However, as you well know we are now living in New Testament times, a time when through the actions of Jesus all sins have been forgiven, and, if you're a believer, you've been delivered from all sins too. So therefore, all Christians ARE without sin (in biblical/christian theory) so are perfectly justified to cast as many stones as they wish. Remember that we've been forgiven for ALL sin, past, present and future.
But hang on, isn't christianity a pacifist society ? on one hand Jesus is saying it's fine to cast stones if you're sinless, and then made us sinless, than he says it's wrong to judge and harm others who arn't sinless. Can you see the confusion ?
But where does greed and selfishness come from ? As a Christian you'll know that we are all made in his image, so does that mean God himself is flawed, or does it mean he created something that was flawed in the first place ? Was this intentional, or simply a mistake on Gods part ?
I've always had trouble reconciling the concept of "Christian charity, pacifism, tolerance and inclusiveness" with stuff like this:
All the charity, love and forgiveness you want but if you believe wrongly, down you go - at the hand of the all-loving god. Or is it at the hand of the all-loathing devil? Without a name in that verse it's hard to tell who we're talking about.
And people think the Old Testament is the nasty one, what with all the raping and destruction - at least if you died in the OT you were gone & free of any further torment. This New Testament god wants to torture your immortal soul for eternity if you step out of line!
I think the only way to view Christianity entirely as a religion of cheek-turning pacifism & eternal forgiveness is if you ignore the many verses of madness such as the above and pick out whatever nicer bits slot into your own morality. There's so much of this awful stuff in the Bible it makes me wonder exactly what percentage of the entire book has been discarded over the centuries in favour of the softer, more compassionate ideas.
I meant rational, reasonable, normal everyday non-believers who have jobs and families and cars and bicycles and dogs and just want to live their lives, not the kind of psychopath atheist dictators that were being discussed at the time. I really should've made that clearer in retrospect. My implication was that, religious or not, blind faith in unsupported ideas, especially in people who are unbalanced to begin with, leads very easily to catastrophe.
last time i bothered to learn about the bible (more than half a decade ago) i came to the conclusion that theres essentially 2 bits which contain direct orders from god
the first one in the old testament doesnt contain anything unpeacful or anything that deals differently with nonbelievers and the second one basically contradicts every rule from the man made leviticus which does
Nice quote, Hankstar.
As a former Roman Catholic I can confirm that a typical Catholic Mass, here, is replete with constant appeals to our sense of guilt (and fear), starting from the original sin and then building on top of that constantly, to peak with "Jesus died for our sins". All this is carefully exploited throughout all Roman Catholic ceremonies.
Albieg, I've met so many more ex-Catholics than current Catholics I'm surprised there are any left in modern countries at all The Vatican seems to have a lock on the Third World though...
Don't quote me on this, but for the New Testament i think it's either 27 or 40 extra texts. I've no idea how big these discarded texts were, but they contain all manner of stuff that the early church felt best to keep a secret.
I'm not sure myself either. What I do know is that in the 4th Century AD, the Council at Nicaea chaired by Emperor Constantine I was convened to resolve disputes between the already varying, conflicting sects of Christianity and decide once & for all on its core doctrines. I'm not sure if the selection of the various gospels happened here or later, but the end result is that the majority of existing texts were rejected in favour of the gospels we all know of. I'm just wondering how it is that you can sit around picking & choosing & rejecting bits of what's regarded as the true word of god as it suits you. Is that not blasphemy?
As is any illiterate, uneducated population - hence the Dark Ages.
Oddly enough there was a programme about this very subject on the Beeb a couple of weeks ago, but i'll be darned if i can remember any of the facts from it.I think it simply came down to the same old same old, politics, sexism, personal opinions and basically who had the loudest voice and the most friends.
One of the hottest debates apparently was whether to included Mary Magdelanes extremely astute and inciteful writings.......guess who won !
Yeah I know...much easier to malign her as a whore and temptress and suppress her words than let mum & dad peasant decide for themselves what to think.
Curious...I've hear many complaints against Christianity. But would you say that religion holds the moral grounds for those who believe in them? I mean, there is a correlation between social corruption and the decline of religion in general.
See, I'm not quoting a material. I'm pushing out a theory that my psychology teacher gave us. I personally do believe (unless proven wrong in the next series of replies) that a decline in religion would result in a decline of public morals (again, this is only a theory)
But it's not because Constantine was viewed to have divine right. Now whether you believe that to be true or not is a different story
Alright I'll ask my teacher. But this is the theory that he presented to us:
Religion give us a basic moral structure in which we must follow or else we'll suffer punishment even if we leave the "material world".
This "after life punishment" serves as a deterrence for doing morally questionable actions. Sure, just because religion was there, doesn't mean people would automatically do good. However, the general public will have a tendency to lean towards avoiding morally questionable actions.
This is the example he gave up: If someone is incredible angry with someone and has reached a breaking point. Then that person in the past would turn to religion for guidance and a priest. However, a modern atheist would say "screw that, I dont believe in hell so I'll do w/e I want and just get a lawyer".
