I do not know what the Orthodox church is if it's not Catholic. But the persecution stories you present each seem to be just one half of the story. I find it far fetched that these things occurred for no reason at all.
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I do not know what the Orthodox church is if it's not Catholic. But the persecution stories you present each seem to be just one half of the story. I find it far fetched that these things occurred for no reason at all.
The thread was deleted as far as I remember. If you are interested in atheist arguments, I and others have listed plenty in the apologetics forum.
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'Are we ignorant because we don't agree with you? Because we hold the Bible in higher regard than the laws of physics?
You make some good points, if I may say so, KWCrazy, but you've no need to be apologetic about our faith and the laws of physics. The plain fact of the matter is that, at the very least, deism has now been empirically proven by modern physics. (In fact, theism also, in multiple ways, but there's not need to broach that, here).
Matter has been discovered to finally reduce, not to energy, but to information : information, not written in binary, but in quaternary code.
'In the beginning was the Word..' could hardly have expressed the primordial truth of all Creation and its Creator more succinctly, could it ? Naturally, the atheist bitter-enders, blinking in the sunlight, as they emerge from the jungle canopy, decades after the end of WWII, with a wilful, a priori hostility to the truth, still try to contest it. They wouldn't be the dolts, with few exceptions, we know them to be, would they ? Have a look at this video-clip :
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/11/it_really_isnt100911.html
Also, be sure to watch the linked video-clip, The Information Enigma. Fascinating.
You make some good points, if I may say so, KWCrazy, but you've no need to be apologetic about our faith and the laws of physics. The plain fact of the matter is that, at the very least, deism has now been empirically proven by modern physics. (In fact, theism also, in multiple ways, but there's not need to broach that, here).
Matter has been discovered to finally reduce, not to energy, but to information : information, not written in binary, but in quaternary code.
'In the beginning was the Word..' could hardly have expressed the primordial truth of all Creation and its Creator more succinctly, could it ? Naturally, the atheist bitter-enders, blinking in the sunlight, as they emerge from the jungle canopy, decades after the end of WWII, with a wilful, a priori hostility to the truth, still try to contest it. They wouldn't be the dolts, with few exceptions, we know them to be, would they ? Have a look at this video-clip :
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/11/it_really_isnt100911.html
Also, be sure to watch the linked video-clip, The Information Enigma. Fascinating.
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Imagine? no, don't do that, make it happen, you don't even have to be a Christian.
Do you, or are you guilty of just what you accuse? I'm seeing a lot of talk here of your views on how Christians should act, right along with some unfounded blanket accusations, so how bout you? How's your own backyard looking these days?
I've heard it said a sincere person wouldn't ask/expect those around him/her to do something they would do themselves. Are you sincere? are not all those at least fair questions, or do you consider them hateful comments?
As to my 50" TV that doubles as a monitor, where I can see print a little better, and there being starving people in the world, where does that stop being a problem for you? How bout my coffee maker, or the fact I don't really need coffee at all? Maybe we should both be at the library right now using their monitors and send the savings to the poor?
I won't even get into what a terrible person Abraham of the bible with all his wealth must be in your eyes, but I will say he was acceptable to God.
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So just to be clear, you think Jesus is OK with you owning luxury items while children are starving? Whatever man, you can have the last word, I don't even care anymore.
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I want to see you as either hot or cold. So if you're interested in dragging his name through the mud, then have fun while doing it. If not, how about dedicating your life to Christ to the point that you impress atheists with your light?
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I have many questions that I've asked. I don't remember what I asked in the thread that got deleted. If you want four of my questions, how about starting with just this one:
Is God above the law or not?
It would seem to me that the answer to this question is an obvious no. Jesus had to die because of the weight of the law. If God was above the law then he would just forgive everyone without sending his son to pay for the debts.
But then there is a problem. Deuteronomy 24:16 says,
The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.
This, presumably, is directly from God.
Then in 2 Samuel 12:13-20, David's son is killed by God because of sins committed by David.
So... is God above the law or not?
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Have you studied Quran?
If you ask most Muslims (Bahai's excluded, and Muslims does not consider them Muslims) if the Bible is corrupted, they will say yes (or say something about what ever goes with Quran is good, else can't answer etc), but in Quran it clearly states that Jews should believe in Torah and Christians should follow Gospel, that is 300 years after the Bible is finalized.
I don't know why the more you study Bible the more you think it is false. I remember initially I don't like the Gospel and only like the OT stories, and later on I like them both. It is not a book to be recited, but a book to be read by heart. Love your neighbor as yourself, this one line alone pretty much summarized the book.
The law is given to us and for us to follow. When someone is killed it might just be God want him/her back to heaven.
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You didn't answer my questions...that sends up a red flag. No one is trying to force you to answer but in all fairness do you feel I should answer yours while you skip over mine?
