Sigh…
So here’s what’s been going on lately. Most of you who read this blog already know that when my wife and I left Christianity, it wrecked most of our family relationships. My wife’s parents and siblings, as well as my own, felt that they could no longer interact with us socially after our deconversion. We were no longer invited to any family functions, and our communication with them all but disappeared. We would speak if it was about religious issues, or if there were logistic issues that needed to be worked out in letting them see our kids, etc.
Over the years, things have gotten a little better, especially with my wife’s parents. Things are by no means back to normal, but at least our infrequent interactions have become more civil and more comfortable. A few weeks ago, I even had a phone conversation with my father that lasted about half an hour and had no references to religion whatsoever. It was nice.
Nevertheless, the awkwardness is still there, just under the surface. And we’re still blacklisted from all the family functions.
Throughout this time, I’ve occasionally reached out to my side of the family with phone calls, letters, facebook messages, etc, in an effort to discuss the issues that divide us. I don’t get much response. I’ve always been puzzled by that, since I know they think I’m completely wrong. If their position is right, why aren’t they willing to discuss it?
In the last five years, I’ve also been sent books and articles and even been asked to speak to certain individuals, and I’ve complied with every request. Why not? How could more information hurt? But when I’ve suggested certain books to them, or written letters, they aren’t read. When I finally realized that my problems with Christianity weren’t going to be resolved, I wrote a 57-page paper to my family and close friends, explaining why I could no longer call myself a Christian. As far as I know, none of them ever read the whole thing. And sure, 57 pages is quite a commitment. But they say this is the most important subject in their lives…
This past week, the topic has started to come back around. A local church kicked off a new series on Monday entitled “Can We Believe the Bible?” It’s being led by an evangelist/professor/apologist that was kind enough to take time to correspond with me for several weeks in the summer of 2010. I’ve never met him in person, but a mutual friend connected us, since he was someone who was knowledgeable about the kinds of questions I was asking. Obviously, we didn’t wind up on the same page.
My wife’s parents invited us to attend the series, but it happens to be at a time that I’m coaching my oldest daughter’s soccer team. So unless we get rained out at some point, there’s no way we can attend. However, we did tell them that if practice is ever cancelled, we’ll go. I also contacted the church and asked if the sermons (if that’s the right word?) will be recorded, and they said that they should be.
Monday night, the weather was fine, so we weren’t able to attend. And so far, the recording isn’t available on their website. However, they do have a recording of Sunday night’s service available, which is entitled “Question & Answer Night.” I just finished listening to it, and that’s where the bulk of my frustration comes from.
It’s essentially a prep for the series that kicked off Monday night. They’re discussing why such a study is important, as well as the kinds of things they plan to cover. What’s so frustrating to me is that I don’t understand the mindset of evangelists like this. I mean, they’ve studied enough to know what the major objections to fundamentalist Christianity are, yet they continue on as if there’s no problem. And when they do talk about atheists and skeptics, they misrepresent our position. I can’t tell if they honestly believe the version they’re peddling, or if they’re purposefully creating straw men.
A couple of times, they mentioned that one of the main reasons people reject the Bible comes down to a preconception that miracles are impossible. “And if you start from that position, then you’ll naturally reject the Bible.” But that’s a load of crap. Most atheists were once theists, so their starting position was one that believed in miracles.
They also mentioned that so many of these secular articles and documentaries “only show one side.” I thought my head was going to explode.
And they referred to the common complaints against the Bible as “the same tired old arguments that have been answered long ago.” It’s just so infuriating. If the congregants had any knowledge of the details of these “tired old arguments,” I doubt they’d unanimously find the “answers” satisfactory. But the danger with a series like this is that it almost works like a vaccination. The members of the congregation are sitting in a safe environment, listening to trusted “experts,” and they’re injected with a watered down strain of an argument. And it’s that watered down version that’s eradicated by the preacher’s message. So whenever the individual encounters the real thing, they think it’s already been dealt with, and the main point of the argument is completely lost on them.
For example, most Christians would be bothered to find out that the texts of the Bible are not as reliable as were always led to believe. Even a beloved story like the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus writes on the ground, we’ve discovered that it was not originally part of the gospel of John. It’s a later addition from some unknown author. To a Christian who’s never heard that before, it’s unthinkable! But if they’ve gone through classes where they’ve been told that skeptics exaggerate the textual issues in the Bible, and that the few changes or uncertainties deal with only very minor things, and that none of the changes affect any doctrinal points about the gospel, then it’s suddenly easier for them to swallow “minor” issues like the insertion of an entire story into the gospel narrative.
