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From: kriz@skat.usc.edu (Dennis Kriz)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Is There Biblical Justification For Capital Punishment?
Message-ID: <Feb.9.02.33.29.1990.20316@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 9 Feb 90 07:33:32 GMT
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Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
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In article <9827@dime.cs.umass.edu> yodaiken@dime.cs.umass.edu (Victor Yodaiken) writes:

Concerning Bernardin's "Seamless Garment" or not ... there's quite a bit
that needs to be done within the Christian tradition for it to live up to
its call of treating everyone in the way Christ had commanded:
"even as you do onto the least of my brothers and sisters, you do onto me"

>Role of women:
>(I Timothy 3 11-15)
>
>Hatred the Christians have heaved upon the Jews:
>(Epistle of Paul to Titus, 10)
>(Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians 14)
>
>Homosexuality:
>(Romans 1, 26)

>And even slavery (I Peter 2, 18):
>	"Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only
>	to the good and gentle, but also to the froward"
>
>victor


And so it seems we come up to a basic contradiction :-)

And so you call and say:

"Yo Church, you are called to love, you take so much pride in the call...
but what of all these citations from your "own book" ... where do you 
*really* wish to stand?"

You'll see a lot of squirming but eventually you'll get the perhaps (or
perhaps not) grudging agreement that there's no way to "love everyone
and judge no one" and yet hate/oppress so many people.  And that a basic
choice is going to have to be made to remove this contradiction.

You will have started perestroika-ing the Christian tradition... ;-)


But in fairness, you'll see many Christians agreeing with you from the
start.  The abolishionist movement came about from exactly this kind of
re-evaluation:

Sure the Bible says nothing explicitely negative about the institution of
slavery ... but how can one treat the "least among us" as one would "Christ"
and allow slavery to continue?

The rest was about a century of history...

dennis
kriz@skat.usc.edu