Are you suggesting that James traveled back in time and prevented himself from being a Christian as a child and studying the Bible for 40 years? That creates a paradox you know... But wait, if James has a time machine, why doesn't he just go back to 32 AD to meet Jesus personally?

And I don't know how long he was a Christian, if you notice I said "studied the Bible for 40 years" which he has asserted many times.

Oh of course I am. I mean, that is obviously the only possible logical assumtion that could be made from what I said.


Are you suggesting that "studying the Bible for 40 years" automatically makes one a "practicing Christian"? If so, I know a couple "practicing Christians" who do not believe in any of the Christian doctrines. Bit of a paradox there don't you think?

Wow, you are like a dog with a bone, you just won't let it go, will you?

James has asserted:

1) He studied the Bible for 40 years.
2) He was a Christian into his teens and was very active.
3) He has multiple uncles who are pastors.

If he was a Christian as a teenager...THEN YES, HE WAS A PRACTICING CHRISTIAN.

Really? Okay, I'll go there. I'm in the mood to laugh.

So 8 months ago, James says "I was a Christian as a teenager and I studied the Bible for 40 years".

Great.

After 8 months pass, you think that maybe he suddenly wasn't a Christian as a teenager and didn't study the Bible for 40 years?

Please explain how you think this would work, without a time machine.

Unless you are implying he was lying when he said he studied Christianity for 40 years and will tell a different lie now.

I really can't see any other possiblity, unless you didn't communicate your point clearly...

utterly absurd. who's god? i think it wrong to beat your wife. yet if you live under sharia law it's not considered wrong and a muslim accepts the existance of god. so who's right? me who is agnostic and thinks god is unknowable, the muslim who accepts the existence of alha as god, or the christian? shouldn't leave out the early hawaiians who accepted pele i suppose. who'd i miss.?

your not responding, your arguing with everyone buddy. ( =
may you should try some introspection hugh? maby try and see what everyone else thinks about what you say or rather how you say it?
its entertaining ill sit and read thanks

Again with the personal perjoratives that have nothing to do with the issue. In that respect, you are just as much like that dog and bone as anyone you've accused of it.

Conceded. I incorrectly interpreted "were" as being subjunctive instead of past tense.

Sarcasm is not always clear to everyone. So I guess I didn't communicate my point clearly to you.

If moral absolutes exist, then a god must exist. Moral Absolutes like "It's always wrong to murder" could only exist if created by a necessary being. If you don't believe in moral absolutes, then you could believe that evolution, societies, religions or individuals determined right and wrong.

The existence of moral absolutes has absolutely nothing to do with a belief in any particular god or even if you are atheist or agnostic. It's two completely separate issues.

Moral absolute means something that is always right or wrong. Like my earlier example of murder (ie an unjustified killing).

Morality on the other hand is a set of behaviors, which one engages in. It might be a moral absolute that you shouldn't steal, but Robin Hood's personal morality said that it was okay to steal from the rich.

The discussion is really about morality, but the OP used right and wrong interchangeably with morality and it is widely accepted that they are two different things.

It's entirely possible for someone to know something is wrong, but still engage in the activity. That reveals the distinction between moral knowledge (knowing right and wrong) and moral's in action (morality).

It's not a pejorative, it's a simile. A pejorative is an insult, a simile is a comparison. I was stating that you were being stubborn on the issue.



If you are saying I'm stubborn, I would agree.

I hope Jason will pardon this repsonse, but since the question came up I'd like to address it.

Yes, I was born into a very devout (not fundamentalist though), extended family of Christians. We were Free Methodist Protestants.

Just for the record Free Methodists tend to worship Jesus and focus on the New Testament, they try very hard to view the Old Testament through the eyes of Jesus.

We also were never taught to proselytize or judge others because of their faith or lifestyle. Free Methodists are what you might call "Jesus Freaks". We believing in doing what Jesus actually said, rather than preaching it.

My entire extended family were all Free Methodists Chrstians. My mother had seven brothers, two of whom were actual full-time pastors of the Free Methodists Church. All of their wives were also Christains who adopted the Free Methodist faith when they married my uncles.

This may seem a bit ironic, but three of my mother's brothers were indeed athesits. The irony was that they all consdiered to be the geniuses of the family. Not because they were atheists, but just because they were clearly the smartest of the bunch. Although even they attended church services on occassion just for the the sake of the family and they raised their children as Christians.

My father had several sisters, all of whom married Christian men. So my entire family where all christians (or Christian tolerant atheists). Some of my cousins grew up to become pastors in the Free Methodist chruch and are still pastors to this very day.

I too, was a very spiritual person. I always believed in God and as I grew up I was taught that Jesus was the Son of God.

