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A question for Christians who aren't bible fundamentalists.

Take Five

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Christianity is a little like feminism or similar creedos, most of the time their greatest critics and detractors are utilising the very analytical or conceptual tools which they fashioned in the first place.

If any humanist or humanitarian cares to criticise Christianity for failing to meet with Christian ideals or standards the stock reply should be that they are Christian standards, Christianity fails because it expects so much of itself in the first place. If they criticise Christianity for failing to meet with humanist or humanitarian standards, well, they are failing to acknowledge the extent to which those very things are products of Christian thinking and culture.

Christianity reorientated the human race's thinking about man, giving him a special status in creation which no faith before or since has done, not only is man the most valued by God, an inverse of previous thinking (man valuing God not vice versa), but God choose to become man, to be man, to experience all the pain, suffering, doubt and dilemma of being a man. No other faith, not even Judahism has such a tenant.

Without it none of the modern humanocentric thinking would have come to pass, for better or worse.

Those are interesting insights.
 

Tiltyred

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I've got to say that I'm pretty misanthropic, or at least I consider myself that way but I cant say that the idea that we're rotten to the core has been borne out by experience.

Most of the people I've known who are rotten are either cognitively challenged or are trapped in some sort of maturational crisis, ie they've got a real developmental deficit that results in them playing games, repeating internal scripts they arent even conscious of etc.

I dont know if goodness is its own reward but badness is its own punishment a lot of the time that's for damned sure. Whether anyone who's rotten gets their just desserts, ie a right rollocking punishment, or not they'll still be miserable.

Agreed -- I was speaking of the race of Man -- we war, murder, cheat, lie, steal, etc. -- these passions are in our nature. Some people exhibit them more than others, and yes, we understand it with a psychological vocabulary that gives less accountability to the more limited person, as it probably should -- but I mean that most of us are not born saints. We have to be trained to control our tempers, jealousy, selfishness, etc. etc.

Also the more sensitive you are to the fact that you sin (which I don't believe is a condemnation, because it's counteracted by Grace), the more sins you can see in yourself. This is not a reason to have low self-esteem or to feel put upon -- I don't understand being insulted by the idea that we sin -- we just do -- don't we?

For me, at least, it's real work to be good. :D And sometimes even when I think I'm being good, I'm not -- I'm getting some secondary gain; it's not truly selfless, etc. I don't have much illusion about attaining any spiritual perfection; in fact, as I was taught, the Perfectability of Man is a heresy. That was a big enlightenment for me. The more I can accept God's grace, the more I can show it to other people -- to me, that's a good use made of sin or feeling convicted of sin in yourself. Accept God's forgiveness, pick up, and go on -- and show the same mercy to other people who sin, in whatever manner, because we all sin and we all need forgiveness, and since Jesus is not incarnate any longer, it's true what Teresa of Avila wrote:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ's compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about
doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.
 

Mole

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God tortured his son? That's news to me. I could have sworn that he was executed and tortured by ancient Romans, goaded by a number of ancient Jews.

In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus spoke to His Father and said, "Father, let this cup a pass from me".

But the Father would not let the cup pass and so his Son was tortured to death.

And from then on His Son is called the Lamb of God, the sacrificial Lamb of God who bears all our sins. Jesus is now a blood sacrifice made to appease the anger of His Father.

Jesus is a classic scapegoat. The blood sacrifice of the first born. The sacrifice of the best and innocent to the blood thirsty anger of the Father.

The excuse, the template for child abuse.
 

Mole

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he was executed and tortured by ancient Romans, goaded by a number of ancient Jews.

This is the classic blood libel against the Jews which you are repeating without shame or remorse.

The blood libel started with the Gospel of John where he has the Jews crying out, "Let His [Jesus] blood be upon us and upon our children'.

And the blood libel that the Jews are deicides has been carried down the millennia by christianity until it culminated in the holocaust.

I remember a nice old Polish lady just after WW II at a Polish railway station on the way to Auschwitz, justified the holocaust by saying, "Well, they [the Jews] are Christ killers, aren't they?".

