Giving Religion A Bad Name

Christianity first : From Fundies Say The Darnedest Things and a post dated 9th April 2007:

"Has anyone heard of Linux? It’s a new kind of Windows, but it’s free. I’ve read up on it, and it seems that it’s created and supported by ultra-liberals. Its creator, Richard Stallman, is even a satanist.

They call themselves “hackers”, and their aim is to destroy every big company, everything that is conservative. I can’t tolerate this sort of persecution. The LORD himself was a conservative and he was nailed to a tree for it. It won’t be long before all of us are crucified too if Linux succeeds."

The Stupid... it Burns...

But really, such insanity in relatively harmless. I doubt that even a million people take it seriously, though I could be wrong. The point is, even those who think Linus Thorvald is one of the Spawn of Satan don't actually attempt to kidnap him and burn him at the stake.

The worst, the most evil things done in the name of Christ are usually done to one's own family. Case in point: Dr Jack Hyles. Much of what he says is good sense, giving children responsibility over money at an early age, for example. Yet much of the morality is taught as conditioned reflex. Thought is actively discouraged. At best, the tract is humourless

One of the most important things a child should be taught is to be cheerful at home since cheerfulness and cleanliness are both contagious. We must be careful to affect others properly with our personalities. A child should be taught to laugh. (Of course, this should also be done with propriety and temperance.) Laughter makes one more healthy. It causes the heart to beat faster and sends the blood bounding through the body. When a person laughs, respiration is increased, the eye brightens, the chest expands, bad air is forces out of the lungs, the internal organs are caused to vibrate, etc. Laughter has a good effect on the liver and gastric juices.

At worst...

Sometimes spanking should leave stripes on the child. Proverbs 20:30 says, "The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil; so do stripes the inward parts of the belly." Our natural man rebels a such punishment, but we are reminded in I Corinthians 2:14 that the natural man cannot understand the things of the Spirit. Hence, we have to trust the God Who knows more than we and obey Him.
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During the formative years, yea, the infant years, the child should be spanked. As soon as his is old enough to walk away from his parents he should be spanked if he does not walk where they say he should walk.
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The spanking should be a ritual. No mother or father should jerk the child up and in a fit of temper administer a spanking. In fact, no punishment should ever be given in a fit of temper. The ritual should be deliberate and last at least ten or fifteen minutes. (In the long run time will be saved using this method.) It should be a ritual dreaded by the child. He should not only dread the pain but the time consumed in the ordeal.
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Deuteronomy 21:18-21, "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that when they have chastened him, will not harken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shall thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."

This is not to say that same thing should be done in this dispensation.,

I was beginning to wonder. Though he doesn't say it's forbidden, merely not compulsory.

Require strict obedience. This obedience should always be immediate, instant, without question or argument. What the father says do, the son does. He does it well, he does it immediately, and he does it without argument. The parents allow no exceptions to the rule. Hence, obedience is the law of the land and the child should not deem it necessary to have an explanation for the orders he has received from his parents. Many unconverted psychologists say that the parents should always take time to explain to the child why he should do certain things and that parents should never command a child to do something without the child knowing the reason. Nothing could be further from the truth! The parents should not have to convince the child the logic behind their orders. This same thing transferred into adult life will bring anarchy to a society.

Sieg Heil! And no, I'm not joking, this is exactly what Fuehrerprinzip is all about. Mindless obedience to Authority.

To be sure, all good Christian men want submissive, feminine, ladylike, and godly wives.
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Teach her strict obedience. Other chapters stress the fact that obedience is the most necessary ingredient to be required from the child. This is especially true in the life of a girl, for she must be obedient all of her life. The boy who is obedient to his mother and father will someday become the head of the home; not so for the girl. Whereas the boy is being trained to be a leader, the girl is being trained to be a follower. Hence, obedience is far more important to her, for she must someday transfer it from her parents to her husband.

This means that she should never be allowed to argue at all. She should become submissive and obedient. She must obey immediately, without question, and without argument. The parents who require this have done a big favor for their future son-in-law.

