Jimmy Carter Leaves Church Over Treatment of Women

I applaud President Carter! Catholic and fundamental "Christian" churches have taught repugnant theology for years! They totally miss the mark on so many issues! Christ would leave most churches today in disgust over the abuse of the Bible being taught as his gospel in his name! Christ was so liberating, radical, inclusive, tolerant! He was found repugnant by the Jews and Pharisees! Their legalism is a major reason for his murder/crucifixion!

My bottom line of all the bottom lines is that Osama bin Laden is directly responsible for more Muslim deaths than any Muslim or non Muslim in history during the 1,400 years since Islam began.
Very few of us would disagree with me that if that piece of waste matter hadn't destroyed the World Trade Center, there would have been no Iraq war. On two ocassions he admitted openly that he was the one who set the Twin Towers bombing in motion.
All the other dead Muslims are the responsibility of Mr. Laden also. He is the evil devil pig (to all pigs...I am sorry). Again, Mr. bin Laden is an evil devil pig.
Do you hear me Mr. Osama bin Laden? You killed more Islamic people than anyone in history. You are the wet bloody rectum of a pig. You were only surpassed by other famous murderers like Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, but they still did not kill as many Muslims as your crap self did.
Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot were all big shot heroes in the minds of some of their followers also. Like with them, the world will look back at you i history and remember you as the garbage who killed more Islamic people than anyone in history.

Oh P.S planning military operations is something I helped do in S-3 Headquarters Company of the first Battalion 13th Infantry. You both know nothing of such infantry operations and the break down of the invasion that lead to the insurgency is the responsibility of the invading army whoever that was. And when the Iraq civilians started looting and field Marshall Donald Von Rumsfeild said that was democracy you could see how this was going to end badly. Shame on you for saying we had no part of the deaths of all these innocent Iraq's. It was our responsibility as being that invading army.

Here's something you don't know akamail and Abraham99. When this invasion was first conceived and initiated from a military stand point and the civilian leadership that said we would be greeted as liberators and handed flowers and chocolates. The leadership our leadership said there had never been a record of Sunni vs shiite in Iraq's history and in the zeal to get to Bagdad if you friggin remember we drove right by ammo dumps that should have been guarded by our troops so they wouldn't have been used later to make car bombs and to arm the insurgency, oh because this well thought out invasion should have had 500,000 troops at the very least to secure such things. But your brilliant Republican administration didn't do the responsible things in planning and against the advice of generals that knew better. So you can if it helps clear your feelings of guilt try and blame all the needless killing on the Iraq's themselves or fess up to the irresponsibility of the Bush Administration and their careless planning. The blood of thousands of U.S. serviceman are also on these assholes hands.

I won't forget the thousands and thousands murdered on purpose by "insurgents"("insurgents" is the code name for coward murderers) who were slaughtered in a few car bombings and a few suicide bombings every day. I remember in the beginning, it was shocking to hear how people who were just minding their own business while shopping in the marketplace, were blown up. In the beginning it was 40 or 50 per day, and then they started killing 100 or 200 each day. But then, when it turned into months and years, most of us just stopped looking or counting.
Those are casualties that I will not attribute to our soldiers. No, no. Those were done by sleazy, low, gutter snipe, coward, murderers who never fought people who could fight back. Of course, they had the usual $25,000.00 incentive and the usual, "You're going to get the 72 sixteen year old virgins in heaven" speeches.
Yes, plenty of casualties, but a large amount were Muslims who killed Muslims.
Today, the same crap goes on, except now they don't murder so many in Iraq. Today they do their murdering in Afghanistan and in Iran and in Thailand and the Phillipines and Pakistan, India,Yemen, Syria and other sweet places where the religion of love dominates.
Let's not forget that Jimmy Carter knows that the apartheid Zionists do all the murders, while the poor, innocent, kind and peace loving Palestinians just sit and get killed.

Abe - I've noticed that your first post here with the financial dealings of Carter went un-noticed and un-acknowledged. I am glad to see you re-posted the info - but the libtards don't deal well with the facts.