The point he was making with that theory was supporting Theory X of human motivation (which comes to the reasoning of "people shouldn't be expected to do more than they are obligated to"). Yes I do realize that I've taken his words out of context, but in it themselves I was curious to see if you believe it to be true.
Scandinavian countries have been declining religiously for years and they've long been reputed to have some of the highest living standards and lowest crime rates in the world. Australia, the UK, Canada, Germany, Japan and others are pretty much secular nations (i.e. no state-imposed religion) and are all doing okay in terms of living standards and crime. Of course no place is perfect when populated bby humans, but compare them to the US (a million people in jail, high teenage birth rates in the most religious states, an evangelist in charge, wars left & right, a tanking economy, polls suggesting 60% of the people are creationists), Saudi Arabi (where rape victims are punished for being out unsupervised, people are beheaded publicly and blasphemers are imprisoned & beaten), Taliban-ruled Afghanistan (where women were treated as slaves or property, often worse than livestock), or many third-world African countries where Catholic bishops, trying to enforce their doctrine of no premarital sex and no contraception, aren't even told off by Pope Ratzinger for spreading the murderous lie that condom use spreads HIV rather than prevents it.
I agree with point one.
The second point is also true, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it was their unbelief which propelled them to mass murder. As I said, there were many other factors driving their decisions.
The third point is only true for some people. Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was a Christian. So is George Bush and he's as far from being a pacifist as I am from being a jihadist muslim. Their faiths didn't and haven't prevented them from spilling the blood of many innocent people for no good reason (as if such a reason could exist anyway!).
Ugh! A grosser, more simplistic and ignorant characterisation of atheists I've never seen. This teacher of yours seems more like a preacher than an educator. Atheist doesn't mean amoral. Some might argue that a moral code derived simply from how your actions affect other people is purer and more honest than one foisted upon you by a supreme being - one which you have to obey on pain of eternal torment.
We had morals before we invented religion. How could our species have survived & thrived otherwise? We had "love they neighbour" and "do unto others" long before we had Jesus. We had "thou shalt not kill" long before we had Moses. Even members of ape groups don't go around hurting each other and stealing because they're not religious. Social animals that live in communities have to cooperate and share and consider each others' needs or the group (and therefore the individuals in it) won't last long.
I object strongly to this concept that religion is the sole source of morality in the world. The whole reason people accept & reject different bits of the bible is because they're weighing its words against their own morality. If they followed biblical morality they'd still stone people who worked on weekends instead of praying.
I'm sodding well moving there if I ever fall off my horse.
I'm not making that assertion, I was merely pointing out a comparison in order to dispel a myth that societies decay in proportion to how non-religious they are. Lizardfolk mentioned a supposed correlation between societal decay and secularism. It's a correlation which doesn't appear to exist.
For all I know it's a mere coincidence that the more secular countries - those without state religions, religiously-derived laws or a ruling body of priests such as the ayatollahs in Iran - have higher per capita income & better government-run social programs compared to the more religious ones. Perhaps improved wages and living standards are causes of people leaving religion and embracing secular, inclusive policies, rather than effects. Maybe they're unrelated.
Give it a rest, will you please? Your statement, above, is not an argument; it is simply more personal insult (same as your pulled-out-of-thin-air [to put it more politely than I could] insinuations about my being closed-minded, religious...OK, I'll give you "weirdo" since, although merely rude, I suppose that you can claim that I'm weird to you).
Is this really how you debate - stand around and simply propose that people are too stupid to agree with you? Very dogmatic, I daresay. And it does nothing to advance anyone's actual understanding of the subject of this thread topic (please, read what I wrote about "ad hominem" [or get the info elsewhere, if you prefer]).
The topic is about the relationship between religion, as a phenomenon, and war, as a phenomenon; the topic is not about any forum member's personal (in your imagination) "biases," or "blindness," or (in your imagination, wrt myself, anyway) personal religious beliefs, or other personal characteristics. You are merely expressing your own prejudices, and doing it in the worst, most obnoxious way, by expressing them in the form of personal insults. You could very well have simply made some statement about the "past" of Christianity, without having been personally unkind and discourteous.
Damn, you guys write too fast.. two days off and there's three more pages
They don't have a lock at all. While Brazil is still the biggest Catholic country of the world, you only have to spend a day here to find out how much it has declined. The Church still has a lot of influence, but the others have something else: money and a more modern/accessible speech. Can't say for sure for the other countries, but Latin America seems pretty much the same to me.
One thing I like about here is that it's perhaps the most religious-tolerant place to live. People just don't care that much...
Just to add to this topic for all the Christians, hope you can answer this.
We Know [sic] from the Bible that Dog (Oops typo ) created the earth in 7 days, blah blah blah, Adam and Eve blah blah blah.
Later we are told that the whole world is flooded and good old Noah and his wife build the big boat, take 2 of each animal. So this means the bible is really telling us that we are all actually the result of inbreeding between Noah and his Wife.
So my question is.... Why do people in the modern world still believe all this shite?
The Vatican seems to have a lock on the Third World though...