By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them, and now listen to what the Fundamentalist Biblical Evangelist had to say about Dr Hynes and those he taught. This was after he'd been caught defrauding hundreds of thousands of dollars, in adultery, and his well-brought-up preacher son being prime suspect of the torture death of a 15 month old infant under his care. Read it, and weep:

In our electronic age there are many web sites, we understand, dedicated to exposing Dr. Hyles. May their tribe be multiplied. Unfortunately, those we have seen have little more to offer than what the sponsors gleaned from our past articles – and few of them give any credit to their sources. Alas, some didn't even get the facts straight. We are not complaining about their use of our material – we merely wish they would be accurate in what they publish. As for me, I am just glad the message is getting out. Hopefully, many lives and ministries will be saved as a result.

Unfortunately, the same sordid story is still going on. Out of many, many examples we could give, here is just one fruit of the Hyles mentality and practice, something we published in our May-June 2000 issue of The Biblical Evangelist. It will probably remind you of the David and Brenda Hyles situation with little Brent Stevens. This was the editorial:

ANOTHER TRAGIC HYLES FALL-OUT!

We consign this terrible tragedy to the Hyles syndrome because, for one thing, the man in question was formerly head of the Hyles-Anderson College Bible Department and billed by Dr. Jack Hyles as the greatest Bible teacher in Christendom, or words to that effect. For another thing, he is a Hyles clone, the man who testified publicly that he sometimes, in petitioning deity, catches himself praying, “Dear Brother Hyles” – a matter which may not miss the mark all that much for many of the Hammond elite. His name is Joe Combs and until recently he was pastor of the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Bristol, Tennessee (now defunct).

This sad story began in 1977 when Joe and Evangeline Lopez Combs, unable to conceive children, decided to adopt a son. Evidently they were pleased and the following year the couple went to what is now the Baptist Children’s Home and Family Ministries, Inc., in nearby Valparaiso, Indiana – a highly respected organization on the approved list of social agencies at the time for the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches – and selected a beautiful 4-month old girl. They signed an adoption agreement and took custody of her, naming her Esther Alice Evangeline Combs. (Strangely, the womb was then opened and the couple produced four biological children.) So far, so good.

Alas, this beautiful story ends right there. The Combses made that precious soul their personal slave and subjected her to a life of horror and abuse – physical, mental, emotional and social – one that ended only when she went to authorities in Georgia and told her tale, bringing to termination nearly two decades of horror. (She had been sent to that State to live with Joe’s brother and his family because Tennessee police had filed a petition for guardianship on Esther – and for the first time in her life she discovered living.)

A life of horror for Esther? Let me count some of the ways.

Å° Her earliest memory was of being thrown down the stairs while strapped in her high chair.

Å° At age 3 or 4, after accidentally dropping a spoon in a pot of hot oatmeal, her hands were burned when Mrs. Combs made her dig it out.

Å° Accused by siblings of jumping on a bed, Mrs. Combs hurled her against the wall and knocked out two front teeth, which were hurriedly placed back in their sockets and grew oddly spaced and crooked.

Å° On one occasion, in a fit of temper, Mrs. Combs threw a shoe at her, hitting her in the head and opening a bloody cut. Evangeline promptly sewed it up with needle and thread, then referred to the scars as “her marks of the beast.”

Å° She was beaten with a hose for falling asleep in church.

Å° Esther was treated as a slave for the rest of the family her entire life, told by the Combses that this was God’s purpose for her life. When she didn’t finish her duties on time, she was beaten.

Å° Over the years she was burned with a curling iron, beaten with a baseball bat, and tortured in other ways. Altogether, there were 410 scars on the poor girl’s body, all documented and charted by the prosecution for the jury!

Å° While the other children were home schooled, she rarely got to attend. When a baby sitter taught her to write her name, Esther was beaten and the greatest Bible teacher in Christendom told her that Jesus didn’t learn to read and write until He was 12 years old, and she shouldn’t either. By the way, this girl and another sitter testified that they suspected abuse, but were afraid of this highly revered Bible professor. The other girl did report her misgivings to the school president, but no action was taken. (The policy is, you may recall, If I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen; even if I did see it, I was probably mistaken; and even if I did see it and wasn’t mistaken, someone else had to have seen it in order to confirm that I saw it!)