READ Abe's post - genius!!! And then if you still want to worship this dried out, completely corrupt asshole - go ahead and pray to him. Abe's facts are just that - facts. If you approve of this type of a behaviour for anyone - and especially a former US president - then you deserve the new carter we got - Carter 2.0...

Marilynn_Murray, Sometimes when people do not respond or acknowledge, one repeats one's self. Yes, I wrote a few times about Jimmy being on the take.

It is very frustrating and even upsetting to learn that someone you trusted is not worthy of your devotion. That happened to me too about Mr. Carter. Clearly it bothered his staff also (14 quit en masse).

Jimmy Carter at first; I was in denial. Then I just researched around and I was hurt by what I found.
Perhaps it's a good idea to save your trust and loyalty for God alone, only He is your forever friend.

You did not prove anything. You repeating it several times doesn't make it true.

PErhaps you should try not to read too deeply into statements made here. When I said AND PROVED that Mr. Carter is bought and owned by oil money, I don't have to have been alive at the time he was president.

You are free to speak about Napoleon even though you weren't here at that time. Through research and reading we gain knowledge.

americans have a relationship of attack when it comes to celebrity. we raise a person high above us, out of reach, on a pedistal and then begin to criticize. we insist on a higher standard than our own to further seperate our accomplishments from theirs. we point our fingers and shake our heads at any human flaw. like an assassin who kills a famous person to become famous; we relish the noteriaty of our criticism especally when we upset others(more sauce for the goose). the lesser person can also hide among the crowd and revel in belonging to the flock, free barabbas.
if i have upset you, think about why before you respond.

On the contrary, many of us were around then and remember Carter signing the Panama Treaty giving control of a vital link involving national security over to a dictator, and now the canal is being run by a Hong Kong front organization for the Peoples Republic of China ... yeah, there is much that we do remember about our wussey peanut farming potus.

To those passing such harsh judgement... the odds are, you were not ALIVE when Carter was President.

Who killed 1 million Iraqi' kennymo? Since occupation to date 4,328 U S casualties, 1,339,771 Iraqi deaths, of which less than 1% were by U S forces... thats right .... 99% Iraqi deaths were by the Iraqi killing each other.

A good man . High praise indeed . Whether you agree with all he did or not , it must be acknowledged , he cares for his fellow humans . Fights malaria , houses the homeless , and is bold enough to voice a very unpopular opinion about injustice against Palestine , though it do himself little good . Hindsight is 20/20 . All of us should be lucky enough to do so well .

Marilynn_Murray the guy is delusional and besides when the right destroyed Carter they have had to live with that for many years, you no how righteous they are never falling for fear and accepting the deaths of 1 million innocent Iraq's. It's getting pretty hard for them too swallow all the guild they have aquired following the republican party for so long. Imagine how much guilt they are living with, not to mention their latent homo filling they have.

wirehedd, is it interesting or just par for the course after having listened to Rush, Hannity, and Beck all day. These people do make me laugh and when I exchange comments with them their anger of America is so evident. Thats right they hate America because we elected the first black president. Talk about traitors, cheeez.

Where did you get your information? If he sold out what did he do with all the money? He lives in a modest home he built himself. Seems to me that he would be living a lot larger if he has been on the take. It also seems to me that more people than you would be aware of his criminal behavior.

interesting how the resident trolls jump out and start attacking him for being a man of conscience.

So if that what you say is fact in your assumption of Former President Carter, then what do you think of the infidel dog Reagan?

Kennymotown, I think Nursediesel's remarks about Mr. Carter are fine. Mr. Jimmy Carter is more corrupt than the Iranian government and Chavez and Kim Jong Il all combined. If the Arabs will tell Jimmy Carter to urinate on the tarmac the next time he gets off a plane (just like his brother did in public when he got off a plane, to shame his brother Jimmy, while Jimmy was still the president), then Mr. Carter will do it. They own him. They bought him and they control him. When they tell him to write a book about the Chinese and that they are corrupt, he will. But the koran does not teach them to hate the Chinese as much as to hate the Jews, so guess which group he wrote a book about.

