general anti-bible thread

NDY...

Is this what you're talking about ?

Why would Paul have the authority or the right to clarify the words of Christ?

 

A better explanation of my feelings about Paul is in an older thread:

http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?p=5357160#post5357160

I have long viewed christianity as a religion invented by Paul, not Jesus. To me, it is very clear that Jesus only wanted to reform the Jewish faith and culture. His untimely death presented both a dilemma and an opportunity for those left behind. Comparing the whole general thrust of Paul's letters to that of the four gospels, I see plenty of evidence that these are just the writings of individuals with their own beliefs and convictions.

Life experience will tell you that even those you know the best and love the most will sometimes surprise and disappoint you greatly. Yet millions are willing to gamble everything on the sincerity and honesty of Paul, who we know very little about, other than his past as a murderer of christians and ruthless opportunist. They are in fact trusting their eternal destiny to Paul, along with the many manuscript copy scribes, canonical council members, translators, theologians, and preachers who had a hand in delivering a book that strongly warns against putting your trust in men. There are too many humans in the chain, and not enough god.

 

Paul will always be Saul to me... I feel he really twisted a lot of things around to fit his own agenda

 

Well-put. I like that.

 

Amen ditto. I'm a Christian, but agree with just about everything everybody has said here. The Bible Thumpers have their heads up their asses.

 

Interesting question, probably requiring more knowledge than I have to hand, but Christianity very much predates the Bible. Even after the Bible was written, it wasn't until adult literacy that people were receiving information directly from the text, instead having it interpreted for them by their priests who, if they were anything like priests now, would not have simply been reading it from the page.

I personally cannot fathom why anyone believes that the Bible is the word of God. The book itself only says so one or two times, and not only do we have no reason to take its word for it, we have every reason to suspect it.

I think it's better to judge those actions by their consequences. My reason being, a lot of people seem totally capable of irrational, superstitious behaviour and decision making without a god or a book to guide them.

I would agree, though, that Christianity is far more dependent on the tacit support of the more rational followers than on the extremists. Even the ones who will denounce extremists when they do awful things still grant those extremists a religion subscribed to by millions to back up whatever they feel like doing.

Not that they need this, of course. We all remember the guy who tried to kill Reagan because he thought Jodie Foster told him to, right? Crazy people can find an unignorable voice in their own feces if a god isn't available.

I hate to say it, but that light's been shining on it for a very long time now. There have been prominent atheist voices in European and American culture for centuries now. When they are being silenced, that is a problem, but when people choose to ignore them, or are unpersuaded, it's kind of hard to do anything about that. I do think people should have the right to choose, but we should not assume that they have been unable to choose purely because they make a choice we find undesirable. That said, I'm very opposed to the church's influence over what books can be found in libraries in America because it denies people the right to hear all sides of the argument. Part of Christianity is supposed to be the resistance of temptation, so trying to simply prevent that temptation from occurring in people's lives seems rather contrary to the sentiment of the Bible anyway.

 

I think the bible is very "anti-spiritual" it disables peoples ability to find their own definition of a higher power.

 

It depends on how your read it. If you view it as a "how to get to Heaven" manual or a science text, it can be spiritually and intellectually crippling. If you open your mind and grapple with the ambiguities, paradoxes and contradictions--Job, Ecclesiates, the Prophets--it can be a source of powerful, complex spritiuality. As Marcus Borg put it, the Bible should be taken seriously, but not literally.

 

Thing is, if it's not to be taken literally, what differentiates it from any other significantly complex or lengthy work of literature? Is it as acceptable to draw your life lessons from Herman Melville or Terry Pratchett?

I ask because I think that it should be, incidentally.

 

I agree. I take them where I find them and regard them all as inspired, some more so than others.

 

is this referring to the missionaries? dudes in white shirts, ties and nametags? I did that shit. They do use the bible for precedent for a lot of their weird beliefs. There's a lot in there and anyone can quote it to suit whatever purposes they have. They won't discuss church history as much because a lot of it is very troubling and has been labelled satanic anti-mormon lit. by the church leaders. It is quite sad that they work for 2 years and some can use google for 20 minutes and know more about mormon history than they do.

the missionary program is not what it seems. the 20 year olds think that they are finding new converts, but what's really happening is that the missionary himself is the one being converted. It's all about the core intermountain-west church staying in the mormon system. the young mormon serves two years day and night so when he's done he feels very invested in and committed to the church, plus he's not allowed to touch himself or have even sexual thoughts, so he gets married in great haste and is instructed to not delay having kids, and more kids. That's where the new members come, they are bred mormon. Boom, he's locked in to the mormon system and his kids repeat the cycle. Now he has his wife's family to deal with if he ever wants out.

I could rant all day on that funky-ass religion. I'm just glad it doesnt have power over me anymore. thank god for deconditioning agents.

 

Burnabowl... your user name? is that part of the deconditioning...:sifone:

 

lol it sure helped the dogma from taking root when I was a teenager. but I needed lsd for the degree of deconditioning required after being raised in Mormondumb, lol. I didn't shake off the mormon contempt for body and self till my first acid trip, for example.

 

yeah the folks in the uniform like suits.i do find the history interesting though.even though it could be termed troublesome.the missionaries seem like polite people.i 'm surprised when i offer them coffee they're not allowed.no pop either?even my mom a devout church goer loved coffee in fact in most churches i'm familiar with coffee is a real mainstay....another thing i find interesting about mormonism is many biblical events occur in north america.the garden of eden in missouri etc.

 

what happen to Mylon?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T32_k4QH95k&feature=PlayList&p=5F1E5666CACD7653&index=26

 

The Mormon religion isn't really based much on the Bible. I'm sure I wouldn't like their book either, but I haven't read it, and don't plan to.

 

read the bible cover to cover 4 times--love the old testement a vengeful angry destroying GOD---not to into jesus though might be more into it if i could believe it was true--which i dont------see u in hell---btw i read the mormon bible and its even more convuluted than the regular bible--i wanted to hear about joseph smith and how he started his cult but the mormons dont talk about him--yeah i had to use acid to deprogram from 11 years of catholic school--religion is the cause of most wars --whats up with that

 

Worse yet, they were reading a Latin translation, and paraphrasing it into a third language.

Smart person. I'll bet you don't believe used car salesmen either.

We just have to keep on presenting our side. The fundamentalists are never going to give up.

I grew up not being aware that there were intelligent, well-mannered and compassionate people who seriously questioned the bible. Through the internet, we can prevent that from happening to the next generation.

 

What blows me away is how some people from a supposed "Hip" forum, glorifying peace, love, and art, are blasting one of the most contraversial books in the world.

There are thousands of ways to interpret the writings in the bible, yet some of you trash it because a group of very fucked up people decided to interpret the bible in their own very messed up extremist ways.

Some of you blast these extremist christians for reading the words in the bible in such a literal sense, yet, they are the same people who are putting down everything in the bible because they are also reading the bible in its literal sense.

It's a double standard...

The bible is such a mysterious book... So much can be learned from it provided you make it work for you. Rather than hating the bible, how about you realize that these fundamental christians won, by not-knowingly making you hate a book that they managed to claim as their own...

 

yeah the no coffee thing is just a cultural icon. the Mo's will tell you that they've been observing the "word of wisdom" (no alcohol, coffee, tea, etc.) since the days of Joey Smith in the 1830's but it was only taken seriously since about the turn of the century. until then they'd been isolated in frontier Utah, but then the guilded age happened, railroads were coming through, and the "prophecies" that the US would collapse did not come to pass. So America was swallowing up the cult geographically, and the Mo leadership needed new ways to isolate the mormons, and the "word of wisdom" health code was one way to set them apart. At first it was geographical insulation, now it's insulation of the mind, but the leaders can't get away with nearly what they were able to when Utah wasn't part of the US.

Nowadays Mo's just like to enumerate all the ways they are righteous, and not drinking coffee is an easy one. But prozac is no problem.

No, the LDS religion is not based on the bible, but Joe Smith could not have done it without the bible as precedent (priesthood authority, polygamy, millenialism). They say the bible is flawed and can't be trusted but are very quick to appeal to it to prove their doctrines to other christians.

Yeah it is fishy that Joe said the garden of eden was in Missouri, Christ would come to their temple in Independence, MO, etc. He was an opportunist flying by the seat of his pants. There was a lot of millenialism back in those days and the people who believed in him were attracted to that sort of thing. He and Sidney Rigdon started communes that they said would be lifted up to heaven in righteousness like the city of Enoch in the Bible. Never happened of course, and the modern church downplays millenialism and the the temple that Jesus was supposed to come to was never built and the date it was to happen came and went. That's part of the troubling history that doesn't get much honest discourse now.

It's kinda sleazy that they have young naive kids coming to your door who know nothing about the issues ppl really want to hear about. It is an overgrown cult but its origins are anything but miraculous. There was a market for a prophet, and Joe Smith was better at it than most. fascinating fellow, kinda reminds me of myself. Fawn Brodie wrote a good biography "no man knows my history." it's considered anti-lit even though brodie was the niece of one of the prophets. But it helped me understand Joe and the whole saga a lot better.

edit: the thing with soda pop is open to Mo interpretation. The ones who want to be super duper righteous wont even drink pop, but it won't keep you out of the big, pure, righteous temple like coffee or tea will. The last month or so of my mission I decided to be bad and drink 3 mountain dews in the morning, a couple more at lunch. I got a lot of acne, haha.