Å° As a teen-ager, Combs bound a rope around her neck, then draped her over his back, cutting off her air supply until she passed out.

Å° It was also as a teen-ager that the greatest Bible teacher in Christendom raped her repeatedly, usually on church property (where they were living).

Å° Esther said Mrs. Combs repeatedly pulled chunks of her flesh out with a pair of pliers.

Å° On at least two occasions Esther ran away from home, not getting far either time and each time brought back by police – when she was severely beaten for her actions.

Å° Finally, as a legal teen-age adult, desperate and unhappy, she decided to end her life by drinking antifreeze. She was found unconscious and rushed by ambulance to an area hospital and the seeds for ending the abuse were planted. Physicians found layers of scar tissue from wounds and fractures than had not healed properly. She had no birth certificate, no school records, no medical records, and no Social Security. Because the frightened girl denied being abused, she was returned to the horror house, but a few months later the police filed their petition for guardianship.

Prosecutor Barry Staubus summed it up well: “Esther lived as a broken person, devastated by physical, verbal, psychological and sexual abuse without any other family… and deprived of self-worth.”

Is the above true? I would certainly be interested in someone explaining those 410 scars on Esther’s body in any other way! The jury concluded both were guilty on 15 of 16 charges (Judge Jerry Beck had dismissed four charges earlier, agreeing with the defense that the prosecution had not filed them in time – not that the pair was innocent of them) and the verdicts certainly pointed to their guilt. (By the way, the fact that the jury only deliberated four hours indicates the panel thought the evidence was overwhelming.) The only acquittal came on the charge against Mrs. Combs of aggravated assault, which her husband had committed but during which she had stood passively by and hence permitted and condoned.

Joseph Combs was found guilty on 11 counts, namely, charges of especially aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, aggravated perjury, aggravated rape, and 7 other counts of rape. The jury imposed fines totally $240,000. Evangeline Combs was found guilty on 6 counts, namely, charges of especially aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, and 4 counts of aggravated child abuse. The jury levied $150,000 in fines against her. The actual sentencing was scheduled for April 25th (past our deadline for reporting) and, if sentences ran consecutively instead of concurrently, “the greatest Bible teacher in Christendom” could get 144 years in the slammer and Mrs. Combs 73 years. It is our conviction that neither should ever see the outside of a prison wall again, but we are enough of a realist to know that American jurisprudence in our day and age doesn’t work that way.

The big surprise to us was that the “great American emancipator of preachers from sin’s penalties,” Jack Hyles, didn’t fly to Tennessee and testify for the Combses, trying to get them off the hook – as he has done for so many others over the years. Perhaps he realized there was too much evidence for even him to offset in this case.

Now I am not a Christian, I don't consider myself worthy of that name. I lack faith, and I don't accept Jesus as my personal saviour. But I do know this : that those who can commit such acts, without repenting of them, are not Christian either. They may know the KJV forwards, backwards and sideways, but they Do Not Get It. Christ's Message.

For wholesale violence though, torture, slavery, conquest and Murder in God's name, you have to go to Islam now. Yes, they're not part the majority, but the minority is large enough for anyone who is not a Muslim to reach for a weapon for self-defence.



A partial transcript:

They want Islam to become Love and Peace. No my dear Muslim Brothers, Islam come to Dominate the World!...
Terrorism is part and parcel of Islam...
Offensive Jihad.. to Conquer, to establish the authority of the Sharia.
Mohammed... took part in 27 battles.. and all offensive Jihads!
All offensive Jihads, and we should follow them.
You may say to yourself no no no they are innocent. No Kuffar is Innocent! Innocence.. is only for the Muslims.
Kill him! And take his money, and his property! And kill them because they are Kuffar!

And according to a spokesman for the Muslim Public Affair Commission, he is not an extremist. And his arrest "does not go down well in the Muslim community".

Where the arrest of the unspeakable Combs pair was not just welcomed by the Christian community, they felt a deep sense of shame that one of their own could pervert Christ's teachings into such Evil. And felt some degree of expiation when the pair were punished.