we started discussing ramseytheii's idea that if you follow God's will to the 'T' it will not save entire continents of people with aids. but, then he brings out the idea that condoms will save everyone. condoms break. so - if you follow the biblical idea of abstinence - who is hurt? the bible is right about everything.
This is a perfect instance of harmful conflation. I never called contraceptives a miracle solution, but when you choose to follow the Word over the scientific consensus that contraceptives such as condoms can drastically reduce the spread of disease, you are putting yourself in danger. When you preach to the masses of uneducated people - who never had the luxury of reading or hearing the doctor's advice - the same thing, you are committing murder. This is unfortunately the situation that irresponsible Christians have created in such continents as Africa. Once again, science and reason is having to work aroud the clock to undo the damage they have caused.
This case demonstrates the hierarchy of Christian principles: the book over the life. Since life on earth is a temporal condition, whose ending is always beneficial and merciful, for the religious, their natural inclination is not towards saving life on earth, but saving life "after death." It is therefore more sinful to vaccinate against HPV, the virus that causes cervical cancer and kills thousands of women a year, then it is to allow those women to die. That's fine if Christians want to treat themselves that way, but when they start enacting these ridiculous values on the rest of society, they are committing murder.
"If you follow the Biblical idea of abstinence, who is hurt?" In other words, if you don't follow the Bibical ideas, take your pain and disease and shove it. This is like putting a child in a room with an enormous, succulent piece of poisonous candy in one corner, and the antidote in the other, and saying, "Don't eat it. If you eat it you will die. If you drink the potion, you will die and go to hell." Hell only works for those who afraid of it; as Tolstoy wrote, "Miracles are powerless to convince those who do not believe." The child gives in to temptation, eats the candy, and dies from the poison; the Christian angle is, "But we did everything we could, and warned them of the consequences." While I applaud the Christians for finally endorsing the idea of free will, I can't help but think it is much better to introduce antidotes and preventatives, then to needlessly risk death.
It is no secret that Christianity is an orgy of death parading as life. All the life that happens there, begins only upon death. Its teachings are designed to maintain the utmost in material and emotional misery while on earth, and in this case, I agree that death will be a great, grand, release.
so - you have to read the bible for yourself. what does it really say? is aids a NEW disease. what were the philistines plagued with when they took the ark. what were the egyptians plagued with? boils? wasting away? i don't know for certain that it was - but we don't know for certain that it wasn't.
Yes, I beg people to read the Bible for themselves, in order to realize that the horrific things that people say are in there
are actually in there.
i believe there is a cause and effect thing that God set into motion. if you break the laws of God, there is always an effect. he did this even with the ten commandments. if you honor your father and mother - youwill have a long life. now, people might not believe this - but it doesn't make it any less true. in fact, sometimes you can go around proving the exact words of the bible by asking people. as someone who is quite old if they think this precept is true. i bet they will say 'yes.' and count the number of yes's to no's.
This is solipsism both at its finest and worst. The idea that those who honor their father and mother will live long, suggests that those who died prematurely did not love their father and mother enough. What for a judgment! And, if asking people about the Bible is enough to prove or disprove the words, I beg you all, ask me about it.
it's almost like God gave us a sort of 'farmer's almanac.' it doesn't always give every detail of making a crop successful - but it does to making the gospel successful. Christ made the analogy of the gospel being 'sown.' it is sown in one's mind. to think and do rightly. we wouldn't know what right and wrong were. or good and evil. adam and eve tested this - and found that choosing for themselves did not cause the 'results' window to be receptive to other alternative ways than God's own word. it's timeless and changeless. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He must have known that we would appreciate Him not changing his ideas from day to day.
I must say, in your previous post you said that Satan committed original sin. If that is the case, then one of two things must be true:
1) We are all descendants of Satan's heritage (Paul writes that one man's sin has condemned all men, and the Old Testament describes sins of the fathers "visited" upon the children)
2) Adam and Eve are innocent, and therefore we are all innocent.
Either way, you have to choose something that is sacrilegious. To state that Adam and Eve are innocent is to defy the Scripture of the New Testament (Paul describes the "transgressions of Adam"), and the Old (if they didn't sin, why did God punish them?). To suggest that we bear the remainder of the sin of Satan is too horrific, by Biblical standards, to even contemplate.
For most people, who have good natures like pianitisimo clearly does, to be religious demands a certain amount of denial of the consequences of a full, committed belief. It requires a denial of cause and effect, as known by reason, since all effect is out of our control according to this view - therefore responsibility is abdicated; it requires a denial of the violent truths of the sacred texts, since those go against the pleasure-producing parts of the non-perverse brain; and it requires a general "willing suspension of disbelief."
Much verbiage has been spilled trying to justify through translation, symbolic interpretation, or other vague techniques that the cruel, intolerant parts of the Bible don't mean what they seem to. It is time for us all to confess to ourselves, the cruel, intolerant, vengeful passages are not only there in black and white, meaning nothing symbolic but what they say, but also outnumber the pleas to compassion by 10 to 1.
Walter Ramsey