♫anna♫
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Post by ♫anna♫ on May 29, 2009 7:08:41 GMT
healtheland.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/germany-jails-lutheran-pastor-johannes-lerle-for-anti-abortion-sermon/ QUOTE: Last week, a German court sentenced a 55-year old Lutheran pastor to one year in jail for “Volksverhetzung” (incitement of the people) because he compared the killing of the unborn in contemporary Germany to the holocaust. Next week, the Council of Europe is going to vote on a resolution imposing Darwinism as Europe’s official ideology. The European governments are asked to fight the expression of creationist opinions, such as young earth and intelligent design theories. According to the Council of Europe these theories are “undemocratic” and “a threat to human rights.” Without legalized abortion the number of German children would increase annually by at least 150,000 – which is the number of legal abortions in birth dearth Germany. Pastor Johannes Lerle compared the killing of the unborn to the killing of the Jews in Auschwitz during the Second World War. On 14 June, a court in Erlangen ruled that, in doing so, the pastor had “incited the people” because his statement was a denial of the holocaust of the Jews in Nazi-Germany. Hence, Herr Lerle was sentenced to one year in jail. Earlier, he had already spent eight months in jail for calling abortionists “professional killers” – an allegation which the court ruled to be slanderous because, according to the court, the unborn are not humans. Other German courts convicted pro-lifers for saying that “in abortion clinics, life unworthy of living is being killed,” because this terminology evoked Hitler’s euthanasia program, which used the same language. In 2005, a German pro-lifer, Günter Annen, was sentenced to 50 days in jail for saying “Stop unjust [rechtswidrige] abortions in [medical] practice,” because, according to the court, the expression “unjust” is understood by laymen as meaning illegal, which abortions are not. Volksverhetzung is a crime which the Nazis often invoked against their enemies and which contemporary Germany also uses to intimidate homeschoolers. Soon, the German authorities will be able to use the same charge against people who question Darwin’s evolution theory.
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Post by Deleted on May 29, 2009 18:38:36 GMT
The footnote to this story (2007) says
"Update: The LifeSiteNews.com story published Tuesday on the jailing of Pastor Lerle in Germany has been retracted after LifeSiteNews.com was informed that we were working with false information from trusted news sources. While Pastor Lerle has in the past been jailed for anti-abortion activities his current one year imprisonment stemmed solely from charges of holocaust denial and not from comparing abortion to the Nazi Holocaust as we erroneously reported Tuesday.
My sincere apologies for this serious error."
But leaving this aside, the Council of Europe has no business in asopting Darwinism (or anything else) as an "official ideology".
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Post by Liberator on May 29, 2009 20:25:17 GMT
Interesting how he can compare abortion statistics to a Holocaust he denies isn't it? Doesn't say a lot for his integrity.
You have to recognise what this publication is when it comes to 'Darwinism'. It is rather like a headline I remember announcing that Mali had jailed some people for practising Christianity. This was when Hastings Banda was running it and although he was prone to jailing people, who might well have been Christians I understood him to be a Methodist minister who had never jailed anybody for being Christian, so I was a bit intrigued.
The article actually revealed that these people had been jailed for refusing compulsory military service because they were Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse it. The paper was Watchtower.
What this actually says is that Creationism cannot be taught as science. I hardly think that Europe or Germany intend to decree evolutionary theories alternative to Darwin's illegal in the manner of the USSR with Lysenko's version of Lamarckism.
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♫anna♫
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Post by ♫anna♫ on May 29, 2009 21:04:00 GMT
The footnote to this story (2007) says "Update: The LifeSiteNews.com story published Tuesday on the jailing of Pastor Lerle in Germany has been retracted after LifeSiteNews.com was informed that we were working with false information from trusted news sources. While Pastor Lerle has in the past been jailed for anti-abortion activities his current one year imprisonment stemmed solely from charges of holocaust denial and not from comparing abortion to the Nazi Holocaust as we erroneously reported Tuesday. My sincere apologies for this serious error." But leaving this aside, the Council of Europe has no business in asopting Darwinism (or anything else) as an "official ideology". Pastor Lerle however denies that he was attempting to deny the holocaust. It is nevertheless illegal in Germany to compare the Holocaust with Abortion.. That comes under the clause of "relativizing" the holocaust. Denial and approval of the holocaust are the other punishable clauses of this law.. He has a website in German and i'll try to find some English language articles.
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Post by Deleted on May 29, 2009 21:14:28 GMT
Anna, that would be good - I googled the guy and found only couple of sites (apart from your link), both of which thought he was pretty nasty - well, more than that actually. But I didn't link them because I don't give them any credence.
I don't live in Germany and don't understand how anyone can compare the suffering of the holocaust with abortion.
If he was saying no more than abortion is reducing the (potential) population of Germany, presumably he approves of IVF?
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♫anna♫
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Post by ♫anna♫ on May 29, 2009 21:20:41 GMT
I met Pastor Lerle once, while i lived in Erlangen and attended a Baptist meeting! He truly believes abortion is simply the murder of children and was willing to be imprisoned for this. A doctor, who performed abortions pressed charges against him too. groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.baltics/browse_thread/thread/27e86d7e3c561f3d QUOTE: German Pastor Sentenced to a Year in Jail for Comparing Abortion to the Nazi Holocaust By Elizabeth O'Brien and John Henry Westen ERLANGEN, Germany, June 26, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A city court in Erlangen, Bavaria, gave Lutheran Pastor Johannes Lerle a one year jail sentence for the "crime" of comparing abortion to the Nazi holocaust. In response, Jim Hughes, Vice President of International Right to Life Federation has called on pro-life activists internationally to take action on the matter by contacting German authorities to demand freedom of speech and freedom of religion for the pastor (see contact information below story). Pastor Johannes Lerle compared the annual murder of 150,000 babies through abortion in Germany to the murder of thousands of innocent Jews in Auschwitz. The court, which consisted of no jury and a single judge, ruled that this statement made Lerle a holocaust denier. On 14 June, Judge Erda Erdenhofner convicted Lerle of a particular crime known as "volksverhetzung", or "incitement of the people". During his address to the court, Lerle defended himself and claimed that his statement was in no way taking away from the gravity of the sufferings of the Jews. The German Catholic news service kreuz.net reports that the reason for the severity of the punishment is in part due to the pastor's six previous convictions, which have seen the pastor serve two prison terms lasting eight and a half months in total. He was formerly imprisoned for calling abortionists and their aides "child murderers." Brussels Journal reporter Paul Belien notes that German courts have slammed other pro-life advocates with heavy sentences for similar statements. German pro-life advocate Günter Annen, for example, was reported by the Journal as having called for an end to "unjust abortions" in 2005. She received a 50-day jail sentence on the grounds that her claim that abortion is "unjust" is legally inaccurate. The courts decided that her words wrongly implied that abortion is illegal in Germany. Pope John Paul II underlined the parallel between the Nazi Holocaust and abortion, which he calls "legal extermination," in his book "Memory and Identity" (2005). He wrote, "It was a legally elected parliament which allowed for the election of Hitler in Germany in the 1930s." He also pointed out that the same country that declared Jews non-persons less than a century ago has ruled that unborn babies are not persons either (see www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/feb/05022306.html). Angela T. Wu, International Director of the Becket Fund, an American organization that guards the freedom of religious speech, commented to LifeSiteNews.com, "If these reports are true, this is a harrowing example of a growing trend of government laws that control its citizens' viewpoints and stifle the free speech rights of religious organizations and practitioners." She continued, "Whether or not you agree with the pro-life position, Pastor Lerle and those like him must be allowed to freely espouse his and his church's views on the issues without fear of government reprisal. While Volksverhetzung laws exist in Germany because of its unique history, that is no excuse for illegally violating the international human right to freedom of belief, which must include the right to profess those beliefs, even those of a controversial nature."
