ok yes the man is head of the family. But that DOES NOT mean he is to drive his family like a bunch of slaves. It is also his duity to run the family in a Godly manner. Teach his family of what we are to do and not to do on earth to acheive greatness and go to heaven. We acheive greatness when we accept Jesus into our hearts and follow his teachings.

agreed.

Cowboy...sinners can never be great because they keep sinning.....and Christians rarely if ever follow the teachings of Jesus ...only True Christians follow all the teachings of Jesus

Oh but a true hearted christian is great. Jesus came and sacrificed himself for our sins. Our sins are forgiven making us pure. But the person has to truely have accepted Jesus into his heart. But i'll agree alot of christians fail. They'll drink and party on Friday/Saturday and go to church on Sunday. But again to recieve forgiveness comes repenting from the action that is of sinful nature.

Cowboy...sure a true hearted Christian may be great...but they are great and true because they follow all the teachings of Jesus ...can you make such a claim yourself

Just what, in your opinion, would constitute 'abuse' visited upon the Church by Christ? To me, it sounds like a logical fallacy, just another pseudo-profundity that is, essentially, meaningless because it states a case that cannot occur.

As to the dictators and bullies, it doesn't make a man either to just quote the Bible and say his testicles give him a divine right of default leadership he earned not by merit, but by birthright. Likewise, it denies a woman standing by virtue of that same lack of them. That may have been fine in the dark ages, but things are a little different now, aren't they?

-Kerry O.

umm..we're not evolving foward anymore. Natural selection, the best mechanism for bettering a species has been taken out of our equation since we invented medicine and philosophy.
Philosophy where we say everyone has a right to grow up and produce offspring. And medicine where we make this almost always so.
Humanity has been getting dumber and weaker for over 100 years. And quite soon, our species will be unviable unless science intervenes by way of genetic engineering. Which will never happen as long as a substantial percentage of humanity believes tampering with the genetics of a species, specifically our species, is against God's will.
So...basically we're screwed.

Abuse, in my opinion, is mistreatment of another for personal gain or ego. Christ loved us too much to abuse us as many abusive husbands do to their wives while using the bible as an excuse. That was not the biblical role of husband at all.

And just as women have been given the divine role of nurturer (through a more easily identifiable BIOLOGICAL attachment to child), men have actually been given a divine role to lead and love their families. I dont consider it a right so much as a responsibility that should be taken just as seriously as a mothers responsibility to love her child.

Do you think a lot of that is about humans not being able to adjust to the more rapidly changing technologies...or just new knowledge?

I think we're screwed if we allow religion to dictate progress...people of religion don't seem able to accept change easily, all that "written in stone" crap...

I'm not sure what you're asking with your first question.
As for the second, religion already dictates, to some degree, scientific progress. Remember the controversy over test tube babies? Remember how many people said they'd never accept a cloned human because it would be created with out a soul? Remember all the b.s. about stem cell research?
Religion has forever been against scientific progress. The reason being, of course, is because the more one knows, the less one is apt to "believe".

I see nothing wrong with capitalism.

Why Pat Robertson is still on the air is a mystery to me. He must have more money than God. When flipping channels on television and his face pops up I cringe until I can flip to the next channel. I hate his voice and every stupid thing that comes out of his mouth. He is totally insane, like the preachers who used to torture witches in Salem. Nobody should take anything that comes out of his mouth seriously. He uses church money to pay for his television spot to spout his stupid opinions.

Not true at all.

No matter how much medicine we create we will not be able to stop disease and we definitely cannot stop our environment from changing so evolution will continue.

We are still no different than the animals when it comes to our vulnerability to disease and environment.

I laughed so hard when I read this.

Some people are sure sick aren't they???

Follow me or else you are going to hell for eternal punishment. I love you with conditions.

Sounds like a standard case of psychological abuse to me. Physical if we toss in the eternal punishment bit.

So men who abuse their spouses ARE indeed following the Bible, (and have a valid excuse) just a bit sooner then by the time one dies.

No, actually I was speaking about the example of Christ, who never said for anyone to follow him or go to hell. Christ, instead, died himself so that others would not. That is the love a husband is to have for his wife, not an abusive love.

to an extant, you are right. But not enough to matter. Seriously, no where close enough to matter.
For example, if the small pox vaccine had not been invented, hundreds of thousands more would have died from it. However, the percentage of humanity that was vulnerable to that disease would've steadily decreased with every generation. More would've died but our species, on the whole, would've been stronger for it. This generally doesn't happen any more.
The main reason medicine has to keep getting more and more complex is precisely because we've taken out natural selection. Right now, the average human's genetic code contains some 4000+ genetic "goofs". These "goofs" will cause a particular disease if both halves of the disease equation are present. When 2 humans breed, the "goofs" get mixed up in the offspring and if it gets a half of the same disease equation from both parents, the disease manifests. In nature, this offspring would most likely die before being able to pass this on to the next generation. However, now we have medicine and other ways of controlling diseases which allow the offspring to grow to maturity and pass this defection on to the next generation. Multiply this by 1000's of times for the thousands of diseases humans are vulnerable to and billions of times for the number of humans born under these conditions and the problem grows exponentially until the species is no longer viable w/o purposeful genetic and epigenetic engineering.

To say we are no different from other animals is to show a complete lack of understanding of the problem. Unless animals, not counting domesticated ones, have doctors and medicines too.

just out of curiousity, if a fireman runs into a burning house and saves some lives but dies while doing it, should those lives he saved now worship him as a god thing?
I've always wondered about that.

A fireman gets COMPENSATION to do a job. I feel this is very different than self sacrifice. A fireman doesnt go in PLANNING to die, he is trained to survie,,also different from Christ who planned and set out to lay down his life. I do feel fireman choose a career of bravery,,but no, I would never worship them for what they do.