Anyone non-religious here? Please be nice!

[chixie]

I believe in god. I just don't attend church. I pray and talk to god. I just don't believe you have to go to church to beleive in him. I enjoy all things he has created

 

[KDbeads]

Quote:
I remember several passages in Genesis about the people outside of Eden. Somewhere around the time Cain was tossed out and again when Adam and Eve were tossed out. Can't remember exactly but it's there, no in depth explanation on who put them there though. At 8 years old I was asking the teachers how they got there and who created them.... resulted in a parent/teacher conference

Quote:
Exactly, it was written my MEN, MEN are human, humans have an extraordinary brain that tends to lead to a fabulous imagination. Plus opiates in various forms were commonly used during the time many of the accepted and unaccepted books were written

Not as 'drugs' but as part of the culture like cigarettes are today.

Not knocking what was written but it was written by men, much of it was adjusted to suit the early 'churches', most of it was written after the time of christ, in many cases centuries. There is no way there aren't mistakes, evolved oral histories, etc. Not to mention the mistakes in translation.... Like the Red Sea Moses parted.... should have been translated as reed sea from the ancient hebrew text.
Then there was the decision on what books to include in the cannon, decisions made by men, men who may not have liked all the books and what oral history they represented. So much was left out, there are several references in the KJV to books that have not been a part of the cannon in 1500 years. Asking why landed another parent/teacher conference for me

There has been several books discovered recently and the History channel special on them was fascinating. I so want them to translate more of the scrolls quickly.

I love this thread, totally awesome!

 

[mom'sfolly]

Wifezilla, I had the same kind of questions you did. If someone had allowed the questions, and thought that questions were okay, I might still be a Christian. It was the absolute "there is only one way and it is our way" that I really had a problem with. Anyone who did not believe exactly what my church believed was going to hell. I asked the "what if no one has ever heard of Jesus, will they go to hell question" too. The only answer was "that's why we send out missionaries", but didn't answer the fundamental question of why a good and loving god would condemn everyone who had never heard of him.

A lot of the people who say they believe that ever word of the Bible is literal and inspired by god, gloss over all the ugliness that the Old Testament contains, or say they have a new covenant and don't follow the old testament. The rape of Dinah and the subsequent murders while the men were recovering from circumcision is one of those

stories in the Bible. It makes you think that God condones both rape and murder. Reading these sections as history, and not divinely inspired word, is the only real approach.

I think Judaism does a better job of handling the inconsistencies and ugliness, and often have large amounts of commentary and explanations of scripture.

Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel....just who were these people who dwelt "East of Eden"? The bible also says there were giants on the earth, and than mankind laid with angels, all of which is some very strange stuff.

I was also very confused by the story of Jacob, Leah and Rachel, and him not getting the right wife the first time, but getting Rachel the second time. A simple answer of "men had more than one wife back then" would have gone along way in helping my confusion. It is also good they stopped the story before they got to Rachel and Leah shopping out their servants to get more children.

I think I am inherently skeptical. It seemed that asking questions was discouraged, and logical inconsistencies were encouraged. It didn't help that there seemed to be different rules for men and women.

 

[RThomas]

Quote:
I read the bible.

Well, there is a little more to it. I never did attend church on a regular basis as a child, but I did have a strong belief in God. The idea that someone wasn't a Christian was just unfathomable to me. There just had to be a god, and of course, he was the Christain God. That was just the accepted belief here in the south (Tennessee).
As a teenager, I read the entire bible. The old testament was extremely boring. But, the new testament, especially the gospels, was very interesting. I never went to church much as a teenager, but still held onto my Christian beliefs.

It wasn't until I met my future wife that I reassessed my beliefs. Her family was (and still is) very fundamentalist Christian. They wanted us to attend church with them. Even though I considered myself Christian, I didn't attend church because of all the hypocricy I'd seen in the past. So, I decided to go back and reread the bible. I began studying the history of the bible. How the stories started as oral tradition. How the early writters wrote in their own biases and interests. How the stories were copied and recopied. How the bible came to be in it's present form through canonization. How many of the early writings were left out. Many Christians think the bible has always been the way in which they see it today. This is far far from the truth. It's amazing how so many claim that their religion is the most important thing in their life, yet they have no knowledge of their religion's history.

