njlauren
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quote:
ORIGINAL: chatterbox24
To answer your question regarding medical research, you may look to the Center of Disease Prevention, as one source.
I am baffled to a regular reference to the Holocaust, referring that " all religions" leads to this kind of sorrowful, unbelievable destruction and death. TO me its like a hate speech toward Christians, Christians that had nothing to do with such a tragic past event, that sickens me. Did Jewish people not emigrate to the United states, along to Palestine, and Israel mainly? We have a Holocaust museum in our community also. We don't hate Jewish people. I have no affiliation with the KKK, which is based on bigotry. I don't hate people of color! I don't hate homosexuals! I love all people, even if I don't agree with everything. THey don't agree with me either. And its okay.
When it comes to a vote, that comes to the time a voice is heard. I agree or disagree, and therefore since I am Christian, that means I vote in respect to my belief, and this means I treat the homosexual community badly? If you believe this, you are mistaken, we don't do this, not how we believe. I cant speak for other little branches, that may be bearing bad fruit in religion.
Chatterbox-
If by medical research you want to talk about things like STD's and HIV among gay men, specifically young gay men, that is fine, but as 'proof' that gays should be denied rights, that is asinine. First of all, one of the fastest growing rates of HIV is among women of color (take a look), are you going to say they don't deserve rights? STD's as a whole are quite common among young people, straight or gay, are you going to tell me they don't deserve rates? Last I checked, Lesbians have one of the lowest rates of STD's out there, lower than among hetero women, does that mean hetero women should be denied right? You are smearing a whole group of people by the actions of some; you whine that not all Christians are Fred Phelps,yet I could point out that roughly 30% of Americans are evangelical Christians, and among them, many of them share similar viewpoints, so how is that any different than you judging gays by statistics when I could do the same thing with Christians?
As far as you voting your faith, when you vote to deny a group of people rights based on your faith, you are being a bully, you are saying that rights granted to people should be put to in a popular plebiscite, that issues of morality are rightfully decided by a majority, and that is dead against what our system is supposed to be. The irony of this is lost on many of the religious who want to use their faith to determine rights, both Catholics and Evangelical protestants were saved by the first amendment, saved the kind of discrimination that they faced before the constitution, and it allowed them to grow and thrive, the separation of church and state they rail against allowed them to exist (do some reading on what Catholics were thought of in colonial america, and read what evangelical protestants, presbytyrians and methodists, faced from the Anglican majority, then come back and talk to me). Voting your faith sounds all great and good but the reason we have courts and a first amendment is people believe many things. The rednecks down south who created the Jim Crow system believed that blacks were inferior, and created a political system around it, how is that any different than your beliefs as law? When rights and privileges are denied people by any belief, rather than by hard facts, you are basically forcing others to live as you believe, same is true for school prayer or banning the right to access birth control. You have to realize that your beliefs are your own, and belief alone is not the problem, but when those beliefs turn into action that hurts others, then you are in trouble. Someone doesn't have to like Jews or Blacks, for example, but if they pass laws that hurt them or if they sit back and watch if a black or Jewish person is being hurt and do nothing, then they are basically saying they aren't human enough for me to worry about that.
In terms of the holocaust, it is much too long to write about the situation. No, modern Christians have nothing to do with it, but the history of Christianity in europe tells a different tale about the religion (again, I am talking about the way it was practiced, not what it was supposed to be). I wish people had read history, and I wish you would, Chatterbox, because some of your statements are patently false, probably because you don't know. Jews went to Palestine? Read up on a boat called the St. Louis, where refugees from the Nazis sailed for Palestine, and were turned away by the wonderful British authorities (don't get me going on the British and their fucked up relationship with the Arabs, they have a lot to answer for with the ills of the modern world, the Israeli mess is one of them). Also read up on Jewish immigration to the US, and how little was allowed, and why. Before the Swansea conference that laid out the final solution, in 1941, The Nazis were willing to deal with their "jewish problem" by making a deal to resettle them (there recently was a book about that, a novel, that hinged upon one of the ideas, settling Jews in Alaska of all places, actually had happened), and there were talks between the US and Germany. The deal was scuttled because of rabid anti semitism (keep in mind that the America First movement's sympathies were more close to the Nazis), and among those who raised a ruckus were the evangelical Christians (especially the leaders of the Southern Baptist community) and the Catholic Bishops, led by Spellman, who opposed any mass settling of the Jews here, Spellman according to a memoir written by Henry Morgenthau, FDR's treasury secretary, told FDR that if he tried to settle those "Christ Killers" in the US the church would tell their people to vote for anyone who opposed it....).
Most of the people who carried out the holocaust or sat and watched it happen were Christian, too. German troops on their belt buckles had the words "Mitt und Gans" on it, "with our God", and Germans were church going people, Catholic and Lutheran. While only the Catholic church in germany signed the non aggression pact with Hitler, the Christian churches in Germany did very little to try and help the Jews, and the churches there firmly supported in public statements the Nuremberg laws that turned Jews into non Citizens. The Catholic Church through the vatican claimed it was afraid to anger the Nazis, yet the Pope issues 16 encyclicals condemning the Nazis for interfering with the church, and also over issues like Euthenizing handicapped people, yet they issues not one such document about the Jews.
What you are missing is that while most Christians in Europe problem did not directly do anything to kill the Jews, that most of them also when faced with the obvious, when Jews started losing rights, when they were being forced into Ghettos or simply disappeared, in many cases pretended it wasn't happening. The functionaries of France who happily ran the bureaucracy that helped the Jews be deported, the people who saw Jewish neighbors being rounded up and did nothing, the people who during Krystalnacht went on a rampage against Jews, all of them were Christians, and they were able to do this, and the reason is that the Jews were so demonized for centuries, and the churches fanned that, instead of saying Jews were fellow human beings who after all were the same people as our Savior, spread the filth of the blood libel, and spread the idea that the jews were responsible for Christ's death,when my dad was growing up a common name for Jews was "those damn Christ Killers" among the Irish and Italian Catholics he grew up among. Anti semitisim is taught behavior, and it doesn't come out of physical differences, it doesn't come out of body odor or eye color, it comes about because in large part the Christian faith spent a lot of time on demonizing Jews, in large party because they saw Jews as rivals.
The Christianity of Christ is not responsible for this, the written faith is not, but what men did with it for hundreds and hundreds of centuries did. When the RC finally changed the Good Friday homily to pull out the claims that the Jews were responsible for Jesus death, they acknowledged that that and things like Passion plays that featured Jews as the bad guys had led to oppression of the Jews and towards anti semitism in general, and they later acknowledged in a pastoral from the vatican called "We Remember" that the church fostered anti semtiism, allowed it to flourish, in part because many of those running the church were anti semitic.
The thing you have to remember is events like the Holocaust are not created overnight, that that kind of hate that can allow that to happen festers over long periods of time. The tribal strife in Africa, the hatred in Northern Ireland, the racism of slavery and then Jim Crow, didn't pop up out of the ground, they are the products of many centuries of belief, cultural and/or religious, that flourish. It is one of life's ironies that the Jews had their best treatment for the most part under the rule of Moslems, whether it be in places like Grenada or in the Ottoman empire. By today's standards it wasn't ideal, but compared to what Jews faced in "Christian" europe, it was light years better.
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RE: "Religion will become as unacceptable as raci... - 
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