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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chris land who wrote (38693)	5/31/1999 9:42:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Chris, your answer to the Satan question will not do. There are as many interpretations of the Bible as a dog has fleas. For that, there are almost as many reasons. For one thing, the concept of God is not the same throughout the Bible. An interesting study of the changes and permutations in that concept, BTW, can be found in The History of God, by the Biblical scholar Karen Armstrong (an ex-nun turned agnostic). For another, the Bible, since it was written over long periods in historical time, is full of contradictions. Formal theology was developed partially in order to deal with those contradictions. Major schisms have occurred -- and major wars have been fought -- over what to outsiders look like insignificant theological points. Why do you assume that anyone who has read the Bible from cover to cover (as I have) would reach the same conclusions as you have reached? jbe

To: Chris land who wrote (38693)	5/31/1999 11:00:00 AM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 108807

The theory of vicarious atonement is the child of cowardice and fear. It arranges for a man to be a criminal and to escape the consequences of his crime. It destroys personal responsibility, the most essential element of moral character. It is contrary to every moral principle. The Church never has been and never will be able to explain why a god should be forced to resort to such injustice to rectify a mistake of his own. To earnest questions and honest thoughts it has always replied with threats. It has always silenced inquiry and persecuted thought. Past authority is its god, present investigation its devil. With it brains are below par, and ignorance is at a premium. It has never learned that the most valuable capital in this world is the brain of a scholar. Every earnest thought, like every earnest thinker, adds something to the wealth of the world. Blind belief in the thought of another produces only hopeless mediocrity. Individual effort, not mere acceptance, marks the growth of the mind. The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear. Fear is the nearest approach to the ball and chain that this age will permit, and it should be the glorious aim of the thinkers of to-day that so refined and cruel a form of tyranny shall not be left for those who come after us. We owe physical freedom to the intellectual giants of the lost past; let us leave mental freedom to the ntellectual children of the future. Fear scatters the blossoms of genius to the winds, and superstition buries truth beneath the incrustation or inherited mediocrity. Fear puts the fetters of religious stagnation on every child of the brain. It covers the form of purity and truth with the contagion of contumely and I distrust. It warps and dwarfs every character that it touches. It is the father, mother, and nurse of hypocrisy. It is the one great disgrace of our day, the one incalculable curse of our time; and its nurse and hot-bed is the Church. As to reading the bible's old testament you should be prosecuted for promoting porn. A loving God that would favor a man like Lot who offered his daughters for rape to save some fugitives he harbored, and save his butt and then turn his wife to salt for taking a last look at the home she was forced to leave is your God. A god who took orders from Moses to repent dosn't sound too powerful. A god who favors a man like David who killed a man to screw his wife and gave him 100's more sure doesn't deserve worship from anyone but a whore monger.Is that you Chris? Is that why you preach so about your God? Take your Roman fiction and myth to the ask God thread. You and Emile can bug hell out of each other and leave others alone.

To: Chris land who wrote (38693)	5/31/1999 11:32:00 AM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 108807

Chris, Chuzzlewit asked why God created Satan. Your reply said to read the Bible from cover to cover. But you, who've presumably done it, can't answer his simple question. Answer the question if you can. If you can't, have the integrity to at least say so. Bruce