freed us from the burden of original sin. Even if that statement made sense, I refuse to accept responsibility for a mistake that was supposedly made by an ancestor thousands of years ago. I therefor reject any sacrifices (that I did not ask for) made on my behalf towards a debt that I do not recognize.

The bible is basically saying that God made man greedy, dangled money in front of his face (the Fruit of Knowledge), punished man for taking the money (expulsion from Eden), demanded regular payments (blood sacrifices before Jesus), sent his son to pay the debt with his own money (because Jesus is God), and commands us to be eternally grateful to Jesus for his sacrifice (which was not a sacrifice).

So even if every bit of Christian mythology is 100% correct, that would simply make us the unwilling slaves of a spiteful two-faced God, faced with the threat of eternal suffering, forced to put a smile on our face and sing praising songs, pretending to be grateful for the burdens and fear heaped upon us by our "loving" master.

I think it is pretty clear why I can't believe a word of it.


Theist: "Well Because of A we know that B happens."

Nontheist: "Sorry, try proving A before you derive anything from it."

By the way, thanks for letting me vent a bit. It's nice to get these swirling thoughts out of my head every once in a while. I hope they make sense to others as much as they do to me.

Peace.


In reply to this comment by smooman:
You have a different view of Jesus than I. The doctrine I hold to is that he was fully human and fully God. Not half-n-half or whatever. In that way, he experiences everything we do, from pain, to happiness, to mourning, to delight, to frustration (money changers in the temple for example). And because he was fully man, his suffering is twofold: the physical, the crucifixion, which most are familiar with even non theists, but then another, emotional, mental, and spiritual anguish and angst in the garden the eve of the crucifixion.

If dying on the cross is not that big of a deal, as you say, then why would Jesus cry out to God the Father "take this cup from me"? This is a man who knew what lay in store for him, and feared it, dreaded it, wanted a way out of it. It's important too that after he asks God to relieve him of this duty, that he wishes, "but Your will, not mine".

You say according to Christianity that Jesus wasn't a man but rather God in the form of man. This is where I would disagree. The mainstream doctrine on the divinity of Jesus in the Christian church is that he was fully man and fully God.

There are theologies that we're discussing that go much deeper than what we've covered so far. I think that this may become a long running discussion. But I do enjoy it and look forward to more. Sala'am =)

also what I meant by "theistic points of view" is this: (this will be cheesy so bare with me)

Theist: "Well Because of A we know that B happens"

Nontheist: "well I dont believe in A so B would never happen because A doesnt exist"


I know that's really silly and such a trivial analogy but it's the best I could come up with =(


In reply to this comment by MaxWilder:
For any wrongdoings or mistakes I make in life, I expect to be punished for them during my lifetime. That may be in many different forms, such as the loss of a friend, the loss of respect from my community, the anger of someone seeking retribution, perhaps even a fine or punishment from the government that is set up by people who want to discourage such behavior. And I fully accept that because I am the only one who could have prevented the mistake or error in judgment.

If you made such an error in judgment, but the police caught somebody else by mistake, would you let that person take the punishment for you? Of course not, that would be completely immoral. Similarly, it would be completely immoral for anybody to be sent to hell for your sins. So exactly how is it acceptable for Jesus to suffer and die for your sins? Well, he was actually God, so he didn't really suffer, he didn't really die, he didn't go to hell. So he didn't really do anything for you anyway. Honestly, what sacrifice did Jesus make? If he was just a man, that would be the ultimate sacrifice. But according to Christianity, he wasn't just a man, so it wasn't really a sacrifice at all. Nothing was lost. Jesus came down, told people what he wanted to tell them, then went back to heaven. Ok, the method he used to go back to heaven was pretty brutal, but it wouldn't be that big a deal to someone who was actually an aspect of God himself.

So... Jesus didn't really sacrifice anything.

And... even if he did, I don't want anybody to be punished for something I did.

And... if God denies us entrance to heaven for making mistakes, the kind of mistakes that every human makes (because God made us that way), what kind of a bastard does that make God?

"Again its all from a theistic point of view so for someone who doesnt share that point of view, all of this will be pretty much hogwash."

Sorry, but a person's point of view doesn't change a line of logical reasoning. Either these points can be refuted or they stand. Please remember that I was raised Christian and started formulating these thoughts well before I completely rejected the church.



>> ^smooman:
Sorry it took so long to get back to ya. This is more along the lines of a theological debate but here goes. I personally, in my theological understanding, do not believe that simply being "good" will save you and the reason is this: Can you think of anyone, anyone you know, anyone you read about, anyone you ever met, anyone at all that has lived a blameless life? A life completely devoid of wrongdoing or a wicked thought or a anger fueled episode from the time of accountability to the time of separation (death)? Everyone does something "not good" in their life. They may regret it, it may be out of character, or they might not have meant it, but it happens. After all, we are only human.
Paul tells us that "all have sinned , and fallen short of the glory of God". I think thePinky had mentioned earlier that these sins or "mean things" or "slip ups" or whatEVER you want to call them cause us to be imperfect of our original creation and separate us from our Creator. Enter Jesus: the sacrificial lamb.
Again its all from a theistic point of view so for someone who doesnt share that point of view, all of this will be pretty much hogwash. But there you have it.
I DO appreciate your openmindedness (I totally just made that word up hehe) and your sincere respect for other belief systems unlike MOST sifters =)
In reply to this comment by MaxWilder:
It's tough to switch gears from arguments against fundamentalists to questions for moderates. But the last couple of days reminded me of my most important question for modern moderate Christians:
If there is a good person, who lives a good life, doesn't break any laws, contributes to his community and passes down a strong code of ethics to his children, would that person go to hell without Jesus?
As far as I can tell, that's what it says in the Bible, and that's one of the very first things that led me to reject Christianity. Most modern, compassionate Christians say you can still go to heaven just by being a good person. But that leads directly to the next question:
What is the point of Christianity if you don't really need to be a Christian to go to heaven?
I think you'll find that if you answer that question, none of your reasons will have anything to do with Jesus being an actual "Savior" or "Son of God".

I think both positions are simply incompatible with the reality on the ground, this is a political situation and needs to be treated as such, so say we allow Wilders his screening, what kind of repercussions does that incur and what kind of view does that create? If this is allowed to be screened then why not a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11, The Truth about AIPAC, Palestine and Israel, An Inconvenient Truth or even something good like Taxi to the Dark Side? Have you ever heard of that? Of course not, and am sure the same people who support this screening would not support the ones I mentioned.

This is not about screening the film. Wilders was refused entry to the UK because of his views on islam. If britain refuses Michael Moore entry to the UK over Farenheit 9/11 because it "offended republicans" then we might be on equal grounds here. The House of Lords invited him to show it, I do not know their exact motivation, and I do not know if screenings of this kind are common in the House, (perhaps someone of British background could shed some light on this?) but I can see your argument if it was about giving Wilders a big platform, but again, he was expelled from the COUNTRY, not just the House of Lords or the screening.


Also worth noting is the REASONING for his expulsion: Basically the British government caved from threats from fascist terrorist loonies, and refused a law-abiding EU citizen entry because of his views.