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Post by Deleted on May 30, 2009 17:31:03 GMT
Thanks - that helps explain his viewpoint. But I don't understand what he is supposed to have said that convinced a court he is a holocaust denieer!
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Post by lonewolf on May 30, 2009 18:34:30 GMT
German Pastor Sentenced to a Year in Jail for Comparing Abortion to the Nazi Holocaust Looks like our European friends are slowly emerging from the Dark Ages! During the Inquisition they would burn you at the stake if you denied the existence of God whereas today they merely throw you in jail for a year for denying the Holocaust.
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Post by Liberator on May 30, 2009 20:02:41 GMT
Thanks - that helps explain his viewpoint. But I don't understand what he is supposed to have said that convinced a court he is a holocaust denieer! Wasn't that referring to an earlier offence? I must admit to finding it a bit strange that although there is dispute over capital punishment and euthenasia, both sides generally accept their belief to be just that a belief, but when it comes to abortion neither side accepts the other genuinely motivated by the belief they claim and insist on imputing ulterior motives. You don't hear proponents of capital punishment hysterically accusing opponents of wanting to keep evil-doers alive because they admire them or something of the sort. But anti-abortionists are always men wanting to control women's fertility and pro-choice are always baby-killers. Meanwhile, that kind of emotional hostility prevents discussion about reasons for abortion and ameliorating them as cause rather than concentrating on abortion as result. I tried to raise it once and got short down for impertinence: women must have an abortion whether they want it or not. I suspect actually, that there really is ulterior motivation at work in some cases, but not the sort claimed. Some women, I am sure, have a deep contempt at being female and pregnancy, even in other women, affects them with a kind of horrified proof that they can't get away from their inferior status.
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♫anna♫
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Post by ♫anna♫ on May 31, 2009 7:46:24 GMT
Thanks - that helps explain his viewpoint. But I don't understand what he is supposed to have said that convinced a court he is a holocaust denieer! Like i said i met Pastor Lerle personally at a Baptist meeting. He's very intense about his anti-abortion viewpoint! The German judical system has decreed that unborn children are not humans and therefore abortion is not murder! In other words that would be like comparing the holocaust to killing in self defense-also not judged as murder by the judical authorities.. So if a member of the Amish said killing in self defense is the same as a nazi concentration camp guard murderering a prisoner he could face charges even though the Amish religion believes killing in self defense is murder. My personal impression of Johannes Lerle was that he is very convinced that God and the truth are on his side! He's very anti-DP, very anti-racist too. He sees the the Jehovah Witnesses as a cult because they say Christ was a prophet and not the savior. Since i accept abortion in certain limited cases and the DP for the worst of the murderers Mr. Lerle accused me of being drawn into a cult, in our half an hour talk! Still as a free speech activist i think the judical measures against him were wrong!
