Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life...

Mr. Gutman misconstrues what Mark Sears was saying when he said that the love of Christ "enables him" to have empathy and compassion in his work. In no way can one take from that any denial that others who are not Christian can have those traits. Although we can see from this exchange a good example that in fact the love of Christ does indeed enhance those qualities. As a matter of fact, to put the lie to the insinuation in the twist of words, Mr. Sears ascribes these qualities to a loving influence outside himself. The alternative is the hubris of claiming to be full of sufficient empathy and compassion by one's own moral superiority. Realizing that love comes from better than ourselves as helps is a humbler for us humans, who have such a penchant for proud moralizing, a weakness that of course is not an exclusive failing of Christians, now is it? But then maybe somebody knows better than us poor misguided followers of Christ to tell us morality preceded religion. A very poor student of history indeed would say this! The teacher should have flunked archaeology himself! There is the repetition yet again of the Crusades, yet only very poor students of history, including this victim of public education, did not learn of the forceful Christian opponents of the Crusades like Saint Francis of Assisi. Then there is the tired old mention of the Inquisition. They like to talk about the witches, but all these "students of history" that like to bad-mouth the most loving character by blaming him for those who hated his teaching, conveniently forget that the most numerous victims of the Inquisition were Christians who actually believed the Bible, preached the Bible. They like to talk about the conflict in Northern Ireland and Belfast, and conveniently forget that the Irish Republican Army was a violent Communist insurgency that would have turned on the Irish Republic itself if they had merged it with the island republic. And now pretending to be morally superior by accusing Christians of their own sin, Christians who are actually doing something to alleviate the suffering in the world with their own money, their own time, their own bodies, instead of voting for somebody who will "legally" steal it from somebody else for a salve to their own conscience. Oh, and pretend they are better by invoking memories of the same type of crowd from times past that could not bear to hear about loving their fellow man for the love of Jesus. And one of the stupidest most absurd thing any real student of history could say about Christianity is to say it was 'established" at the Council of Nicea in the year of our Lord 325. Now, you can use all the worst adjectives you can use about the political empire known as the Roman Catholic Church following Constantine's fatal embrace, and its operatives, but remember, they hated Christians too. But the worst thing Mr. Gutman did was to take a verse out of context, Luke 19:27, and claim that it was "Jesus' own command". It is from the story of the talents and he was telling another true story that we now know as parables, and this one was the story of the talents, and this was Such a one sounds like he's from the same cloth as the guy that tells God to go away, and then blames God for trouble when it comes his way. It even looks like something that could have been grabbed off a typical atheist web site. They commonly have misinformation about Bible verses. Some of their claims were factually refuted, oh, say, 1,700 years ago. --Alan

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