Hogwash!
>But as votaries of imported religions grow more assertive in seeking the opportunities and privileges enjoyed by religious organisations indigenous to those democracies, and as the tolerant democracies respond concessively, so the prospect of real difficulty arises.
These "votaries" have been in place since the very founding of the republican forms of government. These 'great brain' doesn't even understand that governments like the USA are not 'democratic'. There is no more 'difficulty' then there ever has been!
>It is obvious that Tony Blair's Government does not see the difficulty, because it is encouraging the spread of faith-based schools, whether Christian, Islamic, Jewish or Sikh, and considering legislation to protect people from harassment or discrimination if suffered specifically on the grounds of their faith.
So, atheist based schools are better? Actually, home based schooling is the most effective for children up to high school age. This has been demonstrated in the USA by comparing test scores.
>Both developments seem innocuous, even (in the latter case) desirable; but in fact they dramatically increase the potential for social divisions, tension and conflict, and illustrate why the public domain needs to be secularised completely as a matter of urgency.
No, what happens is people get to raise their kids and teach them in a environment that keeps atheism out of the picture. The 'urgency' is that this guy sees his comfortable philosophy being undermined.
>The world's major religions - especially Christianity, Islam, and Judaism - are not merely incompatible with one another, but mutually antithetical.
They actually promote some of the same values. It is only extremeists who promote a actual religious form of government. That will no happen until God steps in to do it, for man has proven he can't rule himself.
>All religions are such that if they are pushed to their logical conclusions, or if their founding literatures and early traditions are accepted literally, they will take the form of their respective fundamentalisms. Jehovah's Witnesses and the Taliban are not aberrations, but unadulterated and unconstrained expressions of their respective faiths, as practised by people who are not interested in refined temporisings or theological niceties, but who literally accept the world-view of the writings they regard as sacred, and insist on the morality and way of life prescribed by them.
Crapola! JWs and the Taliban are not representative of the Bible/Koran and that is easily proven. This guys is so worried about people of faith because they will not compromise to his world-view.
>This is where the threat of serious future difficulty lies, because all the major religions blaspheme one another, and each by its principles ought actively to oppose the others - although not, one pessimistically hopes, as they did in the past with crusades, jihads and pogroms.
Which were the product of extremists, as this fellow fails to note. He also does the big generalization used by every atheist. One bad claimed Christian organization makes all of Christianity bad.
>They blaspheme each other in numerous ways. All non-Christians blaspheme Christianity by their refusal to accept the divinity of Christ, because in so doing they reject the Holy Ghost - which is described as the most serious of all blasphemies.
As JW do, whom he cited as examples of 'Chrisitanity'. LOL
Christians wait on the advent of Christ, they do not seek to run any governments other than encouraging morality that is usually agreed upon by society as a whole.
>The New Testament has Christ say: 'I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me.' This places members of other faiths beyond redemption if they know this claim but do not heed it. By an unlucky twist of theology, Protestants have to regard Catholics as blasphemers too, because the latter regard Mary as co-redemptorix with Christ, in violation of the utterance just quoted.
And that is a big lie. This idiot does not know as much as he thinks.
Christians view people as individuals who can gain salvation by the same, universal means and which denomination they belong to is a moot point. He is correct about the Christ on redemption but then the ones who will accept the calling are called out by God. All we are to do is what it says in Matthew 28.18-2o.
>All non-Muslims blaspheme Islam because they insult Mohammed by not accepting him as the true Prophet, and by ignoring the teachings of the Koran. Jews seem the least philosophically troubled by what people of other faiths think about their own - but Orthodox Jews regard themselves as religiously superior to others because others fail in the proper observances, for example by not respecting kosher constraints. And in general all the religions blaspheme each other by regarding the others' teachings, metaphysics and much of their ethics as false and even pernicious, and their own religion as the only true one.
So what? We are contentious with one another because it is our true nature. When communism/atheism was strong, who fought amongst themselves often? Communists!
>It is a woolly liberal hope that all religions can be viewed as worshipping the same deity, only in different ways; but this is a nonsense, as shown by the most cursory comparison of teachings, interpretations, moral requirements, creation myths and eschatologies, in all of which the major religions differ and frequently contradict each other. History shows how clearly the religions themselves grasped this; the motivation for Christianity's hundreds of years of crusades against Islam, pogroms against Jews, and inquisitions against heretics, was the desire to expunge heterodoxy and 'infidelity', or at least to effect forcible compliance with prevailing orthodoxy. Islam's various jihads and fatwahs had and have the same aim, and it spread half way around the world by conquest and the sword.
Which would have happened for ANY REASON AT ALL, since man has proven himself to be greedy, despotic, vile, depraved and wicked without the various religious influences. This guy uses generalities and does not recognize individual responsibility, just like many of you here.
Rex
