Hello everyone

No, I don't think I "hate" them in the same venom-spitting way that you hate Catholicism. Hate usually comes from misunderstanding.

Haven't you heard about the oil exploration company operating in Israel that's using the Old Testament to find oil? So far, all their drill holes have come up dry, but they have faith and they persist and, despite their stock having fallen drastically,they continue to find new "true believers" to invest in God's Plan for this company.At the same time, oil exploration companies using secular science have successfully found oil and natural gas deposits in that same area. Which demonstrates the superior effectiveness of the Bible over science!{now removing tongue from cheek}

Yet, one might ask what the point of proving that might be for you. Last time this came up, you made excuses for Martin Luther's anti-Semitism and tried to tell us that his hatred was admirably motivated or some such crap that's equally close to that.This time around, though, apparently the story is that Luther is a backslid Catholic.

Paranoid much? But we have the 1543 edition. That's why I can show you photographs of it. If it was different from other later editions, surely Lutheran scholars would be shouting it from the rooftops rather than wringing their hands over what an anti-semite Luther was. That was a Russian thing. Which happened in regions where Russian Orthodoxy was the official religion. Which is why they are described by the Russian word "pogrom".Pogrom - Wikipedia

OK, I couldn't make out the date on the cover you showed. I COULD still wonder what was actually in it of course.Yes, thanks for reminding me about the word "pogrom," though Russian and Eastern Orthodoxy aren't all that different from Catholicism. And such things did happen in Europe. There were the Jewish ghettos with the yellow stars that were foisted on the Jews by the Catholics, and there was the Jedwabne massacre in Poland during WWII which was carried out by the Catholics of the town. Probably lots more but I'm not up on it all.

I didn't defend Luther's recommendations, merely explained what had made him so righteously angry at the Jews after his attempts to befriend them, when he discovered their blasphemies against Christ. Righteous anger for the honor of God. I recently heard somewhere that Lies of the Jews might have parts that were forged, that's why I brought that up this time. Perhaps I'll hear more to confirm it eventually, or perhaps it's untrue.Funny though how so much is made out of this polemic of Luther's which had no effect whatever in the world until Hitler made use of it some four hundred years after it was written, while the RCC had been murdering millions of people including Jews for at least a millennium and the Pope was certainly complicit in the Nazi Holocaust, but you all don't like to hear about THAT.

Amazing, you don't hate the murdering isms of this world. How very strange. OK, so if we understand WHY the Vatican felt it necessary to torture and murder heretics by the multiplied millions, fomented massacres among Catholics against Protestants, put the Jews in ghettos and made them wear a yellow star, which got picked up by Hitler, and why the Pope encouraged Hitler's Holocaust, we'd sympathize with their efforts, right?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Oh there's plenty of EVIDENCE, but there is no way to verify a particular interpretation of that evidence because you can't replicate the past.And the way you find oil is by knowing where certain fossils tend to show up in relation to the structure of the rocks and the strata. That does not require the interpretation of millions of years, it's a SPATIAL thing.What you all have is INTERPRETATION and SPECULATION about the past that builds only on more interpretation and speculation and CANNOT be verified the way laboratory science can be. There is no way to KNOW the past unless there were witnesses there to tell us about it.You are looking at evidence that is ALWAYS IN THE PRESENT, where else could it be? Then you impose on it your IDEAS and IMAGINATION about how it got produced in the past, based for the most part on the assumption that the past was like the present. Which you cannot verify. Some of the ideas are reasonable enough but you still cannot prove any of them and, weirdly, you don't even know all you are doing is imposing an opinion that can't be verified. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

MDXLIII. It's in quite big letters. Well, if it contained nothing anti-semitic I'm sure the Lutherans would have mentioned it somewhere. Nor is Protestantism, frankly. And the Tredegar riots ... oh, Baptists. Whoops. In staunchly Protestant Wales. And the Hep-Hep riots, which spread to Lutheran Denmark. (I can't find out who the German participants were.)

But this is true of everything. It's true of the evidence for last Wednesday and for what happened then. Am I allowed to believe in last Wednesday?

Faith wonders: I've seen it said that hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting it to work on them.

Golly gee, you love those special exceptions, don't you? Comparing a spontaneous non-religiously-motivated riot over local conditions that didn't massacre anybody with the programmed religiously-motivated intentional and cruel massacres of heretics by the RCC. And you apparently did find a real "Protestant" uprising against the Jews, but you impose the term "Protestant" on it because it too was not religiously motivated as the Catholic pogroms were.OK, apparently you'd rather hate us Protestants than the RCC. I guess I'm getting used to it.

No, not "SOMEONE." As I've said over and over and over I do not hate CATHOLICS, I'm talking about doctrines and systems of thought, ISMS, about CatholicISM, NazISM, etc etc. Puhleeze, you CAN read, can't you?You don't hate Nazism either? Well, if not, I know why: it's because I hate it too and you wouldn't want to agree with ME about anything.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

ProtestantISM?

You can replicate evidence for interpretations of things IN the present. You can replicate how anything behaves in the present to prove a theory about something that is always observable in the present. That is the case with laboratory science, with physics and genetics and chemistry etc. You cannot test something that occurred in the past, meaning something historical, one-time events in the past, by evidence in the present. You can know the past only by witnesses who were there.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.