The massacre of innocent people in Norwegian capital Oslo was a sad moment for that country and the world. The media quickly put the blame on Al-Qaida. But, Anders Behring Breivik, the main suspect in the bomb attacks and shootings, has been described by police as a Christian fundamentalist. Are these Christian fundamentalist a menace to our modern society?

Yeah, bloopers. Papers screamed of another (Al-Qaida) terrorist attack in headlines, but when it was announced that a Norwegian committed IT, it subsequently became only an attack.

Right-wing and religious extremist.

I find it horrible to think what have happened in the island of Utöya,
this guy have killed at least 85 young people by shooting.

People usually do not die immediately if they are shot.

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I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

The previous Christian fundamentalist terrorist attack I remember was in 1995 in Oklahoma City.
If a Creator existed I would thank Him if non-Christian fundamentalist terrorist attacks were happening no more often than once in 16 years.

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Brain-washing starts in the cradle. - Arthur Koestler

The New York Times said

Quote:

The man charged with the attacks in Oslo that killed at least 92 people left behind a detailed manifesto calling for a Christian civil war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination, officials said.

Is he crazy but morally and legally responsible for his actions or crazy and not responsible?

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Now there's no way you can prove that the universe makes sense, but there's just no fun in living in the universe if it doesn't make sense... -- Asimov

Anders Behring Breivik.
He is nothing but a cowardly murderer, a miscreant with a political agenda.
An egotistical callous self righteous individual who put himself above all the laws of humanity.
He took the lives, indiscriminately, of innocent young people.
He has taken their future, their dreams and aspirations.
He has caused untold grief among their families.
He is totally responsible for his premeditated actions, morally and legally.
This 'nothing' should pay the ultimate penalty for this hideous crime, he is far worse than any terrorist.

My thoughts and prays go out to all those affected, may they find some consolation from the fact that, the majority of the civilised world is also mourning their loss.

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RULES ARE FOR THE OBEYENCE OF FOOLS AND FOR THE GUIDENCE OF WISE MEN

I agree with the content Geeman's post and others similar. Claiming to be something is not the same as actually being it.

Matthew 7:21-23
(21)Not every one that says unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that does the will of my Father which is in heaven.
(22) Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
(23) And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, you that work iniquity.

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Job 33:15 "In a dream, in a vision of the night, When deep sleep falls upon men, In slumberings upon the bed;" Theology 101 "If He doesn't know everything then He isn't God."

Should US. citizens be concern of "tea party" followers? Yes, they hold similar views of extreme hate that may one day burst into terrorism of this nature. It's obvious!

I haven't seen, so far, anyone in this forum claiming to be a Saint.
I have seen some pretending to be better than some other, which, in Freedelfian commune, is quite ridiculous.
For me, Dreamy's chats with his God are between him and his God, and nothing to do with fundamentalist or extremist behaviour, which was, if I interpreted this thread's heading right, the topic.

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I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

GeorgeV wrote:

JJ - See topic "Personal Conversation ..." - Dreamy's contribiton of July 22, 2011 7:04:20 PM - Last sentence of 1. parag.
Two days later - topic "Saints ..."

Yes sir, every born again Christian is by biblical definition, a saint. It's a pity the word has been misappropriated by the institutional church. Behave yourselves, please.

God's people are also referred to as:

~ "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people;" - like no other(2 Peter 2:9)
~ "children of God" - with God being our Father (I John 3:1)
~ "elect" - reflects God choosing us through Jesus Christ (Colossians 3:12; Ephesians 1:3-4)
~ "members of the body of Christ" - Christ being the head (I Corinthians 12:20; Ephesians 1:22-23)
~ "citizens of the kingdom of Heaven" - God being the King (Phillipians 3:20; Colossians 1:13; Hebrews 1:8)
~ "servants" - showing our station and work (Luke 17:10)
~ "branches" - connected to the True Vine (John 15)
~ "more than conquerors" - over sin, Satan, the world,& its reproaches, afflictions, and persecutions (Romans 8:37)



A 30 second reading:

Romans 8:33-39

(33) Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifies.
(34) Who is he that condemns? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.
(35) Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
(36) As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
(37) Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.
(38) For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
(39) Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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Job 33:15 "In a dream, in a vision of the night, When deep sleep falls upon men, In slumberings upon the bed;" Theology 101 "If He doesn't know everything then He isn't God."

