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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (29875)	9/28/2001 10:04:05 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

Coincidence. Here's the bishop you declare to be no Christian and compare to Judas, writing on how 'acts of faith' have been so damaging to the world and indeed to religion... Since the age of 12, I have consciously and simply believed in God - and, believe it or not, I still do. My way of finding out about God and being in touch with him has been a lifetime of studying the Bible, reflecting on Christian worship and traditions and seeking to share what I was finding out with my neighbours, Christian and others. This has included contacts with both Jews and Muslims. Now the explosions in New York and Washington seem to have blown everything sky high. Those of us who claim to know and be known by a God who reveals himself have to ask ourselves what our receiving of "revelation" has done for us and for the world. For what the acts of the Muslim terrorists reveal to us is that we 'Peoples of the Book' - the Jews with their Torah and the Prophets, we Christians with the Bible, and Muslims with the Koran - too often get God wrong and put God in the wrong. It is clear that anyone claiming to be a Muslim and a faithful worshipper of Allah, the Compassionate and the Merciful, who also claims that the terrorists died in glorious martyrdom for Allah is uttering the clearest blasphemy. But Jews and Christians also seem to have been "getting God wrong". The present condition of Israel surely challenges very disturbingly the religious claim that Jerusalem and Palestine belong to the Jews in their modern role of citizens of the State of Israel because God gave it to them by conquest in the time of Moses and Joshua and has now given it back to them by conquest in modern times. What we have now is a military state in the midst of conflict with displaced Palestinian Arabs. Can it be that the one, true and only God of all the earth has promised and guaranteed this sort of 'Holy Land'? But, again, why did the Jews need a modern state and territory of their own? Because of a long history of anti-Semitism in the Christian West. Who put some nationalistic Jews back in Palestine with a chance of statehood which they bravely and vigorously seized? It was the Western "Christian" powers from after the end of World War I in a process which was hardly considerate to the Arabs. The issue of Muslim countries largely belonging to the most poverty-stricken parts of the world, while the United States is the leader of the flourishing capitalist world clearly plays a focusing part in producing the distress and resentment from which Islamic terrorism emerges and which it claims to represent. But we who persist in being faithful Jews, Christians or Muslims - believing that our faithfulness is focused in the one true and merciful God - must face the atheism which the terrorist hijacking of the religious faith of "Peoples of the Book" is clearly encouraging. Religious self-righteousness is as clearly destructive as secular self-centred demands for revenge above all and at all costs. It looks as if - whether we believe in a merciful God or not - that "Except we repent [and think again very hard and searchingly] we shall all likewise perish". news.bbc.co.uk Emphasis mine. Sensible chap, IMO. Greg, you'll have to face it, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Synod of the Anglican Church recognise this man as a Christian and bishop. Even the Pope and the College of Cardinals accept CofE ordination as Christian... Of course you're free to decide that said worthies are not fit Christian, and you are. Others may disagree.