And you repeat the same blood libel here.
 

ajblaise

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Thanks for all the responses good Christians. I was going to challenge some of the points you guys made, but I'll respect your faith.
 

SolitaryWalker

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One issue of whether or not to believe in miracles has to do with the practical effects of religion....

What about the question of the truth? That is, the question of whether miracles are true. A sensible person will want to believe in them only if he or she has a reason to believe that they are true. A fanatic can believe anything that suits his or her fancy, or in other words anything that he or she thinks will make him feel better. So, if he or she is to assume that believing in miracles will be of benefit to him or her, then he or she should not have any problem doing so.

Although in some respect this person may be truly well-served by such a conviction, however, in other respects he or she may not be. Believing in miracles may be a first step towards the abandonment of rational thought. If that person continues walking that path, he or she may develop a habit of wishful thinking or drawing illegitimate or irrational inferences. This may be harmful in many important respects as such a person would be in danger of falling prey to manipulation by others and a general confusion in life as such a person would be unable to make much sense of the world because he or she has abandoned rational thought.

In other words, believing in miracles is a big step towards irrational thinking. If you want to apply this method of reasoning only to the question of whether or not you should believe in miracles, you should not have any problems; however, if you want to apply it to many other things in life, consequences are likely to be severe. I do not know how significant of a risk one shall incur with regard to collapsing into altogether irrational habits of thought, however, this risk is worth considering and should be taken as a note with regard to why one should be careful with regard to whether or not he or she should choose to believe in miracles.

A person who believes in the miraculous power of God will believe that such power can change their life. Therefore they can change behavior that they could never change without faith, and their life will improve...

They could never change without faith? Couldn't there be another way? A lot of self-help authors claimed to have transformed the lives of people by purely non-spiritual or non-religious means. The positive thinking activists like Napoleon Hill serve as a glaring case in point.

A person who does not believe in the miraculous power of God will not be able to dramatically change their behavior and therefore their religion has to practical purpose..

Could a person find a motivation other than belief in miracles to dramatically change his or her life?

Of course the other side to this is that once you accept miracles are possible then their is no reason to disbelieve any of the stories of the New or Old Testament..

Once you believe in miracles, you believe that God can do anything? In that case, since God can do anything, is it the case that God exercised his omnipotence only in the Old Testament? Or is it the case that God has the liberty to exercise his omnipotence at any time in any context? If he does have such freedom, is he any less likely to make miracles happen in our daily lives than he was in the stories in the Bible? If so, should we embrace the view that anything is possible? That is, should we believe that some day we will see water boil in antarctica, that 2 and 2 will make six and that falling objects will move up as opposed to down?

If so, is that view fundamentally dangerous as it entails an abandonment of rational thinking? If not, how do we know how likely God is to create miracles in our daily lives? If we do not have a way of knowing that, how much can we expect for miracles to happen to us? If so, should we believe that this kind of miracles will happen?

In one sentece, my question to you could be summarized as follows. Once we start believing that miracles are possible, how often can we expect for them to happen and under what circumstances, also what kind of miracles are going to be likely to happen?
 

Tiltyred

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In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus spoke to His Father and said, "Father, let this cup a pass from me".

But the Father would not let the cup pass and so his Son was tortured to death.

And from then on His Son is called the Lamb of God, the sacrificial Lamb of God who bears all our sins. Jesus is now a blood sacrifice made to appease the anger of His Father.

Jesus is a classic scapegoat. The blood sacrifice of the first born. The sacrifice of the best and innocent to the blood thirsty anger of the Father.

The excuse, the template for child abuse.

He came here to die for us. His sacrifice put an end to blood sacrifice, for Christians. His sacrifice was the one that satisfied the Father forever, and now we have a new covenant. A covenant that says we don't have to follow all the rules in Leviticus in order to be one with God, we don't have to sacrifice animals to be one with God, all we have to do is accept the sacrifice that Christ made. It's an end to rules and death.

