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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (25466)	5/23/1999 7:38:00 PM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

Helen Gardner comments the following and I wish you and some of your messianic friends would give a sensible answer to her questions. " Don't you know that if the leading men of the Old Testament were living to-day, they would be known as liars, thieves, and murderers -- some indeed as monsters to whom even these terms would be base flattery. Despoilers of those who had not injured them; infamous liars in the name of God; murderers of men; butchers of children; debauchers of women; if they were living in the nineteenth century they would be unanimously elected to the gallows -- that is if they escaped Judge Lynch long enough. And yet they are held up to us, who have outgrown their morals, as authorities on the subject of God's will to man, as Prophets, Saints, Mediators! Do you want your children taught to believe in the purity and honor of such men? Do you want your children taught to worship a God who sanctioned, commanded, and gloried (and usually participated) in their worst crimes? Do you want them to believe that at any time, in any age, a God was the director in the most heinous crimes, in the vilest plots, in the most cruel, vulgar, cowardly acts of vice that were ever recorded? Either he was or else Moses' word is not worth a copper, and theology is the invention of ignorance. He did these hideous things or the Bible is mistaken about it. There is to-day that kind of a God somewhere in space waiting around to pounce on anybody who doesn't admire him, or else the Church is founded upon the ignorance and fear of its dupes, and teaches them what is not true. They say it is wicked to inquire into the facts. I say it is wrong not to. It seems to me that in a matter like this the most important thing is to be honest all round, and that if the claims of the Church are true no inquiry can injure them. They say, "Oh, well, drop all the bad part, and only take the good. There is a great deal of good in it too." But if I don't know what is good myself I won't go to Moses and that class of men to find out. I'll go to somebody who has got a clean record. I won't go to men who robbed and murdered in the name of God; I won't go to men who bought and sold their fellow-men; I won't go to men who gave their own daughters over to the hate and lust of others, even bargaining for them with sons and brothers. Such men cannot tell me what is good. Such men cannot make a religion for me to live by, or a God that I can accept."