No. Christians here and elsewhere would do well to face the fact that this man was motivated in part by the deranged ideas you're willing to put into the heads of your own children. As,--you ought to be interested, dear reader,--countless other murderers have been. Beautiful as these sort of ideas might seem, valuable as they might be to you personally, given the fact (N.B.: fact) that the religious mindset caused the death of millions of people, and laid utter ruin to the lives of billions, you might think twice about jailbreaking your kid's brain.

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The opposite of hatred is love; the opposite of tyranny is love; the opposite of censorship is love; the opposite of evil is love; the opposite of politics is love; the opposite of war is love; the opposite of god is love.–– Salman Rushdie
Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. –Bertrand Russell
Never believe a liar. Papa, angry people burn our home.

I think you're going too far. Religion didn't teach to take someones life. As a Christian, we're taught that only GOD (the CREATOR) has the right to judge people when the time comes and we're not taught to kill. I don't know where your ideas coming from. What the Christians did to you for you to say that?

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You can do anything, but not everything. —David Allen

I can count myself among the blessed in that I live in a primarily atheist society. However not all bullshit has me been spared. My religious anti-semitic homophobic grandmother would have rejected me out of sight, as she did with other relatives of mine, had she stayed around long enough to do it. I only escaped prison, and, come to think of it, death by gas chamber by being born in the right decade. So luckily I only have to deal with general homophobia and suppression of gay culture, research, history and education. Legislation against gay adoption. The odd teen-suicide perhaps, or murder.
Aside from having myself to put up with the very most revolting opinions and lies from religious people, I am tried by friends and family being mistreated, children systematically being raped by religious officials, people being massacred by religious maniacs only for religious moderates days later to acquit religion for it, women being enslaved, complete innocents being persecuted, tortured and killed, wars being started, countless people ending up dead because of it every year.
There is no need for me to know what you think you are taught as a Christian (though I suggest you take your Bible out of its paper bag, unwrap it and begin at page one) because the effects of religion on societies are evident.

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The opposite of hatred is love; the opposite of tyranny is love; the opposite of censorship is love; the opposite of evil is love; the opposite of politics is love; the opposite of war is love; the opposite of god is love.–– Salman Rushdie
Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. –Bertrand Russell
Never believe a liar. Papa, angry people burn our home.

Good point uschbauer. But what you did say about religions was:
"Beautiful ............... given the fact (N.B.: fact) that the religious mindset caused the death of millions of people, and laid utter ruin to the lives of billions,......."

This fact seems to be trotted out on many forums which have a touch of religion bashing. I have to say this is the first time I have seen it as billions, it's usually millions.
So, just to humour my unwillingness to accept any statistic, on any topic, which exceeds 10 to the power of 4.
I am not a christian so have no axe to grind in asking this but, where is this statistic coming from? I guess that in providing any sources, you may have to separate out those killings done with the sanction of whatever religious leaders did the authorisation - from those who did it because they hijacked the belief system of a populace for their own reasons - and any other motivators - but never mind.
I'd really like to know and am not trying to trip you up as I feel from your usual posts that you are not given to exaggeration. It's solely because it keeps getting said and I can't find anybody to enlighten me - beyond the occasional pagan batting on about the mythical "burning times" which seems, incidentally, to have little basis in truth, if any.

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"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." - Schiller

It's not a statistic but an estimate. Religion has caused the suppression of women throughout history, certainly for some 2000 years. That's half the world population. There are some statistics however that can be helpful. Combine the statistics on the education and size of the Muslim world and you can work out that between one and two billion Muslims must have no education. (Look for instance here: http://www.wikiislam.net/wiki/Muslim_Statistics; http://islam.about.com/od/muslimcountries/a/population.htm; http://www.usislam.org/muslimstatistics.htm). And that's just Muslims today. What about all people ever? What about the suppression of science? The suppression of peoples? How can this not total billions of ruined lives? Wars fought, people executed, the cooperation between religious authorities and dictators, modern terrorism, bodies mutilated by the millions. Lovers torn apart and people married by their parents. Certainly millions and millions of deaths. It doesn't matter whether the misery is caused purposefully or not, whether harm is inflicted by religious authority or military figures (I don't think I see the distinction in fact). It is and has been the cause of serious harm in billions of lives.
I welcome more concrete numbers as warmly as anyone would on this side of the argument but I do not believe I'm wrong in saying that religion is the cause of extreme misery in billions and the deaths of millions.

