Bibles, Religion and other uncomfortable topics

[bloss]

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Do like the findings outlined in your last sentence, bloss. Enough to win over the majority of non believers, if true Can just imagine how it would liven up the driest sermon and door to door preaching. No offence intended!

Just had a quick look through this thread and I now posing a naive(?)question to threeangles and others here. I am not an avid bible-reader by the way, so excuse my ignorance.

You study the bible to learn more about God and his teachings, yes? To my mind, studying the bible means studying different translations, not rejecting any out of hand, discussing and learning from each and setting the differing words used in their historical context. Doesn't sticking with one translation hinder, not help, your understanding?

Like bloss, I am intertestd to know, threeangles, how you reached the view that the tranlators of the KJV were moved by God, while other subsequent translators weren't. Not a criticism, but a genuine question.

Oh dear. If one person isn't superior to another, why should one always submit to another?? Don't get that. Obviously the submission of wives to husbands business came out of an ancient patriarchal society and very handy it was for the blokes of those days. I loathe religion because I think it is dangerous and cruel and divisive and rejecting of people. I believe the imposition of the chador etc makes Islam apartheid for women (except even worse). And IMO it is so irrational. For example, homosexual behaviour occurs in just about every species on earth, how can it be unnatural? I don't believe in any god - saying I have rejected god is like saying I have rejected Demeter, or Aphrodite. Nobody would seriously think I should be considering whether to worship them or not, yet they were taken every bit as seriously as Jesus is now. I saw the mother who sent her child to be a suicide bomber in Israel on the news last night, saying she was glad her son was dead as he was heaven and his victims were in hell. I felt like crying at the stupidity and pointlessness of it all. I just thought, what a terrible world religion makes.

Bloss

Having finally read through the other thread and this I am exceedingly happy I decided religion was not for me.

I can honestly say that I would never, ever want to be in any group or organisation that put so many rules and regulations on what you should do and how you should be in so many aspects of your life. It's my life, why should someone decide for me what I should wear, do or say as some religions do.

On top of that one of the comments that got my attention the most was that someone refered to believing in god was like beliveing in Santa. They couldn't have said it better.

I know science does not hold all the answers yet and I doubt it would ever hold all of them but I will take cold, hard science over a belief in something that as part of it's belief system refuses to prove itself in anyway that can be accepted by those that do not already believe.

One of the main questions I posed though that still does not seemed to have been answered by anyone is why they feel the need to believe in a god or gods? What is it that is missing from your lives that makes you want to pray to a deity?

I admit to not having read as much up on this subject as some of the true believers here but I still cannot see why anyone want's to be in a religious organisation.

Aloha

Thank you, I was starting to think I was the only non-believer here.

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But surely Pupuce's point (hope you don't mind me speaking on your behalf, Pupuce) is that you can't reject something that doesn't exist (to you).

Want to write more but am at work!

Hmm.. I did wonder what sort of response I'd get. They are my honest beliefs, but I did feel a bit goaded by the rather gloating-seeming pronouncements that I will end up in hell (still, at least I'll be surrounded by people I know). I cherish the memory of John Peel blithely calling God 'your imaginary friend' on Home Truths. Which seemed to sum it up for me. I don't believe in God because there isn't the slightest evidence for it. Not any at all. It would seem a most perverse deity who pretended to be all-loving, yet consigned the vast majority of humans (to whom he has bequeathed an intelligent, questioning, independent mind) to enternal torment and torture (children too) just for not believing in something for which he refused (despite being perfectly able) to produce even a shred of material evidence. How could you worship a nasty piece of work like that? I simply cannot understand the religious mindset, though I can understand wanting something to cling to - a friend of mine went through a religious phase after the death of her mother, just because she didn't want to think she'd never see her again. Lots of people believe in the supernatural for the same reason but I don't think it's a reason to believe in ghosts.

But why would God want you to submit to your husband unless heis a mysoginistic old goat??? What possibly reason is there for this teaching except that it coming out of a terribly patriarchal society. St Paul was a grade A loony! Jesus seemed a decent bloke most of the time,but the Old Testament is a riot of contradictory statements, abitrary acts of random violence, death threats and frankly potty rules. I just honestly don't understand how anyone could take it seriously as a way to live your life in the 21st Century.

Bloss, I am so glad that there is someone like you out there who can put across so well the comments and points I would like to make as well. I particularly appreciated the comments on tolerance - this is something that is so misunderstood and a word so misused these days. Keep up the good work!

