the big difference between Christianity and Islam is simple. Jesus said "love your neighbor.' Mohammed said "slay the infidel (any non-islamic person)." Killings done by 'Christians' are done in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus. killings done by muslims are done in obedience to Mohammed.

Last time I looked it wasn't the Jehovah's Witnesses trying to kill us.

Religious freedom doesn't mean that it gives anyone the right to practice that religion if that very same practice entails breaking the laws of the land.

Nope.

Just another distracting article to take away from some very serious hate crimes acted by law enforcement on behalf of some Democratic politicians including the Obama administration, against a New England family, and these officers need to come forward to confess their crimes and be men.

Wear the badge, act in honor.

Do what is right.

(The convoluted words in the article is a tip that the entire thing is fabricated, people - take it from a former reporter)

The right-wing mass murderer in Norway, Anders Breivik, quoted Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer extensively in his manifesto.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2011/07/christian_terrorism.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2018976/Norway-shooting-Anders-Behring-Breivik-inspired-Robert-Spencer-Unabomber.html

So many ignorant people out there... Jeez...I like the comment above that questions how many chrisitians have murdered someone vs. muslims murdered someone in a year in the U.S.... Most Muslims are peaceful loving people.. and this mainstream right tries to downplay this side of their Religion.. Muslims lived here before 9/11 and no one cared...After 9/11 everyone cries WATCH OUT FOR THE MUSLIM INVASION. Just people reacting to fear in a negative way. We have had just as many terrorist attacks in the U.S. done by U.S citizens as done by Muslims... The worlds a crazy place... Sometimes you cannot change it.. But what you can change is how you react to it.

I am just so sick to death of people who do not otherwise give a CRAP about the rights of women, come out to protest when the woman hating comes from another group, and ONLY when it comes from another group.

Sadly, this controversy demonstrates how far the politics of division, hate and polarization have caused the country to regress. Some are old enough or good enough students of history to recall the "dueling" public meetings in Alabama by the KKK and the Civil Rights Movement, or the episode in Skokie, IL where the American Nazi Party marched through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood over the protest of the local community and ACLU.

There will probably always be a segment of society that want to use bigotry and hatred to cheapen the idea of humanity and community. Geller is just a current incarnation of the same type of group demagogue that urged on the KKK and the American Nazis. The message is virtually the same. It is easiest to persuade people who cannot or will not think to descend to fear of their own ignorance and hatred of anyone who is "different." So the real danger is the potential harm that weak minded followers of Geller and Spencer might do after one of their rousing torch burning sessions.

As pathetic as it may be, the Mokhad family should sue the Geller group for appropriation of the name and defamation, to the tune of several million dollars. It is pathetic because it should not take fear of economic loss or a lawsuit to cause someone to rethink something as simple as how to be human and respect others. If Geller wants to spew anti-Islam hatred, there is no need to drag the 20 year old girl's memory into that sewer.

Why is it that you all can go off on all other "religions" but THE ONE that controls The Federal Reserve, The Banks, Wallstreet, Hollywood, Wash. DC, The Blood Diamond Industry, Main Stream Media, etc.?

This is THE ONE that is actually destoying society!

WAKE UP!

When there is a group who finds a way to stop the women abusing Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Islam, Orthodox Jews and virtually every other organized religion in the world let me know. I'm down with that.

"Tolerance is a crime when applied towards evil." - Thomas Mann

Islam is not a religion; it is a cult and political movement. Any real religion doesn't need the death penalty for converting out of it.

Only in America do we hate racists and love bigots.

You know islam would not be a major target for bigots if the followers of islam actually followed its peaceful teachings rather than perverting it into a tool to grab power at the expense of innocent people, and im sorry but honor killings alone make me want to end islam altogether.

As I said in a previous post.

I have contracted Marvin Martian to develop a weapon for this.

The Q-235 Religion Disentegrator should be ready for testing in about a week.

God does not need your religion.

He only wants you to believe.

Religion is a man made concoction to destroy man.

Maybe Marvin and I can fix this.

First of all the idea of referring to this as an "honor killing" is ludicrous. Muslims have no concept of honor, either as a religion or as a people.

Secondly, who cares if Islam "accepts" this behavior or not? Murder is murder, the murderers should be arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced. Other persons who facilitated this crime, like imams or whatever the lunatics-of-status call themselves should also be charged as accessories. Anyone supporting this kind of behavior in the life of such a murderer should be fair game for prosecution.