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The opposite of hatred is love; the opposite of tyranny is love; the opposite of censorship is love; the opposite of evil is love; the opposite of politics is love; the opposite of war is love; the opposite of god is love.–– Salman Rushdie
Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. –Bertrand Russell
Never believe a liar. Papa, angry people burn our home.

Yup, I can see you feel strongly - but you've just downgraded a "fact" as you called it, to an estimate. I have no doubt of the misery of millions in this world and in history but, I'd estimate that a fair proportion would, sadly, have occurred if we took religion out of the equation. I am no apologist for religion but we need to be exact in identifying our foes if we wish to go to battle against oppression. Otherwise we risk setting up a straw man.
For example, I could argue, probably, example for example, that religion, through education, actually improved scientific progress for longer than it suppressed it. The Arab mathematicians and even Galileo, attended universities run by religious authorities. The fact that the churches (I wish I could think of a word for wider religious organisations) didn't like the results does not take away their contribution to the making of their own nemesis. I still can't get to billions through your links though and, taking millions of deaths per year of operation, Stalin and Hitler were well ahead (that is an estimate, I admit). I still state that I find organised religion has potential for more harm than good but I think that if we could somehow wave a magic wand and wipe the historic record of them, the actual enemy might be more nebulous but would still exist. I vote for a human tendency to follow anybody who voices their own prejudices - be they based in religion, science or just plain greed. On that basis I feel that teaching children to question is more vital than trying to set up any sort of prejudice per se, in their minds.

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"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." - Schiller

@intelfam:
There is nothing wrong with an estimate in principle. An estimate has no bias either way, just some uncertainty about the precise number. The fact that it happened, whatever the exact number, is what is relevant. If someone were to prove that the exact number is 1,900,000,000 and therefore not "billions" it would not matter. And it is next to completely impossible that no harm has been done. It is, as I said, subjective, therefore an exact number can never be given but that should not take away from the argument in a case of this magnitude, or of one much smaller.
If I've given the impression that by using the word "fact" I knew with absolute certainty that the number exceeds or equals two billion I'll take care not to use that word anymore. I don't believe, however, any of us knows anything with certitude and think that the word "fact" is in practice never an absolute. If it is thought that not enough evidence exist to merit the extreme severity of the effects of religion that I claimed then I can address that. The education issue alone, as it happens, might well make for the two billion (if one were really interested in it being two billion per se), given that keeping people uneducated is what religion does always and by its very nature. If one wouldn't consider that serious we can discuss what is and what isn't serious harm.

Now it is my conviction that it is wrong to fill people's heads with lies that turn out this harmful. The fact that some questionable educational institutions were once run by religious groups (who virtually always get their money and power unjustly) does not lessen my disapproval of indoctrination because, as religion's place may indeed be filled with another form of barbarism so its supposed benefits may also be replaced with a non-religious alternative. One might even play with the idea that society degrades without religion as value-upholders tend to tell us but I remember reading about at least one study that found that less religious societies were better. With schools and without Spanish Inquisitions.

As for Hitler and Stalin, both would be less capable without religion, and more importantly: they do not take away from the harm religion does. This is not a Stalin vs Church debate, and the fact that we could have a Stalin vs Church debate says much about religion.

I don't, by the way, advocate setting up prejudices in children's minds. I'm not sure if you thought that but I don't. I oppose putting deranged ideas in children's heads and lying to them. I'm all for teaching children to question. I don't know whether it's necessary, though, if they're at least not taught not to question which is an instrumental doctrine to any surviving religion. I think this problem may not be suitable to deal with at the roots because said roots are human nature. Teaching children to question is conditional on them not being raised religiously I'm afraid.

Edit: I want to share this metaphor to explain why estimates are not eo ipso untruths: say that a murder victim is found and investigators estimate by his or her wounds that he or she was stabbed several tens of times. It is completely reasonable then to say in a conversation or online debate that a murder victim was killed with several tens of stabs last night and that that is a fact. The same semantic objection can be made but is is simply not relevant because a body was lacerated so severely that it wasn't quite possible to make out how many stabs it had taken. Similarly the harm done by religion is far too vast to give a death toll but that does not take away from the obvious scale of it.

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The opposite of hatred is love; the opposite of tyranny is love; the opposite of censorship is love; the opposite of evil is love; the opposite of politics is love; the opposite of war is love; the opposite of god is love.–– Salman Rushdie
Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. –Bertrand Russell
Never believe a liar. Papa, angry people burn our home.

Yea Dreamy! Dreamy for Pope!