Didn't ask you to.

You said 'Republican leaders' - I agree. Let's see every elected Republican, every Fox news anchor and every 'shock jock' condemn this and say it was unjustified. That's all.

They don't need to admit they might have incited it. If they were among those saying how they were being 'persecuted' by that FBI report earlier this month saying this might happen, they don't have to own up that a 'credible risk' has become an actual act of domestic terrorism and the FBI have been proved right, and they proved demonstrably wrong. They don't even have to call it what it is, terrorism, even though there are those amongst them that have had Muslims dragged from planes or arrested at Disneyland because they assume a couple of Muslims talking to each other is a terrorist conspiracy.

Every. Republican. Leader. That's all. Not their voters or viewers. Just the leaders.

OK ... I'll spell it out.

1. A person of your political viewpoint has just committed a terrorist murder.

2. Some people here of an opposing political viewpoint to yours have suggested you are banned from the comments section for defending this.

You think only the second of these is objectionable.

I don't think you should be banned. Because a lot of decent, tolerant law-abiding liberals think that there can't possibly be people like you, that 'evangelicals' don't *really* mean all that stuff they say, that O'Reilly and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are 'entertainment'.

Speak. Keep speaking.

Yes ... let's do that. Let's accept your standard. We can now assume that every 'responsible' leader of the anti-abortion movement (nice loophole you left there, by the way), every evangelical and 'Republican leaders everywhere' condone this action unless they stand up and say, out loud and explicitly, without weasel words, that people who kill Americans who've done nothing illegal are terrorists. And let's not leave out the right wing journalists who've been inciting violence against liberals for months now.

As they're decent human beings, and not cowards seeking not to offend their base, they'll make that statement without needing to be prompted.

OK ... journalists, bloggers, everyone - let's get 'Republicans everywhere' and 'evangelists' on the record as unequivocally stating that they condemn this and that it was entirely unjustified.

The National Review say people will die as a result of this.

That would be the same National Review that says 'guns don't kill people, *gun control* does' -

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjI1NDIxNWQ4YjA1NDFlZDJkMzFiMDZlZWViMDgxZWY=

I think I'd prefer my opinion from the reality-based community, if it's all the same.

http://twitter.com/trapphic

"Galatea loved Pygmalion, but as a statue she had been at peace. After his death she bade farewell to their children and sought Medusa’s aid."

When he said he looked at the polling, the only logical result that would have motivated Specter to do what he did is that he'd win the election if he was a candidate, but he'd lose the primary.

So the interesting question is why he didn't stand as an independent.

And the answer to that has to be that the polling showed that if he stood as a third candidate, he'd split the vote and the Republicans would get in.

All this stuff about how he thinks he's got a job for life ... no, it's precisely because he knows he hasn't. He clearly feels, and thinks the polls show, that Pennsylvanians want him as their Senator, but that the Republican Party don't.

This is not because Comedy Central's credibility went up.

There were people opposed to slavery in the ancient world - Israel was founded by freed slaves, Jewish law before the Romans invaded had banned the export of Jewish slaves from Israel. Cyrus the Great abolished slavery in Persia in the sixth centuy BC.

Jesus doesn't say 'one day, the slaves will be freed', he says that we're all slaves of God. The disciples glossed this as meaning that however horrible it was down here, we'd all have a nice time in Heaven.

Yes, Jesus has a bronze age mentality with a moral framework that doesn't map at all well into the modern age. And this was my initial point - people who try to ask 'what would Jesus do?' invariably end up projecting what they'd do if they were a little bit nicer.

OK. Did Jesus mean 'slave' or 'head butler'?

This is simple enough. The Greek word used is 'doulos'. Rabbis at the time would pray 'thank you Lord for not making me a doulos'. It's the word for a man bought in a market, and elsewhere in the New Testament - three times in Revelation for example, 6:15, 13:16 and 19:18 - the word is used to distinguish people of low station who aren't 'free'.

1 Corinthian 7:22 - 23 spells it out. 'We are bought with a price'.

The nearest modern English equivalent is something like 'drone'. It means 'unfree worker'.

Yeah, most translations opt for 'servant'. That's a legitimate, but very soft choice. It's an example of where the translation of the Bible has altered the original meaning for contemporary contingency. And slavery in the Roman Empire doesn't map exactly onto slavery in nineteenth century America, but it was still slavery.

A 'doulos' is someone bought, who works for a master, who can be beaten if he expresses any dissent, who isn't free, who has an extremely low station. It's what we'd call a slave.