Do fundies hate "libruls" because:

[BillZBubb]

If Pontius Pilate had been a liberal, no cruxifiction of Jesus?

I mean where would that leave them, if some soft-on-crime, damned liberal hadn't allowed the execution? Christianity without the cross? My goodness, they'd all be Jews.

[seabeyond]

1. they say out loud, bad intellectuals

gosh, i think that is sad, that proudly they say we like stupid better. i am really sitting in giggle of this, having heard a lot last couple weeks.

[Sulldogg]

2. That's just ignorant

Are you serious?

[Selwynn]

5. Don't think so, but it was funny. :)

[BillZBubb]

15. Not ignorant at all, and I am serious is a tongue in cheek way.

Was the crucifixion a good thing, a bad thing, or both?

No death penalty-->no crucifixion-->no Christianity?

[Selwynn]

3. Christianity without "the cross" isn't that bad of an idea actually...

One of the biggest concerns I have about my christian heritage is the ammount of emphasis placed on the death of Jesus, when I believe how the man lived is infinately more important. I think that one could believe that Jesus was killed very much because of how he lived, and that the teachings and wisdom attributed to him during his time alive is what is more important.

[Sulldogg]

6. I disagree

If you want 'Philosopher Jesus' to be the dominant portrayal of him, you are denying the single most important thing he did in the Cristian tradition. Jesus was not special because of what he taught, plenty of people preached peace throughout the ages. Jesus was special because he died to rid the world of the burden of sin. That death, through crucifixion is the one, divine act which lifted men back up to God.

Not to sound like a fundi, but I am Catholic and take my faith seriously.

[Selwynn]

7. Fine, then I'm denying the "single most important thing he did"

I take my faith very seriously too. I just disagree with yours, that's all.

I love the idea of a God that's such a fucking jackass that must have blood and death to appease his "wrath" over sin. So I know - I'll send my "son" to be brutally tortured and murdered and that "sacrifice" will appease me and "save" human beings again.

The father who gets a stiffy from blood sacrifices, and the torture and murder of his own son - is one sick bastard. And its not like God's hands were tied. People say "God HAD to have a blood sacrifice that was worthy." Really? Why? He's GOD. Are you saying that there is a force of nature out there bigger than God? No. Then in that case, its not that God was forced to need a sacrifice in order to get past the chasm of "sin" - it was that God WANTED blood and death because that's just the kind of system he gets off on.

But hey, God is love.

[Selwynn]

9. Here is a more reasoned source:

I'm not providing this link to get into a debate over who is right or wrong. Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn about that. And the last thing I want to do is get into a debate over whose theology is right and whose is wrong.

But I feel this book raises interesting and profound questions, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in things like this:

Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us by Rita Nakashima Brock, Rebecca Ann Parker

(amazon)
From Publishers Weekly
"Your maxims are proverbs of ashes!" Thus spoke Job when his friends spouted pious platitudes in the face of his considerable suffering. Brock, a Harvard theologian, and Parker, a seminary president, echo Job's cry in this deep theological study of suffering and its role in the Christian faith. The two women became friends in graduate school and continued to meet after graduation, discussing their personal lives and how their experiences shaped their theology.

"We were convinced Christianity could not promise healing for victims of intimate violence as long as its central image was a divine parent who required the death of his child," writes Brock. The two authors take turns communicating their views, sharing deep and painful traumas (such as Parker's childhood sexual abuse, estranged marriage and abortion) as they weigh the concept of "redemptive suffering." Too many Christian women, they argue, have remained in abusive situations because they have been taught that their suffering is necessary for spiritual growth. The authors are serious theologians, confidently challenging such explicators of the faith as Anselm and Abelard, Wesley and Whitehead.

Readers may not agree with Brock and Parker that the fundamental Christian doctrine of Jesus' atonement is inherently dangerous and destructive for Christians, especially women. But they cannot help but be swayed by the book's searing passion and profoundly literary writing style (a remarkable achievement in a coauthored work). Brock and Parker have thrown down a gauntlet that cannot be ignored.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

[Sulldogg]

12. I think you're viewing it incorrectly

I don't really want to discuss thelogy here either, but the sacrifice was not made to 'appease' God, he needed no appeasing.

