Neon Genesis

They're not exactly the same but the point remains that both could offend others and both are freedoms we enjoy the right to but that doesn't mean that they're appropriate behavior to engage in. And many Christians react very violently when their ritual's privileged place in society are challenged, so it's not as innocent as you make it out to be.

Cherry picking the teachings of Jesus and twisting his words to make it fit your already preconceived beliefs-sounds like Fundamentalism to me.

I've known many evangelical Christians who see praying in public as an evangelizing tool to save the lost poor souls. My Sunday school teacher said that the reason they pray in public at restaurants is on the off-chance that some poor lost soul will see them doing it and that somehow their actions will lead them to Christ. After all, as we all know, if you're working at a restaurant on Sunday morning instead of being at church, you must be a wicked heathen damned to hell or something.

Jesus doesn't say anywhere here that it's with a specific type of public prayer. He very clearly says to go into your closet and pray in secret and God will reward you for it. I don't see how my suggestion is any more offensive than anything Jesus says in the gospels about praying in public. I'm not suggesting a separate but equal situation because I'm not proposing any laws to ban prayer in public or anything that extreme. I merely think it is inappropriate behavior in a public secular place that's supposed to be welcoming to everyone like a restaurant to turn it into your own private church. It would be like if I went to your church wearing a Marilyn Manson tshirt that had lots of foul language on it. I could say it's my freedom of speech to wear a tshirt with cuss words to your church and you have no right to tell me not to wear it to your church but that doesn't mean I'm not being a jerk if I were to wear a tshirt with cuss words to your church.

I don't even know what this has to do with the conversation. Why don't you go to church if you want to pray in front of others so badly?

This seems like a good reason to me:

So why don't they just do it in the car before they walk into the restaurant? You know if a Muslim family got up and started praying around the table in a restaurant that most of the same Christians praying at their own tables would be outraged about how offensive it was to them.

I don't know if this is is off topic or should be split off, but one thing I never understood about Christian prayer was why do some Christians always feel the need to pray in public in the most visible way possible? Like sometimes when we're eating out at the restaurant, we'll see someone praying in the table and everyone at the table will get up and hold hands to pray and stuff. What do they think they're accomplishing by praying like that? Do they think they're going to convert any heathens that happen to be in the restaurant at the same time to Christianity? I don't know why they can't just pray in private like Jesus commanded in Matthew chapter five. It just seems like an extravagant way of saying "Look at how holy we are! See how devoted we are in our prayer?!"

Weren't the Gnostics the ones who started that whole thing about how Jesus didn't really die on the cross?

I trust the Daily Mail about as far as I can throw it.

That just seems like a distinction without a difference to me and not even a biblical one. Though Christians claim god is all-powerful, the book of Judges portrays God as losing a battle against an enemy tribe just because they happened to have iron chariots.

Interventionist prayer seems to be the most popular form of prayer in Christianity but there is a tradition of centering prayer in Christianity you might be interested in, Norm: http://www.centeringprayer.com/

Another solution would be to say that good and evil don't really exist and are just human-made illusions we have created but that opens up a whole nother can of worms.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=dw-wetzel_broncos_tim_tebow_playoffs_112711

Tim Tebowism seems rather popular in football circles right now though.

When I still believed in supernatural theism, I didn't make these kinds of prayers because they were considered to be selfish and self-serving. It was like with the Pharisee and the tax collector where the Pharisee was praying to God about all these selfish motivations but the tax collector wouldn't even lift his eyes up to heaven and we were supposed to be emulating the tax collector with our prayers. So it would have been acceptable to pray to God to help give you strength to do your best on an exam or something but it was selfish if you prayed to God to give you an A and didn't do any studying on your own and just expected to God to give you an A on a silver platter without any part on your end.

There has been scholarly debate over whether or not The Secret Gospel of Mark currently available is the genuine Secret Gospel or if it's a modern day forgery that Huston Smith made. Personally, I think there's stronger evidence that David and Jonathan were gay lovers over Jesus being gay.

