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Originally Posted by LucienSlade
Hey.... how's it going? My view on the Bible is very.... negative. Moses came down from the top of a mountain and claimed he heard god, and coincidentally he had the tools needed to forge a list of rules that were given unto him by a burning bush. Nowadays nobody with a high school diploma would believe a story like this, why? Because common sense was not yet discovered by these primitive Neanderthals, who blindly followed any story laid out in front of them, as long as the story teller had the bigger army behind him.
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I'm sorry if this comes off as rude, but you seem to not have made your research.
- While I have to admit that the story of the 10 commandments isn't exactly an allegory, most other stories in the bible are.
- Believes don't have anything to do with a high school diploma. Nobody can prove God really sent a message to Moses, but nobody can disprove the story, either. All we can do is either believe or not believe this story, a decision everybody has to make for themselves - and one that is in no way dependent on your intelligence.
- Common sense in those days was actually more prevalent than it is nowadays. It was what made people survive, while with today's western culture most people would probably starve if it wasn't for instruction manuals.
- There are at least 30 millennia between Neanderthals and the Old Testament... :P
- Jews/Early Christians didn't have an army behind them at all. They where the underdogs, the enslaved. It wasn't an army that made people listen to those stories, it was HOPE.
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I'm not saying it is impossible for Jesus to be real, but i don't believe any of those corny "miracles" he performed, or that his mother was a virgin. FYI in those times, if you lost your virginity before being wed, you were put to death. So wouldn't logic dictate she used the whole "impregnated by the holy spirit" story, to keep herself and her unborn child, from receiving a painful death?
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Again I have to disagree, since this is actually not true.
- Women were not put to death for loosing their virginity. They were simply shunned and had next to no chance of ever finding a man accepting them as their bride. They used to die because they just couldn't take care of themselves (and their babies, if they were impregnated during loosing their virginity) without a community to support them.
- Back then that part of the world was ruled by the Roman Empire. All those talk about the messiahs being born did not help the poor girl to survive - on the contrary, the Romans did fear and search for the heir of David, because he brought hope to the underdogs and thus endangered their supremacy...
- A lot of modern scientists believe that the immaculate conception was actually meant to hide a by far more cruel fact than that of a woman having sex before she was wed. There are actually indications that loosing her virginity wasn't her own free will, but that she rather was raped by one of the Roman occupants (which was pretty common in those days).
I can understand why back in those days - when hope was the one thing that people needed the most, something like that did not fit into a holy book. Nowadays I think this detail actually makes the whole story even more important - imagine, a good man taking in a raped girl, becoming father to her bastard son, raising him with love and care into the great man billions of people are worshiping today. If that's not Christian love, I don't know what is.
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Bible camps are just brainwashing facilities, making you thank an evil, uncaring being for every fortune and misfortune you receive in life. As for you and anyone else who is Bi or Gay, and still cling to this decadent faith, I mourn that you torture yourselves with trying to understand why these so called "holy people" don't accept you. Until the Bible and any book like it are considered works of fiction to the larger population, people will never stop persecuting what they don't understand. Then again, humanity will just find another reason to kill each other... *coughs* oil......
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I don't think she or her friend are torturing themselves at all. On the contrary, it seems like they have found their own way of living their faith, without relying on those bigot hypocrites. They draw strength from their faith and use it as a morale guideline. I'd call that a pretty positive thing.
And they are not following an evil, uncaring being. They are following a God who - despite having a temper, which at times makes him seem almost human - does care a lot about his followers. Christianity, if you look past the militant idiots, is a religion of love and acceptance.
Don't let the vocal minority of "hardcore" Christians blur your judgment on an otherwise pretty positive, life-affirming religion.