Sigh…
I’m going to either attend these sessions, or I’ll watch/listen to them once they’re available online. I may need to keep some blood pressure medication handy, though.
Finding Truth 
Crown’s pathetic attempts to whitewash the barbaric behavior of the OT god is proof that even really intelligent people (like Crown) can be brainwashed.
Evil is evil.
No one but a brain-washed neo-Nazi tries to whitewash the crimes of Hitler. No one but a brain-washed conservative Christian (and orthodox Jew) tries (so desperately) to whitewash the crimes of Yahweh/Jesus.
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Gary M: Deuteronomy 23:1 “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the Lord.”
That’s right, Gary. And what was “the assembly of the Lord”? It was the Hebrews, assembled at the Tabernacle or the Temple, before the Aaronic priests, performing the specific rites as required of Hebrews, in Israel, under the law of Moses.
That law never applied to Gentiles at all, and it ceased to apply to Jews also upon the conclusion of the following chain of events:
(1) Jesus curses the fig tree, killing it, and tells the parable of the fig tree, referring to Israel under the Mosaic covenant, and beginning the invocation of the “penalty clauses” of Dt. 28.
(2) Jesus pronounces the doom of the Temple.
(3) Jesus pronounces the doom of Israel, and the handing over of the vineyard to others, after reminding Israel of the chances that it had.
(4) Upon Jesus’ death the curtain of the Holy of Holies was torn in two: God has left the building, never to return.
(5) In 69 AD, the Roman Army under Titus carries out the sentence of destruction of the Temple, destroying it forever, and destroying the Aaronic priesthood, without which the rites required by the Mosaic law CANNOT be undertaken by Jews.
And with that, it’s all gone. The “Assembly of the Lord” spoken of there: Hebrews, assembled before the Aaronic priesthood, before the tabernacle/altar, no longer exists.
There are the Christians of the New Covenant, in Jesus’ blood, but the Mosaic covenant never did apply to them, and still doesn’t.
So, no one whose testicles were crushed or who had his penis amputated could appear before the Aaronic priests at the altar of old Israel. But everyone, including the Ethiopian eunuch, can appear at the table of the Lord under the New Covenant.
You’ve give a classic example of the laws in the Bible that do not, and never did, apply to Christians.
This is why reading comprehension is so important, and why it is best that people not read the Bible at all, if they are not going to be careful about reading it. The Torah is a law book, not a novel. Laws have jurisdictions to which they apply, and bind certain people and not others. All of that is spelled out in Scripture, but lay people have an unfortunate habit of just reading it and applying it any old way, sort of like how American children find out about the First Amendment and then start challenging authorities and, when punished, assert that they have “freedom of speech”.
They do, but “freedom of speech” doesn’t mean that, and the laws of Moses only ever applied to Hebrews of Covenantal Israel. And all they were ever promised for obeying them all was a farm in Israel. (And for disobeying them, they were promised the destruction of Israel, and scattering and misery. They disobeyed, and Jesus pronounced the doom.)
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Does Jesus ever tell his followers to stop circumcising their sons? Does Jesus ever say to stop following Jewish kosher dietary laws? Does Jesus ever tell his disciples to stop worshipping on Saturday in the Temple and in the synagogues?
Answer: no
If we really followed the teachings of Jesus we would all be circumcised (those of us who are men) Jews abstaining from pork and shrimp, worshipping in the synagogue on Saturdays. The current Christian worship practices are an invention of the bipolar, mentally ill mind of Saul of Tarsus.
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“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. 18″For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.…
—Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet
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Wow, Gary, project much?
“Whitewash”…”Evil!”
What is evil Gary? What you don’t like? Is that the definition of evil?
Nature is evil, Gary: we all die. Gravity is evil: it killed all of those people on that airplane.
Or perhaps these things just ARE. Nature IS. And what is the name that God revealed? “I am”, and his nature “I will be what I will be.” Nature is the emanation of God.
I presume that you don’t think that the physics are evil, do you? They kill everybody in the end.
With Israel, God plucked slaves out of a desperate situation, with power, to make an example out of them for the world. These were nobodies with nothing, a mixed bad of people whose commonality was that they were utter property. God plucked them straight out of the greatest kingdom in the world, systematically humiliating the local gods in the process.