In 1978, BCCI (a bank controlled by the Saudi Royal family, and among whose principal investors was a man who became Mr. Carter's "friend," Sheikh Zayed), miraculously came to the rescue to bail out Mr. Carter's peanut farm business which had huge debts. Of course, that means Zayed gave the bank his money to keep the bank funded and open.

Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of that bank, with the urging of Sheikh Zayed, gave Mr. Carter, "$500,000 to help the former president settle his farm debts and then gave Mr.Carter more than $10 million extra, for Mr. Carter's different projects and to start his Carter Center.
This same Mr. Abedi called his bank's funding of Carter, "the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists."

However, BCCI isn't the only source of Jimmy Carter's
money. He needed even more money to continue other projects. He appealed to the Arab oil shieks, and then
the king of Saudi Arabia heard about Mr. Carter's need for money, so the
Saudi King Fahd contributed millions to the Carter Center. Only the records from 1993 alone, show that the king gave his "Jimmy" $7.6 million and then other members of the Saudi Royal Family during other years, gave even more millions for other Carter Center projects. Mr. Carter also received a million dollar pledge from the Saudi-based bin Laden family, as well as a personal $500,000 environmental award named for Sheikh Zayed, and paid for by the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, a neighboring Arab oil kingdom.
From there it was on to Kuwait, and then back to Saudi Arabia.
They liked Mr.Carter's pledge of friendship to them so much, they also influenced various board members to recommend Mr. Jimmy Carter the humanitarian, to win the Nobel Prize, and wow! he actually won it. No doubt, he won it for all his wonderful contributions from oil money, woops, I mean for all his contributions to world humanity.
When his staff members heard that he wrote a book not about his memoirs, not about his presidency, not about his life as a politician, but a book about how terrible the Zionists are, they were all shocked.
Why would Mr. Carter suddenly write a book called,
"Palestine: Peace not Apartheid."
Mr. Carter's staff also wondered why he would strangely and suddenly write that book, and an entire group of 14 staff members in the Carter Center quit all at once.
Nursediesel hit it on the head. The man is a total two face, and he is an oil money puppet. They own his soul; he sold out.

Here is a short summary of the hostage crisis:

When it became clear that the Iranian government was not going to resolve the problem, President Jimmy Carter moved to freeze Iranian assets, both in the United States and abroad. Diplomatic efforts were launched through the United Nations and various private intermediaries, but by March 1980 it had become clear that none of the rival political groups in Iran was willing to risk the unpopularity of letting the hostages go. This impasse led Carter to order a rescue effort by helicopter, but three of the eight helicopters failed before reaching Tehran, and the mission had to be aborted. Eight men died in the operation.

News of the failure aggravated the American public's mounting frustration over the crisis, providing a focus for broader criticism of Carter's administration (sharpened by the fact that this was an election year) as well as more general distress over America's waning ability to control world events. These issues undoubtedly contributed to Carter's defeat by Ronald Reagan in November. Nevertheless, by then a new Iranian government had been formed, and serious negotiations began soon after, with Algeria as mediator. The United States agreed to unfreeze most Iranian assets in exchange for the hostages. Finally, on January 20, 1981 - only a few hours after Carter left office - all fifty-two hostages were released and landed safely in West Germany.

The Reagan Administration played no role in their release. Carter was far too honorable a man to leave the problem to his successor even after his defeat and was therefore able to deliver the hostages as a parting gift to Reagan and the American people. He has never been given credit for this (must have chafed a little doing this for people who were so ungrateful, but he did it anyway) and has never ASKED for credit.

And somehow the (U.S.) who installed the Shah that spurned the Iranian revolution that led to our Embassy personnel being held hostage was the cancer then? Please explain who was the cancer nursediesel. Since your a history buff and all that.

It's refreshing for you to speak of Jimmy Carter as if he is a human being. I like to think that no President gets up in the morning and says, I think I'll do a lousy job today and screw up as many people as possible. I'm sorry to sound preachy but we usually do the best we can with what we have to work with. By the way, President Obama is also a human being.

Uh...Nurse? My undergraduate degree was in History, too. Like you, I have a BA in History. My law degree is, of course, a JD. A fair bit of law school involves the study of history as well because one has to learn how the law has evolved from its primarily English common law beginnings.