The sacrifice was meant as a symbol of the reconciliation of Man to God, a symbol which needed to be seen by Man for them to understand. It misrepresents the story by presupposing God had to do something to appease himself.

[Selwynn]

16. I don't need a symbol of tourture and child-killing to know God.

And any God who would "send" his son for such an "atonement" is not worth serving.

[Sulldogg]

17. Then it is very tough

for you to still be a Christian, since the new Testament outlines the new covenant with God formed through the redemption of the Christ, and all the teachings in there are 'tainted' with the mark of that sacrifice.

[Selwynn]

22. Fortunately, its not you who needs to burden yourself with labeling

me. :)

[Touchdown]

4. Your far off.

They hate liberals because we exist, and as long as we exist, we can poke holes into their fragile, house of cards worldview. If you have to yell at the top of your lungs, ridicule any other points of view, and flood the marketplace of ideas with supply-side social darwinism, while shutting out any competing ideas, then your idology is on shaky ground to begin with....and they know it.

Edited for typos.

[ezee]

8. Agreed

They hate liberal thinking people because they challenge there belief system. IF you challenge that then you challenge there control, which is most important to there existence.

[LeahMira]

13. Well, everyone would like to feel "in control"...

They hate liberal thinking people because they challenge there belief system. IF you challenge that then you challenge there control, which is most important to there existence.

Agree, but I think that most people, liberal or conservative, believe that at some point they have figured out what works.

I remember feeling impatient with my daughter at one point because she was dealing with some young adult issues that I had dealt with also when I was a young adult. I was impatient because she was bringing up points of view and arguments that I remembered using also, but that I had later discarded. After the first few go-rounds I realized that I could not impose my "voice of experience" on her but that I'd have to question and probe (even though I knew some of the answers already) in order to try to guide her through.

I think that conservatives feel that they already have answers that work for them, and they resent those who keep asking them to haul out all the uncertainties again and reconsider. Maybe the difference between us is that they are content with what works for them while we liberals are always pushing for something that we believe will work even better.

Does that make sense?

[Ready4Change]

10. To people who don't want to expend effort thinking...

A group of people valuing thought and analysis makes people who don't WANT to think feel badly about themselves. Thus liberals are resented.

Listen to RW radio. One of the themes most often pumped out is that people are sheer geniuses for listening to RW radio.

[gulliver]

11. The fundies are lost and found.

They become fundies because they can't stand the modern world and can't cope with it. Fundies of all faiths are that way. They have a hard lot in the material world and need to be spiritual just to preserve their sanity.

It's ironic that when they become more spiritual, they take their hatreds and resentments with them. If there is any proof of Nietzsche's will to power, the fundie phenomenon has to qualify as a top contender. Fundies abandon the hard world only to form groups that want power against it.

To a fundie, society is disintegrating. Their foolishness is in assigning blame. Liberals claim mammon is wrecking everything (and are correct). Conservatives blame everything but mammon. They are just especially fond of blaming religions (or lack of religion), races, etc. -- whatever serves to feed hatred and division in the name of their god, mammon.

Fundies are the dupes of false prophets. If they would look for the money behind the Republicans, they would see an inhuman, crushing economic trend masquerading as a respectable political philosophy. But these people aren't rocket scientists by and large.

[LeahMira]

14. A little polarizing?

They become fundies because they can't stand the modern world and can't cope with it. Fundies of all faiths are that way. They have a hard lot in the material world and need to be spiritual just to preserve their sanity.

I don't know about that. I don't know that fundamentalists of any faith group are characteristically those who have a hard lot in the material world. Certainly not a few of them are materially well-off. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding your thought.

I'm remembering an interfaith discussion that I attended... must have been twenty years ago. At one point the Catholic priest on the panel said that he really thought that most people didn't want to grapple with issues like "how can I achieve salvation?" or "why do bad things happen to good people?" and so on. He thought that most people just wanted to be told what to think and how to act on these kinds of issues so they could get on with the day-to-day business of earning a living and raising their families, etc.