He ground the Egyptians down, just exactly as they had ground down the slaves for 400 years. That’s JUSTICE Gary. Remember what happened to the Southern plantations and their owners’ wealth in the Civil War? It was all destroyed, gone with the wind. Wealth based upon oppression of others – monstrous injustice – was stripped away and destroyed: that’s justice.
And what did the Egyptians do? Why, just as the Southern plantation interests did, Gary: they fought to keep their wrongful power and their ill-gotten gains. And so God, the sea and General Sherman, respectively, killed them in very large numbers, until they collapsed under the agony and either relented, or died. This is justice.
These people were then led out into the desert by God, fed, and given a new prospect in life: I am. You are my people. I will protect you IF you obey me. I will be your king. I am pure, therefore, when you approach me, you must be pure. If you eat as I have told you, and practice the purity I have told you, I won’t inflict any of the diseases upon you that I inflicted upon Egypt (but if you don’t obey me, I will). You are not to mutilate people, but if somebody is mutilated, he is not to appear in my assembly.
You call this barbaric. What’s barbaric about it? The Assembly of Israel did not promise eternal life to anybody. The Mosaic covenant promised a FARM.
Break my laws and I sentence you to death, you Israelites, because you are my people, and a model of me to the world. So if you are filthy, I am forced to live with your filth – and I won’t – and you disgrace me before others, which I won’t tolerate either.
This isn’t barbaric. It’s law.
Consider America. If you don’t obey the cop, he will taze you and, often, shoot you dead. Is America a barbaric country, because we enforce substantially all of our laws with the threat (and actual execution) of death, by official action, for disobedience.
If you think that God’s laws of Israel are barbaric because they are backed up by death (both in the end, and also, in Israel, by immediate action in many cases), then do you think that the police should be disarmed, and should only use force in murder cases? No?
Is it that because we AGREE we can kill these people, by police, for disobedience, that makes it ok? Well, the Canaanites agreed to burn up their children. Why was that not ok?
Is it “Judgment by Gary” again? “The laws of MY land that I like are justification for the police using deadly force, but those OTHER laws are barbaric, because they use deadly force to enforce things I don’t agree with?”
That’s a fair standard, for Gary. Crown has his own opinions too.
God gave a law to all of mankind after the Flood: don’t kill people, and execute justice by shedding the blood of those who shed blood. That’s it. That’s the law for mankind. Still is. Jesus upheld it for all mankind: killers fail judgment.
But the laws of Israel? They applied to Israel, only, and under the specific conditions of their making. They’re not barbaric. They’re divine. And they don’t apply to you and me and never did. The Law against killing, and the other precepts of Jesus are what apply to us.
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If you cannot comprehend that hunting down and executing children and infants is evil, a barbaric act that your god ordered his followers to do on multiple occasions, and sometimes carried out himself, you are either brainwashed or immoral and evil yourself.
Period.
Just as I would not debate a neo-Nazi about the immorality of Hitler’s holocaust, I will not debate you on the immorality of your god. If you cannot see his immorality, we do not have any moral basis upon which to begin a debate.
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Could You and your Religion pass this Morality Test?
Religious people, conservative Christians in particular, talk a lot about “morality”. It is my belief that if you are truly a moral person, you will agree, unconditionally, to the following statement:
“The hunting down and targeted execution of children and babies is evil and immoral; there is never, neither now, in the future, nor in the past, any circumstance in which the hunting down and targeted execution of children and babies is justifiable; any individual, being, or entity who perpetrates or orders the hunting down and targeted execution of children and babies is vile, evil, immoral, and worthy of the harshest condemnation; under no circumstances can such an individual, being, or entity be considered “good” or be given any form of honor or respect.”
If you cannot unconditionally agree with this statement, I believe that your are either pathologically brainwashed…or evil and immoral.
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“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. 18″For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.…
—Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet
That’s right, Gary. You suffer from terrible problems in reading comprehension. Jesus did not abolish the Law or the Prophets.
Now, turn back to The Law, and the Prophets. To whom was the Law addressed? Specifically, to the circumcised Hebrew people, via Moses, on Sinai. Nobody else was addressed by that Law. And what were the terms of the Law: Do ALL of this, and you will have a farm in Israel, which I will give to you. NOT “Eternal life” ,NOT a room in God’s mansions – THOSE promises were made by Jesus, to mankind. There is nothing – not a word – in the Law or the Prophets that promises anything but circumcised Hebrews a farm, while living, in Israel, IF they obey all the laws.