"Cling?" Come on. I am not even a liberal -- I am a moderate independent. The Democratic Party is simply much more talent-rich than the Republican Party at this point in time, but I am uncomfortable with the level of influence held by the educational unions.

I do not believe in socialistic solutions. I think that an aggressive re-regulation of the financial services industry is even MORE dangerous than deregulation has been. Our approach should be surgical, not scattershot. The vast, vast majority of capitalists in the United States are regular people who own rental homes or duplexes, corner stores, or are part-owners in fast food franchises...not modern-day Carnegies or Rockefellers. You don't have to be liberal to admire Carter...and Presidents have virtually no influence on either interest rates OR unemployment rates. We DON'T elect kings in this country...

Economics 101? kennymo if you were to employ the same means to handle your financial obligations if you were mortgaged to the hilt and owed damned near everyone such as the U S of A does, they'd throw your sorry ass in jail....what's good for the goose should be good enough for the gander ...go figure huh?

nursediesel, once again showing those real ideals of yours. Condoning the killing of humans with a missile attack what kind of nurse are you?

You don't have to like every president but at least give him the benefit of the doubt. The recession was full blown before Obama came into office, you know that and it probably will be a depression before it's all over. I work very hard at a physical job every day and know for a fact that this bullshit economy is in the toilet and health cars has to be fixed before I will ever see a raise. Every year any raise that I was suppose to get has been eaten up by health care cost that my employer bares as a so called perk for doing my job well. I am sick and tired of hearing people bash the president of 6 months for the decades of trickle down economics. And if I have to explain economics 101 to a college grad then things must be a lot worse than I thought.

nursediesel, I'm not picking on you but your outrageous remarks regarding President Carter and our newly elected President Obama and until he puts us into a third unprovoked war while he is trying to clean up the poop from the last administration have a little respect because your continued opposition to whatever the current President does is not befitting a so called college graduate.

This is for you, too, CZ! That's right pick on me for my ability to see passed my nose.. You two haven't seen the light. I used to be a flaming liberal so I understand your clinging to failed policies. Been there, done that. I used to be a community organizer and they elected me nurse!!! =D Yeah, I'm licenced to heal with reciprosity! And a college degree.

Melvin, nice make-up.. The difference between liberals and republicans is that republicans actually work or look for work. That's why they are frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the so called "stimulus bill". And no, nurses aren't required to take any history or political science courses.

I believe that Jimmy Carter is a good man with good intentions. His life shows that. Though he made an inept President he will also be remembered for his good deeds which are many.

Always showing your true colors nursediesel. I thought you had to go to college to be a nurse? What part of the 2 year stimulus package are you referring too, the first 4 months of the 24 month package. And the bailouts thing you really have let educated nurses down everywhere with that remark.

Nurse, I really thought better of your analytical skills than this. Carter was far from perfect, but he agonized over the ethics and morality of his use of power far more than any other President in my lifetime (Kennedy was President when I was born).

Blaming the office of the PRESIDENT for high interest rates and high unemployment? "Leaving our Prisoners in Iran...are you KIDDING me?" If you really think that then you were either not alive at that time or were not paying attention. The man could not have worked any harder on the hostage crisis. What was he supposed to do -- fly the attack helicopters in there himself? And please don't give credit to REAGAN for rescuing them...everybody on the planet knows that his Presidency started off with an incredible stroke of luck...followed by eight years of subpoenas, indictments, trials and convictions as we witnessed the most corrupt Administration in American History (The Bushies and even the Nixonians were amateurs compared to the Reaganites...)

nursediesel, i love how you can place a newly elected president in some self conceived shame position that you regard President Carter. You right wingers have always impressed me with your diabolical conclusions.
If your that sore of a loser nurse I suggest some BENGAY to rub on that deflated EGO.

Yep, Jimmy, was a good an honest man that ruined the economy, 21% interest rates, embarrassing the army in the middle east, leaving the american prisoners in Iran, and unemployment was up to 12%. Lousy president. Sorry but it's true! Yes, Barrack is Welcome back, Carter!