What happened was the following:

Even as a young child I started to realize that even the preachers didn't agree on everything. They often invited other pastors over for dinner and so I would hear plenty of religious conversations, and my atheistic (or skeptical) uncles would ask their sincere questions that bothered them.

What I observed was that the preachers confessed that even they had their doubts about certain things and often had quite differnt opinions of things.

I sincerely wanted to get to the bottom of all of it. I had had been taught by those same hypocritical preachers that the Bible has answers to all our questions. Well, clearly they didn't even believe this themselves really.

So I started to ask my own question and study the bible in great detail. Not as a skeptic at all. On the contrary, I believed that it was true and therefore it should contain the TRUTH.

After years of study what I found was that it is nothing more than a totally contradictive story that even clergy can't agree on.

That's the REAL TRUTH for anyone who is sincerely interested.

Also as I grew and studied it I found myself having to defend against Christians themselves (especially the fundamentalists) who would use Jesus as an excuse to damn other people's lifestyles, etc.

It became clear to me than many fundamentalists are doing nothing more than using Jesus as their own egotistical battering RAM to drive home their own prejudices in the name of Jesus Christ.

I soon recognized that many of the religion institutions themsleves were totlally unrepresentative of the Jesus that I had learned about. And it became clear to me that the religious institutions could not be trusted. Moreover, it also became clear to me that many religious factions are actually in heated opposition with each other.

As I studied the Bible trying to find TRUTH, it became apparent to me that Jesus could not possibly have been the son of Yahweh (the God of Abraham). I finally began to realize that the Gospels aren't the 'words of Jesus' at all, but rather they are nothing more than a distortion of some historical event that more than likely was about a man who had been crucified for having denounced the ways of the Old Testament rather than any 'fulfillment' of prophesy.

I began to realize that the things Jesus taught were actually much more in line with the things that Buddha taught 500 years earlier in nearby India. And that even according to the writings in the gospels, Jesus denounced a lot of the things that had supposedly been taught by the fallacious God of Yahweh.

Adding to that the "missing years" of Jesus from the time he was 12 until he was 30, it became obvious to me that Jesus probably had traveled to India during those years and came back as an early version of Deepak Chopra.

Seriously. I believe that Jesus was a Buddhist ultimately. It fits in perfectly with the kinds of parables that he tuaght.

It all became clear to me that Jesus had actually tried to denounce the Old religion and replace it with the higher morals of the Buddha. Everything he taught was in precise agreement with what Buddha taught and totally opposite to what had been taught by the Old God of Abraham.

So I concluded that Jesus could not possibly have been the son of Yahweh (for a myriad of reasons). And he was not a 'sacrifical lamb' of God sent to pay for the sins of man.

In fact, even today science has shown us that the whole idea that mankind is repsonsible for bringing death, disease and imperfection into the world is clearly false. Those thing existed long before mankind ever came onto the scene. So the whole story of Adam and Even falling from grace is a lie (at least in a literal sense).

Also the very idea that Yahweh would be appeased by blood sacrifices doesn't make any sense either. That's just a hangover from the Greek mythology of Zeus.

The whole religion just doesn't hold an once of water, IMHO.

But yes, I was a Christian, but only because I was born into it. I don't think I would have ever fallen for it otherwise. I wish I had been born into a family of witches instead. I would have been far better off.

I'm disagreeing with them, just as they are disagreeing with me. I believe that I am allowed to have an opinion and I am allowed to defend it. If you feel I have broken any forum rules, I strongly encourage you to report me to the mods.

But regardless, I'm glad you find the discussion entertaining. I hope you will also find it informative.

As a self-proclaimed Fundamentalist who believes every word in the Bible is the literal word of an omniscient God and in Biblical inerrancy, I think you're going to have a simply awful time explaining how your last paragraphic is logically consistent with verses like this one:



I don't think Darwin ever used language this graphic, advocated such violence or condoned genocide.

Nor do I worship Darwin or hold the totality of his works as being inerrant, inviolate truth. I think it's perfectly reasonable to posit that he could be correct about some things and crazy as loon about others.

As a Fundamentalist, though, you sign on for the whole binary show. And it shows.

-Kerry O.

So... are you stating that you have actually read all of Darwins works?

What page number and chapter of what Darwin book published in what year are you saying promotes eugenics?

Or... did you just pick up some pointers from the Doom Daily (again) ???

After the Doom Daily hyperlink post, you really screwed yourself on any further credibility issues.

A prophecy given by prophet Hosea as to what was going to happen to Samaria without God's protection. Samaria was a small country and while they were loyal to God, God protected them. After generations of them worshipped idols, God sent a prophet to war them of what would happen if they didn't turn away from their idols. They didn't turn away, so God removed his protection from Samaria and the Samaria's were attacked by invaders.

