Posted by pancho from pool0153.cvx20-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.250.153) on Thursday, November 28, 2002 at 12:37PM :
I don't know. Neither does anyone else. It's tempting to believe that since we think we know several people were willing to die in the belief, who claimed they'd witnessed it, then it must be true.
Seems logical...that's why religious people use this kind of trick..."seems to be true" is exactly what they're peddling.
By that "logicqeique" anyone willing to die for anything must be dying for something real. They do in a sense...every nut who thinks he's Napoleon "believes" he is. That doesn't make him French.
900 people committed suicide in Jonestown because they believed Jim Jones had an "IN" with God. Did he...or were they all crazy? Would a God ask you to get yourself killed? If the guy can make the universe in six days and watch football on the seventh...he can't build a world without the need to get people who love him and believe in him killed?
Is it not yet evident that death and murder and cruelty beyond belief are what this god has handed out...not mercy or charity or love? Would a father give his child cancer to see if she loved him...and TELL her he did because he wanted to "test" her love? We lock people like that up...not worship them. And a god???
You would expect the people who believe in this sort of god to kill, murder, burn, rape and steal, and they do and they are and they always have been. You would also expect them to deny any direct responsibility for what they pay to have done in their name.. well, who set them the example...?
I could have made a better world...so could a child. Why the need to prove anything to anyone...and why through misery and death? Where would have been the harm if we just lived in the belief that this planet is the only heaven we're ever going to know...that if there should be something after we have no way of knowing what...and that each and every person is as worthy as we are to enjoy life?
Take the rest of it and shove it...it exists to give added weight to the machinery by which we are ripped and torn apart and sent to live in the streets when no one needs us any longer...primarily to justify these sorts of inhuman but god-ordained things...and give people the chance for "penance"...taking a break, washing the accumulated filth off of them...and going back for more.
Please...
-- pancho
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