smellincoffee

I came out of the Pentecostal/Apostolic sect of the Christian church. Anyone who has been to a truly apostolic service will tell you that the defining characterisic of their services is the emotional worship that goes on. People yell, run, roll in the floors, jump up and down, and threaten to swing from the chandaliers. I was told that only through worship can you be saved.

If this was true, however, then all of creation was a perversion. We were made in the image of God to worship God? This would indicate that he's both narcissistic and insecure. It offended my pride, and moreover offended good sense. Christians will jump on the "pride" part of my statement, but that isn't the core problem I have; it's the good sense part. If God’s sole purpose is for humanity to worship him, he’s done a rather poor job of communicating that fact. Worship isn’t mentioned until the story of Abraham. Moral guidance is likewise absent; God just drowned people when they offended him. He finally gets around to telling people how to avoid being drowned, burned, or otherwise killed in Moses’ time…which is historically convenient. But despite God creating man only for his own pleasure, he seems to be a bit picky; he only wants Hebrew praise. It seems odd that God limited revelation to only the Hebrews. He includes the entire western hemisphere centuries later on, when he allows Paul to witness to non-Jews. But he forgot the eastern hemisphere, so he’s wasting generations of potential praisers. Doesn’t this strike you as inefficient?

It is inefficient, and absurdedly so. It makes far more sense from a naturalistic standpoint; that the Hebrew people, and people alone, wrote the various works that would become the Christian bible later on. They made themselves out to be the good guys -- just as every other culture does in creating a religion around themselves. The laws in the Bible are not Biblical mandates, they are attempts at self-government. As someone so eloquently put it over at the Ex-Christian.net forums, "The Bible has fingerprints all over it. And none of them are god-sized."

Joan of Bark

"For God so loved the world ... " that he sent all His prophets to the same tiny area of the near east.

No argument here.