Gary Patton's List: Multiculturalism

• Celebrating—and Limiting—Religious “Freedom”

  • Dr. Klein makes some excellent points about the unBiblical behaviours and demands of many traditional Christians and Christendom in North America.
    
    Interesting, the Bible makes clear that Jesus Followers are to love and have compassion for those who don't believe in our Saviour and Master. It actually prohibits us from not criticizing and judging them ...especially for doing things that God commands only us to not practise
    GaryFPatton (2012-07 05)
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• Muslim Persecution of Christians: May, 2012

  • Christians and others are always wise to remember that the Bible clearly tells us that our real enemies are not Islamists, Islam, Muslims, or others that persecute and kill us solely because of our faith.
    
    Christians' R-E-A-L enemies, world-wide, are diabolical spirits as outlined at http://diigo.com/0jl35 . (R--E-A-L = Revolting-Enervating-Authoritarian-Loathsome)
    
    Persecutors of Christians are motivated by Satan and his hordes of demons. The Bible says they oppose anything that is of the One Living God existing in three personalities.
    
    Except for confusing "bad people" with "bad beliefs", the statement of a Roman Emperor over 2,000 years ago still holds true today because the R-E-A-L enemy of humankind hasn't changed:
    
    "To expect bad people not to do wrong is madness, for he who expects this desires an impossibility. But to allow people to behave so to others, and to expect them not to do you any wrong, is irrational and tyrannical" ~ Marcus Aurelius (121-189 AD) Roman Emperor
    
    Please pray for persecuted peoples worldwide as you are led using the the helpful information Mr. Ibrahim's outlines below based on his exhaustive and accurate research.
    GaryFPatton (2012-07-05)
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• • "Who is a Moderate Muslim?"
    
    Many would agree with the opening speaker: "There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim in Islam!"
    
    This is because the Qur'an demands fundamentalism of each of it's adherents and fundamentalist Islam is radical Islam. It demands the re-establishment of the Caliphate and the control of Islam over everyone in the world. Islamists wish to do the latter by implementing "Shari'ah Law" in every country on earth.
    
    Islam is a total lifestyle. Islam includes one's "politics" as ex-Muslim authors Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq argue and as Islamic scholars will attest.
    
    The Muslims in this video chose NOT to mention this fact ...actually they avoided it and the U of T Prof seemed to obfuscate its existenece.
    
    The non-politically correct and important complementary question which was skirted around in the video is: "Who is a radical Muslim? The word "radical" simply means "a person who goes to the root or origin of something," in this case, religion.
    
    A Muslim Islamist, fundamentalist or radical goes to the root teachings of Islam; a Christian Evangelical, fundamentalist or radical goes to the root teachings of Christianity. There are many of both in North America as the surveyed data tabled during the video discussion demonstrated re radical Islamists.
    
    The most important question is which group represents a clear and present danger in society, right now?
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• Who is a Moderate Muslim?

• God Behaving Badly

  • In this Interview by fellow author, Frank Viola, David Lamb author of "God behaving badly" contextualizes a number of "hard sayings" from the Old Covenant portion of the Christian Bible. He helps a reasonable reader understand that the seemingly harsh and vindictive God of thr Old Testament is the gentle Jesus of pre-cross Christianity.
    gfp (2012-05-08)
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• Three Degrees of Separation