Nurse - how can you compare with an outspoken aristomoron who composes these long and bloviating messages? They all need some Thorazine - each and every one of the lovely libtard boys...

Could be nursediesel, Mr. Carter is 85 yrs. old.

Is it me or am I the only one here thinks Jimmy needs some Aricept? You know the dementia drug?

I had to read that three times. It must be a typo, right? He's saying he's leaving the southern baptist church because it treats it's women like the Islamics do in the Middle East? Whoa, Jimmy, I thought you loved the Palestinians.

all this talk of arabs and jews, like one is better than the other? the children of abraham are pious and sectarian. loyalitys outside their faiths are meaningless, to think of peace between them is ludicrous. jimmy did try his best, everything at his disposal for peace. carter was probally the best man to be president but beside being a good man he was naive. he believed in the power of love.
what fruit does his tree bear? certainly he made mistakes and he was blocked at every turn. i remember he made a campaign promice to open secret files for public viewing, among them the u.f.o. files at area 51. c.i.a. director george bush sr. denied him access.
i've done work for habitat; restoring old houses, what a joyful group of volunteers to work with. this is all that i have personal experence with. the rest who knows if even christians lie.

The whole Israeli/Arab conflict is really Abrahams fault. He was Pusse whipped by Sarah two times. First when she insisted he breed with her maid servant Haggai who gave birth to Abrahams first born son, but then when she got pregnant in her 70's had her own son and then ordered Abraham to take the Haggai and Ishmael to the desert to die. Abraham had no balls. Sarah had demonstrated a pattern of usurping her husband's authority, who knows if she didn't just take matters into her own hands and got herself knocked up with another man.

Facts are so important to any position. So, instead of just saying, "Carter got money from the Arabs," which could be said by any ten year old, here come the facts.
I mean facts about Jimmy Carter's funding coming directly from Arab oil money. Fair enough?

Jimmy Carter's family peanut farm business collapsed and was in great need of money. Suddenly, in the late 1970s, BCCI (a now disolved and virulently anti-Israeli bank controlled by the Saudi Royal family, and among whose principal investors was a man who became Mr. Carter's "friend," Sheikh Zayed) miraculously came to the rescue. Of course, that means Zayed gave the bank his money to keep the bank funded and open.

Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of that bank, with the urging of Sheikh Zayed, gave Mr. Carter, "$500,000 to help the former president establish his Carter Center, plus more than $10 million extra for Mr. Carter's different projects."
This same Mr. Abedi called his bank's funding, "the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists."

However, BCCI isn't the only source of Jimmy Carter's
money. He needed more money to continue projects.
The king of Saudi Arabia heard about Mr. Carter, so,
Saudi King Fahd contributed millions to the Carter Center "in 1993 alone...$7.6 million" as have other members of the Saudi Royal Family during other years, for other Carter Center projects. For example, Mr. Carter also received a million dollar pledge from the Saudi-based bin Laden family, as well as a personal $500,000 environmental award named for Sheikh Zayed, and paid for by the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, a neighboring Arab oil kingdom.

Even though I personally consider The New York Slimes to be a European newspaper dominated by anti Americans with a Communist bent, I quote it here for the purpose of noting that even it called Mr. Carter's book a "distortion of history."

Indeed, and exactly as expected, Mr. Carter opened his center and used the monies his received to hire staff and establish offices in other countries.
However, because of the book's inaccuracies and imbalance, and Carter's subsequent behavior, 14 members of the Carter Center's Board of Councilors have resigned -- many in anguish because they used to respect Carter's other work.

CZ, Thank you.

CONTINUED...

