Vinnie

""""hLater, deciding that man needed god to die for the forgiveness of sins created against god.""""

A quick comment here: I think many Christians posit Jesus' sacrificial death was foreordained from eternity past. There seems to be some debate over that issue though. My understanding of atonement theology is currently under revision--as are a million of my other views.

Vinnie

Pomp

ilgwamh,

I do think it would fit better in a different forum here...

I agree. Off to MRD it goes.

Oh, and welcome back, Vinnie.

Mike Rosoft

From <a href="http://www.positiveatheism.com/hist/quotes/qframe.htm" target="_blank">Positive Atheism</a>:

"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?" - John Adams

"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits." - Dan Barker

"It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?" - Richard Dawkins

"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must approve the homage of reason rather than of blind-folded fear. Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences ... If it end in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others it will procure for you." - Thomas Jefferson

"Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system." - Thomas Paine

"No amount of belief makes something a fact." - James Randi

"There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny." - Carl Sagan

"What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem." - Bertrand Russell

"How can any woman believe that a loving and merciful God would, in one breath, command Eve to multiply and replenish the earth, and in the next, pronounce a curse upon her maternity? I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or gave out the laws about women which he is accused of doing." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell - mouths mercy, and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!" - Mark Twain

"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." - Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet)

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." - George Orwell

"The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever." - Robert Green Ingersoll


Mike Rosoft

[ June 04, 2002: Message edited by: Mike Rosoft ]</p>

Jamie_L

"The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
Bertand Russel

Ubi dubium ibi libertas.
"Where there is doubt, there is freedom."
Latin Proverb

Jamie

lpetrich

I'd prefer some polite mention of some of the absurdities and contradictions of the Bible -- something non-confrontational, yet something that will make people think.

Like how many pairs of each kind of animal did Noah take on the Ark.

Or where the Devil takes Jesus Christ up a mountain from which he could see "all the kingdoms of the world".

Or the places where Jesus Christ advocates self-amputation to keep oneself from sinning.

Or Matthew 19:12 "... there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven."

Or where he states that those who call people fools deserve eternal damnation -- and where he himself calls certain people fools.

And what a false prophet he has been