Layman

I'm sure it confirms your own bigotted prejudices, yes.

Sure it does. I've known a lot of Southern Baptists and attended a lot of Southern Baptist church events.

How did you determine what the "common practice" of Southern Baptists is?

You can read hearts? Please prove this.

So you don't have any source for your accusations? But you admit that it is not the position of the Southern Batpist Convention that segregation is moral?

You mean about how the SBC has June 1995, apologized to "all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systematic racism" and "denounce(d) racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin."

Or that "almost 7 percent of the SBC's 40,000 congregations are made up predominantly of minorities."

Sauron

No prejudice involved. I simply read your posts, and form an opinion. Prejudice unnecessary, since evidence abounds.


No, it doesn't.

Irrelevant. We aren't discussing your personal anecdotal and highly selective evidence.


By watching their public pronouncements, seeing who their membership includes, and looking at their other pronouncements on various topics.


Unnecessary. All one has to do is observe the history of his comments and behavior with regards to blacks. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh".


The history of the S Baptists is that they broke away from teh general Baptist confrence over the topic of segregation and slavery. They supported segregation and resisted integration during the civil rights years. What exactly do you find unbelievable about this?

I admit that public pronouncements don't always map to de facto views and positions. And of course you don't believe they do either, you're just trying to sidetrack the debate. Gee; what a surprise.


No, I mean:

Racism itself is as knotted up with the history of Southern Baptists as it is with the history of Dixie. Just prior to the Civil War, as Southern states were breaking from the Union to allow its citizens to continue to own slaves, Southern Baptists broke away from Baptists in the North to allow their missionaries to own slaves. After the war and on through the civil rights struggle, as Southerners fought for separation of the races, Southern Baptist ministers preached the glories of segregation from the pulpit. For good-hearted Southern Baptists, the struggle of the century has been this: how to reconcile the Bible's message of unconditional love with the native prejudices that, for the last 150 years, have become part and parcel of living in the South.

Tercel

And yet another thread is hijacked by the latest episode of the eternally recurring Sauron/Layman bickering.

Please do it elsewhere. The topics of Southern Baptists support of slavery and mutual insults are not topics in anyway related to this thread. Why don't you go start a new one called "You're bigotted! Am not! Are too!" and discuss it there like good bickering children?
:banghead:

Jayhawker Soule

Ditto.

Stephen T-B

Hello wenbur84.
I think you should know that 99.99999999per cent of Christians will assume that the reasons you’ve given up the pretence of believing in god are because you are wicked, wilful and deluded.
As you’ve found out, the very expression: “I don’t believe in god,” provokes a shocked reaction, like you’ve admitted eating babies for breakfast or skinning live cats.
I don’t think they “believe” in god so much as “know” there’s a god. His existence is a fact, the truth of which is affirmed for them many times every day.
(Just sometimes, however, something undermines it, so then they need to re-affirm it by praying or going to church or speaking to their pastor or a fellow believer. Their “certainty” of god’s existence is therefore slightly fragile, and the reason your disbelief affronts them is because it goes straight to that tender little spot and gives it a painful poke.)
The other thing about belief in gods is that it has absolutely nothing to do with rational judgment. You have applied rational judgment to your religion, and having done so, you can no longer believe in it. Anyone would reach the same unavoidable conclusion - for the very same reasons as you did. Those reasons are objectively valid, whether we like it or not.
The Believer, therefore, must perform strenuous mental contortions in order to be able to dismiss them, which is why most Believers go WA WA WA WA so as not to hear them, because it’s damn hard work. Those who are prepared to make the necessary effort, however, will always be able to devise justifications for discounting them.
So you won’t find arguing very productive. Or even at all productive.
You could say: “I don”t believe the Bible provides a reliable historical record because my credulity threshold is higher than yours.” Which they will not like.
You could say: “If I needed to believe I would. I don’t need to believe, so I don’t.” That will annoy them too (it suggests they have “needs” which you don’t have, and that you feel superior to them.)
You could say: “When did god stop liking the smell of burnt offerings?”
Or “According to the Bible, the Earth is flat (or how else could Satan have taken Jesus to a high place from which he could see ALL the kingdoms on Earth?) and since it isn’t, the Bible in that respect is wrong. And if that is the case, how do we know it isn’t wrong in other respects? And if it is, how are we to decide where it is credible and where it is incredible?”
You could say: “I will believe in god when everyone who says they believe in god can agree on what he wants. That, for me, will be the single most convincing proof I need - when Catholics, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Born Again Fundamentalists and all the thousands of Christian sects join together and say
they have no disagreements and can all worship in the same church, and share the same doctrine. Since they all say they worship the same God, that shouldn’t be too difficult.”
And that, wenbur84, will make them REALLY annoyed.

Jayhawker Soule

That's one hell of a majority. It leaves me amazed at my ability to stumble upon the 0.00000001% that are far less rabid, though a few of them might reasonably suggest that many atheist (though far less than 99.99999999%) are sometimes given to hyperbole.

Stephen T-B

Actually, 100per cent of the Christians I know, think the reason I'm an atheists is because I'm a wrong'un.

Gregg

Christianity is a Scripture-dependent religion. Always has been.

As a Jesus Myther, I think the early Christians got practically all of their information about their (purely spiritual) Annointed Savior from the Jewish scriptures. However, even if you're a historicist, you must accept that Jesus' followers interpreted their leader's life, trials, and crucifixion through the lens of Scripture. 1st C. Christian writers almost invariably turn to Scripture to describe Jesus' activities, instead of simply referring to oral traditions about his ministry. Not until the Gospels do we find "biographical" information, and most of this "biographical" information is itself lifted from Scripture. The trial and crucifixion, for example, can be reconstructed almost in its entirety by quoting "OT" passages.

Therefore, if you think that Christianity can somehow be divorced from Scripture, that it can exist independently of it, you're just kidding yourself. The Jewish scriptures are the source of Christianity. You might be able to make a case that Christianity isn't dependent on the NT, because obviously it existed before any of the letters or gospels were written. But without the Jewish scriptures, Christianity as we know it wouldn't exist at all.

Gregg

Tercel

I suppose I agree with that.

Yes and we already all know what I think of the Jesus Myth thesis, so I will refrain from attacking it again here.

To a limited degree yes. I believe that revelation received after the resurrection had a large influence.

I don't think anyone's saying that. All that is being asserted, by me at least, is that Scriptural Inerrancy is not a necessary (or even desirable) part of Christian doctrine.

Hayden

Please don't take this as an attack, because it's not meant to be, but how can you follow some of the teachings of Jesus and reject others? One of my best friends, for example, claims to be a Christian but rejects Jesus' teachings about Hell (although he may be lying to placate me as we have some fairly heated arguments on the subject), at least in a literal sense (i.e. Hell as a lake of fire).

I guess I don't understand how someone can take a book like the Bible, dismiss some of it on no other basis than their own personal interpretation (partially emotionally-based) but embrace the rest. I'm really curious - seriously.

HR

PS This is a guy who (due to the influence of some church or other) claimed in 1991 that Satan was coming to rule the earth in 2000, so I feel at least partially justified in questioning his beliefs.