badmedia, I'm afraid I don't have time for a detailed reply right now - I'll just write quickly that your "moral system" is based on double standards. You are prepared to imagine any excuse possible to forgive God acts of evil! Would you do the same if that child was killed instead by a pedofile? Would you say that was not a crime and offer some "out of this world" excuse ("that we don't know the end and God's final purpose, blah-blah-blah) for the psycho killer as well, the way you do it when you try to save God from "embarrassment"?

Yes, I used a child in my examples just because if I used an adult some religious people might say the adult may have been punished for his sins. Is the child I mentioned in those cases punished? Is the faith of the child tested? That of his parents? Why does God allow that? What purpose does it serve? You failed to answer that. You can choose to believe God must have some "higher purpose" for that poor child - but that is a "belief" - not a rational argument. God would let a child die in pain from an incurable disease - so you choose to believe that we don't know all, that God takes his place, that death is not the end, etc. - because otherwise you cannot explain it ...

It's amazing how easy it is for the religious to forgive random evil "acts of God" - with the "joker card excuse" - the "higher purpose"?! Wasn't it that same "joker card excuse" - the "higher purpose" used also to justify the victims of religious wars and oppressions throught history (be them Christians, Jews, Muslims, non-believers or others)?


[edit on 15-12-2008 by zamolxis]

Originally posted by badmedia
But you said history. And the rule of History is that it is written by the victors. Most of the taught history is propaganda. My apologies if I misunderstood.

So to is calling recorded history propaganda just propaganda. I believe that is a statement that is more false then it is true, but assuming it was true I'd say:

To the victors comes the spoils, including the right to write history in the way that the majority seen it, as the victors tend to be the majority rule.

However I believe seeing things in negitives is false and misleading. If you look for negitives, do you expect not to find them?

Well this one is easy. To be a christian you must have faith. There is no evidence of a jesus anywhere outside the bible. But its okay as long as you have faith. You do not even have to follow what the bible says (Exodus 21:7,Deuteronomy 21:18-21,Leviticus 24:16,Deuteronomy 13:5-10) You just have to have faith. If jesus was a real person and the things in the bible were fact you would not need faith you would have knowledge. but Joseph Smith Jr, Muhammad, the Dalai Lama L Ron Hubbard were all REAL people with somthing to say. But oh no. Joseph Smith was a lair, the Dalai Lama has lived more than once without going to heaven,L Ron Hubbard wrote science fiction for a living by no means a holly carpenter and that Muhammad guy called his god Allah. All these real people had somthing positive to say and wanted better for their fellow man. So its real easy to write off everyone else as a christian because no matter what happens they have faith. I always wondered what christians think about other religions. I mean do they write everyone else off as crazy for not conforming to the thought that a virgin gave birth to the son of god who grew up to die for 3 days then rise from the dead? I just had a thought if the bible is true and jesus comes back to save all the good christians i think the christians will kill him thinking he is the anti-christ.

Originally posted by kevintorvalds
About the "stealing" from Sumeria:
If you actually study the bible, you'll see that Abram (as Abraham was formerly called, or so say the translations) originally came from a city called Ur, located in.... drum roll.... yep, you guessed it, Sumeria! The writings that the christians hold so sacred say themselves that this whole thing originated in Sumeria!
It was the custom of these people to choose one of the MANY gods to worship for life. They would devote their lives to this one god, so that the whole civilization had all their bases covered, so to speak. Abram did nothing different. He simply chose one of the Sumerian gods and went with it. That's where things got funny. They spent some time in Egypt, where their religious beliefs were affected by that culture as well. On and on the story goes, picking up little religious tidbits on the fly, until, today, we get "the bible".

Not so fast.
Monotheism was before polytheism.

You first have idea/concept about one thing, not many. It's pure logic. So, you have concept about one God, then later about more gods.