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Do you?
I guess your reply means you are gong to excuse yourself from the conversation before that inevitable question was asked...again? Yep, might be a good time to get out.
Why would you think I'm interested in doing that..because I own a TV? Besides, I thought it took 70inches to qualify as dragging Jesus' name through the mud...mine is only 50...can you explain that little discrepancy?
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Not sure why you ask...you do understand these were God laws for us, not him..right?
So in the two verses you quote, if your point is God is above the law because he was allowed to break the law when we are not...God broke no law at all. He said though shalt not kill as well, yet he does it.
To clarify...If your boss says only the managers can use the managers lounge, yet the boss chooses to use it, it's just natural to assume he has the right, it's his lounge, he makes the rules for those under his employee, he makes his own rules on what he can do, and those rules are essentially none of our business. But as an employee, if you want to get in his face and tell him off for breaking the rules...well, just common sense says, not a good idea at all. I'd go so far as to say it would be a very stupid thing to do unless you are ready to quit the job already.
Get it?
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You say in your other posts that I dodge questions and it's a red flag. Yet here you are putting God above the law and not answering the question of why he then had to send his own son to die.
Forget my red flag, you're waving the white flag quite clearly.
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Waving the white flag? that's a funny thing to say...how do you draw that conclusion, lol? If you don't have an answer, I'll know why, so don't concern yourself too much with it.
Yes it's a red flag and you still haven't answered. If you cannot answer questions, that speaks for itself, but you don't get to make up one sided rules where only you ask the questions.
Still, I'll let you slide, and as long as you get on the ball from here on out, we can still move on with this, and I'll answer yours just the same as a show of good faith. That's what you would expect from a Christian, right? you act like you want but we tow the line, or we are dragging Jesus through the mud? correct?
First..God didn't *have* to do anything, it was his choice to send his son to die. Secondly, there was no actual question there about Jesus, only your opinion, but there was an implied question and we can work with that. However, that implied question about Jesus was dependent on was God above the law being true or not, and once that part was answered, I thought you'd catch on the the fact it nullified the following implied question about Jesus.. Here is what you stated.
I answered the part about God being above the law, told you why the law didn't apply to him and went into detail to explain why. So though it "seemed to you" the answer was no, it was really yes. So, since you didn't disagree with God being the Boss and not under the law, there is no question left to answer, implied or otherwise.
If you disagree, that's fine, I'll still try to work with you. Now knowing that God is above the law, if you want to call it that, because the law doesn't apply to him and why it doesn't apply, and the fact you didn't disagree with that (do you disagree? I'll need to know that and why?) do you still have a specific question about Jesus? If so form it into question format and we can work on that next.
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Commander Xenophon
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To be clear, if we do this, @St_Worm2 would not be a participamt in the debate but would act as an Ombudsman or referree, so if you objected to any argument I used as an ad hominem or logical fallacy (or any of those used by any other members of the Admiralty, my debate club), but these arguments of mine fell short of violating the rules of CF.com, you could complain to @St_Worm2 and if he agreed with your complaint, he could force me or any other members of my club who might join in to retract our argument and apologize, and he has the power of removing us from the club if we do not comply.
We dont always live up to our motto of "Homesty, Integrity, Fidelity" in debates, but we do try, and we do have an ombudsman specifically for this purpose.
Firstly, let us clarify one point: I assume you did not mean to imply that genocide or religious persecution is ever a justifiable response to a grievance, no matter how severe? Your post did strike me as possibly suggesting that, but I can't believe that is what you meant, as you seem to be an honorable and decent person, and I do not wish to put words in your mouth.
Oh, certainly the genocide did not occur without a cause. The Orthodox did not historically persecute Muslims and were the victims of the Crusades along with the muslims; the first crusade was ostensibly to help defend the Byzantine Empire but the real motive was always a desire by the Papacy and the Franks to take over the Byzantine regime, and in many cases Crusaders killed Eastern Christians and Muslims indiscriminately. The only Eastern Christians to benefit were the Maronites of Lebanon, who, perhaps owing to their long term struggle with the Druze, had become expert warriors; on encountering the crusaders they immediately professed Catholicism and joined in.
The motives for much of the persecution, like the Jizya tax, are Quranic or from the Hadiths. Speaking of the Druze, they secretly worship the Egyptian caliph Al Hakim as a mamifestation of God; Al Hakim was particularly horrible in his treatment of the Coptic and Greek Christians of Egypt, forcing them to wear heavy chains and subjecting them to other gross cruelties which were actually illegal under Islamic law, and which were quickly reverswd by his successor. That incident happened roughly 150 years before the Crusades IIRC.