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Post by Deleted on May 31, 2009 12:56:50 GMT
The whole thing strikes me as very odd, Anna. If he had been advocating taking action against those involved in carrying out abortions I could have understood why he was prosecuted - but as a Baptist he is unlikely to have been stirring up violent protest, is he? We are used to some anti-abortionists and animal rights activists describing people carrying out legal killing (whether of embryo or animal) as "murder." Say it often enough and it becomes meaningless. Here is an article from the Guardian which puts a different perspective on Lerle and his crime. As the author says, few of us speak German so can't follow up the various links, but the implication is that anti-abortion groups have been distorting things. Christians and the lunatic fringeHere's an extract: "Last week, an even stranger martyr was offered for the adoration of the faithful. Dr Johannes Lerle was jailed for a year by a court in Erlangen. You might think this was unremarkable. Dr Lerle is an unabashed and deeply anti-semitic holocaust denier. He takes the view that the only good Jew is a Christian convert. All others are children of the devil: "Jews" with scare quotes round them, to distinguish them from Christians. Those "Jews", his website explains, control the world's press, and the American government, are murderers, hypocrites, liars and bent on world domination for religious reasons. All this and more is on his website but it's in German - a language few Americans read. And so this rabid nutcase has been taken up by elements of the American right as a hero and a martyr. William Dembski, the leading proponent of "intelligent design", has argued on his blog that the jailing of Lerle proves that advocating intelligent design would soon also be classed as a hate-crime in Europe, and punishable by jail. This is because he has been told -- by a far-right website in Brussels - that Dr Lerle was jailed because he compared abortion to the holocaust. He did that, too, and published on his website the names of women who had had abortions, and of doctors who had performed them. But that was not illegal. He was not jailed for being "pro-life" but for being anti-semitic. There is a pleasant irony in seeing such a man taken up as a hero by people who believe that the Germans are all Nazis under the skin. But the phenomenon is more than funny, in a hideously twisted way. It is also a deeply worrying example of a rising tide of Christianism - the belief that Europe is menaced equally by Muslims and by secularisation, which is so widespread as to be self-evident in parts of the American right.
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♫anna♫
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Post by ♫anna♫ on May 31, 2009 15:26:26 GMT
All i can say for sure about Johannes Lerle is that if you're not a Christian as he sees being a Christian should be he'll criticize you! If you're pro-dp or support abortion in any form and call yourself a Christian he'll accuse you of being a hypocrite, in a cult or wayward from the true way! Jews of course don't believe in Jesus Christ as the savoir and are therefore in his eyes are going against God's will, as are Muslims, non-believers, etc., etc. . In the Baptist community where he's been known for decades he's not taken very seriously and is seen as judgmental because most Baptists do stray from the line that Johannes Lerle follows with such dedication! Johannes' reprimands and criticisms elicit responses like "Oh you talked with Johannes.". wink, wink . Like ohhh you had to listen to a 3 hour concert of the Barbershop Quartet, but we do love the Barbershop Quartet, don't we?? I feel it just makes the judical system in Europe look very bad when people like Johannes are put in prison!
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Post by Deleted on May 31, 2009 19:36:47 GMT
Obviously someone takes him seriously, Anna! And presumably he is still a pastor, which is suprising.
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Post by Liberator on Jun 1, 2009 4:02:03 GMT
Wherever you draw any line, somebody will want to draw it somewhere else or absolutely. The slippery slope, camel's back argument is a phony produced by extremists who believe in it, usually the other way round, because even when people disagree about an exact demarcation line, they do agree within a range.
What I cannot accept as not hypocritical are the two arguments that abortion is 'child-murder' except in cases of rape or incest, and that arguments against abortion are all motivated by 'patriarchal' determination to control women's fertility, regardless of what they say.
In the first case, if it is murder, it is murder regardless of circumstances of conception. It is murder to strangle a child because it was conceived by rape or incest. So if 'murder' is the argument, the circumstances of conception are irrelevent, and if the circumstances of conception are relevant, then the 'murder' argument is not.
If 'patriarchs' wanted to control women's fertility for some Conspiracy Theory reason that doesn't need explanation beyond doing it for the sake of doing it, then they would seek to prevent women from having children so that they need not bother about upkeep and the women could go on being productive worker-consumers without having children to divert them to something else, just as men have been expected not to allow their children to divert them from their job. If 'patriarchy' wanted to control women's reproduction, then it would put them under every pressure possible to prevent it and to abort any 'accidents' that occur so they can be just like men. Now who have I seen advocating just that? Like a lady I knew nearly 30 years ago told me "Abortion is a male crime" (from which it follows that what now calls itself 'feminism' is a male standard imposed to suppress women's (and liberated men's) opposition to Industrial wage-slavery whether individuals or the State are shareholders.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 1, 2009 7:24:22 GMT
Anna, I've been pondering over your question: "I feel it just makes the judical system in Europe look very bad when people like Johannes are put in prison!"