If you don't like or approve of western ways, keep the f**k out of the west, you inbred morons. Otherwise, if you come here America wants more than an address to send your welfare. We also want you to respect our laws, our culture, our language and common decency.

This should have nothing to do with religion. This girl was murdered and nothing has been done about it. If a

persons religious beliefs give them the right to murder their own families, then I am really afraid of the other

atrocities they will be allowed to commit. This is not a third world country yet and their beliefs should not be accepted here.

islam is a dirty and base reilgion.

The best detractors can come up with is "what about the crusades?"lol

why don't you talk about dinosaurs and the ice age?

Islam is the scourge of the world. HERE AND NOW.

First i would like to know how many of you ever picked up a Quran and read it? Im a muslim and if you knew anything about islam you would know that IT DOES NOT SAY ANYWHERE that you must force your religion on anyone . In the end only god will judge. If your a true muslim you dont KILL or HATE anyone because of there beliefs and there race! There are bad people everywhere in this world that are all kinds of religions and ethnicity but for some reason when a muslim does something its like the whole world thinks all muslims and arabs are all alike. How about putting the blame on just that one person. No one really knows 100% what the story really is or what this man really did and even if the girl wasnt covered he still was not suppose to kill her Islam does NOT say that . So just like the rest of you i hope this man gets what he deserves . Islam does not support terrorist and its sad that some of these people use religion to back up there actions. A TRUE MUSLIM DOES NOT SUPPORT KILLING OF INNOCENT PEOPLE! I dont care what religion or race you are i respect you but if you choose to hate me because of where im from and what i belive then how are you any diffrent from any of these bad people ? Enough is Enough why cant we all stand together against the true evil and stop spreading hate

Pam Geller Justifies Breivik’s Terror: Youth Camp Had More ‘Middle Eastern or Mixed’ Races Than ‘Pure Norwegian’

By Lee Fang on Aug 1, 2011 at 9:40 am

Pam Geller with House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)

Popular hate blogger Pam Geller has received scrutiny in recent days as the public became aware that the right-wing terrorist in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, had praised her blog and thoroughly cited her writing in his political manifesto. After a number of blogs made the connection, as well as the New York Times, the Atlantic, and other major outlets, Geller became incensed and began lashing out at her critics.

In a post defending herself yesterday, Geller — who has called Obama “President Jihad” and claimed that Arab language classes are a plot to subvert the United States — reached a new low. Geller justifies Breivik’s attack on the Norwegian Labour Party summer youth camp because she says the camp is part of an anti-Israel “indoctrination training center.” She says the victims would have grown up to become “future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole.”

To get her point across, Geller posts a picture of the youth camp children Breivik targeted. The picture was taken on the Utøya island camp about 24 hours before Breivik killed over 30 children, so it is likely Geller is mocking many of the victims. Under the picture, Geller writes: “Note the faces which are more MIddle [sic] Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian.” View a screen shot (click to enlarge) of Geller’s blog post below:

Could Geller’s outburst of smears be a distraction against mounting evidence that she might have communicated with Breivik in the past? A post from Geller in 2007 reprints a reader-submitted letter in which an anonymous Norwegian complains of Muslim immigration and boasts that he is “stockpiling and caching weapons, ammunition and equipment.” In the comment section, Geller claims that she provided anonymity to the reader to protect him from being prosecuted. Although Geller recently deleted the ammunition line from her post, a cached version is available. As Glenn Greenwald notes, “If this were an attack by a Muslim group, and a Muslim had something like this on his/her website, the FBI and multiple other groups would be swarming.”

Geller, a fixture on Fox News and conservative gatherings, gained a large national following last year after fueling a campaign to smear a planned community center several blocks from the Ground Zero site as a “victory mosque.” Her influence extends beyond Breivik and the anti-Muslim blogosphere to the Republican Party, given the fact she has appeared with politicians like Newt Gingrich. And she is not the only leading conservative to rationalize Breivik’s beliefs and actions. Pat Buchanan wrote a column recently arguing that “Breivik may be right.” On his radio show, Glenn Beck said the youth camp Breivik targeted, which could be compared to the College Democrats or other mainstream political organizations, reminded him of “Hitler Youth.”

When in the hell are we going to take back this country for Americans and those who believe in our laws and ethcs and defend those who come here for asylum? This is insanity. If you come to this country, abide by our laws and customs or go back to where you came from and quit polluting our values and country!!!!!

Jews, Catholics, Islam, and Protestants ALL worship the SAME God. We're supposed to get along with everybody, not just everybody in your own church. We ALL have free will. We're ALL supposed to NOT JUDGE. Judegement happens when they meet their maker. We're ALL supposed to help each other.

• Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence
• By Kathryn Joyce
• • • Write a letter
    • Email
    • Print
    • Share

• Kathryn Joyce
  Kathryn Joyce is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, a study of conservative Christian women’s movements (Beacon Press, March 2009). Her articles have appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, Newsweek, and other publications.

• What is a good enough reason for divorce? Well, according to Rick Warren’s Saddleback church, divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery or abandonment—as these are the only cases permitted in the Bible—and never for abuse.

  As teaching pastor Tom Holladay explains, spousal abuse should be dealt with by temporary separation and church marriage counseling designed to bring about reconciliation between the couple. But to qualify for that separation, your spouse must be in the “habit of beating you regularly,” and not be simply someone who “grabbed you once.”

  “How many beatings would have to take place in order to qualify as regularly?” asks Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and advocate, author of the 2007 book Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence, an indictment of church teachings of wifely submission and male headship. As she sees it, by convincing women that leaving their relationships is not an option, these teachings have laid the ground for a domestic violence epidemic within the church.

  Andersen writes from personal experience, describing an episode of being held hostage by her husband—an associate pastor in their Kansas Baptist church—for close to twenty hours after he’d nearly fractured her skull. Andersen was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention, where she heard an unremitting message of “submission, submission, submission.” She saw this continual focus reflected in her ex-husband’s denunciations, while he detained her, of women who wanted to “rule over men.” Though Andersen was rescued by her church’s pastor, who had his assistant pastor arrested himself, she says other churchwomen aren’t so lucky, particularly when churches tell couples to attend joint marriage counseling under lay ministry leaders with no specific training for abuse survivors, who instead offer an unswerving prescription of submission and headship, often telling women to learn to submit “better.”

  Pastor Holladay takes care in the taped sessions to explain that enduring abuse is not a part of a wife’s call to submit to her husband—a principle that Warren and Saddleback espouse. “There’s nowhere in the Bible that says it’s an attitude of submission to let someone abuse you,” he says in the audio clips. Nonetheless, Andersen finds it telling that the issue of submission always arises in church discussions of domestic violence, “subtly reminding women of their duty to maintain a submissive attitude toward their husbands.”

  That this occurs even in Warren’s church, which is derided by more conservative Southern Baptists for its purported cultural liberalism. Andersen sees this as proof of the centrality of male authority throughout mainstream evangelical culture, “which can still be maintained in a controlled separation but is seriously threatened when a woman is given leeway of any kind, for whatever reason, in ceasing to submit to an abusive husband by divorcing him.”

  There are more blatant examples of excusing abusive male authority among stricter proponents of complementarianism and submission theology. In June 2007, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Bruce Ware told a Texas church that women often bring abuse on themselves by refusing to submit. And Debi Pearl, half of a husband-and-wife fundamentalist child-training ministry as well as author of the bestselling submission manual, Created to Be His Help Meet, writes that submission is so essential to God’s plan that it must be followed even to the point of allowing abuse. “When God puts you in subjection to a man whom he knows is going to cause you to suffer,” she writes, “it is with the understanding that you are obeying God by enduring the wrongful suffering.”

  While Saddleback’s teachings certainly don’t make such an explicit argument for submitting to violence, and Holladay tells abused women they must seek safety before they attempt to reconcile, there is a similar profession of helplessness before biblical mandates. In the audio clips, Holladay protests he could tell women that there was a third biblical justification for divorce, “a Bible verse that says, ‘If they abuse you in this-and-such kind of way, then you have a right to leave them.’” But ultimately, he says, there’s not, and the question of separation versus divorce comes down to a matter of dealing with the pain of fixing a marriage now or later, almost a matter of discipline.

  “It’s not like you can escape the pain,” Holladay explains. “You think you are—there’s an immediate release when you get the divorce.” But the pain abused wives escape through divorce will just be traded for pain down the line as they have to negotiate shared parenting duties with their exes, or encounter “old issues” with a new spouse—a seeming charge that the abused spouse’s “issues” contributed to the abuse. “I’d always rather choose a short-term pain and find God’s solution for a long-term gain, than find a short-term solution that’s going to involve a long-term pain in my life,” Holladay says.