Several of the genocides were based on the premise that the protections for the Dhimmis, or People of the Book in the Quran and Hadiths no longer applied or the rules on the conduct of Dhimmis were not being enforced strictly enough, and thus the appropriate response was "confess Islam or die." I believe this to be the specific motive for the genocide of Tamerlane, who before he died boasted that he had never taken a life without cause and without giving a warning for the person to change their ways, which in the case of the Asian Christians of the Church of the East in China, Tibet, Mongolia and Central Asia, almost certainly meant some form of apostasy or unacceptable concession to Islam. I am presently reading three books on this precise subject, The Lost History of Christianity, The History of Christianity in Asia (in two volumes) and The Church of the East, and hope to find more information about the specific cause of the Tamerlane genocide.
In the case of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, Assyrians, Syriac Orthodox and Pontic Greeks, I believe the main motive was similiar to the Holocaust; essentially ethnic clensing. The Ottoman Empire had been taken over by a revolutionary group known as The Young Turks; the powers of the Sultan had been drastically curtailed, in effect, reducing him to the holder of a ceremonial office, and the Young Turks, in particular, certain leaders of their military, had the idea that Asia Minor, or Turkey as we call it, should become exclusively a homeland for the Turks, with all other ethnic groups exterminated (with the curious exception of the Kurds, who are now themselves locked in a brutal conflict withnthe Turkish government; the Yazidis, who the Muslims regard as devil worshippers, were not targeted in the genocide of 1915, which makes me doubt Islam was the only motivation, and indeed the Yazidis helped the Armenian Christians by sheltering them among their families; in return, when the Armenian state was created after the war, the Yazidis of the Caucaucus region and from Turkey were invited and encouraged to settle there, and to this day they remain the largest minority in Armenia, where they are quite safe, unlike in their traditional homeland in the Nineveh Plains near Mosul; I personally believe the Yazidis are the descendants of Syrian Gnostic Christians, as there are Gnostic elements in their beliefs and also crypto-Christian elements including Baptism and a Eucharist, and newlywed Yazidis will seek a blessing from the priest of any Christian church they walk by in their wedding procession).
So, because of the specific targeting of Christians, there is no doubt Islam was a factor; the Young Turks wanted to rid Turkey of undesirables, and being Christian was maximally undesirable. No doubt they would have proceeded to in turn exterminate the Jews, the Kurds and other minorities.
Now, in the 19th century, with Western European influence, Greece, and later Romania and Bulgaria (following another horrific attempted genocide of Romanians and especially Bulgarians conducted in the 1870s conducted mainly by the Bashi Bazouks, the freelance warriors of the Ottoman Empire, which owing to its pure brutality horrified and sickened Western Europeans and the Russians), and later still the Balkans, were all liberated from Turkish rule. This doubtless created a sense of national resentment particularly against Christians, although in that timeframe the Sublime Porte also lost abaolute control of Egypt, the Sudan and several other territories.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, in the Greek Revolution, isolated members of my church engaged in small-scale genocidal attrocities against the Turks during the course of the war. In doing this, they ignored the Gospel and violated the commandments. For that matter, we have the massacres lf the Transylvanian prince Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Dracul, meaning "Dragon," an evil man who I believe was in fact Roman Catholic. Some Romanians to their gross discredit view him as a national hero; I cant recall whether or not he killed civillians or limited his butchery to soldiers, but his impaling of a large number of Turkish soldiers was so repulsive it sickened the invading Ottoman Sultan and he ordered his forces to retreat, and Romania avoided Turkokratia for a while longer.
However, the Turks routinely engaged in massacres of this sort, in many cases without provocation.
In the specific case of the Armenians, one contributing factor was a fear that they would be disloyal and cooperate with the Russians, who were fighting against Turkey in World War I. This is probably why the genocide started against them first. They were innocent of this however, and together Assyrians and Syriac Christians were entirely innocent of any of the isolated incidents savagery members of my own Greek Orthodox church had committed in the 1820s, yet they were also killed. And while Russian Orthodox missionaries had started a dialogue with the Nestorian Assyrians (along with the Anglicans) and converted some of them to Eastern Orthodoxy, the Russians had no contact with the Syriac Orthodox and there were absolutely no grounds formthe Turks to suspect the Syriac Orthodox of any treachery, other than the fact they were also Christian and spoke a related but not mutually intelligible dialect of Aramaic, which the Assyrians also spoke. But even if the Armenians, Syriacs, Assyrians and Greeks had collaborated with the enemy during the war, that would in no way have justified the genocide against any of them.