The Guardian article seems to cast doubt on whether Lerle was ever punished simply for calling abortionists "murderers." That would be odd indeed.
The concept of "holocaust denial" as a crime seems bizarre to me; I like to think that most people today would consign such ideas to the same bin as the Flat Earth Society and its ilk.
We have our race-hate crimes and I suppose holocaust denial shares the platform with the old National Front (does it still exist?) and Muslim extremists.
We seem to have our share of mad mullahs inciting their young followers to violence against the infidel. Should we be following Germany's example by locking more of them up? My instinct says this will just make them martyrs, just as the right wing Christians seem to be trying to use Lerle. But why should we tolerate it?
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♫anna♫
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Post by ♫anna♫ on Jun 1, 2009 19:10:26 GMT
Lerle did call doctors, who practice abortion professional baby killers, and served a prison sentence for that about 15 or more years ago, rather than pay a fine for slander. The concept of a "thought criminal" disturbs me too. BUT people, who advocate murder, like say the nazi murders were a good thing really don't interest me, if they get put in jail.. I think putting people like Johannes Lerle in jail for comparing the holocaust to say abortion is an outrage..I know there are many genuine "holocaust doubters" in Germany and the US.. The term that the media uses "holocaust deniers" seems to give the impression that these people are saying that no wrong was done to Jews and other concentration camp prisoners and that no one died..The people, who get charged for the denial part of the holocaust laws in Germany are usually those, who minimize the extent of the deaths and claim typhus was the main killer, etc.. The Jewish Historian David Cole for instance claims that the Auschwitz gas chamber is a fake. tinyurl.com/nrky5xI really don't know if Johannes went in this direction as some news sources are claiming.. You're right that imprisonment only makes these people martyrs.. People like Germar Rudolf and Ernst Zundel only have to recant their statements, apologize and their sentence would be greatly shortened. Instead they serve out the full 5 year sentence that "holocaust denial" charges can bring.
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Post by chefmate on Jun 2, 2009 2:25:48 GMT
I have never once doubted the existance of the Holocaust and have a major problem with those that do but understand in some way what the person was comparing.
To me, Hitler murdered over six million people; in our country we have murdered millions of unborn babies for far less reasons than Hitler seemed to have so I can understand the comparison.....some times I think we owe him an apology for the way we so callously murder the innocent unborn who can't even begin to defend themselves.
Now I know it is two separate occurances and Hitler was terribly wrong and did a horrible injustive to those he put in the concentration camps and murdered so cold heartedly, but is abortion any better?
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Post by Liberator on Jun 2, 2009 3:49:49 GMT
What disturbs me much more is how easily we ignore mass murderers worse than Hitler because they were less organised about it. At least with the Nazis you had some vague idea of some sort of law, however perverse. With Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot it was what any nutter felt like. If you wore glasses with Pol Pot, you'd had it. What the hell has any of that to do with Marxist belief in freedom for workers with hand or mind?
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Jun 2, 2009 8:42:54 GMT
The holocaust was a pre-planed, well documented genocide against a certain group of people, abortion is there for all...the two simply cannot be compared in any serious way....more people probably die in traffic accidents, is that a "holocaust" as well?
AH
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Post by randomvioce on Jun 2, 2009 11:26:39 GMT
To me, Hitler murdered over six million people; in our country we have murdered millions of unborn babies for far less reasons than Hitler seemed to have so I can understand the comparison.....some times I think we owe him an apology for the way we so callously murder the innocent unborn who can't even begin to defend themselves. How can you possibly compare the the two though? Whatever you think of abortions, it cannot be compared to a murder of a human being. I accept that embryos have the potential to grow into fully functioning babies and therefore the potential to become fully functional human beings, but until they are born they are unable to live outside the womb. Whatever an abortion is, it is not murder. I have no problem with people who are against abortion carrying a child to full term, but to impose that choice on someone else is just wrong in my book.
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