Begin, Judea and Samaria, are almost synonymous. They were not occupied lands. They were liberated territories. He rejected any territorial compromise, and for Begin, retaining Judea and Samaria was not a sophisticated negotiation ploy. He had an ideology, and he was not going to bend on that ideology. His ideologies were red lines. Other Israeli politicians have had ideologies that have been pink. They change color. For Begin, retaining Judea and Samaria was his closing position. They are the heart of biblical Israel. They were a part of his fiber. When he spoke about the territories, there was a reverent unshakable attachment. Judea and Samaria were inextricably connected to the renaissance of Zionism and the geography of modem Israel. He carried ideology with him; he took it with him to Camp David; and he came home with it…

Jimmy Carter does not like to waste time. No grass -rows under his feet. You want something done, he figures it can be resolved, and it can be done completely. President Jimmy Carter never believed that a problem could not be solved. He has an engineer's mentality, which believes that if you go at something directly, forcefully, continuously, you will solve the problem. Forget political idiom. Forget the historical idiom of the Jews. Forget Arab hatred of Israel. Forget Nasser. You can reach a solution, because reasonable people can come to a conclusion, and it can be done even in a comprehensive manner. What did Jimmy Carter try to do? He tried to resurrect the Geneva Conference, the whole notion of a comprehensive peace in a comprehensive manner by bringing in the Soviet Union, the two conveners of the 1973 conference. The notion of a comprehensive peace achieved in a comprehensive manner actually pushed Anwar Sadat to go to Jerusalem, because the focus was no longer on Egypt. The focus was on the Palestinian participation and the United Arab delegation. We can't live on the myth that the U.S.-Soviet declaration drove Sadat to Jerusalem. That's just not the case. Rather, the case was that Jimmy Carter was focused on everything else including the Soviet relationship, including PLO representation, and including how to bring in Hafez ElAssad and Syria. As Sadat had done all along - by going into the '73 war, by forcing out the Soviets a year earlier - he was going to do what was necessary to change the status quo, to move things along with Israel. Sadat wasn't going to wait…

There is no doubt that Jimmy Carter was appreciated by Middle Eastern leaders. Dayan and King Hussein were impressed with Carter's involvement and knowledge of the issues. Dayan remarked in his memoirs that Carter was the center figure and the man who made the decisions. He showed great knowledge of the matters as compared to the knowledge shown by other Americans. He knew the various formulations and where the difficulties lay. He also knew more about the Arab-Israeli problem than any prior U.S. president. These were almost the identical words of King Hussein when I interviewed him as well. At Camp David, Carter personally wrote and rewrote several drafts of the Egyptian-Israeli Agreement.

Abe99 et al.,

I share this as a matter of general interest -- not to persuade anyone of anything other than that one can very quickly compromise oneself intellectually by treating people with great accomplishments as though those accomplishments were simply a matter of luck and/or that the actors involved are really just two-dimensional cartoons and that we armchair quarterbacks know what REALLY happened...
Prof. KENNETH STEIN, William E. Schatten Professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History and Israeli Studies and Director of Middle East Research Program and Institute for the Study of Modern Israel, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Author of Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace.
Camp David would not have happened if there had not been Anwar Sadat, because the trip to Jerusalem wouldn't have happened. Anwar Sadat was singly most important for the breakthrough that took place between 1973 and 1979. I put more stock in Anwar Sadat's vision, boldness and courage, than I do in any of the other leaders. That is after working for fifteen years with President Jimmy Carter. It is not meant in any way to negate the importance played by Begin or Carter. Sadat possessed one unalterable objective. He didn't have fossilized ideologies. He was a strong patriot, who had a capacity for enduring his goal, and that single goal was the return of Sinai. He was going to accomplish that no matter what it took. He was never willing to share all his information with all of his advisors. He was never hesitant to take a bold initiative. He was for many Arabs, Israelis and Americans, coming after Nasser, a strange breed, a political oxymoron. Nasser was embedded in absolute ideology. How could it be possible that an Arab, let alone an Egyptian, would seek to make an agreement with Israel? Sadat was a tactician; he was a strategist. His method for managing Israel for his Arab peers, his economy, the superpowers was in some sort of continuous formulation. He wasn't wedded to a particular ideology. Therefore, it was extraordinarily difficult for Americans or for Israelis to put their ideological arms around him. Dayan always asked the question: "Can we trust him?" Israelis were never sure. Americans weren't sure. No one was sure about Sadat. That's what made him unique…

