Re my Comments

Submitted by Kepha Hor (United States), Oct 26, 2011 at 21:06

One does not need to belong to a certain group to feel sympathy with truly injured people.

As for not sounding "Christian" for expressing SOME sympathy for the Hui and Uyghur under Chinese Communist rule, what am I supposed to do? Call for a repeat of Baghdad in 1258, was it, when all the Christians were locked in their churches and the Mongols (many Church of the East Christians themselves) set the troops loose on all the Muslim quarters of the city? Am I supposed to cheer and glorify crusaders riding up to the horses' hocks in blood when they took Jerusalem? Should I think that the most "holy" thing one of my country's leaders might do would be to drop a nuclear device on Mekka at the height of the Haj?

And, having some Far Eastern family connections, I am also a great pork-eater--and with all due respect for a good kielbasa or pork with pickled cabbage, we have you Poles beaten hands down on what we can do with pork! But, again, should I cheer when people who are pork avoidant (Jews, Muslims, Adventists) are forced to raise or even consume it against their consciences?

Is it not better that I let my Muslim neighbor know that the Gospel is not a club held over his head, but the gateway to true knowledge of God?

Or, by the same token, am I to cheer when Buddhist or Daoist kin see a child lose an eye because of careless use of fireworks during an idolatrous ceremony? Or throw bricks at my Jewish neighbors while forgetting my own sins on Good Friday? Is that what you think being "really Christian" is?

Sure, I believe that some people are going to Hell, but where in Holy Writ, apart from the once-in-history commands to cleanse the land of the Canaanites (and I'm about 3000 years too late for that), am I to hurry anyone on his way to eternal condemnation? Please enlighten me. I've always thought that God expected us to pray for, present the Gospel to, and deal justly with our neighbors to help the Holy Spirit turn them in the other direction.

But, what do I know? I'm just a stupid, backwards, ignorant Midwestern American Christian believer who's been reading the Bible for 30+ years in more than one language and hearing preaching. Yet, somehow, every Marxist who lets the dust settle so thick on his mother's Bible that you can write "damnation" in it, and who never enters a church except to disrupt an make bigoted remarks seems to believe he knows my religion better than I do.

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