How do you get that it's a template for child abuse?
 

Totenkindly

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My guess is that the NT is not completely literally true. In the ancient world the discipline of history as an objective study didn't exist. Plus, the gospels were based on oral traditions and weren't written until something like 70 years after the Christ.

Typically in seminary there are discussions centering around the differences in the narratives of the Gospels, which events are ignored, differences in language, etc.

it doesn't really say anything about the veracity of events and how each narrative got written (for example, there's a general idea that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source but fleshed the narrative out based on their own sources and the things that mattered to them).

And that really does come out -- each gospel tends to view Jesus with a different purpose/theme in mind (Matthew is about "Christ the King" and proving he is the authority and heir of heaven, Luke tends to take a far more detailed and clinical approach, Mark focuses on the actions of Jesus and not much on the heady stuff, and John meanwhile creates image after image, tons of metaphors, about Jesus to help us understand who he was and what his purpose was.)

This makes it difficult for me to approach the Bible as a specific historical record. it definitely tells a story and presents truths... but in no single codified way. Christians still argue over theology, heatedly, nowadays -- what happened, what it means, what the "rules" are, who is a believe and who is not. it seems to me that one's interpretation depends a lot on one's individual priorities, which have no real bearing on what exactly is true. Hence, I can take a more legitimately conceptual approach to the Bible -- I try to distill the gist of things -- rather than getting hung up on the conflicting details or what rules might have been derived and inscribed from culture, pressing social needs, and/or general historical context.

As far as I can tell, there is no way of absolutely knowing what did and didn't happen.

That.

He came here to die for us. His sacrifice put an end to blood sacrifice, for Christians. His sacrifice was the one that satisfied the Father forever, and now we have a new covenant. A covenant that says we don't have to follow all the rules in Leviticus in order to be one with God, we don't have to sacrifice animals to be one with God, all we have to do is accept the sacrifice that Christ made. It's an end to rules and death. How do you get that it's a template for child abuse?

Step outside your framework and look at it differently, and maybe you'll get it -- even if the idea seems violently opposed to your reading of Scripture.

Look at the story of Abraham and Isaac too, for more clarification. As a believer of a particular tradition, you will tend to view it one way; now look at it from an outsider's POV.

Put in a nutshell: The guy "hears God telling him" to go sacrifice his son on a stone altar. Nowadays when someone claims that, we take away the kid and throw him in jail for abuse; and when we don't, a woman drowns all her kids in the bathtub and spends the rest of her life in an asylum.

The salvation story only makes any sense IF you accept all the premises (people are inherently sinful and doomed to hell without redemption; there is something about sin that God cannot just 'forgive' even though he's God; there is something about innocent blood that is redemptive but only Jesus was "innocent" despite clearly doing and saying some stuff that would seem sinful coming from another; etc.) What sort of God sets up salvation that involves the torture and punishment of his own child?

Have you ever read that e-mail forward about the kid who has a special quality to his blood to create an anecdote for a plague that if not stopped would destroy all human beings, and how the parent basically has to choose to let the docs murder his boy in order that all humanity be saved? That situation was different (there, the kid was young and didn't understand; Jesus seemingly could "choose to go along willingly")... but I found that story offensive primarily because the child WAS too young, and the parent has a bond that demands the child be loved and protected, and here the parent was abandoning the child. Some people carry those same feelings over into the Jesus story.

I think scriptural literalism, in any faith (and I would argue that it is a far, far greater aspect of Islam than any other faith today), is a sign of "bad faith" in the believer, secret doubts are masked by the letter of the law, and I also think, in fundamentalist interpretations, that it is a sign of emotional and psychological immaturity or neurotic trends.

I'd have to differentiate between extreme literalism and the more literalist tendencies showing today in evangelicalism (I have good friends in the latter), but I do disagree with some of them on their way of approaching scripture.

