Radical Clerics, Christian Morals, and Homosexuality

I agree with brennakimi's post above.I suspect that you don't see so many documentaries on fundamentalist christians, but perhaps that tells us more about people who make documentaries than about the existence of fundamentalist christianity. We all too often think about fundamentalist christians "killing people for their beliefs" as something that ended in the middle ages. But it has persisted in contemporary times.For example if you read up on the various dictatorships in central and south america in the late twentieth century you find not only "religious fundamentalists" who were working honourably for peace and justice (see for example this article on Jesuits in El Salvador) but also "religious fundamentalists" who were working for torturers and assassins (see this article on the Catholics in Argentina).When did you last see a documentary on the role of the Catholic Church in Argentina's dirty war in the 1980s? Not as often as you will see manic Islamists on TV, no doubt.(For that matter, the Christians who are in favour of democracy and social welfare don't get much airtime either).Mick

Hi rahvin,I would also like to briefly add that radicalism isn't always a bad thing. For example I would consider these guys to be radical but not particularly evil.I suppose what people abhor is the imposition of one's beliefs on non-believers (whether those beliefs are religious or not); the politics of power clearly overrides religion in that sense.A question for Americans - are "conservative christian radicals" more violent than "liberal christian radicals"? If so, then violence is not to do with either radicalism/extremism nor with religion, but simply to do with politics.Mickedited by mick to give a more radical non-evil religious organization from the 1970sThis message has been edited by mick, 08-18-2005 03:45 PM

LOL. Fortunately atheists don't have to believe in evil. Tal is probably just a repressed homosexual or something

Contemporary American christian fundamentalists generally carry out their violence overseas rather than in the US itself. Here's an example of how modern Christian fundamentalists condone and support violence overseas:

quote:

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The Norfolk congregation, like churches near military bases around the country, is bracing for the possibility of a long war. Since the United States began retaliating against the Taliban for the Sept. 11 attacks, these churches have felt the brunt of the nation’s call to action...Norfolk is perhaps the congregation in our fellowship most profoundly touched by the conflict, with a full 80 percent of its membership in the military...These soldiers are very young, and they’re mostly new converts, said Roberts, adding that most of them are gone now shipped to the Arabian or Mediterranean seas...Cheryl Warren says such prayer from the brotherhood at large and from her own congregation is immensely reassuring. I know my husband has an army of people praying for him, she says. Her Northside elders called all the active and retired military to the front of the building the Sunday after the attack. They asked the whole church to kneel with them on their behalf, Utley said. Fervent prayer and reassurance were a part of the service at each of these churches that Sunday. Roberts says that reality weighed heavy on the hearts of those in his Norfolk congregation. Some of the guys had called me earlier that week, and they said, ‘We may be launching things at these people, and we want to talk to you about that.’So Roberts spoke from the pulpit about the right to defend our country. I told them that Jesus didn’t tell the Centurion to stop being a Centurion, he says. I quoted Romans 13, about how God establishes governments. I think they appreciated that.

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So you see how Christian fundamentalists "reassure" their young kids who are "recent converts" that carrying out an illegal war of occupation that has killed tens of thousands of civilians overseas is actually okay.When a young soldier says "We may be launching things at these people, and we want to talk to you about that." the Church says "Jesus didn’t tell the Centurion to stop being a Centurion". In other words they provide an ideological justification for a war of aggression, which I don't imagine was something very close to Jesus' heart... After all, Jesus was executed for threatening an imperial system, whereas these military chaplaincies are urging their members to kill others in support of an imperial system. Shocking hypocricy, in my opinion. And it's hypocricy that has a price in the lives of innocent Afghan and Iraqi civilians.Mick
added in edit:I suppose I am trying to see that I can't see a moral distinction between fundamentalist christian and muslim clerics. On the one hand you have fundamentalist islamic clerics who bless suicide bombers prior to or after their missions against both civilians and military targets, and who reassure the families of suicide bombers that their loved ones died in a just cause. On the other hand you have fundamentalist christian clerics, who sign up to a military chaplaincy, bless soldiers before they launch attacks against both civilians and military targets, and who reassure the families of dead soldiers that their loved ones died in a just cause.This message has been edited by mick, 08-20-2005 05:27 PMThis message has been edited by mick, 08-20-2005 05:36 PM