(February 11, 2012 at 8:47 am)Epimethean Wrote: "I admire anyone with the courage of their convictions."
We differ there. I can admire conviction when it is backed by sanity and reason and not motivated by desire for mass destruction. This has no such backing, and admiring Hitler for the engineering that came of his madness is misplaced admiration, when you should be admiring those who did the engineering rather than the madman who planned to employ such things solely to destroy a race. The fucknut in this video seems to be thrilled at his conceptualization of how everyone who is not of his brand of madness will suffer for their differences. That is insanity.
Perhaps it takes insanity to be a "true" xtian, but I hope not. The zealots are nearly always the worst expression of religious diseases.
If a man does 1,000 admirable things but 10 bad things, should we condemn him for his bad things and ignore the great good he has done? Should we admire the great things and ignore the bad?
I tend to admire the good things in people and deplore the bad; recognising that we are all flawed to one degree or another. Take 'Undeceived' for example. I think it's great that he comes here to help us poor lost souls even though people are very rude to the poor misguided man. I'm sure he does a lot of harm to his children etc but the poor guy is trying to do what he thinks is right and I admire him for it. That only seems fair and I hope the people who know me personally can overlook some of the silly things I have done and recognise that I am generally a decent, honest human being with a strong sense of fairness and concern for my fellow man. Maybe you feel the same way about yourself.
What about Hitler's favourite enemy? Churchill did some monumentally stupid things, wicked things, but he is very widely admired. Fairness is the way to go for me but I accept that it doesn't suit everyone.
As to what it takes to be a Christian, a psychiatrist will describe religion as a psychogenic illness - unless they happen to be suffering from it themselves.