I recently started reading Leo Tolstoy's book, "The Kingdom of God is Within You," in which he argues that true Christians should practice total non-violent resistance and he argues for a form of Christian anarchism. While I highly respect Tolstoy and I find his views to be more respectable than the warmongering fundamentalists, I think there are some theological and moral problems with Tolstoy's arguments. The main crux of Tolstoy's argument rests on his interpretation of the word "evil" when Jesus says in the gospels not to resist evil with evil. Tolstoy takes this to mean that Jesus was a total pacifist and that Christians should be pacifists as well and he points to an account in the gospels where Jesus chides Peter for physically attacking a Roman soldier but elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus tells the apostles to sell their staffs and take up swords to protect themselves from persecution and Jesus acts in less than pacifist ways when he uses a whip to drive out the money changers in the Temple, so as with most theological issues, it seems like you could come away with both moral beliefs depending on your interpretation of Jesus' teachings. Tolstoy's main objection against the argument of self-defense from danger is that what we consider to be a dangerous threat is subjective and can be abused to justify needless violence. Tolstoy points to instances where the church justified the Salem witch trials by claiming that witchcraft was a dangerous threat that they needed to defend against and I think there is some merit to Tolstoy's concerns about the abuse of what is considered a threat, such as the controversial stand your ground laws and the Trevon Martin case that's been in the news recently. But I think Tolstoy was taking his condemnation of self-defense to an unrealistic extreme and I think there are some clear issues where self-defense is justified that Tolstoy ignored. Like what if you're a battered wife being abused by your husband and the only way out of your abusive situation is to fight back to escape? These situations might be rare but they are real and I think it would be unrealistic and dangerous even to tell someone being abused that it's wrong for them to fight back to escape from a dangerous situation out of some political/religious ideology.

As with most theological issues, the bible seems to have conflicting views on the omniscient nature of God. As the bible's mythology continued to be developed, God's powers kept getting beefed up by the writers and there are passages like the prophecy verses which seem to hint that God has all-knowing powers. But then there are other verses like in the story of Adam and Eve's fall where God doesn't know where Adam and Eve are and is calling for them in the garden or in Noah's Ark where God actually forgets about Noah at one point.

Of course this thread wouldn't be complete without some Lady Gaga thrown in:

I've also heard another argument that Judas Iscariot was a literary invention that symbolizes the conflict between the Pauline Christian school of thought and the followers of Peter and the gospels' condemnation of Judas is symbolic of their support for Peter's Jewish Christianity over Paul's Gentile Christianity. If I'm not mistaken, Bishop Spong makes this argument in one of his books.

Even outside the radical anti-abortion movement, there are plenty of other crimes committed by radical Christian movements where the domintant threat is by white male Christians such as violent militia movements like the Hutaree who were found guilty of plotting murder at innocent police officers, the Tea Party who sent violent death threats to politicians after Obama's health care reform was passed, and homophobic Christians who murder gay people just because they're disgusted by their sexuality. It was a Christian fundamentalist and not a Muslim who walked into a Unitarian Universalist church and opened fire on the members while they were worshiping because of his hatred towards gays and liberals. Whether Muslims kill more people overseas or not, the point remains that radical Christian terrorists murder far more Americans than radical Muslims do and speaking as someone who loves Christianity and Christians, I don't think we can ignore that radical Christian terrorism is currently the greatest threat to our freedoms and security in America. I also highly recommend that you read the book American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, And Power Bind Jihadists And The Radical Right by Markos Moulitsas.

Here's a list of murders of abortion doctors: http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/violence/murders.asp Here's a list of all the abortion clinic bombings: http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/violence/arsons.asp In comparision, how many successful Muslim-led terrorist bombings have occured on U.S. soil since 9/11?

It is racism if Harris thinks all brown skinned people are religious terrorists who should be treated as criminal suspects. And why doesn't Harris demand that the government profile white male Christian pro-lifers just in case one of them might be a radical abortion clinic bomber or plotting to murder another abortion doctor? Why is it only Muslims that he's singling out?

From the article itself: Harris specifically says himself that he thinks it's crazy not to consider ethnicity and nationality when profiling for terrorists. If it walks like a duck....