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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Law and Christianity (sort of)
Message-ID: <3882@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Mar-85 23:43:58 EST
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.3882
Posted: Thu Mar  7 23:43:58 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Mar-85 02:57:57 EST
References: <399@terak.UUCP> <1038@reed.UUCP>
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Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
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In article <1038@reed.UUCP> ellen@reed.UUCP (Ellen Eades) writes:

>> What happened to you was pretty unfortunate but is there any Biblical
>> basis for saying that what they did to you was Christian? 
>
>     I'm afraid that there is Biblical basis, and Laura is not alone
>in her experience.  "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off."
>"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."  "Spare the rod and
>spoil the child."  More subtly, one of my closest friends was
>driven out of school by the refusal of faculty and thesis
>advisor to believe that she was "academically serious" after she
>revealed her paganism.

    Biblical, maybe, but only under a very seriously deficient scheme of
interpretation.  "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" comes from Exodus
(Chap. 22 if I remember correctly); "Spare the rod" is Proverbs.  Both of
these, being OT, are not binding upon gentile christianity-- and besides,
we are supposed to observe the SPIRIT of the law, which is mercy, not
vengeance.  As for "If thy hand offends thee", it most explicitly does NOT
say "If thy neighbor's hand offends thee, cut it off"!  The statement is
with reference to one's own conduct.

>> Christians never gave up witch burning.  They never did it in the first
>> place.  If you will take the time to do some research into the Salem witch
>> burnings, you will learn that the actual witches got off scot free. 
>> David
>
>     Uhhh...the nine million or so European women who died in the
>Roman Catholic Inquisition were killed because they were
>suspected witches.  The Roman Catholics of the 1100s to the
>1500s were the only Christian church in Europe.  When the
>Protestant movement arose in Germany and spread across the
>Continent and to Britain, it was the Calvinists (Presbyterians)
>of Scotland, also Christians, who devised some of the most
>bloody and brutal tortures and murders of suspected witches.
>The Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, was authored by
>Jesuit priests.

'Fraid she's right.  Yet another entry in the heavy ledger of crimes
committed in Jesus' name.

>     As far as I'm concerned, if a person claims to be a
>Christian, he/she is.  God may disagree, but since I have less
>data to go on, I cannot go around saying one man is a Christian
>and another is not;  what standards have I?  And if an
>inquisitor claims to burn witches, it doesn't matter if he kills
>old widows, three-year-old girls, or pregnant wives;  he is a
>witch-burner.  

>     And if I claim to be a witch, if I stand up to be counted
>among the priestesses of the Mother Goddess, I may well be
>burned even today, because of the intolerance of some who claim
>to be Christian.  And the person who lays a hand on me in the
>name of his deity will be cursed in the name of mine.  

So be it.  Most likely his own deity will do the honors.

Charley Wingate    umcp-cs!mangoe