After years of being in the mindset myself and struggling with it, personally I think more literalist tendencies have an underlying fear of making a mistake and/or displeasing God. Life is also pretty ambiguous and sometimes terrifying, and belief in something concrete (whether it's picking a concrete rule out of scripture or else trying to translate a lot of abstracted spiritual concepts into tangible literal laws to follow in order to 'do good') allows a lot of that anxiety to dissipate.

Someone told me once it was a little like walking blind folded with the assurance that you will not fall from the path you are on, if you trust that you wont fall you'll not give it any more thought, if you dont trust then you may begin to scrutinise the blind fold itself, looking for flaws or holes or ways to peak out or around it.

What I tend to see is that closure-oriented people (e.g., J) better appreciate having a rules mindset, it frees them up to focus on other things and gives them a recipe to "make life work." Also, free-floater types (e.g., SPs) appreciate rules if they've felt unproductive in life or had their lack of discipline/rowdiness end up taking them far afield into unhappy places. A lot of religious converts to evangelicalism seem to fit into these two categories. Fundamentalism seems far more extreme to me. You'll see a lot more NTs operating outside those boxes simply because they have more trouble living with discrepancies in thought or not acknowledging inherent ambiguities in one's faith statement.

with this postmodern perspective it's pretty easy to not care so much about sweating the details because ultimately there's no such thing as a perfectly accurate story IRL anyways--but that doesn't mean they lack value.

This strongly resonates with me.

I think we are, as human beings, rotten at the core. We have to work to be peaceful, tolerant, and loving.

I'll be blunt: This is an example of extremism I avoid.

I was raised to believing in "Rotten to the core" humans and I finally have to say I don't see that as true.

We are imperfect and flawed creatures, that's what I have experienced over the course of my life.

I have seen spontaneous acts of kindness and a desire to be positive; I've also seen spontaneous acts of selfishness and some pretty horrendous violence. What does that say? It says we are both -- both profane and profound, and it is intermingled in our very being. We are both divine and animals all at once.

Trying to define people as either "naturally good" or "naturally evil" is actually the completely wrong question and leads to terrible assumptions being made.

I see "natural human dev" as moving from a self-oriented and short-term gratification level (because the organism's world originally is within itself) -- a toddler only sees its own world and other people are not inside the ego boundaries, except for maybe the mother but not as a separate entity but only to serve the infant. However, as a human being grows, there is a natural development towards extending one's boundaries and incorporating others inside, as separate entities but still treated with the respect with which a person hopefully treats oneself.

So this is why people are both victims and victimizers -- they are responsible for their actions even while being unable sometimes to choose something different (because they were raised in a way that limits their options, yet are still culpable).

The goal is to get people to move from toddler behavior (which is inappropriate and destructive when practiced by adults with adult power) to adult community-oriented behavior, which seems to provide the most potential in life.

Trying to ascribe someone an overall moral character, rather than just dealing with their specific violations of others, seems to be nothing more than a judgment issues in order to shame someone into changing. There is no real philosophical answer to "Is man good or evil?" We have drives and inclinations for both. It's just a control mechanism in the guise of philosophy.
 

Lark

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He came here to die for us. His sacrifice put an end to blood sacrifice, for Christians. His sacrifice was the one that satisfied the Father forever, and now we have a new covenant. A covenant that says we don't have to follow all the rules in Leviticus in order to be one with God, we don't have to sacrifice animals to be one with God, all we have to do is accept the sacrifice that Christ made. It's an end to rules and death.

How do you get that it's a template for child abuse?

To be honest Jesus was aso part of the trinity, so it was God himself who paid the price, who lived and died, died in one of the worst possible, tortured and cruel manners imaginable.

Fundamentally this is what I reflect on when the questions about bad things happening to good people, puzzle of evil thing, comes up. God has been there, done that, got the t-shirt pretty much. Himself. In person. Not as an abstract entity on looker who laments the consequence of free will, life and death.

Some of the interpretation of the life, ministry and death of Jesus is a little strange, a lot of it to me has become obscure and esoteric, under and over written by mystery school wannabes who reference blood pacts, covenants, sacrificial rites etc. None of that makes sense to me, the simpler truth of God entering into his creation becoming part of it directly makes more sense.

