The Problem With Humans And Religion

[Minor Axis]

Seneca Pastor Under Fire For Saying Government Should Kill Gays:

The pastor says these are not his words. He says he only preaches the word of God. Knapp says, "In Leviticus 20:13, if there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act. They shall surely be put to death."

Some religious people are such fools, of course that can be said about humans in general...but this man is a dangerous example of where religion can take us. However, it is an interesting perspective on morals and how they shift over the years.

For times sake, Knapp broke it down for us. He says, "We punish pedophilia, we punish incest, we punish polygamy and various things. It is only homosexuality that is lifted out as an exemption."

Last I heard incest, pedophilia, and polygamy were not punishable by death... My understanding is that at one point in human history incest was ok until it was shown to cause health and medical issues. So our morals in many cases appear to be dictated by standards other then what we inherently decide is despicable. Another example recently mentioned in these forums is/was promiscuity due to undesired pregnancy and disease transmission. If you look at the AIDS history in this country the promiscuity standard hits gays hard. But the objection to gay relationships in themselves seems to be centered in the religious/abstract morality arena.

 

[Tim]

He's a fucking hypocrite. I didn't here him say anything about the other dozen or so laws in Leviticus that carry the death penalty. Was he wearing clothes made from two types of fabric? Then he needs to be put to death

 

[fuel1316]

double post

 

[fuel1316]

if he wants to dig up all those other "offenses" TBH i think only pedophilia and related crimes should be illegal. pedophilia has a VICTIM. being in a gay relationship does not. i really dont know why polygamy is illegal

 

[HK]

i really dont know why polygamy is illegal

I think in western countries it's something to do with how many other laws we have regarding marital rights, that'd get extremely complicated if multiple marital partners were allowed.

 

[Minor Axis]

I have no problem with polygamy as long as it is between consenting adults and they can make it work. I see no real issues for property ownership, instead of 2 people, you have 3, 4, etc in a legal contract. In the U.S. I believe the push away from polygamy was pushed by Christians offended by the notion of marital orgies.

 

[Minor Axis]

The Begining of the End

​

Send Your Kids To Church School Paid for by the State

(Reuters) - Louisiana is embarking on the nation's boldest experiment in privatizing public education, with the state preparing to shift tens of millions in tax dollars out of the public schools to pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to educate children.
Starting this fall, thousands of poor and middle-class kids will get vouchers covering the full cost of tuition at more than 120 private schools across Louisiana, including small, Bible-based church schools.
The following year, students of any income will be eligible for mini-vouchers that they can use to pay a range of private-sector vendors for classes and apprenticeships not offered in traditional public schools. The money can go to industry trade groups, businesses, online schools and tutors, among others.
Every time a student receives a voucher of either type, his local public school will lose a chunk of state funding.

Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don't cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.

Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don't cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.

 

[Stone]

The Begining of the End

​

Send Your Kids To Church School Paid for by the State

This is a really bad idea.

 

[Greatest I am]

if he wants to dig up all those other "offenses" TBH i think only pedophilia and related crimes should be illegal. pedophilia has a VICTIM. being in a gay relationship does not. i really dont know why polygamy is illegal

If the policy of a country is that Gays may find a loving partner as well as all of us, then the policy will continue to say the same for all who wish more than one life mate.

As with Gays, it will be a small portion of our population that will go to multiple partners.

Most sane humans recognize that one to one is the way to go regardless of what sexes are involved.

Sure, some immature males will want to be with two or more willing women but only a small part of life is in bed and they will soon realize that sex is not worth the trouble of having more than one woman around. I also cannot see a woman wanting more than one man.

Do not get me wrong. I have a life mate and soul partner but in no way would I want two of them.

Regards
DL

 

[All Else Failed]

This is no worse than people saying "Lets invade and kill X country for X reasons that are totally secular".

 

[Tuffdisc]

I have no problem with polygamy as long as it is between consenting adults and they can make it work. I see no real issues for property ownership, instead of 2 people, you have 3, 4, etc in a legal contract. In the U.S. I believe the push away from polygamy was pushed by Christians offended by the notion of marital orgies.

In polygamy marriage in some countries they sometimes marry people who are too closely related to them i.e. almost an incestuous relation

 

[Zorak]

In polygamy marriage in some countries they sometimes marry people who are too closely related to them i.e. almost an incestuous relation

Regardless, I don't believe the two to be symbiotic.

 

[Minor Axis]

Newsweek: The Forgotten Jesus
written by Andrew Sullivan. Online the article is called: "Christianity in Crisis". You should read this article, even if you are an Atheist.

Hijacking Jesus:
Joel Osteen:

"God wants to increase you financially, by giving you promotions, fresh ideas, creativity...Think big. Think increased. Think abundance. Think more than enough."

Rick Santorum:

"One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is... the dangers of contraception. It's not OK... to do things in the sexual realm that (are) counter to how things are supposed to be."

The single most important teaching of Jesus:

Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching.

I've been in this thread pinging mostly against organized Christianity. And whether I argue for or mostly against Jesus being the literal Son of God, this Newsweek/Daily Beast article, *if* it accurately portrays the person known as Jesus, illustrates someone who should be the figurative Son of God and it also illustrates the problem with organized religion: politicized faith. In a nutshell, religion, any religion that is organized around the premise of exerting coercive power over human beings has been corrupted by the mind of man. Besides the reported philosophy of Jesus, there is a very interesting description of Francis of Assisi who gave away everything he owned including his inheritance to live the humble life.

The article starts by describing Thomas Jefferson and the Jefferson Bible where he cut out the passages that he attributed to the actual teachings of Jesus, pulling out what he called the "diamonds in the dunghill", teachings he called "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which have ever been offered to man."