  Saddleback’s position is “typical evangelical fare on the subject of domestic abuse and domestic violence,” responds Andersen. Typical because, like other well-known and extremely influential evangelical leaders, Saddleback is pushing a message of “leave while the heat is on,” but only with the intention of returning to the marriage when the violence has cooled. This is the message that Andersen tracks from Christian leaders as prominent as megachurch pastor John MacArthur, Focus on the Family head James Dobson, and established Christian radio psychologists Minirth and Meier on the far-reaching Moody Media empire. “Everyone with a lick of sense knows that, in a violent marriage, the heat is never really off,” Andersen tells me. “Everything can be fine one minute, and the next minute you’re dead.”

  In the face of prominent leaders who claim helplessness in the face of biblical tradition, Andersen and a small but growing cadre of like-minded abuse survivors are fighting this established conservative wisdom on domestic violence not with secular or feminist domestic violence tactics, but with new theological arguments arguing for abused wives’ rights within a biblically literalist, and in some cases even complementarian, framework.

  While Holladay explains that divorcees will not be turned away from Saddleback, and their divorces will be treated as either any old pre-conversion sin if it happened before they were saved, or forgiven as a repented sin if it happened post-salvation, he nonetheless stresses that mature Christians must admit that their divorce “was more for [their] own selfishness than any other reason.”

  For Danni Moss, a pseudonymous blogger and formerly-Baptist abuse survivor, this offer of forgiveness isn’t good enough. “I’m not ok with being accepted because my divorce is in the past, and God accepts and forgives our sins. I didn’t sin in getting a divorce. God directed me.”

  Moss’ story of entering and eventually ending an abusive marriage reads like a cautionary tale of the excesses of male headship theology. A daughter of missionaries who followed the popular authoritarian teachings of Bill Gothard, Moss says that her marriage was “arranged” by her father, who believed, as Gothard, that parents know what’s best for their children. Following a popular fundamentalist women’s teaching that love is a choice rather than an emotion, Moss dutifully complied with her father’s choice for her. Hyper-criticism that began on her honeymoon turned into physical abuse when Moss bore the first of her and ex-husband “Gary’s” three children. Sexual assaults and marital rape later became commonplace, as did violence towards both Moss and her eldest two children.

  Contrary to Holladay’s limited definition of dangerous abuse, Moss found Gary’s generalized violence, in rages and wall-punching, as damaging as actual beatings. After a particularly intimidating episode, when Gary punched a glass door panel and had to be hospitalized to stop the bleeding of his lacerated arm, Moss left Gary for the first time. “I felt God had shown me that the end of violence was death. I’d kept thinking he would die, but here [with his survival], was this chance that he might not…I realized it would be me if I didn’t get out.”

  Moss left Gary twice, but twice was convinced to reconcile with him by their Southern Baptist church, which sent both spouses to marriage counseling, seeking to hear “both sides” of the story. In their focus on reuniting estranged spouses, the counselors gave equal credence to “each side,” equating Gary’s complaints about Moss’s “willful” failures in the kitchen with the physical violence that she and the family endured. Moss believes that the teachings that were common in the SBC and independent Baptist churches that they attended underscored this strategy. “We were taught that women were the completers of men, and that therefore God created Danni for the sole purpose of completing Gary. Since my job was to complete him anywhere he was incomplete, I was supposed to already know what he wanted.” After their first separation and reconciliation, this attitude led Moss to take her children to an outside counselor, so that they could work on “not pushing Gary’s buttons.”

  These days, Moss doesn’t attend church—not because she’s opted out or waned in her faith, but because she hasn’t yet found a church where she feels safe to trust the male authority. After Moss finally divorced Gary, a pastor told her she should return to her father’s house so that she could be under the proper protection of male authority. Though Moss didn’t, she doesn’t disagree with the directive on principle: a distinction that is an interesting part of the community of Christian survivors that Moss and Andersen belong to. In this community, which has become more active in the last several years, theologically focused, and often biblically literalist, women are working to reconcile their belief in the literal truth of the Bible with language that has long justified male authority and female subjugation in literalist churches. In their efforts to square biblical literalism with self-preservation, they’re crafting liberation theologies of a sort that do not spring from women’s lib, at least as it’s conventionally understood. (Moss laughingly relates her surprise at being criticized as feminist—a label she doesn’t apply to herself at all.)