With that insight I can understand the rallying cry of the loyal angels in the war in heaven, truly, "Who is like unto God?"
 

Take Five

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In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus spoke to His Father and said, "Father, let this cup a pass from me".

But the Father would not let the cup pass and so his Son was tortured to death.

And from then on His Son is called the Lamb of God, the sacrificial Lamb of God who bears all our sins. Jesus is now a blood sacrifice made to appease the anger of His Father.

Jesus is a classic scapegoat. The blood sacrifice of the first born. The sacrifice of the best and innocent to the blood thirsty anger of the Father.

The excuse, the template for child abuse.

That's your interpretation of it, but it's not correct for a number of reasons.

For one, unless you consider Roman guards to be the hand of God, or better yet God himself, you can't really blame God for the torture and death. You can't even put up a good argument that God told the Romans to go through with the punishment.

For another, in Christianity, God is both the Son and the Father, so this child abuse hogwash is really invalid.

Jesus is a scapegoat, but ultimately it's the people, not God, who condemned him.

Once again, you are misreading things and taking them literally. Making judgments based on a literal reading of a text that you clearly don't understand contextually.

For every quote pulled out of the Bible, there are a dozen that contradict it or seem to contradict it. So please, please, don't just pull arbitrary lines out and pretend like you really understand it all.

I'm not attacking you, but really, if you say this crap outside, people will laugh. Clearly the child abuse connection you are trying to make is not there. Your argument, in a court of law, would not be sufficient evidence to convict God for child abuse. So it's just not there.
 

Take Five

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This is the classic blood libel against the Jews which you are repeating without shame or remorse.

The blood libel started with the Gospel of John where he has the Jews crying out, "Let His [Jesus] blood be upon us and upon our children'.

And the blood libel that the Jews are deicides has been carried down the millennia by christianity until it culminated in the holocaust.

I remember a nice old Polish lady just after WW II at a Polish railway station on the way to Auschwitz, justified the holocaust by saying, "Well, they [the Jews] are Christ killers, aren't they?".

And you repeat the same blood libel here.

And now you have made a personal accusation against me.

The really sad part is that as bogus as the accusation against me is, the child abuse argument is even more ridiculous.

In your desperation, you have resorted to a false ad hominem argument. Shame on you.
 

Lark

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Jennifer, I cant distinguish between one sort of scriptural literalism and another I'm afraid, I think tradition is more important, although it is just as corruptable I'm afraid and can result in bad faith too or in faith becoming a dead religion like a sort of reverse alchemy, turning gold into lead.

I dont see why anyone would need to be literalist, in the main I find its a bad foundation for faith and important to someone who is unsure of the truth of their faith and needs comfortable fall back positions to retreat to.
 

Totenkindly

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... it's true what Teresa of Avila wrote:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ's compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about
doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.

Teresa was a pretty insightful woman, I think.

Regardless of all the intellectual arguments over historicity, she's still stating the bottom line here.

...I dont see why anyone would need to be literalist, in the main I find its a bad foundation for faith and important to someone who is unsure of the truth of their faith and needs comfortable fall back positions to retreat to.


I think my issue more is just that I have no idea what specifically is being defined as literalist.

No one follows the Bible literally, they always filter it through some perspective and have a set of priorities by which they interpret.

So you get some literalists who believe you should stone homosexuals, which is a very literal reading, or following the specific dietary requirements for Israel in the OT, or a congregation like the Seventh-Day adventists who believe they must worship God on Saturday (which is the 'actual' Sabbath) in order to fulfill the Ten Commandments.

Or you get evangelical varieties of faith, where people are not quite so literal, but still view something like Paul's comments about women in the church to be a universal mandate rather than a cultural-specific set of strictures.
 

Lark

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And now you have made a personal accusation against me.

The really sad part is that as bogus as the accusation against me is, the child abuse argument is even more ridiculous.

