Are you Christian? Ever read the Bible? Sermon on the Mount.

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However, that did not limit the carnage done in the name of Christianity either. Jews and protestant ''heretics'' and suspected heretics had some fairly unpleasant things done to them in the name of God. Nor did it prevent the harm done to the indigenous peoples of this continent. KKK members often cloak what they believe and do in terms of God's ''natural order.'' Nazis were mostly Lutheran and Catholic.

Christianity, despite its well-published ''love one another'' philosophy, has been a fairly violent religion in the past. None of these misapplications of religion speak for all of Christianity. However, there has often been a fairly vocal Christian contingent denouncing these atrocities.

Religion is good for good people and bad for bad people. It can elevate the human spirit or be used to justify the most horrendous actions against others who do not share our particular vision of the almighty. Radical Muslems are just the current bad practitioners.

(My personal favorite part of this whole thing is the *trademark* sign next to *True Christians*)

Freehold, Iowa - Landover Baptist Church members have been glued to their television sets for the last few weeks, watching survivors of God's powerful hurricane (named Katrina by secular meteorologists) try to make sense of their ravaged lives. When you live in an area of the world God despises, and He gets ready to blow it off the map, you'd best duck low or high tail it out of town, says Pastor Deacon Fred. The Bible teaches us that when it comes to wiping out sinners, God has a history of having some pretty bad aim. This time I understand He knocked down a few church steeples and even took some good Christian folks back home with Him to Jesus.

What saddens members of the Landover Baptist community the most however, is that the unsaved world is hell-bent on doling out artificial optimism to the victims of God's latest attack. They are providing food, money, gasoline, and shelter, says Pastor Deacon Fred. These are temporary gifts that give these poor lost people a false hope! The only real hope comes from the Word of God! The Holy Bible! These folks need to get fed and sheltered on the Word of God. We daresn't open our doors to the homeless, because we know it never gets at the real source of their problem, and we always end up with dirty floors.

How are the lost of Katrina going to understand why God did this to them if they don't have a Bible to read? says Pastor Deacon Fred. How are they ever going to be able to prevent it from happening to them again, if they are not able to study the Word of God? Through the Bible, history teaches us that God has serious issues with large cities that condone prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, mixing of the races, sexual promiscuity, drunkenness, idol worship, practicing false religions (voodoo), and loud pulsing music. Some of them folks in New Orleans, were luckier than Lot's wife though - they stayed behind even though they received the message to get out, and God spared their lives.

It is understandable that the survivors of God's hurricane are confused, starving, homeless, and distraught - but as True Christians� we know without a doubt in our hearts, that giving them food and shelter is not going to solve the biggest and only real problem in their lives. In fact, it will turn them into beggars and make their misery even worse. The issue that caused their condition is not an earthly condition at all. We know that it is an eternal condition, and there is only one sweet balm to soothe a lost soul who has no respect for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And that is getting a Holy Bible KJV 1611 into their hands. From what I've seen of these survivors, I doubt many of them know how to read, so we will be sending Bibles on tape for them as well, says Pastor Deacon Fred. They can play the Bible tapes on the boom boxes it looks like they made it a priority to salvage or loot.

Landover Baptist's effort to assist in providing Bibles to victims of Hurricane Katrina is known as a, faith-based response. It is our heartfelt hope that some worthwhile people might be saved from a destruction much more powerful than God's hurricanes - for they are but a precursor to what is really going to happen on that great and glorious day when He finally gets so ticked-off He just blows up the whole world.

So help us by sending a spiritual relief offering of no less than $100 (we do not accept checks, so please send cash, or money order) to:

BIBLES FOR HURRICANE VICTIMS
Landover Baptist Ministries
777 Soulwinner's Lane
Freehold, Iowa

If you are paying by credit card, please address your payment to:
Wexler Offshore Holdings - Care of Landover Baptist Ministries

Each $100 gift will absorb the cost of printing and recording *Bibles, and packaging.

*Disclaimer: If Landover Baptist receives reports that hurricane victims are using the pages of our Bibles are for hygienic purposes, such as toilet paper, we reserve the right to end this faith-based response effort immediately.

An Easter Sermon

Jesus knew viral marketing.

In the Gospel of Mark, the disciple John complains that nondisciples are selling bootlegged copies of Jesus� miraculous powers. �Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.�

Jesus tells John to quit obsessing about the intellectual property and to focus on getting the brand out. �Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.� Jesus adds, �Whoever is not against us is for us.�

Fast-forward two millennia. Weeks after 9/11, George Bush says roughly the opposite. His famous �You�re either with us or against us� means that those who don�t follow his lead will be considered enemies. The rest is history. Today, Jesus has more than a billion devoted followers. Mr. Bush has ... well, fewer than that.

The religious left � yes, there is such a thing � complains that Mr. Bush ignores the Bible�s moral injunctions. But leave morality aside. If he could just match the Bible�s strategic savvy, that would make a world of difference.

