1. Moderates Storm The Religious Battlefield

Comment #106451 by kmichels on January 3, 2008 at 1:28 am

Just seen Bart Ehrman's book available for pre-order on amazon.co.uk ... and yes, I've just ordered my copy. I'm sure it will make for fascinating reading!

2. Let us kill all the teddy bears

Comment #94980 by kmichels on December 7, 2007 at 5:21 am

Looking at some of the comments here, I think we need to keep in mind that Islam is, and always has been, pre-disposed to violence as a means to an end, and so has Christianity. My opinion on the matter is that the only reason that we *don't* see christians burning down movie theatres and hacking off the heads of so-called infidels naming their soft toys Jesus, is that we've been really lucky in many Western nations that the Law has developed mostly independently of religion, which means that the legal basis of law and order in most Western is mostly free from the religious shackles with which Islamic states have bound their legal systems (although I'll bet someone will disagree with me on this and have half a dozen websites and publications to prove me wrong!).

What this means is that just because it isn't Christian violence we're seeing doesn't mean it can't and won't happen, and history shows us that is has happened before, in a really ugly way. If fundamentalist christians secure a political powerbase in North America, once they've cleared the area around the I-35 of homosexuals, you can be sure that *they* won't be frowning on christians "correcting" members of other faiths naming their soft toys after the non-existent christian deity.