Originally posted by prepstudinsc@Jul 2 2004, 01:12 AM
This is why, as a Christian, I get so riled up, by my fellow evangelicals. They can be so stupid sometimes. In their small minded thinking, trying to be morally righteous, they turn off those tho whom they are trying to preach, thus negating their whole witness.
Jonb and Prepstud know my position on relgion from the earlier incarnation from this board (and elsewhere) and I take the view as expressed by Lacsap1 in that I am an athiest and happen to believe that religion is the biggest conspiracy ever perpetuated on this world. However, I also respect the fact that people are free to believe whatever the hell it is they want to believe
except when they vocalise those beliefs which can do harm to anyone else. Which is why I have made a few strongly-worded posts against Tender. As far as I am concerned she falls into the Right-Wing Christian camp who spout
parts of the Bible but
ignore other aspects of it because they believe it gives them the moral high ground. But, Jon and Prep are also religious people and yet they have never given me the slightest cause to have crossed words with them. If people choose to believe and it makes their lives happier then all well and good and I am happy for them. The right-wing "Christian" Conservatives can all go and fuck themselves. They scream from their pulpits (or their LPSG posts) that
homosexuality is wrong because it says so in the Bible . Well actually the Bible also says:
that you can sell your eldest daughter into slavery as long as it's in a neighbouring country
that you can take an unruly child to the city gates and stone him to death
that you can be punished by death for eating shellfish
you can be stoned to death for touching the skin of a dead pig
etc etc etc; there are many more anachronistic examples from that particular book.
No
sane person would kill another because lobster was eaten, so
sane person would kill their child because it had been naughty. None of the right-wing "Christian" bigots can answer me when I point out that they tirade against homosexuality but don't stone their own children to death when they are unruly; that they pick and chose what to believe from the Bible because it suits their own fascist, Victorian, puritanical view-point.
As an athiest, I believe I live a more
Christian life than so-called Christians simply because I believe we are here to learn and help each other not to denigrate or harm others. So-called Christians
really do damage when they become law-makers and impose their fascist views on everyone.
As DMW has pointed out, there are problems with the
translation from Hebrew to Greek to English. We've grown up hearing all sorts of stories from the Bible and we are led to believe that they mean this or that. The Good Samaritan: we are led to believe that this means we must help our fellow human beings but in fact the story was Jesus' attempt at political agit-prop and was an attack against the money-changers who ran the temples. We are led to believe that "there was no room at the inn, so Jesus was born in a stable". Well that's partly true but a mis-translation between Hebrew and Greek has led us to believe that the "inn" was some kind of Bethlehem Hilton which was full (well, it was Christmas!! (sorry, just a joke)) but the original Hebrew word referred to the upper part of dwellings were people lived as opposed to the ground floor where the animals were kept. So Jesus was simply born in a normal dwelling but on the ground floor. It's all a matter of interpretion and mis-translation and the politcal agendas of those doing both.
Sorry to ramble on and people such as DMW and Jonb who are far cleverer than I will perhaps clarify some of the things I have mentioned.
So in my opinion Christians can believe whatever they want to but the moment their beliefs cause harm to others, they cross the line and deserve to be slapped down.
Here endeth the lesson.
and positioning of women as secondary citizens in society. Since I strongly disagree with these things, I also reject the idea of homosexuality being wrong. Actually I disagree with quite a lot. I have that option because I have researched it more fully than some. To accept some but not the parts that seem icky is what almost all (excuse this) psycho-Christians do. Then they have the audacity to condemn others for doing the same thing, making their own discernments. Then there's the topic of Apocolyptic writing, which was an authorial style around at that time where exaggeration and simile was used heavily to make points more dramatically. It was a commonly used writing style and probably accounts for explaining much of the book of Revelation. Then there's the issue of John, there are at least three distinctly different authors who are attributed to "John", it was as common a name then as now! sheesh, rant done.