Some of us who attended were pretty much aghast at that statement because we were of the opinion that the unexamined life is not worth living. At the same time, I remember thinking that there are certainly all kinds of people in the world and although personally I tend to think of those who want to be told as maybe a tad less intelligent, at the same time I have to remind myself that there are all sorts of paths that intellectual inquiry can take. I'm not interested in exploring nuclear physics, so maybe it's all right that someone else is not particularly interested in exploring what is meant by salvation.

[gulliver]

24. Yes, maybe.

It seems like I am picking on fundies, but I'm not.

I feel sorry for fundies. Most of them are living in spiritual squalor because some parasite (e.g., the Republican "philosophy") is feeding on their weakness.

I feel sorry for them. And I don't think I want them to lead an examined life. I'm not sure most of them could take it. The only thing I want is for their leaders to give them dreams that aren't suicidal or homicidal (or both).

The fundies follow "false prophets." There are genuine good leaders (real "prophets) out there. But the ones who cater to and feed on hatred and smallness are far too many.

[mmonk]

18. Fundies hate who they are told to hate

It's pretty much that simple. It's about following in a cult like manner.

[leesa]

19. It's not 'soft on crime' that's bad to them, it's THINKING. You shouldn't

think but do what you are told. They are mentally abused and abusing people. Remember the heaps of scorn on "doubting Thomas" for daring to think?

[EV1Ltimm]

20. because they see liberals as anti-religion.

we don't want religion/religious symbols in schools, courthouses or government facilities, so they think we're trying to outlaw religion altogether, which is absolutely ridiculous.

[VOX]

21. Liberals are the "capo di tutti capi" of boogeymen.

For a long time, average Americans have been frustated, angry, miserable, and loaded with unfulfilled expectations.

These negative feelings are ready to be put somewhere, and the RW media has done quite a job in capitalizing on this phenomenon, making liberals THE source of all the world's perceived ills: high taxes, resource shortages, welfare cheating, inflation, an unresponsive military, etc., etc.

The ante keeps getting upped, to the degree that liberals are now called anti-American, terrorists, and mentally ill.

It's a disturbing trend, one that threatens at least to take us to a one-party system, and at the worst, could result in violence.

[are_we_united_yet]

23. They hate our freedoms.

[raysr]

25. They hate more than that

"http://www.web-ministry.com/linear.php?postID=8632

[Cat Atomic]

26. Fundamentalists feel that they're under siege.

Call it paranoia, or a martyr's complex, or whatever, but Christian Fundamentalists feel that they represent tradition. They believe that the world was better in the past, and that today, it's being sunk by into debauchery.

Fearful people have been yearning for the good old days for thousands of years, it's nothing new.

Anyway, for fundamentalists, "liberals" represent a sort of immoral allied front of heathens.

[Yupster]

27. I think you're right Atomic Cat

There's a feeling that in the past you could let your 10 year olds take their bikes out and you wouldn't worry about them (the kids not the bikes) till dinner time. There wasn't open sex on the tv on HBO every night, kids weren't singing songs about their "Jimmies taking down some hoes", there weren't kids walking through the high schools with their babies, they weren't giving out condoms to 13 year olds, they didn't have drug busts in the schools, boys weren't getting prescribed with ritalin or being suspended for carrying a pocketknife.

Rightly or wrongly, they blame liberals for these changes from taking prayer out of the school to the drug culture of the 60's to the free love movement of the 60's, to the relaxed censorship on tv to forced bussing and integration.

I think myself sometimes of the things I did as a kid (I'm 45) and now that I have my own kid, I won't dare give him as much reedom as I had simply because things are a lot more dangerous today.

I couldn't turn on the tv at age 10 and watch naked women having sex for two hours straight. That's not something my parents had to worry about. I sharpened my pencil in grade school with my pocketknife. Today it would be a mandatory suspension.

I may disagree with the causes, but I sympathize with parents (like me) who think they aren't getting an awful lot of help from the prevailing culture. Some things are a lot more course than they used to be.

On the other hand, materially, things are much better. Things like kid seats and seat belts and air-conditioning are now taken for granted, but I grew up without any of them.