Begin, of course, always lived in the shadow of Ben Gurion. For Begin, the PLO was an anathema. He always believed its goal was to destroy the State of Israel. He was consumed with Jewish history. He was defensive about anyone who wanted to impugn Israeli legitimacy and as Yechiel Kadishai (Begin's personal assistant) told me on more than one occasion, he only asked one question. The bottom line for him was: Is it good or bad for the Jewish people. Begin ultimately made an agreement with the Egyptians, which was truly remarkable for Menachem Begin. He actually signed a document that spoke about legitimate rights. It was an ideological compromise that he made. Some people say he was forced. Some people say Jimmy Carter twisted his arm. I don't think so. I think he did it because he knew what was important for the State of Israel and knew what was important for the Jewish people. He possessed an extraordinarily analytical mind with a phenomenal memory. Often, I have heard Jimmy Carter speak to my classes. I have heard him speak on Camp David. I have heard him talk about it. I have heard him read about it. The one point he consistently makes is that he never met a political leader that was smarter than Menachem Begin, never. Therein was Jimmy Carter's problem, because Begin immersed himself in every detail. He paid meticulous, if not excessive, attention to specifics. He read cables before he went to Washington in July of '77 on his first trip to visit Carter. He read all the minutes of the meeting that Rabin had with Carter previously. When he delivered his response to Sadat, he did it virtually off the top of his head.

Marilyn,

For whatever it's worth, Click's post reminds me of a few stray thoughts that have been chasing each other around the large, empty cavern between my ears these past several years:

1. Bear in mind that not one single word of either the New or Old Testaments was actually written by either God or Jesus. They were written by men [maybe a woman or two, but that seems unlikely -- whether the gender involved makes them more or less accurate is an issue I would prefer you wrestle to the ground yourself ; ) ] Even where the text says, "And God said..." what we have before us is what a man WROTE that God said. And since I doubt VERY much that God instructed said man to "take dictation" the word of God was recorded either sometime well after the words were actually spoken (I can't even remember more than four items at the grocery store without a list...) or were jotted down in the course of some kind of divine inspiration ("You weren't there, Brother Zekikia, but this is what I, your Lord God, said..."). All I am saying here is that adhering to the precise words of the Bible is kind of like trying to interpret the American Constitution in modern America according to the precise words of the text. The Second Amendment gives me the right to bear arms. Tactical nuclear arms did not exist when the Second Amendment was adopted. Do I now have a Constitutionally-guaranteed right to bear tactical nuclear arms? Unsurprisingly, there are members of the NRA who would answer in the affirmative. In fact, Mr. Cheney and his lawyer are undoubtedly out hunting pheasant with one even as I type this missive...

2. I did not read the Bible from cover-to-cover until I was in my 30s, so I have no right to throw rocks at Christians who have not done so. But I was embarassed afterward at not understanding more fully the foundational text of my professed faith. Of course, there were few major surprises in the text -- over the course of about five years, I would guess that most Protestant churches cover nearly all of the most significant passages, stories, parables, and the like -- but I had a MUCH better sense of overall context afterwards as well as a completely new perspective on the relationship between the old testament and the new. The God of the Old Testament is an angry, fearsome, incredibly violent and (dare I say?) surprisingly petty God. I mean, He gets awfully bent about stuff that modern Americans would likely put on par with sticking your used gum on the underside of your desk. That God is not necessarily GONE in the New Testament...but he seems to at least have gone through some pretty effective anger management therapy. I guess what I am trying to say is that there are certain inconsistencies that one has to work through on both an intellectual level and as a matter of faith. This is where the atheists take a walk, of course. I don't blame them -- I took that walk myself for a good long time. And then I walked back. That is one of the few perks of growing older...I can reserve the right to change my mind on the basis of new information (or even old information thought through with the hopefully added sophistication of greater experience, maturity and wisdom).

I don't think one can just decide that the Bible only contains those passages with which one agrees -- chalking up those with which one disagrees as problems of interpretation, translation or textual inconsistency. But I am also EXTREMELY skeptical of any excerpt being used to prove an argumentative point. Every bit must be read with every other bit. When one does so, I think one usually finds that some of the harder, sharper edges tend to soften. Frankly, I am not even certain that God MEANT for much of what is in the Bible to apply 2,000 years later. Helpful dietary hints, for example, might have been intended to be dropped once mankind invented refrigeration...He may have figured we would be smart enough to see that for ourselves...but no

I've noticed.

igordy,

Well, good morning to you, too, igordy. I am fine, thank you. How are you this fine Wednesday morning? What a finely balanced and nuanced post you have constructed here. Your logic is inescapable. How could I have been so blind? I shall study your future posts closely, learning at the feet of the master, so to speak. Perhaps one day, if I work hard, I will have a first rate mind like yours so that I can put together a piece of prose as persuasive as this one.

