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Author | Topic: Charismatic Chaos | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
A couple decades ago there was an expos book, Salvation for Sale, written by a former staff member of Pat Robertson's TV network; the author had been a major force in bringing the network's programming up closer to commercial standards. He witnessed Pat Robertson do a healing. An old man with ashen complexion was wheeled up in his wheelchair and Robertson prayed over him. And as the author watched, the man's complexion turned rosy and his spirits visibly lifted; the man had been healed. Then a short time later, the author decided to do a follow-up (good for the TV show) and discovered that the man had died a few days after the "healing."
Placebo effect in action? How often do faith healers do any follow-up checks to see whether the fix had taken? True story: I had heard of the book and went into the neighborhood Crown Bookstore (which should date this story) and asked for it:"Do you have Salvation for Sale?" "No, but there's a church right down the street from here."
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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Of course, we have These if we dare trust that they are not yet another scam. I seem to recall having heard something about not using bare links. If you want to bring up ideas about martyrs, then you should just do so and not hide it with a bare link. Even better, since martyrs for all kinds of movements have existed, shouldn't you also present why you would think that bringing up martyrs would be relevent? Another example of a martyr would be Host Wessel, a young Sturmabteilung (SA) brown-shirt murdered by a Communist:
quote: I will not try to summarize the sordid and convoluted tale of Wessel's murder except to say that it had almost nothing to do with the ideological basis for his being a martyr. My point is that the mere existence of martyrs says nothing for the validity or value of that for which they were martyred (or made into a martyr). Praise be to Godwin. There's also the issue of many Christians' obsession with martyrdom and the problems that it causes. On the social and political level, it plays out with hypocritical wailing about being persecuted by everybody. To be sure, religious discrimination and persecution do exist, but in the USA it's the Christians who are doing the discriminating and persecuting of others, not the other way around. In practically the same breath in which they point to other intolerant countries where Christians are a minority lacking political power to stop the imposition of the governing religion, they then seek to use political power to impose their own governing religion on non-Christians. And when the laws and the Constitution thwart their efforts, then they claim that they're being persecuted against by not being allowed to persecute others. And when non-Christians speak out against their efforts, then they start whining that every hates them just "because they love Jesus" (an actual reason an actual creationist gave for his often vicious pathological lying). Here's a pertinent illustration. I tried to find this scene on YouTube from the Bob Newhart Show (the one with Suzanne Pleshette), one of the show's many short scenes of Bob with a patient (quoting from memory from about 40 years ago):
quote: IOW, haven't our USA "persecuted and hated Christians" ever considered that the reason why people reacted so negatively to them is because those Christians' constant efforts at persecution and attacking other beliefs (which is the basis of proselytizing) make them very unpleasant to be around? And then to add insult to injury, once they have driven you to hating them for their behavior they insist that it's God that you hate. So how can that kind of conduct lead to successful proselytizing? A posting from Quora reposted by Ed Babinski on FaceBook last summer says that conversion is not the goal:
quote:
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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So then. You take a single sentence out of the reposting of a complete message that I in turn reposted here and you misrepresent it as something that I myself wrote? All to redirect attention away from what that quoted message was saying?
Wow. Just wow.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
The audience at TRUMP rallies is 100% believers. At my OLLI we have a class, Cyber Security and Warfare, which is held every other Wednesday. We covered this tangentially last Wednesday. Two classes ago we looked at big data and how our location and movements are being through our mobile phones. That includes a practice called geo-fencing in which the GPS coordinates for a particular location is mapped out and all phones entering that area are logged in a big data database. Even though the big data collector normally doesn't have access to tie your phone's ID to your personal identity, that phone can still be targeted with ads and propaganda. The example we were given two classes ago was an abortion provider whose building had been geo-fenced and all phones entering that building were logged. Then that big data was either sold or given to an anti-abortion organization who, with the assumption that those phones belonged to women seeking an abortion, flooded those phones with anti-abortion messages. In this last class, the class facilitator cited a source as saying that Trump rallies were geo-fenced and that at least half of the attendees of those rallies had not voted for Trump before, but were apparently lured by curiosity, etc. Then the Trump campaign targeted the phone IDs collected with pro-Trump propaganda. So then the audience at Trump rallies is not necessarily 100% believers, but rather also include many curious who are then narrowly targeted for conversion into Cult 45. Edited by dwise1, : added link for what OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes) is Edited by dwise1, : "the curious" --> "many curious"
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
GDR writes:
No, I say it doesn't matter if it happened or not. You said somewhere along the line that you don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus Back on CompuServe in the late 80's in the Religion Forum's "SCIENCE & RELIGION" Section (where the creationism discussions were), there was a crazed Christian named "Suds". He claimed to be a mathematician who invented Gray Code (though Frank Gray died two decades prior in 1969) and couldn't work anymore after suffering a stroke. He promoted odd forms of word magick and had even claimed that since Hamurabi predated Moses by centuries, that meant that Hamurabi had copied his code from Moses. But Suds did come up one very good point: It is not important whether the claims of Christianity are true or not, only that people believe that they are true. The history of Western Civilization for the past two millennia was based almost entirely on belief in Christianity, not on whether there was any truth at all to Christianity. Like Rick Perry said, even a broken clock is right once a day.(Perry succeeded G.W. Bush as Governor of Texas, which has led Texans to refer to Bush as "the smart one.")
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