Just one thing, in response to Aloha - God is a God of love but he is also the God of justice: he is merciful to those who repent (merciful because he has already paid the price demanded of sin, paid because of his love) but justice demands that those who do not repent receive the indicated consequences - eternal separation from God in hell. It's not a nice thing, it's not a cosy, feel good religion, it's demanding and wholly rational.

Posts crossed - I didn't meant to imply gloating by you, Bloss. I do note the 'sadly' in your last post.

Rational? Come on... Everyone goes to hell is rational? I though God made the rules. If so, they are silly and unfair rules. So ergo, God must be unfair. So why is he worthy of your worship?

For me, of course, all this is entirely hypothetical. I firmly believe God is a purely man-made construct, not the other way round.

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I have to say, if I was God, I'd be lot nicer to people.

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I have no doubt that a lot of the Bible does cover historical ground and features the fascinatingly bizarre activities of real people, and indeed, sometimes in beautiful language. But that doesn't mean I think any of it has anything to do with a guiding spirit.

I agree with Aloha but don't see the point in trying to have a rational discussion with fundamentalists of any religion. However, I do want to respond to something that Rhubarb mentioned on the Fathers Day thread about JWs having guts to knock on people's doors and that that's what Christians should be doing anyway. I thought the idea that Christians had a responsibility to try and convert heathens and save souls disappeared with the Empire. Plenty of people do not feel that they need religion. Why should they be bothered by JWs or people of any other belief knocking at their doors? Plenty of other people are religious but have the dignity and security of their own faith to practise it quietly, either through the way they live their lives or in the community of their own church without feeling the need to preach to people on doorsteps. JWs knock on people's doors not through courage but through the supreme arrogance borne of narrow-minded evangelicalism.
By the way, interesting that no-one religious has properly replied to Aloha's questions.

aloha, thanks, you are expressing all my feelings for me!

We have some friends who became born-again christians on the strength of a child not being scarred after an accident when somebody prayed for her. (Nothing to do with the efforts of the medical profession, obviously.) They have toned down a bit now but for years used to drag god into every conversation and he (or she?) always got the credit for the good things that happened but was never held responsible if things went wrong - that was a Test. God couldn't lose in their world.

I love John Peel's "imaginary friend". There is another brilliant remark which Paul - forgotten his name - little millionair magician chap - made - "I believe that Man created God".

Fundamentalists of all persuasions are very dangerous people - none of their books should be taken literally as their god's word, only as guidance at best - and they leave all the rest of us, getting on with our lives as best we can, with or without our own faith be it Catholic, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian, Judaism, Jain, Pantheism, or any of the many others I have forgotten, very vulnerable to having their beliefs imposed on us - as in the Sept 11 pilots, and suicide bombers in Israel, who believe their martyrdom will send them straight to their heaven.

As for Religion doesn't kill People, People kill People - the same argument used by the gun lobby!!!! Stop! Think! Use your own minds! People have been killed in the name of various gods for millenia!

I agree, I can see the pull of religion as some of it is so comforting. And most churches are lovely buildings etc. But I also think it would be nice to believe in fairies and a rather like the look of the Coliseum (though I have to say, I thought it had a rather sinister atmosphere - ghosts of all those Gladiators perhaps!). But to believe that your good, compassionate, kind and loving friends and their children will be consigned to Hell because some God is cross with them for not believing in him (despite his refusal to give any evidence of his existence), well, that's no God I'd consider worthy of my worship. If he's so all powerful, why does it piss him off so much if people don't believe in him. Seems a bit insecure to me.

aloha - that's the bit I don't get. If he is so slighted, surely he is imperfect and can't be God.

KS

I would be described as a Strong Atheist.

I don't just not believe in God, I don't think God exists.

Lots of cross posting! I totally agree with all that, everything good is God's doing, everything bad is a test/work of the Devil business. That seems very convenient, but I think, the only way to stay religious. If you believed God was giving your mother the pain of cancer and killing your child on a whim, then he would be very hard to keep on worshipping.
It's funny, but having a child has actually made me less religious (if such a thing was possible). A childless, borderline religious friend was saying after the death of her mother, 'I think I believe because this can't be it. People just can't vanish.' I didn't say this because it would have been cruel and tactless, but I thought, having my baby makes me feel as if I have fulfilled my purpose on earth. I have made another person, passed on some of my genes and sent him into the world to carry on something of me into the future. So I now feel more useful then ever before but also more redundant and unimportant than before, if anyone can understand what I mean. Like one of those animals that reproduces and dies! I feel at one with nature and the universe in that way. Perhaps motherhood is my new religion and my son is my God

KS and Jahn

Welcome to the club. I was starting to feel a bit lonely here.

Aloha

Be careful about pronouncing someone to be god or thier son, look what happed to David Ike when he started doing that!