XPost: talk.philosophy.humanism   
   From: daeron@some.net   
      
   Saw this message posted at a Church,   
    "If I say I have Faith and do nothing,   
     then I have nothing"   
      
    So what do other people think of this message?   
      
    Is a person's faith fictional if they are not willing to put   
   faith into action?   
      
    And should people pick & chose which problems they prefer to   
   address? Or should they first attend to those problems which   
   they are responsible for, or which are in their own back yard?   
    Is helping with child care as important as stopping your   
   neighbor being tortured, murdered, or worse?   
      
    Should people worry about Sudan on the other side of the planet   
   **when** 100 to 400 thousand people have been killed in the   
   country next door;   
    or worse have been tortured & killed by people paid with your   
   tax money?   
      
    Which issue is more urgent? Sudan or Bosnia or Ethiopia, or the   
   latest media fade of the month? Are their half million dead   
    worth more than the half million killed in West Papua and the   
   Maluccas islands? Are Papuans worth less because they are   
   black, or because they are called "primative"?   
      
    Or is  it bad manners to tell the Indonesian government &   
   military that it is rude to shoot people or rape their women   
   and dump the bodies a month later when the troops are finished   
   using them. ?   
      
    West Papua is part of the Australian contintent, and yet   
   Americans (so called friends) have been paying US taxes for the   
   US military Aid that funds the Indonesian troops who've been   
   raping and murdering these people for forty years;   
    US companies like Freeport McMoRan ( www.fcx.com ) have been   
   caught payng $5.6m/year under the table to local Indonesian   
   military to shoot any locals who try to return to their   
   homelands, yet two years later the company still pays for this   
   service, and US taxes still pay for training & arming the   
   troops of Indonesia whose only task is to suppress the   
   populations of the various countries which want to be out of   
   Indonesian occupation;   
    in East Timor the population paid a heavy price for being   
   allowed to vote in an Independednce Plebiscite, yet, that is   
   all that the Papuan and Acehnese and Maoluccasian, the Manado   
   and Minahasa people, and the Dayaks and Melayus people, want;   
    so, what is the Christian thing to do?   
      
    Can people call themselves Christian while remaining silent   
   about the hundreds of thousands killed and more being tortured   
   with the US money paying for this? Denying these people a chance   
   to vote for their independence?   
      
    Answers?   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)