What does it matter how strictly you proclaim your belief in various doctrines if you do not live as these doctrines demand? What is politics if not a dangerous temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself? If we return to what Jesus actually asked us to do and to be—rather than the unknowable intricacies of what we believe he was—he actually emerges more powerfully and more purely.

The crisis of Christianity is perhaps best captured in the new meaning of the word “secular.” It once meant belief in separating the spheres of faith and politics; it now means, for many, simply atheism. The ability to be faithful in a religious space and reasonable in a political one has atrophied before our eyes.

Jesus's Doctrine:

What were those doctrines? Not the supernatural claims that, fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms, reformations, and counterreformations. Jesus’ doctrines were the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching. That’s why, in his final apolitical act, Jesus never defended his innocence at trial, never resisted his crucifixion, and even turned to those nailing his hands to the wood on the cross and forgave them, and loved them.

Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion:

The issues that Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in either Jefferson’s or the original New Testament. Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who, along with his followers, anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant.

Organized Religion in Decline:

Meanwhile, organized religion itself is in trouble. The Catholic Church’s hierarchy lost much of its authority over the American flock with the unilateral prohibition of the pill in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But in the last decade, whatever shred of moral authority that remained has evaporated. The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up, an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children. I don’t know what greater indictment of a church’s authority there can be—except the refusal, even now, of the entire leadership to face their responsibility and resign. Instead, they obsess about others’ sex lives, about who is entitled to civil marriage, and about who pays for birth control in health insurance. Inequality, poverty, even the torture institutionalized by the government after 9/11: these issues attract far less of their public attention.

As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores in his unsparing new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, many suburban evangelicals embrace a gospel of prosperity, which teaches that living a Christian life will make you successful and rich. Others defend a rigid biblical literalism, adamantly wishing away a century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory. Still others insist that the earth is merely 6,000 years old—something we now know by the light of reason and science is simply untrue.

Why the abundance of Atheists?:

All of which is to say something so obvious it is almost taboo: Christianity itself is in crisis. It seems no accident to me that so many Christians now embrace materialist self-help rather than ascetic self-denial—or that most Catholics, even regular churchgoers, have tuned out the hierarchy in embarrassment or disgust. Given this crisis, it is no surprise that the fastest-growing segment of belief among the young is atheism, which has leapt in popularity in the new millennium. Nor is it a shock that so many have turned away from organized Christianity and toward “spirituality,” co-opting or adapting the practices of meditation or yoga, or wandering as lapsed Catholics in an inquisitive spiritual desert. The thirst for God is still there. How could it not be, when the profoundest human questions—Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? How did humanity come to be on this remote blue speck of a planet? What happens to us after death?—remain as pressing and mysterious as they’ve always been?

That’s why polls show a huge majority of Americans still believing in a Higher Power. But the need for new questioning—of Christian institutions as well as ideas and priorities—is as real as the crisis is deep.

 

[Leananshee]

Part of a tune I penned a few years back (to the tune of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious")

Give me a hosanna or go to hell (repeat)

When I was a younger man, I learned all about God
But certain folks around me thought they did a better job
They shoved their dogma down my throat, well isn't that just grand
Supercharismaticmindcontrolreligion is at hand! Oh,

Supercharismaticchristianmindcontrolreligion
We know that the earth is flat and evolution's fiction
Gonna save your soul from hell, we're always on a mission
Supercharismaticchristianmindcontrolreligion!

And it goes on....

 

[Minor Axis]

Part of a tune I penned a few years back (to the tune of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious")

Give me a hosanna or go to hell (repeat)

When I was a younger man, I learned all about God
But certain folks around me thought they did a better job
They shoved their dogma down my throat, well isn't that just grand
Supercharismaticmindcontrolreligion is at hand! Oh,

Supercharismaticchristianmindcontrolreligion
We know that the earth is flat and evolution's fiction
Gonna save your soul from hell, we're always on a mission
Supercharismaticchristianmindcontrolreligion!

And it goes on....

You've seen some of the truth.

 

[Minor Axis]

I've been known to state my feelings that Muslims in the Middle East have altered their religion with cultural inputs or the two (religion and culture) are intertwined. However it's just as fair to say the that modern Christianity is a product of religion and culture and in many cases far removed from the standards taught by Jesus evidenced by lack of empathy for those who are less well off, lack of tolerance, lack of forgiveness, the idea that those who are most righteous will be granted financial security and success in their lives. In both cases these are not a blanket assertions. Not all Muslims are bad and not all Christians are good. Not all Muslims are good and not all Christians are bad...

 

[Stone]

Not all Simulated Earth spiritualists are bad, either ........

 

[Minor Axis]

More ammo against evangelical religion and Republicans!
Richard Mourdock (Republican Candidate) On Abortion: Pregnancy From Rape Is 'Something God Intended' (UPDATE)

Defending his stance that abortion should be illegal even in the case of rape, Mourdock explained that pregnancy resulting from nonconsensual sex is the will of God. “I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God,” Mourdock said. “And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/20...ed.php?ref=fpa

 

[robdawg1]

Religion's great...I just wash it down with milk, and it's like i can't taste anything!

 

[Minor Axis]

I've been on vacation on one of those Viking River Cruises in Europe cause I retired in Oct. That is why you have not heard much of me for the last 2 weeks. And I know your sad about that.

Anyway as I have toured fabulous castles and palaces, it has reinforced my view that human beings are fundamentally flawed. If you let them, a few powerful individuals will scoop up all the riches for themselves and tell the rest to screw ourselves, while claiming to be Christians completely blowing off the supposed teachings of Jesus. And while we as a society have supposedly advanced beyond our medieval beginnings, now I see these views trying to be resurrected in our politics and our business leaders. It's sad.

If it is not my imagination, how do we overcome this?