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A fringe Christian pressure group has attributed Tesco's recent poor sales to divine intervention, claiming that "God has answered our prayers for confusion in the Tesco boardroom".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2...hristian-group
A fringe Christian pressure group has attributed Tesco's recent poor sales to divine intervention, claiming that "God has answered our prayers for confusion in the Tesco boardroom".
VodkaOriginally Posted by Ephesians
I'm still waiting for the London floods.
I wonder if Fuddam would be understanding if I married his daughter and on our wedding night discovered that she wasn't pure. That she had previously been raped (at least that's what she claimed). I wonder if he would be understanding, sympathetic and supportive of the actions suggested by the bible. Namely for me to stone my new bride to death on her father's door step.
It's all there in the good book.
Having said that, I rather liked the youtube poem. It does point out that there are many problems with religions and christianity. The catholic church's propensity for child rape is just one example.
But you don't get off that easily. To try to claim that christ and christianity are entirely different things is just bearing false witness. One is a direct and inevitable consequence of the other.
That poem itself, the film production and its mass distribution on youtube is an excellent example of proselytizing and is essentially the very essence of religeon.
Try watching it again and whenever he mentions "jesus", replace it with "science" or "humanism" or "my family" or "the charity work I do" (or whatever else is an important part of your life).
True, although as a stand alone set of 'rules for society' they make a pretty good foundation, which was probably the intention for a lawless age. And if man doesn't have the ability to enforce them, invoking them as the word of an omnipotent super power is a reasonable attempt.Or .... what men say are the commandments in what they say is His book.
Don't forget that the Bible is not a 'book' as such, but a collection of texts. The Old Testament is pretty much a history of the Jewish people, and if you read texts like Leviticus, which include the rules on food and hygene, they make sense in a hot land with poor sanitation, particularly for a group of people with no fixed land or settlements.
Christianity is mainly addressed in the New Testament, where the "Eye for an eye" philosophy is replaced by "Turn the other cheek", and the question of religious power co-existing with the civil power was answered with "Pay unto Caesar what is Ceasar's, and unto God, what is God's".
And as a collection of texts, many have been left out, and form the Apocrypha, and the decision of what was in and what was out was decided in the first centuries AD, again for political control purposes. The Catholic Church was (and arguably still is) concerned as much with political influence as it is with the souls of its followers.
The modern Anglican Bible was authorised by King James in the 17th century, so is a relatively modern translation - and like all translations, may have ambiguities from the original texts. Like most rules, it is "for the guidance of wise men, and the blind obedience by fools"
Indeed, and it was the Quakers who formed the founding fathers in America to escape religious persecution in England (although I suspect some of those founding fathers would be horrified to see what has happened to their ideal.)
I had a long discussion with a Trades Union leader about the role of Qhakerism in society. He asserted that Trades Unions were the single force for worker welfare, andf only reluctantly conceded that Cadbury, Rowntree, Macintosh, Lever Brothers etc, had started an industrial revolution in workers' welfare long before trade unionism.
Of course that was not not truly altruistic. Well clothed, fed and housed workers were more productive, and the companies were more profitable, (and until the last 20 or 30 years, there were no pubs in Bournevill!) but all those I mentioned set up charitable foundations and so much of the profit generated was ploughed back into society - really the heart of the 'benign capitalism' that is exercising the minds of the political leaders today.
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scaryjim (19-01-2012)
I don't really get your point Fuddam - Jesus can only be greater than Christianity if Christianity is not the direct result of the teachings of Jesus, surely? I happen to agree on that point, and agree with those who say that Christianity is more the religion of St Paul than that of Jesus, but you can't get away from the fact that Christianity is a religion - so how can you be a Christian and claim to hate religion?
Or is it the social religion so common in America you're making the point that you hate? That is, the perceived link between the moral conservatism of Christianity and the social conservatism of the Republicans and their followers?
Good point. We don't even know if life exists on other planets, though statistically it seems a damn good bet. And if it does, we don't know if it bears any resemblance to the things we take for granted, like gender, or tentacles/hands.
So it's a stretch of a significantly higher order to suppose that God resembles us, or we resemble him/her/it/other (*) ..... unless you take "created in his image" pretty much at face value. Seems highly improbable to me that anything with an image anything like man could be capable of creating the Big Bang.
Though, thinking about it, maybe not so improbable. I think about experiments with nuclear weapons, etc, and an image forms of a scientist sitting in a lab somewhere in whatever came before the Big Bang, pushing a button and going "Ooop ........ "
(*) delete as appropriate
Surely when people read the 'Old Testament', if read without a prior assumption about it, you would assume it was man made? It's so obviously written from the point of desert tribes 6000 years ago - as you say it makes a lot of sense in that culture and none in ours. Don't the punishments of stoning for being raped sound so unjust by today's morals? Yet it was common practice and made sense at that time to punish by death and torture. Doesn't the extermination of rival tribes, even to wives and children, make sense in that culture, but again not in ours? If you were to read the old testament without prior knowledge of it, would you really think it was any less man made than the history of the Sun God Ra of Egypt, and how he created the world?
And Jesus himself said that the morals of that time were still correct. He never said stoning a woman was wrong - only that none of us was innocent enough to be able to do it. The punishment of being stoned, just for being raped, was still just in Jesus view - he never contradicted that. Lots of the views he espoused were laudible, true, like putting others before yourself, but these were hardly original. Original to the Jewish tradition, true enough, but it was in the context of Roman civilisation with their heavy Greek influences that he made these statements.
This is the problem then that I have with all religions that I have come across - to me they all seem to very self evidently have been written by men, with morals very obviously deriving from the culture in which they lived. The old testament especially is clearly written to benefit the people involved, or perhaps better put to create a fictional history for themselves that puts themselves as the 'chosen people of God' with therefore a divine right to genocide. What better excuse could you have? Then Jesus comes along, into a more enlightened civilisation and comes up with ideas that have been around for hundreds of years (see here for examples), gains some followers and apparently claimed to be God - which was never going to harm your chances of developing a following of devotees.
All other religions I have looked at have the same ring of being man made - Islam, Jehovah's witnesses, Mormonism (what could be a better example of man made religions than American's claiming in their religion that Jesus visited America?). I won't claim to have looked at many eastern religions in any sort of depth, but I'd be amazed if their holy books didn't have the same sense of being written by men who had their own goals in doing so.
my personal view on religion is that it was created by man to keep mankind living in fear, personally i dont believe in higher powers like gd and that he created the world, but i still live to a social standard, ie. dont steal, dont hurt people etc. im moar of a scientific guy like big bang theory, yeah i have a cross tattooed on my arm but thats because i like the way it looks
Religion = religious practices, that essentially teach all the things you have to DO in order to 'earn' one's salvation. Do this, do that, then you'll be good enough.
Christianity = Christ = following the teachings of Christ. The emphasis here is on relationship to Him, wherein one gets forgiven for one's bad actions (of commission or omission), and a free pass into Heaven, as a result of repentance and acceptance of His lordship over one's life.
Jesus says explicitly that there is NOTHING one can DO to earn this salvation - it is a freebie.
Why? Because of His love. The love of you that lead Him to die on the cross for you.
A relationship is not a series of practices/laws/penalties, any more than you'd describe your relationship to your girl/boyfriend/wife/husband as such.
That's what the video is about.
FWIW, an example of Christ's opposition to Religion is his attitude to the Pharisees ('vipers, snakes etc')
One can never stop saying Thank You
iamlorro (20-01-2012)
Religion is about fear, ultimately
Christianity (ie a relationship to Christ) is about freedom, joy, love, giving, generosity, compassion, etc. And quite explicitly, FREEDOM FROM FEAR.
eg: http://www.topbibleverses.com/bible-...fear-and-worry
One can never stop saying Thank You
fially someone who thinks like i do
fuddam (19-01-2012)
Here is a crucial point: if you read the Bible, you'll see that it is essentially about God pursuing mankind. ALL other religions are about the opposite: mankind trying to get salvation of one kind or another - behave a certain way, eat certain foods, follow certain laws, meditate a whole lot etc. Fact.
The more I read the Bible, the more I'm impressed with how un-human it is. Why? Because it is such a bizarre story if created by people. It doesn't make sense, in fact. People do not write stories about how debased people are, about God/gods that are chasing them in order to save them, and then give them a freebie entrance into paradise. We want revenge, we want to put the boot in, we want to amplify our attributes (the greatest lover/fighter/philosopher/thinker etc) and minimise our failings. We do that in our every day speech, our books and movies extoll such thinking all the time.
Christ's words, His examples, His wisdom have an unearthly quality - they sit so far above our behaviour/expectations. Some of you will dismiss that idea as the rantings of a believer - no problem. Go and sit down and study literature from all sources/cultures, however, and show me otherwise. A Creator God that comes down to earth and subjects Himself to our torture, because He loves us so much? F.R.E.A.K.Y.
One can never stop saying Thank You
Jesus in the garden
God is in the house
And the holy ghost in the closet
Unsure of when to come out...
m
Last edited by melon; 20-01-2012 at 04:21 PM.
fuddams words are humorous towards then end, I like the perspective.
Last edited by riding moon; 20-01-2012 at 08:29 PM.
Nope.
There is a lot of revisionist history here. The pilgrims came to America mainly in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were mainly Puritans who were not fleeing persecution, but came to the US to persecute.
The puritans believed that the English reformation had not gone far enough, and that the Protestant Church of England still followed the Catholic church practices too closely. They believed in strict religious laws, and objected to a country which permitted games on a Sunday, for example. Of course, Europe was not a model of religious freedom at the time, but the Puritans were generally allowed to practice (less so after Laud), but were heavily punished for speaking out against the government.
They moved to the colonies in a mass migration with the express intent of setting up a theocratic government, forcing strict religious law and persecuting those who wouldn't follow it. As a Quaker, you should know of Mary Dyer, who was executed for refusing to follow the state religion.
The founding fathers are a very different group, many years later who were responsible for the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution (Which rivals the Magna Carta as the greatest document in history). They were not an overly religious group for the time period, and many of them were Deists and Unitarians. They were dead set against the US being a religious country, mainly because of the experiences of the colonies, and the constitution's rigid freedom of religion is an express result.
The unfortunate rise in religious extremism in the US is actually surprisingly recent. The country's motto 'In God We Trust' was a product of the 1950's, as was the addition of 'Under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance. The Puritans would be delighted, the Founding Fathers horrified.
Last edited by TeePee; 20-01-2012 at 07:40 PM.
I dismiss this as the rantings of a believer. Factually incorrect, illogical, poorly sourced. You have me wondering if you've actually read the Bible. I know you can't have read any other religious books and compared them.
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