God didn't condone these actions, God warned of what would happen. Just as he warned Nineveh through the prophet Jonah. Not to change the subject, but Nineveh was an interesting situation. Nineveh wasn't a Jewish city, they didn't believe in God, but they were incredibly wicked. They killed Jews and had a huge pile of their skulls in town. The heads were severed and thrown into the pile to rot. God sent Jonah to encourage them to change their ways. The citizens of Nineveh heard Jonah's message, repented and followed God. They were spared destruction. What's interesting here is God's forgiveness. God is so quick to forgive those who ask for forgiveness.

Now following the events in Nineveh, Jonah was angry with God. He was mad that God would risk Jonah's life to save a bunch of heathens. God explained to Jonah that He loves everyone and even their livestock and didn't want to see them die. God decided that it was worth the risk to send his loyal prophet Jonah to Nineveh, in the chance that he could save the gentiles who lived there.

God loved Abraham, Issac and David greatly. God didn't want to remove his protection from Samaria (descendants of the above), but his just nature wouldn't allow him to bless sinners any longer. Either the Samaritans had to worship God or God would remove His blessings which protected Samaria. Unfortunately, the Samaritans didn't listen to Hosea and they were slaughtered.

The term "insult" is not used in any definition I can find for pejorative. And all the definitions of pejortive that I can find, apply perfectly to your statement.

Also, the fact is that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the issue, and had everything to do with me personally. Hence it was ad hominem as well as pejorative.

So lets leave all this off-topic behind and get back to the issue.

Or has that deceased equine been bludgeoned enough?

Darwin never promoted eugenics in those words. What Darwin did was claim that any member of a species that was different should be weeded out if it wasn't of superior stock. Because an inferior member of a species could out breed the superior stock. He also was grossly racist, calling blacks and aborigines "anthropomorphic apes". He said he would rather be the descendant of a baboon that be descended from South American natives. His writings led to the eugenics movement and inspired Adolph Hitler in his quest to rid the world of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the handicapped. The title of his most famous works is usually only called "Origin of the Species", but the full title is "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life".



Doom daily?

These kinds of explanations of a egotistical jealous God who removes his protection from people because they are knowingly choosing to worship idols over their true creator is utterly absurd.

Just thing about this for even a mere moment.

Sane intelligent people are going to knowingly choose to worship false idols over their actual true creator?

What sense does that even make?

Clearly if these people were worshiping other Gods then they must have very sincerely believed that those other Gods were indeed their true creator.

There's no way that this could be seen as being knowingly defiant.

That's the fallacy of the whole religion.

What kind of idiots would knowingly worship false idols over their true creator if they actually knew what they were doing?

And if they didn't know what they were doing then they couldn't have been said to having been doing it knowingly.

This is the fallacy of the whole idea of a jealous God who is mean to people just because they don't worship him.

A God who plays HIDE AND SEEK and refuses to make himself KNOWN would be totally unjustified in allowing any harm to come to anyone who fails to worship him!

He absolutely must make himself known in no uncertain terms before he could demand such a thing.

That whole religion can be nothing other than a manmade lie because no divine supreme all-wise being could possibly be that utterly STUPID!

Your attempts to justify this mythology simply don't make any sense at all. The Biblical God would need to be utterly STUPID to pull the stunts that you claim that he pulls on people.

He would be totally unrighteous.

I'm sure you would like that. To be able to claim that I insulted you and used an Ad hominem argument. But I didn't do either. If you want to move on, that's fine. But I didn't insult you, even if your feelings were hurt. I didn't make an ad hominem attack. I used a simile to say that you were being stubborn. If you have any current or future complaints about what I say, take it up with the mods. I don't want you lying about me in the open threads. I am however done discussing anything with you until you apologize for your mischaracterization of my post. Good day.

1) I didnt claim that you insulted me, so accusations of mischaracterization would apply to you.
2) I claimed that you used pejorative, exactly per the definition of pejorative. (Look it up yourself.)
3) I claimed that you use ad hominem, exactly per the definition of ad hominem. (Again, look it up yourself.)
4) Yes, you did use a simile, but that in no way excludes either pejorative or ad hominem. (And again, look it up yourself.)
5) I never lied about you in open thread, so you don't have to worry about that. However,
6) you lied about me in open thread by claiming that I claimed you insulted me.

Thus,
a) There was no mischaracterization on my part
b) There was mischaracterization on your part
c) There is nothing for me to apologize for, even if, to use your own words "your feelings were hurt".
d) If the last few posts of yours are indicitaive of what I could expect from future discussion with you, then I welcome your exclusion of yourself from such future discussions.

So good day to you too.