On some newsgroups various people wrote:

This is one of the easiest diseases to avoid, its a killer because people want illicit sex and are not **faithful to their spouses. Remain faithful and honour your marriage vows and you can forget about AIDS. Provinding one does not acquire it from a blood transfusion, like one of the well known AIDS activist, a conservative clergyman in South Africa (Dominee Christo Greyling)

Extremely rare and of little concern for the VAST majority of people.

and always providing that one's spouse reciprocates.

As I stated......."are not faithful to their spouses."

One of my clergy colleagues lived an entirely faithful life and *still* acquired HIV from an unfaithful, but much loved (pardon the unintention possible pun) spouse.

As I stated.

Such a happening tends to make one sensitive and loving to the situation of HIV in these cases.

He didn't get it through his own fault which is a very different case [including the children of despicable parents] from those who defiantly go ahead and fornicate with every date or women/man they can get their genitals together with. What a great cost this 'free-love'.

From there it's an easy reach to extend that love, which is Christ's, not mine, to others. After a while the manner in which people acquire HIV becomes unimportant.

Exactly, so the shame and the depths of the selfishness of those commiting fornication slips away into the background.

So instead of shaming people into stopping their stupid and foolish and death threatening escapades, they boldly carry on playing with death and couldn't care less of all the trouble, financial burden, heartache and early deaths they will cause their wives, husbands and children and others around them.

They have got what they deserve and God has made sure they have paid with their lives [Millions have reaped the 'Wages of their sin which is death"] in so resisting His commands in living a decent and moral existence.

They have taken the path of death, willingly and leaped in with both feet. Such are so thick and stupid for another 9,000 will be affected tomorrow in Africa alone.

The answer is keep away from Whores, do not have illicit sex with anyone, but they just do not want to listen, so the fools pay the price for their evil lust and fulfil their obvious crazy death wish.

For God has made the disease so complicated puny mankind cannot find a cure for it. If they did people would become even more immoral and corrupted then ever, till the whole world would become one fornicating mass of corrupted and debauched human degenerates, just as in the time of Noah.........when God destroyed every human on the planet apart for Noah and his family.

And those vile "fornicating" cities of Sodom & Gomorra where razed to the ground and every human being, including man women and childen were incinerated into oblivion.

Thus is the inevitable punishment for wilfully resisting God's way of living, refusing to change, repent, and lead a decent and wholesome life.

Then this response:

I want to say that I personally take offence with this message.

I am HIV positive, AND a Christian.

I acquired this disease as a result of my own actions; I was, at the time, a cocaine addict.

But God delivered me of my addiction, and is now using me to spread a message of hope to addicts, and to educate youth groups of many local churchs about both drug addiction and HIV prevention.

God did not "punish" me. I contracted HIV through reckless behavior. God is love. He does not wish to bring evil to us, but to bring grace. The Bible is full of stories of the Lord taking evil and turning into good. I like to think my story falls somewhere along those lines.

Remember, Jesus sat and ate with the tax collectors and the prostitutes. He healed many, many people of leoprosy. (Which, coincidentally, was thought at that time to be a "punishment of God".)

Jesus said to love one another, and by the measure we judge, we shall be judged...