Was that law abolished? No. Read Deuteronomy 28. God set up a penalty clause in the law. The Hebrews had to do ALL OF IT, OR ELSE the penalty clauses would be imposed, and they’d lose the land of Israel and be hounded.
And that’s what happened. The Prophets were sent, by God, to warn and warn: Israel, you’re fucking up. Israel, I’m getting mad. Israel, I warned you what I would do. Israel, if you repent, I won’t do it, but Israel, you’re not repenting.
That’s all IN the Law and the Prophets. And Jesus didn’t abolish a word of it. He EXECUTED THE JUDGMENT.
On WHOM? On the ONLY PEOPLE TO WHOM THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS EVER APPLIED: Circumcised descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in the land of Israel.
They lost the farm, as the prophets warned they would,. BECAUSE OF the Law, which included the penalty clauses. The LAW was UTTERLY FULFILLED!
The reading comprehsion problem that you and all Protestants seem to have is that you cannot seem to understand that The Law and the Prophets applied EXCLUSIVELY to the People of the Covenant, that THEY were exclusively the circumcised heirs of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph, and that the Covenant of Moses was SIMPLY a promise of a FARM in Israel. Nothing about eternal life, or heaven, or hell.
Follow the WHOLE LAW OF MOSES, and you get NOTHING. Because you’re a Gentile and it never applied to you, not before Jesus or afterwards.
Get yourself circumcised and move to Israel, and IF the Temple were still up and the Aaronic priesthood still doing the required rites, THEN you could have the promise of a stable farm in Israel. Nothing more. No promise of forgiveness of sins to get into Heaven. No promise of Eternal life.
Want Eternal Life? Then stop reading Moses, because God never said a word about that to the Hebrews. The Mosaic covenant is exclusively about LAND, while LIVING, in ISRAEL. Nothing else.
Want Eternal Life? THAT covenant is with Jesus.
Jesus said that the Law and the Prophets were not abolished to the end of the world. That’s right. And that’s WHY Israel CANNOT BE REVIVED under the covenant. Because, you see, to fulfill the WHOLE law, the priests had to perform daily rites on the Altar, the Altar had to be at the right place, and the priests have to be Aaronic – none other. The Prophets warned of that.
But guess what? God destroyed the Temple, the altar is gone, and the Aaronic priesthood is wiped out. The LAW is still in effect, but because God invoked the penalty clauses of Dt 28, the Hebrews were driven out of the land, it was given over to others, and their ABILITY to perform all of the terms was removed. Forever.
And all of that had precisely ZERO to do with eternal life or going to Heaven fpr any Gentile OR Jew, ever.
This is the great reading comprehension problem of Protestants. You cannot seem to read a simple legal text, see WHAT was contracted for, with whom, and what the penalty clauses were.
Read it again, carefully, and stop adding all of your Christiajn notions.
Moses’ covenant was for a FARM IN ISRAEL, in exchange for obedience. Nothing more.
And nothing to do with anything in Jesus New Covenant, which is about pleasing God.
Your objection is absurd.
Jesus spoke truly, and you stare straight at his words and don’t understand a word he is saying.
You left Protestantism, so open your eyes to what the law actually SAYS.
Witches and testicles and pork? IF you’re a circumcised descendent of Jacob, living in Israel, and you follow those rules, and IF the priests do the rites, and there is justice, then God will give you the secure farm he promised you and your heirs.
Eternal life? Who said anything about that?
GENTILES? Who said anything about THEM?
The Torah is about Hebrews and farms. Not Heaven and you.
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So Gary, given your comment about the hunting down and extermination of babies, I gather that you, a medical doctor, oppose all forms of abortion from the moment of conception? That’s the point when God references the beginning of human life from the beginning of Scripture, so that’s the right standard of when a “child” begins.
Yes?
You categorically oppose all abortion, because it’s the murder of children, yes?
Otherwise, you’re horribly evil by your own definition.
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Yes, I oppose all abortions of children.
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Gary M: “Does Jesus ever tell his followers to stop circumcising their sons? Does Jesus ever say to stop following Jewish kosher dietary laws? Does Jesus ever tell his disciples to stop worshipping on Saturday in the Temple and in the synagogues?
Answer: no
If we really followed the teachings of Jesus we would all be circumcised (those of us who are men) Jews abstaining from pork and shrimp, worshipping in the synagogue on Saturdays. The current Christian worship practices are an invention of the bipolar, mentally ill mind of Saul of Tarsus.”
You Protestants with your reading comprehension problems are really funny.