In terms of the number of victims, I believe the Syriac Orthdox and Assyrians suffered the largest percentage loss of members, and the most cultural destruction, also, the genocide was not confined to Turkey, but occurred in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria; in short, everywhere these Christians lived it was so severe that a vast amount of Syriac literature, folk customs, musical customs, et cetera, were permanently lost, and much of what survived survived only because the Indian Orthodox Church in Malankara had become a part of the Syriac Orthodox Church in the 18th century and consequently had copies of the many of the liturgical and historical manuscripts which otherwise would have been lost permanently. The Armenians, on the other hand, had the largest total body count; while a smaller proportion of Armenians were killed and Armenian culture was less severely damaged, far more Armenians were slaughtered. I will get the exact figures; I do remember after the war there were just about 50,000 Syriac Orthodox and 50,000 Assyrians left alive; in the case of the Armenians, I think 1.5 million Armenians were killed, which was about 66-75% of their population, whereas with the Assyrians and Syriacs, the casualty rate was closer to 95%.
I don't believe we can legitimately say these genocides were provoked any more than we can say the Jews provoked the Nazi holocaust against them, and together, the Jewish Holocaust and the Turkish genocides were the worst in history. As the Jews say, never again.
Of course, ISIL begs to differ; their current persecution of Christians has involved destroying all Christian churches built after the birth of Mohammed (practically all lf them), forcibly circumcising all the Christian men and boys who remained in Mosul without painkillers, choppimg off the hands and fingers of Christian children and letting them bleed to death, and crucifying children. They have committed equally heinous acts against the Yazidis, who as I mentioned before, I think might be crypto-Christians owing to the similiairty of their theology to many forms of Gnosticism, and vestigial remnants of Christianity in their rites and religious texts. But the Muslims believe them to be devil worshippers, and not protected by having Dhimmi status; ergo Daesh wants to kill all of them. The reason is simply their extremist interpretation of Islam.
There is also a severe persecution in Turkey of Alevis, who also appear to be closely related to Christianity in their belief systems and relifious practices, but who are ostensibly Shia Muslims; many Alevis are Kurds but most are Turks, and they represent about 14% of the population.
So I hope that answers your questions and concerns on this issue satisfactorily. If not, please let me know what additional information I can try to provide.
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Serving Zion
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I am curious to know whether you could put a number on the Christians who are not in a back-slidden state, who you are also holding in mind for this topic. Then comparatively the number of Christians on this forum who are not in a back-slidden state. Plus, as an exercise, if you could identify the ones being/not being backslidden in this thread, and give an approximate ratio. It is because of your comments in #84, #93 and #99 that this would be useful.
Please consider Luke 12:48 and Matthew 25:26-27, also keeping in mind the aforementioned talents that you are possessing and manifesting (#84, #93 and #99).
I know that a Christian demonstrating those fruits of the flesh are not living a perfectly repentant lifestyle. When one departs from the truth of The Holy Spirit, they accept a counterfeit instead. Consider James 1:22 with respect to that.
I am grateful to see your topic on this, despite that I wish you'd make a positive contribution. You are uncovering and addressing a very important truth.
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Ah, I see I did not phrase the following as a question:
Jesus had to die because of the weight of the law. If God was above the law then he would just forgive everyone without sending his son to pay for the debts.
So how's this:
IF God is above the law, THEN he can freely forgive us without sending his son to die. SINCE God is above the law, WHY did Jesus have to die?
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aiki
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God is the law. He is not above or below it, He is it. His moral law expresses His own nature.
There are laws which do not apply to God. God is not a human and therefore He is not bound by human-specific laws. Just as a father has rules for his children from which he is exempt because he is not a child, God has rules for us from which He is exempt because He is not one of us.
Jesus did not have to die. God would have been entirely within His rights not to take on human form and die on a cross for our sins. His redemption of us was not as a consequence of some law external to Himself that He had to obey. It was an entirely gratuitous thing, emanating from His incredibly loving, merciful and gracious nature.
Jesus is God. And he laid down his own life willingly. No one forcibly took his life from him.
John 10:17-18
17 Therefore My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again.
18 No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father."
Jesus freely chose to take upon himself the terrible task of atoning for our sin. Doing so was a gift, an act of stunning sacrificial love and grace on his part. And his atonement was efficacious because he was the perfectly holy and infinite God, not just some sin-corrupted human. Christ's death, then, does not violate the law of God mentioned in Deuteronomy 24:16. Every man who does not by faith accept the gift of salvation offered to us in Christ, will be put to the "second death" of eternal hell for his sins. If a man will not accept the perfectly-atoning work Christ has already done for him on the cross, then he is obliged to make an imperfect and thus endless atonement for his sins himself.
David's infant son was not punished for David's sin but was the victim of David's sin. As the Bible says, "The wages of sin is death." (Ro. 6:23) In this instance, David's sin caused the very literal, physical death of his own child.
God is also in a unique position as the Giver of life to be the Taker of life, as well. And God is in no way obliged to make our temporal earthly lives long. If it suits His purposes, He may do as He did with David's son to any life He creates. That's His prerogative as Creator-God.
Selah.
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one reason is because it attracted more souls to him. another reason is that humans die. another reason is because people who are evil do evil things to others.
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