Jeremy Pallant

I'm going to borrow from Ambrose Bierce for the second time today.

"SCRIPTURES, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based."

MBR

A way to answer any question without really answering it.

sullster

A book of imaginary stories from a pastoral society on the fringe of the Roman Empire.

This book can be fondled, caressed, thumped or carried about like a child's favorite doll.

Mageth

God, as the sovereign creator and sustainer of the universe is working through and in history to redeem the human race, restore creation, and establish universal righteousness (i.e. justice and peace) through the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Paraphrase: god sacrificing himself to himself to save humankind and creation, which he created, from himself.

Defiant Heretic

Bible Humper covered this already, but this is the version of it from a news report on the show Red Dwarf.

GPLindsey

MAD magazine answered this question sometime back as I dimly recall. It did a bit on really short Cliff Notes, and it had one for the Old Testament:

God creates Mankind and everything they do makes him mad.

Arrowman

The writing of this book was completely unsupervised by either Amnesty International or the American Humane Society. A shitload of humans and animals were harmed in the writing of this book.

Special effects by Skywalker Studios.

Al Pacino appears courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

gsx1138

Grim fairy tales...very, very grim.

kingjames1

Honestly, ax's first suggestion sounded somewhat serious to me - the sarcrasm came later, at least in greater degrees. I didn't realize that serious and sarcasm were so sharply separated on this forum.

I apologize for confusing the evident disdain for the Christian religion with "serious discussion" - you have to admit, its not always a clear distinction here.

J.

kingjames1

If I may then paraphrase atheism: In the beginning, there was nothing, and as it began, so shall it end.

Truly, this is a tale told by an idiot!

Or...the expanded form:

From nothing, (mysteriously - has something to do with complexity theory) into something (which is really nothing because...), it all amounts to nothing again, in the end!


We start from 'before' the big-bang (i.e. nothing), and end in the so-called "universal heat death," when the universe decomposes and degenerates into useless heat energy, resulting in the loss of all structure, all information, all possible meaning. In the end, there is no difference between a Mother Theresa's subatomic energies/particles and an Adolf Hitler's - its actually a law of quantum mechanics!)

Hence, as Sartre said, our existence is absurd, being bounded by nothingness. Since nothing (no-life, death, whatever you call it) is both our mother-womb and our "heaven," nothing really matters. Ethics has no possible significance in nothingness or a chaotic, uninhabited cosmos. What is the difference, whether we committ mass murder or mass aid? It doesn't matter in the end, when everything in the world will be dead -- and everything will die! Why save the planet? Despite all of our efforts, it will die one day. Why save human life? One day the human race will cease to exist altogether. What does it matter if we cease to exist now, and not in 10,000 years? Why put off the inevitable? Whatever progress we make as a race will be ultimately undone in the cold, dark end - the death of a universe.

Death, then, is our ultimate horizon - live now, screw tomorrow, screw the planet, screw the world...it's already dead!

Oh...but we want a meaningful existence for our offspring... Why?! You sap, you fool, you sucker - free yourself from the bondage and stupor of the bio-chemical intoxications called 'familial love', through which "the blind watchmaker" has drugged you (making you think that you 'love' another mass of organized tissues, whatever that can mean genetically and biologically), and thus impelled you to replicate! Now that you have mysteriously stumbled upon self-consciousness, rid yourself of the tyranny of the selfish gene, and stop reproducing! Stop prolonging the needless agony and inevitable heartbreak of human existence. Stop producing more children who will suffer, and inevitably die. Why continue this tragic circus of existence, this meaningless circle of nothing, going nowhere? And for what? A brief moment in the sun? A Sisyphean breath of air? Only then to die, after experiencing the "short warm moment" of life, only to then forget and to be forgotten? What an absurd notion - what an absurd life! There is no redemption here! You are trapped in this absurdity, a life given to you without your consent by your genetically programmed mother.

Okay, its more than a paraphrase...

J.

[ October 15, 2002: Message edited by: kingjames1 ]</p>