Have a great week!

Please look it up in any good modern English translation for confirmation MM. Today we are fortunate to have a more accurate understanding of the original Hebrew and Greek Bible texts - translated from scrolls dating almost back to the time of Christ. Its sad that most folks simply accept someone else's opinion about what the Bible says, rather than conduct their own due diligence..

I don't believe that is the word of God. Who translated it?

For those genuinely interested in what God has to say on this subject, 1Timothy2:11-13 puts it this way;
"Let a woman learn in silence with full submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach, or to exercise authority over a man, but to be in silence. For Adam was formed first, then Eve." Of course woman have equal value in God's eyes, scriptures make that clear also, but they may not exercise headship over a man, just as an airplane cannot have 'two' Captains, yet a co-pilot is equally valued.

Yay Jimmy C! In the religion I was taught 200 years ago, faith is measured in deeds, not words. Carter has, for the most part, walked his talk, and now he's walking right out of a church that clings to hatred while professing love. Sure, he probably should have taken this step a long time ago, but it seems he really thought he could affect change from within. Gotta give him props for that, too.

Hats off to Jimmy Carter. This verifies something I suspected of him. He's a good man.

With Carter taking a public stand...maybe some of the women that have been indoctrinated into this backwards, uncivilized behavior of the church will make a stand.
This is America, and as yet, we have not made it legal to kill people for taking a stand for human rights.

What did Mr. Carter do with his ill gotten gains Abraham? Last time I looked he lived in a small modest house he built himself. Personally I believe Jimmy Carter was just too honest to be an effective president. Too damned bad we didn't support him more.

Abraham99, do you do a lot of living in other peoples heads, cause I think you need a check up from the neck up. And by the way when the U.N granted a state for Israel they also granted a state for the Palestinians. Where is that state, or is that a state of mind.

Mr. Carter might be against the bad treatment of women. He sure ain't against the bad treatment of the jews.
Mr. Carter stated that the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine was because of attacks by Jewish extremists in the 1930s, meaning that he is blaming the U.N. for not noticing Jewish bad behavior in the late 1930s. Yet, Mr. Carter heard of the Arab friend of Hitler, Hajj Amin El Husseini and the Palestinian riots of the 1920s and the revolt of 1936. Yet Mr. Carter deliberately chose to ignore those truths and additionally ignored that the Jewish reaction was clearly retaliatory.
Mr. Carter, whose soul was purchased more than ten years ago by "prizes" he won from Muslim foundations, has morphed into a recording of the Muslim/Arab slanderous diatribes such as that Israel is an apartheid state, even though members of Israeli parliament and even cabinet level members are Muslim, in Israel. He also forgot to mention that there is not even one Jewish representative in any Arab or Muslim government in any of the 55 Muslim countries on the planet. He also forgot to mention that the Arab/Muslims forgot to help their own Arab/Muslim brothers in the refugee camps in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, besides the one in Israel for the past 61 years. But they had enough money to buy hisw hate and his soul. Who do you think was instrumental in getting this anti American, out of the closet pro communist, the Nobel Prize?
In fact, the name of Mr. Jimmy Carter's most recent book in which attempts to copycat Arab hate is, "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid."
The Jews should know very well that Mr. Carter not only loves Arab/Muslim oil money; he also despises Jews, and he uses no excuses to disguise his hatred; forget reading the whole book, one need only to read excerpts or even just reviews of his "book." Why the Jews do not protest him, is beyond me, perhaps they are so used to hate and they also might be very busy preparing for other items on their menu.
He reminds me of Mr. Obama because he also smiles a lot and has also tricked the American people and has also apologized for America. He is also ashamed of us. He is also a communist.