From: bobbe@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Robert Beauchaine)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,alt.atheism
Subject: Re: I feel threatened by Christianity...
Date: 13 Jan 93 00:58:24 GMT
Followup-To: talk.religion.misc
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.

In article <1993Jan11.221419.9773@iscsvax.uni.edu> sperry2699@iscsvax.uni.edu writes:
>
>Society IS moving further away from God.  Don't you believe drug use or murder
>(for example) are sin?

  (The above line simply used as an example to lead into the
  argument).

  It's time for you to have a look at the real world.  You and your
  christian friends are of the opinion that simply returning to god
  in our daily life will rid the world of the majority of it's
  evils.  Is this truly the case?  Let's see...

  It seems that a sampling of christians such as yourself should do
  nicely to establish the strength of your arguments.  

  You believe in family values, yet the divorce rate among self
  proclaimed christians roughly mirrors that of society in general.
  Are your members merely paying lip service to these "family
  values?".  

  Your religion proclaims fidelity and chastity as virtuous, goals
  to be strived for.  Yet the rate of extra marital affairs among
  christians is not terribly low, and is considered by your very own
  leaders a particularly thorny issue w.r.t. christian counselors,
  ministers, and other authority figures in the church who are using
  their position to extract sexual favours.  Jimmy B. wasn't alone.

  This group has provided numerous accounts of child abuse directly
  related to your religion; some of it is easily as sickening as the
  most evil purported Satanic rituals.  The religious clergy ranks
  in the top five of sexual predators.

  Alcoholism?  Don't even get me started on that one...

  A religiously motivated group in my state attempted to make Oregon
  the first state with Constitutionally mandated discrimination.
  Where's your love for mankind?  Don't feed me the "love the
  sinner, hate the sin" crap.  The kind of love that ejects a
  homosexual from his home on the same day he is fired from his job by
  virtue of his orientation is love I can do without.  

  How many poor and hungry people could have been fed for the $20
  million spent in the last five years building the Mormon temple
  right here in my own back yard?  

  So where is your panacea?  Where is the evidence of the miraculous
  benefit a nationwide revival would inevitably bring?  Stop
  spouting flowery passages for a minute and take a look around you:
  christianity doesn't work, at least not on the grand scale.  It
  may be what's best for you, but you've got a long uphill climb in
  convincing me to adopt it.

>Christianity is opressed in the U.S.  However, I've always heard that the
>opressed Church is the best!
> 

  Dandy!  I'll do my part!

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ 

Bob Beauchaine bobbe@vice.ICO.TEK.COM 

"Look, I tried the cat experiment.  On the third trial, the cat was
dead.  On each of the subsequent 413 trials, it remained dead.  Am I
doing something wrong?"
			James Nicoll

Q.  How many Heisenbergs does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A.  If you know the number, you don't know where the light bulb is!

Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc