All Comments (14)

The West separates Church in State and embraces pluralism. In turn talking heads in West are blind to the Islamic world view that does not embrace separation of religion and state and rejects pluralism. We have mirades of politicians and media types running around saying that Islam is a religion of peace that must be accepted in the West while the Islamic world does not see it that way. WAKE UP America and the WEST they are going to fight as Muhammad said, "... until the whole world says that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet." Until we stop looking at the Islamic world through the lens of pluralism we will be behind in defeating the enemies of freedom

Dear Mad Love -

Great post!

I have lost the lord
and found the light
and I'm here to tell you
that it feels alright.
Lost the lord found the light
just gotta tell ya that
I feel alright.

I have lost the lord
and freed my brain
and I wanna tell
I don't feel no pain
Lost the lord freed my brain
just gotta tell you
I don't feel no pain.

I have lost the lord
and found what's true
and I gotta tell you
that you could too
Lose the lord find what's true
just wanna tell ya

that you could too.

How can you say Christianity is not involved in the Middle East? Part of the motives for Iraq are ancient Christian/Muslim hatred, Christian extremists expectation that Bush's current crusade will bring on the "rapture" and the Jew's "biblical warrant to return to their lands in Palestine" Christianity, or at least your new American extremist version of it, is very much a part of the insanity.

Great piece by Mary Jordan.

The religion she describes many leaving to become 'non-religious', would be the religion I would want to leave too.

The religion they describe is a religion that depends on results here and now. A religion that provides that individual wants are satisfied now. (Stamp the foot!)

Ideologies demand that too. So do wars. So do human rights. So does science and technology. So does every human being. It's got to be now, now, now.

We arrogantly think this or that is the right thing to do, even though we know so little.

We have such a small god in our minds. So we don't follow through on the promises. We go our own way.

Wright is right. There is nothing for him to go back to. His focus was on a false, personalised religion. A religion that falsely represents the Creator God who came and initiated the restoration of the cosmos through Jesus Christ (APBTHN).

Jesus Christ crossed the boundaries of personal, national and cosmic political power, which makes the controversy over church and state separation a farce.

Christianity, has more often that not, adopted the power strategies of the pagan world, and so doomed those within and without the 'church' to the same mire of confusion, death and destruction as other human endeavours.

'There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end leads to death.'
Proverbs 14:12

In Europe and U.S., Nonbelievers Are Increasingly Vocal

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 15, 2007; Page A01

BURGESS HILL, England -- Every morning on his walk to work, high school teacher Graham Wright recited a favorite Anglican prayer and asked God for strength in the day ahead. Then two years ago, he just stopped.

Wright, 59, said he was overwhelmed by a feeling that religion had become a negative influence in his life and the world. Although he once considered becoming an Anglican vicar, he suddenly found that religion represented nothing he believed in, from Muslim extremists blowing themselves up in God's name to Christians condemning gays, contraception and stem cell research.

"I stopped praying because I lost my faith," said Wright, 59, a thoughtful man with graying hair and clear blue eyes. "Now I truly loathe any sight or sound of religion. I blush at what I used to believe."

Wright is now an avowed atheist and part of a growing number of vocal nonbelievers in Europe and the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, membership in once-quiet groups of nonbelievers is rising, and books attempting to debunk religion have been surprise bestsellers, including "The God Delusion," by Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins.

New groups of nonbelievers are sprouting on college campuses, anti-religious blogs are expanding across the Internet, and in general, more people are publicly saying they have no religious faith.

More than three out of four people in the world consider themselves religious, and those with no faith are a distinct minority. But especially in richer nations, and nowhere more than in Europe, growing numbers of people are actively saying they don't believe there is a heaven or a hell or anything other than this life.

Many analysts trace the rise of what some are calling the "nonreligious movement" to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The sight of religious fanatics killing 3,000 people caused many to begin questioning -- and rejecting -- all religion.

"This is overwhelmingly the topic of the moment," said Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society of Britain. "Religion in this country was very quiet until September 11, and now it is at the center of everything."

Since the 2001 attacks, a string of religiously inspired bomb and murder plots has shaken Europe. Muslim radicals killed 52 people on the London public transit system in 2005 and 191 on Madrid trains in 2004. People apparently aiming for a reward in heaven were arrested in Britain last year for trying to blow up transatlantic jetliners. And earlier this month in Germany, authorities arrested converts to Islam on charges that they planned to blow up American facilities there.

Many Europeans are angry at demands to use taxpayer money to accommodate Islam, Europe's fastest-growing religion, which now has as many as 20 million followers on the continent. Along with calls for prayer rooms in police stations, foot baths in public places and funding for Islamic schools and mosques, expensive legal battles have broken out over the niqab, the Muslim veil that covers all but the eyes, which some devout women seek to wear in classrooms and court.

Christian fundamentalist groups who want to halt certain science research, reverse abortion and gay rights and teach creationism rather than evolution in schools are also angering people, according to Sanderson and others.

"There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public, and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising Islamic and Christian militancy," Sanderson said.

Though the number of nonbelievers speaking their minds is rising, academics say it's impossible to calculate how many people silently share that view. Many people who do not consider themselves religious or belong to any faith group often believe, even if vaguely, in a supreme being or an afterlife. Others are not sure what they believe.

The term atheist can imply aggressiveness in disbelief; many who don't believe in God prefer to call themselves humanists, secularists, freethinkers, rationalists or, a more recently coined term, brights.

"Where religion is weak, people don't feel a need to organize against it," said Phil Zuckerman, an American academic who has written extensively about atheism around the globe.

He and others said secular groups are also gaining strength in countries where religious influence over society looms large, including India, Israel and Turkey. "Any time we see an outspoken movement against religion, it tells us that religion has power there," Zuckerman said.

One group of nonbelievers in particular is attracting attention in Europe: the Council of Ex-Muslims. Founded earlier this year in Germany, the group now has a few hundred members and an expanding number of chapters across the continent. "You can't tell us religion is peaceful -- look around at the misery it is causing," said Maryam Namazie, leader of the group's British chapter.

She and other leaders of the council held a news conference in The Hague to launch the Dutch chapter on Sept. 11, the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United States. "We are all atheists and nonbelievers, and our goal is not to eradicate Islam from the face of the earth," but to make it a private matter that is not imposed on others, she said.

The majority of nonbelievers say they are speaking out only because of religious fanatics. But some atheists are also extreme, urging people, for example, to blot out the words "In God We Trust" from every dollar bill they carry.

Gaining political clout and access to television and radio airtime is the goal of many of these groups. With a higher profile, they say, they could, for instance, lobby for all religious rooms in public hospitals to be closed, as a response to Muslims demanding prayer rooms because Christians have chapels.

Associations of nonbelievers are also moving to address the growing demand in Britain, Spain, Italy and other European countries for nonreligious weddings, funerals and celebrations for new babies. They are helping arrange ceremonies that steer clear of talk of God, heaven and miracles and celebrate, as they say, "this one life we know."

The British Humanist Association, which urges people who think "the government pays too much attention to religious groups" to join them, has seen its membership double in two years to 6,500.

A humanist group in the British Parliament that looks out for the rights of the nonreligious now has about 120 members, up from about 25 a year ago.

Doreen Massey, a Labor Party member of the House of Lords who belongs to that group, said most British people don't want legislators to make public policy decisions on issues such as abortion and other health matters based on their religious affiliation.

But the church has disproportionate power and influence in Parliament, she said. Forexample, she said, polls show that 80 percent of Britons want the terminally ill who are in pain to have the right to a medically assisted death, yet such proposals have been effectively killed by a handful of powerful bishops.

"We can't accept that religious faiths have a monopoly on ethics, morality and spirituality," Massey said. Now, she added, humanist and secularist groups are becoming "more confident and more powerful" and recognize that they represent the wishes of huge numbers of people.
While the faithful have traditionally met like-minded people at the local church, mosque or synagogue, it has long been difficult for those without religion to find each other. The expansion of the Internet has made it a vital way for nonbelievers to connect.

In retirement centers, restaurants, homes and public lectures and debates, nonbelievers are convening to talk about how to push back what they see as increasingly intrusive religion.

"Born Again Atheist," "Happy Heathen" and other anti-religious T-shirts and bumper stickers are increasingly seen on the streets. Groups such as the Skeptics in the Pub in London, which recently met to discuss this topic, "God: The Failed Hypothesis," are now finding that they need bigger rooms to accommodate those who find them online.

Wright, the teacher who recently declared himself a nonbeliever, is one of thousands of people who have joined dues-paying secular and humanist groups in Europe this year.

Sitting in his living room on a quiet cul-de-sac in this English town of 30,000, Wright said he now goes online every day to keep up with the latest atheist news.

"One has to step up and stem the rise of religious influence," said Wright, who is thinking of becoming a celebrant at humanist funerals. He said he recently went to the church funeral of his brother-in-law and couldn't bear the "vacuous prayers of the vicar," who, Wright said, "looked bored and couldn't wait to leave."

Now, instead of each morning silently reciting a favorite nighttime prayer, "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers . . . " (from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer), he spends the time just thinking about the day ahead.

He said his deceased mother, a Catholic, was comforted by her faith: "It kept her going through difficult times," particularly when his father left her when he and his sister were young.

"I really don't know how I will react if something really bad happens," he said. "But there is no going back. There is nothing to go back to."

Not believing in an afterlife, he said, "makes you think you have to make the most of this life. It's the now that matters. It also makes you feel a greater urgency of things that matter," such as halting global warming, and not just dismissing it as being "all in God's plan."

He called himself heartened that the National Secular Society, which he recently joined, is planning to open chapters at a dozen universities this fall. The rising presence of the nonreligious movement, he said, is "fantastic."

"It's a bit of opposition, isn't it?" he said. "Why should these religious groups hold so much sway?

Well for a change there are a few good observations by Mr. Colson here, but the usual blind spots are in evidence. He ignores the impact of fundamentalist Christianity, with it's emphasis on apocalyptic end-times prophecy, on US foreign policy.

But he's correct to observe that religion and politics are deeply intertwined in the region, and that one of the reasons the West has been able to move away from these kinds of conflicts is due to its increasing secularization. This is not, however, a virtue of Christianity, as Mr. Colson would have us believe, but a virtue or secularism and reason.

Regards

A Hermit

Matthew:

There you go, cherrypicking.
Those verses mean nothing. They are not the Word of God, they are the Word of Man. You have read the Bible, right? Ever read anything other than the Bible? Ever wonder why those stroies are so popular? Ever wonder where the stories come form? BORROWED! All of it. Well, most of it anyways.

And its hard to be a blasphemor if I don't believe in God.

Russell,

Yes I can back up that faith alone in Christ is the only way to salvation, see the selected verses of the Bible below.

The Truth is that Jesus died to save you from your sins. If you can't accept that, you will be condemned to eternal damnation. What you said in your post is blasphemy!

# Romans 1:17-18: "Therefore the just shall live by faith. The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness."
# Romans 3:28: "Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law."
# Romans 4:5: "But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness."
# Romans 5:1: "...having been justified by faith..."
# Romans 10:9: "That if you shall confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shall believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved."
# Romans 11:6: "But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace."
# Romans 14:23: "...and everything that does not come from faith is sin."
# Ephesians 2:8-10: "For by grace are you saved through faith; and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them."
# Philippians 3:9: "and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith."
# Galatians 2:16: "Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified."

Matthew:

Wrong Answer!

Care to back that up? I am always curious why people think faith in Christ is the only way. Totally fascinates me. Do you still believe in Santa Claus too?

Well, Chuck, you were actually making some sense until you hit the last two paragraphs.

The Jews have a "biblical warrant to return to their lands in Palestine" you say. This is EXACTLY the kind on nonsense that is nothing more that using religion for to commit all kinds of atrocity. But it's different when it's YOUR team right? "It's in the Book!" Nevermind that the Muslims book say that lopping your head of is okay since you don’t support THIER book. YOUR book is truth and as Mathew pointed out "All other religions are false, and therefore, of Satan".

You people are insane!

Chuck goes on to assert:

"Christianity as a worldview has, certainly in modern times, effectively separated church and state. But it is not Christianity that is involved in the Middle East "

I don't know (or care) if this is mere stupidity or an outright lie. It is nothing more or less that Christianity that has enabled the neocons to get away with whatever the hell it is they are doing in the Middle East. And we all know what lengths Chuck will go to to push the ol’ Republican agenda along, don’t we?

A pox on both your houses.

Dear Mr. Colson,

In your essay above, you used the word "fascist" more than once. I find this quite intriguing for two reasons:
1 - You are a leader amongst fundamentalist Christians who want to establish a theocracy here in the United States. I am a Christian myself but am an avid supporter of the separation of church and state. I simply do not share the views of fundamentalist Christians and am thankful that we are not completely dominated by them. (If "theocracy" is too strong a word, I would reply that, if fundamentalists were fully in charge of the government, their "values agenda" would certainly include many items beholden to the religious right).
2 - You were a member of the Nixon administration, which ran ramshod with the constitution and the rule of law, ordering the NSA to spy on ordinary Americans, the FBI to investigate civil rights leaders, and the break-in of the Democratic party headquarters. Nixon was as close as I hope we ever get to a fascist leader (although Bush is a close second, sadly).

Why is this all relevant? Because while, yes, we Americans should be very concerned about the effect of middle east insecurity on our security; we should also be vigilant about protecting our democracy from neo-fascists such as those in the Bush administation and the religious right.

Right on Brother Colson,

Of course the real problem in the middle east is that Islam is an evil, satanic religion. The only true way is through faith alone in Christ. All other religions are false, and therefore, of Satan.

Hello Brethren(s) Chucky-Boy Colson, Sistar(s), et al;

Your Last Paragraph & next to last one are "RIGHT-ON"!

My mother always said, "Leave the Politics to Politicians & the Religious stuff to the Rabbi's & Priests [Immams, Gurus etal]"

Pssssst, Jealousy cause them nasty "Love-Hate" relationships or is it that selfish tribal thinking of an exuse as "My Religion" Pollution or like the classic "Blame-Game" instead of do something to help Humanity Angst??

Peaple are Jealous, hence, thus in fact, live in fear [Actually over nothing, especially anything of ancient Pre-Apocalyptic [Man-Made] Religion(s) and this is the curse!

BEHOLD: It is the ECLATi-ON's who are reversing these curses & un-Bollixing the Bollixed via them "FACIST" bibliomaniac "Frontal Lobe" bollixing Word Merchants. And;

We Eclati-On's have REVEALED (opposite of Secret) the Riddles of the Satans/Devils/jinns and t`hus exposed them with their biblical pants down, so to speaketh, and a neked WE have them running into HUMATE-KINDS oblivion!

HARK: NEW YORK STATE AMERICA, U.S.A., is now the "Center Of ALL Religions via the MELCHIZEDEK PEACE BLESSING that was given to "Shiloh" the Photon Bringer of The Apocalypse, as is prophecied & Promised , Via ALL your five ancient, PRE-APOCALYPTIC, Major INFIXUS-BOOKS that are in fact Man Made & never, in FACT, G-d, Yawah, Jehova, Hashem, Alllah, Krishna, Buddha et al made! Specifically ECLAT + 'i" Made!

Praise the Lord! Hallajulla! The Lord Cometh Twice to NEW YORK! This means Jerusalem, Mecca, Delhi, Tibet, greece, Rome et al are no longer the CENTER OF RELIGION! Ottersville , N.Y. & Smyrna, N.y. is about "IT" or G-d being "ITSELF" [Lord/Eclat/Holy-No-Man]!

Beware the "SHILOH" is come for a Healing of Nations & Global Peace & More Good Tidings.

WHEREFORE: The Rapture & The END OF TIMES IS PAST & The "MILLENIUM" era is over Due! (Started around 998 A.D. Ending 1998 A.D. +/- like that, ) The Lord/Eclat consents, but only for a TIME (Temperature). IT is TIME!

Please: HEAR O'SPACE-SHIP EARTH; Throw Down your Pre-Apocalyptic Biblical Weapons Of Mass Destruction [WMD] and uphold & make honorable the "HOUR-BOOK" a/k/a the Holy One Universal religion BOOK" a/k/a OUR-BOOK or "The Book Of OUR" System that is and was created via the UNITED NATIONS & the mandated "WORLD FAITH EXCHANGE & via the VOTARY ASSOCIATION" that will usher-in the GRIDARIAN DEMOCRACY's for One World Government INEVITABLLY!

Hence; All Eclation's a/k/a HUMATES (Citizenz of Space-Ship earth/tellus/Gaia) will have the BOOK OF HOUR/OUR for ever lasting peace & Knowledge that "WE THE PEOPLE" [of Space-Ship Tellus something] never was created nor can WE ever Die!

Brother Colson, et al, You once wrote something about this last statement I made herein and Finally thereof!

Happy every Day & Good G-d/Eclat Hunting!

< ?: +)/ Ya Ya Praise the Fearless thus Non Jealous Holy No Man Lord/G-d/Almighty/Eclat/Allah/Krishna & by many un holy Name(s)!

Eeeeeeee Haaaaa. Ah, LIFE=PHOTONS, is so beautiful with Eclati-On's & never with the Eclati-Off's! Shame Shame Shame Shame shame . That's for Each of The five Major Superstupidstitious man made Non Holy Scriptures/Bibles/Novels/Books with man made Story's and Never Eclat's Reality/Transfinity story (NEW-PHILOSOPHY. a/ki/a New-Song(Genuine-Singularfaith) coming from them five Old-Song(s).

Like Once I was a Caterpillar & now I'm a Butterfly awareness & Many more Good rejuvinating Holy Cosmic feelers Faith Prophecy Fullfillment & more! Ya Ya!