wilkes

I KNEW YOU COULDN'T DO IT. THEORY THING YOU CAN DO IS TRY AND SKATE AROUND SOMETHING WHENYOU GET YOUR *** CAUGHT.

And I'm waiting on you.

WHAT WAS ASKED AT 12:40 IS STILL WAITING ON YOU.

Please go ahead. I'm not skeered.

BECAUSE I WANT TO MAKE YOU OUT TO BE THE LYING FOOL THAT YOU ARE.

ANYTHING ELSE?

Why do you want to know?

SPARKY, YOU A CHRISTIAN?

WHAT DOES MATTHEW 5:44 SAY?

You are welcome to love the Muslims

I just popped in for a few minutes of reading so have no intention of getting into argument ... Religion does not make anyone more moral, freedom loving, etc.

The general hatred for Muslims should be proof of that

Well unless the only religion you speak of is Christianity

Sure you have.

YES I HAVE READ IT. IT WAS REQUIRED READING IN COLLEGE.

YOU KNOW, IT IS WISE TO STUDY ONES ADVERSARIES.

Elmo, I am not struggling.

What I do see in all our conversations is a strong connection between anti religion, anti morality, anti freedom and anti capitalist ideas. The corollary is also true.

So, you haven't read it either.

Read this, then from victimsofcommunism.org:

As part of atheistic education, communist states published and widely disseminated counter-Christian literature. In Romania, the work of perhaps the greatest Romanian writer, Sadoveanu, The Lives of Saints, was re-published as, The Legend of Saints.

Significantly, communists did not merely try to block or halt religious faith but to reverse it. This was particularly true for Romania, even before the Nicolai Ceausescu era. This meant not just forbidding religious practice and jailing ministers and believers but employing torture to force them to renounce their faith. It was not enough to contain, silence, even punish believers in prison; it was decided they must be tortured in truly unimaginably degrading ways to attempt to undo religious faith.

One of the best sources on how communists went through extraordinary pains to reverse belief is Richard Wurmbrand, a pastor who endured 14 years of earthly **** in a Romanian prison. He later detailed some of the cruelty he witnessed in testimony before the U.S. Congress and in his famous Tortured for Christ, first published in 1967. Here are a few passages from Wurmbrand's gripping book:

Thousands of believers from churches of all denominations were sent to prison at that time. Not only were clergymen put in jail, but also simple peasants, young boys and girls who witnessed for their faith. The prisons were full, and in Romania, as in all communist countries, to be in prison means to be tortured�

A pastor by the name of Florescu was tortured with red-hot iron pokers and with knives. He was beaten very badly. Then starving rats were driven into his cell through a large pipe. He could not sleep because he had to defend himself all the time. If he rested a moment, the rats would attack him.

He was forced to stand for two weeks, day and night�. Eventually, they brought his fourteen-year-old son to the prison and began to whip the boy in front of his father, saying that they would continue to beat him until the pastor said what they wished him to say. The poor man was half mad. He bore it as long as he could, then he cried to his son, "Alexander, I must say what they want! I can't bear your beating anymore!" The son answered, "Father, don't do me the injustice of having a traitor as a parent. Withstand! If they kill me, I will die with the words, �Jesus and my fatherland'." The communists, enraged, fell upon the child and beat him to death, with blood spattered over the walls of the cell. He died praising God. Our dear brother Florescu was never the same after seeing this. 11

Wurmbrand recalled story after story about the torture he witnessed. He not only saw torture of his fellow believers but also experienced it himself. His captors carved him in a dozen separate parts of his body. They burned 18 holes in him. Among the many forms of torture he endured was the "refrigerator cell"�a large frozen icebox. The believer would be locked inside with little or no clothing. Prison doctors would peer through an opening until they saw symptoms of freezing to death, then they would signal the guards, who would rush in and defrost the victims. They would be thawed and then re-frozen within minutes of death. This process was repeated.

All of this, of course, took considerable effort by the captors. "What the communists have done to Christians surpasses � human understanding," wrote Wurmbrand. "I have seen communists whose faces while torturing believers shone with rapturous joy. They cried out while torturing the Christians, �We are the devil!'" He called communism "a force of evil" that could only be countered by a greater spiritual force, "the Spirit of God." He added:

The communist torturers often [told me], "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish." I heard one torturer say, "I thank God in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."

In his May 1966 testimony before the Internal Security Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate, Wurmbrand described crucifixion at the hands of communists. Christians were tied to crosses for four days and nights. That was bad enough. But the communists were imaginative, and sought to ensure that those crucified would suffer greater humiliation than Christ himself:

The crosses were placed on the floor and hundreds of prisoners had to fulfill their bodily necessities over the faces and bodies of the crucified ones. Then the crosses were erected again and the communists jeered and mocked: "Look at your Christ! How beautiful he is! What fragrance he brings from heaven!"� [A]fter being driven nearly insane with tortures, a priest was forced to consecrate human excrement and urine and give Holy Communion to Christians in this form. This happened in the Romanian prison of Pitesti. I asked the priest afterward why he did not prefer to die rather than participate in this mockery. He answered, "Don't judge me, please! I have suffered more than Christ!" All the biblical descriptions of **** and the pains of Dante's Inferno are nothing in comparison with the tortures in communist prisons.

This is only a very small part of what happened on one Sunday and on many other Sundays in the prison of Pitesti. Other things simply cannot be told. My heart would fail if I should tell them again and again. They are too terrible and obscene to put in writing�

If I were to continue to tell all the horrors of communist tortures and all the self-sacrifices of Christians, I would never finish.

We see here an almost unbelievable dedication by communists to reverse and undo belief. This involved not only extraordinary abuse but also state attention. The fact that the communist state devoted so much time and effort shows its remarkable devotion�ironically, an almost religious devotion�to the goal of eliminating religious faith. It also reflected the communist conviction that religion truly was an incompatible threat to Marxism-Leninism.

PERHAPS YOU CAN PICK A COPY OF IT UP AND READ IT. I'M NOT GOING TO DO THE WORK FOR YOU.

Perhaps you would be kind enough to quote the relevant portions.

ELMO, IF SPARKY HAD READ THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" HE WOULD HAVE KNOWN THIS.

No it's not a package deal. That is you struggling to be right.

It's a package deal.

Communism is a political/social/economic philosophy. If atheism is a result fine, but it's not based on a religion or lack of religion

START STATING YOUR FACTS THEN.