What did circumcision get a man? Nothing, unless he was a descendant of Jacob under the covenant, or adopted in.
What did the dietary laws get a man? Nothing, unless he was a circumcised descendant of Jacob.
God never even commanded the Hebrews to worship at Temple or synagogue on Saturday. You’re adding a Protestant habit to the law. God commanded only: Do not work. So, if you don’t work, what will you get? You’ll get a day of rest, which God knows you need, but beyond that, unless you’re a circumcised descendant of Jacob, you’ll get nothing more.
If you do all of those things, AND the priests do their part in keeping up the rites, AND the judges uphold the laws and there is justice in the land. Well then, guess what! You’ve fulfilled the Law of Moses. And if you’re a circumcised descendant of Jacob living in Israel, you have the promise of secure life on your farm. Congratulations.
None of those things ever had anything to do with Eternal life, or life after death, or entering the Kingdom of God. Why? Because God never said one word about Eternal life, or entering Heaven, to Moses or through Moses.
The Mosaic Law was about farms in the land of Israel. It was a land and peace covenant, during life, for a tribe.
And if that tribe had listened to Jesus, and followed all those laws, they’d be there still, following those laws, on their farms. But unless they followed Jesus and entered into the New Covenant, they would not have any promise of a room in Heaven.
Because, you see, the only covenant in the Bible that offers a room in the Father’s mansions in the City of God is through Jesus – not Moses. And shrimp, circumcision and Saturday have precisely zero to do with that.
Reading comprehension, my dear sir, reading comprehension. You’re confusing your contracts, and the reason you’re doing it is that you’ve accepted preachers telling you what the law MEANS, without ever carefully reading what it SAYS.
That’s why you’re so confused.
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Now, will you or will you not agree unconditionally to the above statement or will you continue to bluster?
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Answer the question, Crown.
“Say it! Say it!”—Sam Kinison, “Back to School”
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Silence.
We’re waiting, Crown.
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@Crown … I actually agree with you! To a point.
I agree that Yeshua was a prophet, but more importantly, he was a JEW who came to deliver a message to HIS people. He did not come to “save the world” (Gentiles).
While alive, he repeated much of what God had said to the Israelites over the years. He reaffirmed the Law and the Prophets. But more importantly, he tried to help his people understand that if they truly wanted to fulfill God’s purpose, they needed to “love their neighbors as themselves.” (Of course, this was in direct contrast to what they had been doing over the prior years.)
Further, he tried to help them understand that the long-awaited Kingdom was not in the far off future, but was present in the here and now. (Mark, Matthew, and Luke all said so.)
This, of course, was in direct contrast to what they believed and had been told by previous messengers — that the arrival of the Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom was something that would take place at some future date.
Now whether or not Yeshua was truly “sent by God” is debatable. But to me, if one takes off the blinders of Christian teaching, they cannot help but see his true mission.
It was PAUL who decided the Gentiles should be “brought into the fold.” Not Jesus.
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I finished reading the Ray Rogers paper as well as the skeptical response Gary linked to. For anyone who wants to read the paper (5 pages) there is a PDF of it located at: http://www.shroud.it/ROGERS-3.PDF
I don’t think the paper is very convincing. Rogers does not give any photo comparisons to back up his claims whenever he refers to “the main parts of the shroud”. For example, Figure 3 would have been more compelling if it was compared against his “main part” samples, but on it’s own it does not prove anything. On such a controversial topic it would have been important to provide as much evidence as possible, which he does not do.
In the 2002 restoration all of the patches and the backing cloth were removed from the shroud. The patches were added by nuns after the church fire in 1532. These can easily be seen in the burnt sections and were therefore easy to identify and remove in 2002. The patch that Rogers is trying to say existed would have been quite a feat. It would have required interweaving old and new threads and carefully dieing the new threads to match the colors of the old threads. It also would have been done so well that it went unnoticed by the experts who approved of the sample location. This just does not seem very likely to me. Why would anyone go to such great lengths to patch the bottom corner and make it look old / original? Obviously the nuns who patched after the fire did not do this on their patches.
The biggest remaining mystery is how the image of the man was made. If the carbon dating is correct then it was probably done by someone who knew they were creating a relic forgery. (I guess there were a lot of forgeries in those days.) I still need to do more research on the claims concerning the image and the theories that have been put forward to explain it. I did another 3 hours last night of shroud videos. I do find it very interesting and can see how some people have devoted their lives to studying it.