  In Moss’ case, she argues for a distinction between the language of spiritual authority that she can’t deny is part of the Bible she believes in, and actual practiced authority between husbands and wives, which should not involve power hierarchies. In the meantime, she says that good complementarian marriages might not look any different from egalitarian partnerships—though this common standard of “good intentions,” an echo of traditional complementarian insistences on husbands’ sacrificial headship—leaves little recourse for women who end up the bad sort. In the latter, Moss sees the hand of the original misogynist, Satan, prophesied to have enmity with woman ever since the Fall, who strikes at women outside of male spiritual “covering” through the violence of abusive husbands: a surprising twist of the complementarian insistence that women be protected under the spiritual covering of a man. Reconciling the seeming contradiction between this literalist biblical command and her championship of women’s right to leave abusers, Moss invokes a third way out traditionally reserved for widows. Domestic violence survivors are widows of a sort as well, she says, and so likewise can consider themselves married to God and safe under his protection.

  Andersen, who also writes extensively on biblical prophesy, has a different theological explanation, one with a seemingly more feministic bent. The story of the Fall should not be seen as a prescription for marriage roles, she argues, with women charged to follow men as punishment for acting outside the chain of command, but rather as the first chapter in a long history of domestic violence of husband against wife. In Andersen’s reading, the story of Adam and Eve is that of Adam’s deadly betrayal of his wife: offering her up for punishment—the wages of eating the apple were death—rather than owning his blame for sin. Women have been responding in a sort of biblical battered wife syndrome, the “Eve Syndrome,” ever since.

  Another of Moss and Andersen’s contemporaries, Barbara Roberts, Australian author of Not Under Bondage: Biblical Divorce for Abuse, Adultery and Desertion, even calls herself a complementarian. Though Roberts believes that complementarianism too often has “an undue emphasis on female submission and too little emphasis on the husband’s duty to protectively lead his wife,” she still agrees with large portions of classic complementarian documents, such as the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s Danvers Statement. She holds this belief even as she lays out a theological case for including abuse as one of biblical grounds for divorce: a counterintuitive confluence of ideas, but one which Roberts says is an essential protection for Christian women.

  “We know from small studies in Christian contexts, as well as from a great deal of clinical and pastoral experience that domestic abuse is prevalent in Christian contexts,” says Roberts, adding that research has found that Christian women often stay in abusive situations several years longer than secular abused women.

  While she sees some churches teaching that “wifely insubmission is the cause of domestic abuse,” as had Bruce Ware, more common is the approach of churches like Saddleback, which allows separation but never divorce for abuse.

  “I think Saddleback’s teaching is profoundly and dangerously wrong,” says Roberts, who tried to contact Saddleback twice after the teachings were publicized in early January, offering them her book’s findings that 1 Corinthians 7:15—a verse commonly interpreted as applying solely to an unbeliever deserting a believing spouse—provides the biblical grounds for abused wives to consider their union nullified. “The key question is not ‘who walked out’ but ‘who caused the separation?’ I believe I have provided a thorough and comprehensive refutation of the view held by people like those at Saddleback.”

  Refuting Saddleback’s position on biblical grounds is direly important, says Roberts, to account for the different and additional burdens Christian women experience in weighing whether to leave a marriage. “Devout Christian believers are more intensely bound by their desire to obey God: their very real Savior, who they do not want to displease in any way. Christian victims thus put a positive internal pressure on themselves to ‘stay, submit, pray, forgive, and forget the previous abuse because that would be holding unforgiveness.’” Simply put, Roberts says, “A Bible-believing Christian woman needs a biblical argument for leaving a dangerous marriage because she loves God and wants to obey the Bible…Her scriptural dilemma can only be solved by applying and properly interpreting more scripture to counterbalance and correct her unbalanced emphases and misunderstandings.”

  It’s to that end that Roberts and her fellow travelers are amassing a library of resources—novels, personal testimonies, and exegetical material—for women to whom secular reasons for leaving can’t appeal. Perhaps what’s most compelling about the existence of these seemingly contradictory stances on women’s rights, submission, complementarianism, and abuse is the fact that complementarian teachings and domestic violence are both large enough issues within the evangelical church to give birth to such an array of approaches. These including such nascent theological attempts—neither quite feminist nor complementarian—to help give biblically literalist women a safe exit

Bigotry against stupid, ignorant and harmful ideas, even if, and especially if, they are religions ideas, is just fine with me. I do not understand why the most heinous practices are supposed to be beyond reproach simply because they are based on ancient beliefs. Ancient prejudices are no better that modern prejudices. Religious prejudices should not be sacrosanct.

Islam is NOT A RELIGION. Religions bring people together with love. Islam divides people, subjegates them, and governs them. This is a political cult bent on world domination and ownership, (by men only). There is little different in the establishment of this cult than the Charles Manson terrorist cult a couple decades ago. The world should stop giving Islam the charity of defining it as a "religion".

hi