Fair enough... you guys carry on.. I'm gonna have a beer and chill with my wife.

Fuck this shit.

Rain Dog wrote:It is not up to you to decide how offended I have a right to be or not to be.

You're right, it's not. I should have couched that as "you APPEAR to be more offended" based on your responses. And when you come out swinging as you have, as personally as you have, I have every right to make that observation.

I am not willing to give you that luxury.

Clearly.

As to not avoiding answering my post -- BS again --- you made the time to personally attack Dagenham and try to smooth things with G-Mach by joking about baptisms etc. But questions remain unanswered.

I'm not going to justify myself to you for the order in which I respond to posts. With this and your previous comment you sound like a spoiled teenager who feels disrespected.

Dagenham and I attack each other as a matter of habit, it has become a game.

I have absolutely nothing to smooth over with the General.

I actually tried to give you a chance to climb down from your first hateful post --- but you chose to double down instead.

How very noble of you.

Evidently me standing my ground just fueled your rage and indignation even further - but honestly, weren't you looking to maintain the rage now that you've so clearly been duped by the nice guy I am every other day?

Here is an excerpt from an excellent article on the topic:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-gree ... 08761.html

Great.

I'm not going to engage with you over an online article that you feel makes your point about me. You've called me a bigot and worse, and now you want to add Islamophobe. I hear you - I'm personally very offended by your personal hater response to me, but I hear you.

Before you reply in another burst of anger and pride (about being called on your disinformation) -- perhaps you should read this article, reflect, and consider the differences in your approach to his. I am not trying to be personal here --- you really need to look at how you are presenting yourself today.

I have, repeatedly. Have you? Or as the only poster on here to advocate for Islam (to summarize you) do you now own the high ground for all time?

Credit to Dagenham for calling it early. I was taken in. He must be laughing his ass off now.

I'm sure he is.

Meanwhile the points made in my post (linked above), your sources, and Dagenham's questions about the specifics of your arrangements with CoC remain unaddressed.

Do you hear yourself? Drop some of the attitude and stop the personal attack, and I'm happy to discuss with you. Until then I'll leave you to your name calling.

You're all freaking idiots. And to the poster, I forget the name, that said the link I posted was against rape... Read it again. He admitted that there are places that permitted that law practice. Every sources saw rape as wrong it's the admitting that such laws at practices exist that was the point.

You'd be hard pressed to find in English a site that promotes it and I can't read Arabic, Dari or Pashto so I can't read those sources.

I spent to much god damn time sitting in a restaurant on my phone on this.

ALL religions are a way to control the masses. That was their point and purpose. To inject moral code into our lives. At a time in our history we needed such guidance. To be told why things should be a certain way and where the sun went every night to only emerge the next morning. To not be afraid of what went bump in the night and what we didn't understand.

My favorite thing to mention is the idea of not eating pork. That was a rule that had merit during our history. It was unhealthy to eat pork so they made laws against it, religiously. Now with mass production you could say it's unhealthy. My grandmother had pigs and when they wanted to slaughter it they deprecated it and feed it nothing but good grain and feed to flush to bad things out.

I don't have a thing against Islam, Christian, Jewish, Greek, Roman or Icelandic religions. You believe what you want and do what you want. When it hurts me or my family I have a problem with it. I have opinions about radical, in my eyes, state funded radical religious laws. But I'm not one to change that, it's beyond me.

I live my life as I see fit, not hurt others and try to show respect to others, the ones that aren't worthy of it I don't.

All hail Zeus! He's my God now and everyone who doesn't believe in my royal pantheon of Greek gods is a heretic!

StroppyChops wrote:
How very noble of you.
Evidently me standing my ground just fueled your rage and indignation even further - but honestly, weren't you looking to maintain the rage now that you've so clearly been duped by the nice guy I am every other day?

I'm not going to engage with you over an online article that you feel makes your point about me. You've called me a bigot and worse, and now you want to add Islamophobe. I hear you - I'm personally very offended by your personal hater response to me, but I hear you.

Drop some of the attitude and stop the personal attack, and I'm happy to discuss with you. Until then I'll leave you to your name calling.

Ok --- I guess we can wrap it up here.

1) You made some extremely bigoted and Islamophobic remarks and are now very upset and taking it as a personal attack that I have called you on those remarks being bigoted and Islamophobic

2) I have asked you to cite your sources and you have refused to do so. I have suggested that if you were really interested in getting into these topics I would be happy to go through them topic by topic. You just doubled down on your propaganda and ignored the offer.

3) Dagenham's queries on the specifics of your relationship with CoC remain unaddressed to this day.

