Posted by panch from pool0479.cvx20-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.251.224) on Saturday, July 20, 2002 at 12:42PM :
: : +++I get mad at people who tell me that the cruelty they want to practise anyway...is sanctioned and approved of and demanded and expected by ANY God.
: ***Fred, this is not true at all. No where in the New Testament that says God sanctions
: human participation in murder and injustice.
+++I LOVE this part...it doesn't have to say it anywhere...the ENTIRE point of the New Testicles is that GOD demands murder and injustice be applied to his own darling son...what can the rest of us hope for? Whereas Ishmael and Issac are ultimately spared by a capricious god...the full sentence of death MUST be carried out in the case of Jesus. Once you accept that as "necessary" in ANY way...in ANY way...you've thjrown the gates open for humans to kill at will and refer back to the arch murderer of them all for inspiration.
+++We'd have the good sense to lock a man like that up, YOU would demand it!!!...let alone make a "divine" criminal out of him and call him our God. You wonder why these three sisters from hell are at each other's throats still, and will be till they get their goddamn Armageddon...taking the rest of us with them?
:
: : ++++There is no need to even have a god, unless....unless you feel the impulse to committ a heinous crime you know damn well IS a crime, so you need "divine" sanction to hide behind. No law mandates the killing of innocent children...only believing in God demands that sort of thing.
: ****Alright Fred, you're looking at religion in a very narrow way.
+++So are you baby...so are you. But since what I see in my narrow view of it are all the murders and cruelties it condones...and you chose to see it in its sunnier manifestations...you are bound to be more googleeyed than I am. When you testify before a court, you may bring up all the nice things a guy did...all I have to do is point out that he raped a child...and he's condemned...I don't care HOW nice he is to his mother.
You're completely disregarding the SPIRITUALITY of religion and belief in God.
+++You couldn't define that if a gun was put to your head. What are you talking about? Do you think you've achieved or understood "spirituality" when you've spelled it?
Religion is multidimensional. It isn't accurate to look at it through one lens and make a generalization about the whole.
++++As a theorhetical exercise in a college class, it isn't. Theorhetical violence, or love...does no harm or good either. I'm not talking theory...I'm talking about the bombs and the soldiers that the priests of a god will bless as they set out to kill innocent people. After that, I don't care WHAT kind of nice things those soldiers do back at home in the community...and you wouldn't either if those bombs were being dropped on you! I'm sure Mr Atta was nice to his mommy.
+++I know people are murderous anyway...religion or not...but your's excuses this sort of thing all the time and you get away with it because "gee you are really TRYING to be good...but it's so HARD...forgive me again for failing." try that defense in court. Your religion gives the best way "out" of any of them. That's one reason there was a Reformation to begin with...the patent absurdity of it all was just too obvious...what spirituality??? We're talking about the biggest corporation the world has ever seen, that has been wracking up tax free property for the last 1200 years...largely by playing on just this notion that they are dealing in any kind of spirituality at all...right down to the present when these same crooks are trying to hide their assets, which in many cases even they don't know of...to avoid paying just and fair damages for the damamge their pimps of Bishops and pederast priests have been committing since time began. Yeah, yeah I know...think about "god" instead. Tell that to the millions of people who were killed in the name of that god of love.
+++ God Stella,,,what is WRONG with you? See how pernicious this stuff is...how it makes the wisest person infantile, dribbling spit all over their otherwise comely selves as they rationalize the inexcusable? Humans are flawed and rotten and all of that...okay....but this method they've found of excusing where they can't justify...and obscuring where they can do neither...and then just burning at the stake when all else fails...is harmful to a person's mental and physical health. It is a Corporate entity you defend or explain....NOT any kind of a god.
: : +++Funny how you profess ignorance and certainty in the same sentence...when it suits the paltry "point" you are about to make. You can see why children are no match, not only from priests who rape their bottoms, but their minds as well.
: ***You've read alot of Freud. Try Eliade next time.
++++I don't see where you saw Freud in that. Does Eliade teach how to side step issues? Reading isn't believing anyway...you believe a Jewish history book you have no way in hell knowing was written by anyone who ever "talked" with a jewish tribal god in a desert 2000 years ago. That's taking "faith" a bit far, don't you think? Or does this stuff ever allow a person to free their mind enough to think at all?
: : Christian people see humans as inherently sinful.
: : +++Well then Fuck them...they ought to know. Just what is a "sin" anyway...besides getting caught doing what some prelate says you mustn't do. The Bible is a Jewish history book...no more and no less.
: ***Sin is a simple concept made complex. It's doing wrong. Like, killing your neighbor's sheep, making him unable to feed his family. Doing something to hurt others.
+++You didn't mention blessing armies and the weapons used to kill innocent families with. Sin is so simple everyone manages to do it...Christians make it even simpler by saying their God forgives anything they do...anything.
In the Bible, sin is described in many different ways:
+++Let them define it any way they want to...we have been spared the depredations of a church that uses divine sanction to commit every unspeakable act known to man...it is Man who has invented god...not the other way around...he just knew he had to excuse himself somehow. I'll be satisfied from now on with man's law...not god's. Once we got god's law off our backs...humans have made far better laws...and when we err, we have to look no furhter than ourselves, if we don't like what we see we still don't have to blame anywhere else, on any other innocent soul we next want to kill for our sins....not find our excuses in the heavens. At one time the church did indeed soften the often harsh treatment humans received at the hands of an all powerful "nobility"...but those days are long gone...extinguished in the bon fires the church used to silence all crtiticism once they'd managed to become strong enough to oppose kings...thank god we got rid of god.
as a reigning monarch in a closed cosmos (like Saul in the OT and Emperor Nero later on); as a free choice to break the covenant with God:as ignorant, non-malicious, off-target life choice; as interior, mean-spiritedness, crookedness of heart. When you really get down to it, it's common sense. I know what you're going to say next: "You can have common sense without a GOd who plays his cruel joke of a "divine will" on humanity by putting his innocent son to death on a cross." I don't know how to answer you on that one.
+++Of course you don't...and there isn't any answer to it. It is so stark, so mean, so ugly, so ludicrous...that you have to swallow it whole, or what's the point? It's as if to make a good Christian of you at all, a lobotomy has to be performed first...in the guise of accepting this kind of definition as proof of a new and improved god of "love". After that...what WON'T you accept???
I'm not a Christian apologist to even try. It's not enough to look at Christianity through the single angle you're looking at it through.
: 'nuff said.
++++I am willing to take what is good in all ways of thought...especially those that provide NO excuse for shirking personal responsibility...who don't deal in "guilt"..because guilt is that license to commit crime after sin after crime...whereas responsibility doesn't allow you that easy way out. I am NOT responsible for the Roman's killing Christ...I would NEVER accept his offer to die for my "sins", or suffer for them in the slightest.
++++If I ONCE agree to such a horrible notion...that an innocent and sweet and unoffending young man has to be tortured and put to death to save a single hair on my ass...I've just sold my soul to damnation...as I would richly deserve.
-- panch
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