Consider a teaching of Jesus that seems on its surface devoid of strategic import. �You have heard that it was said, �You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.� But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.�

Christians often cast this verse as innovative, a sharp break from Jesus� Jewish tradition. But the same idea can be found in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), and here it is clear that the point of the kindness is to thwart the enemy: �If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; for you will heap coals of fire on their heads.�

Coals of fire? As the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible explain, submitting to this treatment was an Egyptian ritual that �demonstrated contrition.� (And how!) �The sense here seems to be that undeserved kindness awakens the remorse and hence conversion of the enemies.�

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn�t. It�s unlikely that sending Osama bin Laden a Hallmark card would induce paroxysms of self-doubt. Still, there are other ways that reining in hatred can hurt your enemy�s cause.

Suppose, for example, you were nurturing a nascent religious movement in the Roman Empire, and your antagonists welcomed excuses to harass you. Suppose, that is, you were the Apostle Paul. When Paul preaches kindness to enemies, he uses not the formulation found in the Gospels, but the one from the Hebrew Bible, complete with the coals of fire.

Of course, Mr. Bush is more in the shoes of the Roman emperor than of Paul. America isn�t a small but growing religious movement. It�s a great power threatened by a small but growing religious movement � radical Islam. But the logic can work both ways. Great powers, by mindlessly indulging retributive impulses, can give fuel to small but growing religious movements. If you want to deprive jihadists of ammunition, make it hard for them to persuade others to hate us.

Right after Paul espouses kindness to enemies, he adds: �Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.� Sounds like na�ve moralizing until you look at those Abu Ghraib photos that have become Al Qaeda recruiting posters.

The key distinction is between man and meme. Yes, a great power can always kill and torment enemies, and, yes, there will always be times when that makes sense. Still, when you�re dealing with terrorists, it�s their memes � their ideas, their attitudes � that are Public Enemy No. 1. Jihadists are hosts for the virus of hatred, and the object of the game is to keep the virus from finding new hosts.

The Internet is fertile ground for memes, and jihadists are good at getting the brand out. One of the few things Osama bin Laden has in common with the Jesus of the Gospels is belief in the power of viral marketing.

The ultimate in viral marketing was Jesus� ultimate sacrifice. Deemed a threat to the social order, he was crucified under Roman auspices. But the Romans forgot one thing: If you face a small but growing movement that threatens the imperial order, you shouldn�t attack the men in ways that help the memes.

Mr. Bush says his favorite philosopher is Jesus. One way to show it would be to spend less time repeat- ing the mistake of the Romans and more time heeding the wisdom of Christ.

_________________

Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv.

I was reading on ABC.com and found this article in the comments section. I don't know much about the Huffington Post, so this may be taken with a grain of salt. I thought it was interesting though.

Meet The (White) Man Who Inspired Wright's Controversial Sermon
Sam Stein
The Huffington Post
March 21, 2008

Meet the man who inspired Reverend Jeremiah Wright's now famous tirade about America's foreign policy inciting the terrorist attacks of September 11.

His name is Ambassador Edward Peck. And he is a retired, white, career U.S. diplomat who served 32-years in the U.S. Foreign Service and was chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq under Jimmy Carter -- hardly the black-rage image with which Wright has been stigmatized.

In fact, when Wright took the pulpit to give his post-9/11 address -- which has since become boiled down to a five second sound bite about "America's chickens coming home to roost" -- he prefaced his remarks as a "faith footnote," an indication that he was deviating from his sermon.

"I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday," Wright declared. "He was on Fox News. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true: America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Wright then went on to list more than a few U.S. foreign policy endeavors that, by the tone of his voice and manner of his expression, he viewed as more or less deplorable. This included, as has been demonstrated in the endless loop of clips from his sermon, bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuking "far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye."

"Violence begets violence," Wright said, "hatred begets hatred, and terrorism begets terrorism."

And then he concluded by putting the comments on Peck's shoulders: "A white ambassador said that yall, not a black militant, not a reverend who preaches about racism, an ambassador whose eyes are wide open and is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice... the ambassador said that the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have, but they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them... let me stop my faith footnote right there."

So it seems that while Wright did believe American held some responsibility for 9/11, his views, which have been described as radically outside the political mainstream, were actually influenced by a career foreign policy official.

Who is Peck? The ambassador, who has offered controversial criticism of Israeli policy in the West Bank but also warned against the Iraq War, was lecturing on a cruise ship and was unavailable for comment. But officials at Peck's former organization, the Council for the National Interest, a non-profit group that advocates reducing Israel's influence on U.S. Middle East policy, offered descriptions of the man.

"Peck is very outspoken," said Eugene Bird, who now heads CNI. "He is also very good at making phrases that have a resonance with the American people. When he came off of that Fox News, a few days later he said they would never invite me back again."

And what, exactly, did Peck say in that Fox News interview that inspired Wright's words?

Here are some quotes from an appearance the Ambassador made on the network on October 11, 2001, which may or may not have been the segment Wright was referring to. On the show, Peck said he thought it was illogical to tie Saddam Hussein to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and that while the then-Iraqi leader had "some very sound and logical reasons not to like [the United States]," he and Osama bin Laden had no other ties.

From there, Peck went on to ascribe motives for what prompted the 9/11 attacks. "Stopping the economic embargo and bombings of Iraq," he said, "things to which Osama bin Laden has alluded as the kinds of things he doesn't like. He doesn't think it's appropriate for the United States to be doing, from his perspective, all the terrible things that he sees us as having been doing, the same way Saddam Hussein feels. So from that perspective, they have a commonality of interests. But they also have a deeply divergent view of the role of Islam in government, which would be a problem."