4) You accuse me of "rage" (i am remarkably calm actually) and name calling for pointing out the bigoted and hateful nature of your comments yet you mock Dagenham's mental health, call him things along the lines of sad old bastard, sad git etc.

5) I tried to get you back to talking reasonably by posting you a Christian article on the topic and we can note your reply above.

I have learned a lot today but also spent too much time on this

As another prominent poster frequently says ....

Nuff Said.

General Mackevili wrote:

Rain Dog wrote:
3) Dagenham's queries on the specifics of your relationship with CoC remain unaddressed to this day.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure we'd all be interested in having this addressed.

Stroppy, understandably, seems to be a tad confused himself here. All that micro-brew drinking has caught up with him. He "says" that he aint a CofC member, but they issued him an introduction letter in order to masquerade as a "missionary" (what he himself says he is) to start teaching here. So..they don't really care if "their" missionaries are from their own church. Odd that. Do they send Baptists too?

He seems also to claim that they don't contribute even a 100 riel note toward any his "independent" effort whatsoever (materials, etc.)...yet...he needs the cover of this letter (from a fundamentalist cult - check the net for that phrase - it's not mine) to do his completely "secular" teaching. I guess I'm confused here as well...we all are I would think...

Stroopy isn't a card-carrying member, but he is a self-described Christian missionary (replete with his own 2 extra Commandments - no one on the net seems to know what the 11th and 12th ones are like our pal Stroppy does). There appear to be 10 original Old Testament Commandments and then there are dozens of other "commands" or "directions" scattered throughout the bible, but official numbers allotted past the original "10" appear to be "home-brewed", at best. The evangelicals of all stripes would, of course, loudly claim that god shouted down to "spread the word" for conversion purposes - instant Commandment #11! Surprise!

Subterfuge. The missionaries most effective tool for centuries now. And Stroppy is simply being traditional - bless the good 'ol boy for that. The truth will never emerge from the murky waters of the faithful...they don't deal in truth after all - they trade in fear of damnation in Hell and carry trinkets in baskets - always have and always will. Any method is "righteous" toward furthering the expansion of god's kingdom...

General Mackevili wrote:

Rain Dog wrote:
3) Dagenham's queries on the specifics of your relationship with CoC remain unaddressed to this day.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure we'd all be interested in having this addressed.

You mean more than this: https://cambodiaexpatsonline.com/viewtop ... 453#p14453 ?

Sure. Why not.

We're not and have never been members of the denomination called the Church of Christ. We attended a Church of Christ fellowship for four months while we were transient and preparing to leave Australia, as that was the local church.

I would be completely comfortable to be a member of the Church of Christ (Australia) - it is not related to the so-called cult that is criticized here, in the same way that the Baptist Church in Australia is a completely different and unrelated organization to, say, Southern Baptists in America.

As it seems of huge interest here, I was a Missions Director for an Apostolic congregation years ago, and we were Missions Coordinators for a Baptist congregation more recently.

The senior pastor of the Church of Christ took an interest in our personal project (free education in Cambodia) at a humanitarian level and after checking us out was happy to endorse us to the local churches in Cambodia, pray for us and bless us - this is the "commissioning as missionaries" mentioned earlier, as seen in the New Testament. It's a scriptural check and balance to make sure you don't end up with unknown self-appointed missionaries creating havoc.

No membership, no financial support. Not now, not ever.

General Mackevili wrote:

Rain Dog wrote:
3) Dagenham's queries on the specifics of your relationship with CoC remain unaddressed to this day.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure we'd all be interested in having this addressed.

Dagenham can speak for himself. When I was criticizing him for attacking stroopy too hard I suggested that rather than attack Stroppy he should ask these questions:

-- What exactly is his relationship with "Church of Christ"?

-- Do they fund him in any way?

-- Does he have any specific accountability or "Mission Objectives" related to hem?

-- Does he share the views of Church of Christ as stated on their web site? (e.g., Salvation only by Baptism)? Is he out to (or even willing to ) half drown poor, young, brown skinned, "willing" potential converts in the murky waters of the Tonle Sap?

The only reply from stroppy has been this;

"We are NOT Church of Christ members and nor do we receive (or have ever received) any funding from any source other than my severance payment from the WA State Government. The 'commissioned' part that you've got yourself hung up on constitutes the equivalent of a letter of introduction/reference from one of the national leaders, a prayer and a blessing. Not that I would be ashamed to be a Church of Christ member, the Australian form of this denomination is quite different to the cult that you've been bashing on about like some sad old hack. "

I personally have never heard of an evangelical group blessing or otherwise sponsoring missionary work without specific objectives being included. The remaining points outline above remain unaddressed.