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Jesus always called gentiles “the dogs” and he refused to even speak with them And maybe you should always remember that he routinely called the gentiles “the dogs”. (Matthew 15:26)
And that he would not even preach or in anyway associate with them, even when they begged him to do it. Jesus only had a few very reluctant and terse conversations with the gentiles recorded in the bible, a couple of forced conversations that he could not get out of.
He liked talking to the gentiles like he liked having his teeth pulled. It was the very last thing that he wanted to do.
And he strictly told all his 12 apostles to never preach or even to speak to gentiles. “These twelve Jesus sent out after instructing them: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and do not go into any town of the Samaritans 6but rather only go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. (Matthew 10:5-6)
Jesus came to bring Yahweh message to the Jews, not to Gentiles. The religion of Jesus is strictly Jewish. Christianity was an invention of Paul for the “dogs”.
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Anyone who wants to show that the carbon dating sample was taken from a patch should look at a hi-res photo of the corner of the shroud and demonstrate where the patch is located. I just don’t see it. Try yourself at:
http://www.sindonology.org/shroudScope/shroudScope.shtml
There is a button that shows you where the dating sample was taken from. Zoom in on this corner and look at it closely. Some think that the line above the sample location could be a seam, but if you follow that line it eventually disappears, which indicates to me that it is a fold / crease / wrinkle line.
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Matthew 15:21-28
Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22 Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26 He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 27 She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28 Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
Notice what Jesus says in this passage: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Why would Matthew have Jesus say he was sent “only” to the Jews, and in John, Jesus is saying that God gave his son for the whole world (Jn 3:16)??
To me this is clear evidence that the writer of John was either completely fabricating the sayings of Jesus (we see nothing similar to John 3:16 in the three synoptics), or he was high on LSD. The Synoptics all describe a Jesus who came as the messiah for the JEWS…not the gentile dogs.
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Gary M wrote: “Now, will you or will you not agree unconditionally to the above statement or will you continue to bluster?”
God kills everybody Gary, Men, women, children. Some by fire. Some by cancer. Some by lightning. Some by human agency. God forbade men from killing other men – except in the particular case of Canaan, where he ordered the people to be completely driven out or killed. He killed the Canaanites for the same reason he kills everybody else. He used the Israelites to do it so they’d possess the land after them. He ordered the death penalty under various crimes, in Israel, to maintain the purity of his rule (remembering that he is going to kill everybody anyway, so it is a matter of accelerating the day).
God is brutal. A killer. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to kill you. And if that were that, it’d be awful.
But that’s not that. We die. We close our eyes “for the last time”. And then we wake up. It’s the fact that there’s an Act 2 that can mitigate for us the fact that the blade will come down on Act 1, and it won’t be an accident when it does.
The difference between God killing everybody and a man doing the same thing is that God knows what he’s doing, and what the implications and timing mean. Man doesn’t.
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Gary, you oppose abortion. But do you oppose abortion from RU 680 and the like? Is the “morning after pill”, which prevents a very young child from implanting in his mother’s womb, “abortion” to you, or isn’t it.
Everybody opposes abortion in the delivery room at 9 months.
Do you oppose abortion from the moment of conception.
That was my question.
Still is.
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It’s a simple question. It requires only a simple answer: Yes…or…No.
Please answer the question, Crown.
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Crown. Interesting that you should admonish people to read their bibles. That’s one of the reasons I know longer believe – I read it and realized that it’s a mythical tale, written BY men, FOR men. Of course, there IS my (woefully inadequate) Protestant understanding . . .
Also an interesting example you used – the Wizard of Oz. It’s one of my favourite movies and one I watched when I was a child. Now that I have grandchildren – all being brought up in secular homes – I watched it again, just this past Saturday, with two 3-yr-olds and a 5-yr-old. We enjoyed it immensely and the girls were particularly impressed with the ‘princess’ (they didn’t ‘get’ that she was a witch) and were quite intrigued. One of the reasons I wanted them to see it is this – if they ever ask me, “Nannie, is there a god?”, I’ll be able to say, “Remember the wizard?”
Surely you must realize, Crown, that for many people who follow this blog, the curtain has been pulled back.
Reading through your proselytizing reminds me of a meme I saw today on the FB site of a smart guy I know – “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means”. – George Bernard Shaw
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whoops, ‘no’, not ‘know’
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Crown,
If we were in a court of law, the judge would hold you in contempt and put you in the slammer.
Answer the question. Yes or no.
I answered your question with a clear yes or no answer, I would appreciate the courtesy of you doing the same.
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