• Some Brief Thoughts Regarding Liberal Scholarship, Redaction Criticism, and Islam
• the vast majority of those who embrace form and redaction criticism in all of its flavors and kinds do so out of tradition, not out of having examined the case set forth in defense of these methods.
• I truly wondered why the Lord had closed all other doors and put me in that context, but, now I know) forced me to consider deeply why I could not in good conscience embrace the "status quo" of modern NT scholarship
• I found, over and over again, the same kind of bald anti-supernaturalism at work, even amongst those who did not openly espouse such a view in their "religious life."
• This kind of double-mindedness was epidemic in Christian theology then. It is still quite prevalent, but in the past decade more and more have shed the religious trappings and are seeking to be consistent, not even bothering with the religious garb any longer.
• I would challenge (respectfully
• saying the gospels were quite late, post AD 70, for example, I would ask why they would date them so late (and, as a result, deny the eyewitness authorship of, say, Matthew)
• we would date them late because…of theories. Theories about how documents develop (in the natural world). Theories about how the early church developed (based upon, again, how such things happen in the natural world). And of course the big reason was…they had to have been written after AD 70 because, well, they couldn't have been written before otherwise they would contain…prophecy about the destruction of Jerusalem! And we all know prophecy doesn't really exist, so there!
• I only learned later in seminary and after graduation how confident scholarship had been in the past in giving even later dates, German scholarship, for example, having dated John as late as AD 175, only to have those dates thrown to the wind by manuscript discoveries.
• the "consensus of scholarship," especially in a day when humanism and naturalistic materialism has become the religious dogma of the society, and of higher education, is not an option for the faithful follower of the teachings of Jesus the Messiah.
• For years Shabir Ally had been making a presentation wherein he presents the "snowball" argument. It is a basic anti-gospel argument based upon a rather simplistic viewpoint of the origination of the gospels.
• Shabir thinks there is an over-riding impetus on the part of both Matthew and Luke to "grow" Jesus, assuming, of course, an evolution in the development of Christology (another assumption that is just accepted, never proven). So, Matthew and Luke are looking for ways to "improve" on Jesus---which puts them in the category of deceivers, really, at the very least from an Islamic viewpoint
• examples of where Matthew was "growing" Jesus
• Shabir did not know that Mark used the Greek term κύριος (kurios) when he was making his presentations before 2006, but he does now. But still, in our debate in Toronto, he argued that in fact this is still an example supportive of his thesis, no matter what his understanding had been before, for "lord of the house" is still different from "Lord." He likewise cited a scholar who, writing on the "synoptic problem," likewise mentions this "change."
  
• let's talk about how this text could be seen in a very different fashion.
• Let's admit something: We do not know when any of the gospels were written. They have no date stamps on them. If we examine the internal material of the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) without naturalistic biases, we would have to conclude they were written between 35 and about 65 AD (i.e., after the crucifixion but prior to the opening of hostilities leading to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in AD 70)
• As Richard Bauckham has pointed out (and his role in our debate was most interesting, and again illustrated that I really do not believe Dr. Ally understands my point on this matter), the eyewitnesses to the events of the gospel continued in the church for many decades, forming a very important core element of the continuation of the gospel message.
• The gospel story began to be proclaimed by the eyewitnesses and the first generation of believers immediately after Pentecost. It spread like wildfire, turning the world upside down. It spread both by zeal as well as by persecution. The oral tradition of the church was the context out of which the gospels themselves were written. The gospel writers were fully aware of that tradition. They were not seeking to supplant it, but to organize it and preserve it in yet another form.
• This oral tradition, something shared by the entire community, is the source out of which they drew their narrative.
• If we assume that Matthew and Mark are not liars, that they are not dishonest men, and that they are seeking to communicate a message faithfully, drawing from the tradition known to them, we conclude, upon examination of numerous texts such as the above, that
• we can see that both are giving us perfectly proper renditions of the same incident and the same words, one in fuller form than the other, both seeking to communicate the same concept, though to two different audiences.
  

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• 'I am the Mahdi'
• he hidden Mahdi -- a savior figure in Islamic eschatology.

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali:The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World

• For thus the Lord says to me,

     “Go, station the lookout, let him ^(B)report what he sees.
• Let him pay close attention, very close attention.

• the following remarks
• the moderate, benevolent, true face of Islam

• Does UN Rights Council Turns Blind Eye to Terror?

• Imam Aly Hindy
• “I accept that, over the years, there may have been persons, involved in questionable activities, with questionable associations, who have passed through the Centre from time to time. In my view, this in itself is not sufficient to taint the Centre in any way.
• Aly Hindy, imam of the Salaheddin Islamic Centre in Toronto, has served as a focal point for Toronto area Islamic radicals, notably the Khadr family and members of the ‘Toronto 18’ conspiracy.”

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• Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream
• Fewer native-born African American Muslims than others completely condemn al Qaeda. In addition, younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified.