It's difficult looking for good points while wading through the murder and forced rape. I'm pretty sure if someone goes out and murders someone on the same day they helped a wee old lady to cross the road, it probably wouldn't be much of a defence in court. Just saying.
Does faith excuse serious problems with the bible?
by iCeltic 62 Replies latest watchtower bible
-
-
Watchtower-Free
My favorite part of the bible is when
god gives people free will then murders
everyone with a flood for not acting the
way he wanted -
Watchtower-Free
"Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." - I Samuel 15:3
-
iCeltic
Watchtower free - agreed, it does make it difficult to see any good when this is the norm.
-
jgnat
Goodness gracious; how about the Psalms? They helped me get through some depressing days.
-
iCeltic
My wider point really is since the is so much bloodshed, hatred and behaviour by so called faithful humans that we would view as vile, is it worth even looking through so called nicer parts considering how violent god and his people seem to be?
-
mP
jgnat:
Most if not all books in the bible are written by kings and priests who lets face it have a prime motivation to tell everyone to obey and pay them via sacrifices etc. Everyone who harms this arrangement is "evil". If you respect this or are part of this sytem then you are fine. this is the only way to rationalize how all the aresholes i mentioned are judged righteous, because they are not at all generous, kind or even nice.
-
mP
jgnat:
Did you read this scripture from Psalms ?
58:10 The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.
-
punkofnice
Does faith excuse serious problems with the bible?
Faith trumps everything.
Especially faith enmasse.
I like Sagan's dragon though:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage.”
Suppose … I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself….
“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle—but no dragon.
“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.
“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.
“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”
Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”
You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
“Good idea, except she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.”
And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.
Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it is true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility….
Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you they have dragons in their garages—but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths after all…
Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself: On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such “evidence”—no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it—is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.
—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), pp. 171-173.
-
iCeltic
That looks like an interesting book to read, great example punk.