In your desperation, you have resorted to a false ad hominem argument. Shame on you.

Yeah, sounds like there's some Jewish reverse racism going on there.

I dont understand how it is a libel if its not untrue, libel, if I'm not mistaken is written lies, did they or didnt they say that his blood could be upon them?

If they did not believe Jesus was the Messiah then I dont have any trouble believing that they could have said such a thing, its plain they would have cared for him as much as they would have for any perceived heresy at the time or today.

Has it resulted in anti-semitism, maybe, although properly understood the state of Israel is as responsible for anti-semitism today as anyone else, the domestic and neighbouring aboriginal populations being semitic but not Israeli.

Of the actual existing anti-semitism, including the holocaust, Christianity is not to blame, it has been ideology and mass psychology which has been responsible, better still the divide and conquer of tyranny which divides the public into in and out groups.

However if this is who contemporary Jews feel about Christianity and "gentile" followers of Christ that's pretty telling.
 

Totenkindly

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Note: I've already sent some warnings out in regards to this thread. The anti-semitism angle seems to be somewhat a tangent and also is leading straight into personal attacks.

If we could get back to the "title" topic, I think that would be appreciated by everyone, thank you.
 

Take Five

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I think my issue more is just that I have no idea what specifically is being defined as literalist.

No one follows the Bible literally, they always filter it through some perspective and have a set of priorities by which they interpret.

I think a great amount of the literal interpretation comes from judging the book to improper standards, that is, reading it as if it were the same type of literature that we are familiar with in history textbooks.

On top of that, the biblical books themselves are made up different types of literature. The pursuit of objective history wasn't around in ancient times--not even in Thucydides, the father of history.

To gain full, or even nominal understanding, you have to look at the books as they were originally intended to be understood. Our modern minds come with all kinds of preconceptions, and people reflect their own contexts onto the biblical books. That's bad scholarship.
 

Lark

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Teresa was a pretty insightful woman, I think.

Regardless of all the intellectual arguments over historicity, she's still stating the bottom line here.




I think my issue more is just that I have no idea what specifically is being defined as literalist.

No one follows the Bible literally, they always filter it through some perspective and have a set of priorities by which they interpret.

So you get some literalists who believe you should stone homosexuals, which is a very literal reading, or following the specific dietary requirements for Israel in the OT, or a congregation like the Seventh-Day adventists who believe they must worship God on Saturday (which is the 'actual' Sabbath) in order to fulfill the Ten Commandments.

Or you get evangelical varieties of faith, where people are not quite so literal, but still view something like Paul's comments about women in the church to be a universal mandate rather than a cultural-specific set of strictures.

All those examples are examples of old testament Christians or Judeo-Christians and I feel that's wrong too, Jesus has a pretty clear and simple message throughout his ministry which supersedes all the existing prior scriptural law and tradition.

Love God and Love your neighbour, this is the whole of the law.
 

Totenkindly

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...Love God and Love your neighbour, this is the whole of the law.

Now we are getting into one of the main intersections of the arguments in this particular topic :), which is this:

What does it mean specifically to love god and love your neighbor?

Is it a feeling?
Is it an attitude?
Is it fulfilling a list of specific actions?
How do people recognize whether they are "really" loving God and others?

On top of that, the biblical books themselves are made up different types of literature. The pursuit of objective history wasn't around in ancient times--not even in Thucydides, the father of history.

Could you explain for the court what the "pursuit of objective history" is? :)

I think it's part of the meat of this sort of topic. Most people are only acquainted with their own particular way to approach an issue.... A common mistake is to assume that one is part of a traditional way of viewing something, when that really is not the case.
 

Lark

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Note: I've already sent some warnings out in regards to this thread. The anti-semitism angle seems to be somewhat a tangent and also is leading straight into personal attacks.

If we could get back to the "title" topic, I think that would be appreciated by everyone, thank you.

OK, cheers, was it anything to do with my posts? I'll delete them if you like :coffee:
 
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