There was more to my deconversion, of course. But reading the bible was the start. It's funny. Many Christians think someone is an atheist because they haven't read the bible. But, it's my experience, that many are atheist becuase they have read the bible. As a matter of fact, I'd say that most atheists know much more about the bible and Christianity than most Christians do.

So, I guess it was my fundamentalist Christian inlaws that started me on my path. Ironic I guess. I've been an atheist for about 14 years now. My mother-in-law still seems to think it's just a phase.

 

[ConchRepublic]

Quote:
True there. Many of my religious friends can say only what had been said in church, that is, if they go to church. My non religious friends, and more importantly my atheistic friends could recite large portions of the bible. I thought it was just plain funny to me that the non religious could correct my religious friends what they say wrong when they try to recite the bible.

 

[EweSheep]

From what I remember of the Bible, in Genesis, Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden. Cain and Abel probably were born at that time, and later on, Cain killed his brother Abel and he was moved elsewhere...probably by Adam, who was ashamed of him of killing his son. Ask any devoted father who has been shamed by his son for his crimes and emotional and physical burden on his father's families, you can be certain he would tell him to make a life of his own and move elsewhere to marry and raise his family.

Now the other "women" in the Bible, if it is ONLY Adam and Eve's descendents, it may or may not have been first cousins Cain married (oh wait, they did not have "marriage" certificates but probably a PARTY! and possibly married by the father of the daughter being married or an city elder (who knows).

I do not see how Noah can fit a pair of each animal in an ark, let alone finding time searching for each and every species of animals living on this earth. What happens when one of the pair dies? Where would they store the food? Now, get this, the lions, tigers, oh my, how would you feed them MEAT!!! If Noah had to kill an animal for meat, I bet you that half of the ark will die for the meat eaters. Man can go without meat but how long would it take for the pair to reproduce offsprings....and those offsprings will have to increase in number to feed Noah and his family meat in daily or once a week basis. They didnt have CornishX's chickens back in those days. Four months is a long time raising a chick to fryer stage.

How about the salt of pillar? Do we really turn into salt?????? I do not remember their names but I know the story has something to do with them NOT to look back and one did or both did.

How about the Babel? Imagine so many people talk into different languages......isn't that what we do today? I do not think there was thousands of languages at that time.

Now how about Lucy, the recent found Cro-Magon or Homo sapiens that we may have descend from her.

I remember seeing a program on one of the channels, people submitting their DNA from various parts of the world to find out if we ALL have common ancestors. The scientists say we had FIVE people as our "first" branch in our family DNA tree. My question to them....if there is NO other DNA from Homo sapies, could THAT five people be in the chimp family?????????? I am not sure if they extracted DNAs from various species of primates and I would not be surprised if we do found that source.

Neat!

 

[deb1]

It was Lot's wife who turned to a pillar of salt.

The story of Dinah has always troubled me. Poor girl.

Now Tamar, there is a girl who took charge of her situation. When both her first and second husbands die, she asks for the third brother to marry. But her father in law believes that she is cursed, so he refuses. Tamar dresses up as a prostitute with a veil, seduces her FIL and becomes pregnant. When he finds out that his DIL is pregnant, Judah wants to have her killed but Tamar pulls out some items he left behind the day he slept with her and saves her own life. One of her children, Perez, is in King David's lineage.(Found in Genesis Chapter 38)

I have always found that story humorous and odd at the same time.

 

[joebryant]

The Gospels and Punctuation
by John Shelby Spong

Elizabeth Robinson, a friend of mine who teaches English as a second language to the children of immigrants in New Zealand, recently sent me an exercise on the importance of punctuation that she has used in her class. Please note that the words in these two examples are identical, only the punctuation has been changed.

1. Dear John:

I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we are apart. I can be forever happy - will you let me be yours? Gloria

2. Dear John:

I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we are apart I can be forever happy. Will you let me be? Yours, Gloria

Why would I use this column for a lesson on punctuation? Because it illustrates a primary problem we have with biblical fundamentalists who make excessive claims for the accuracy of the Bible. Stick with me to the end of this column and the connection will be clear.

Recently, I had a television debate with Dr. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky. In that debate, he proclaimed, "I believe that every word of the Bible is the inerrant word of God." It was such a astonishing statement that I responded by asking him if he had ever read the Bible! Yet his words are not dissimilar from those voiced by such fundamentalist media evangelists as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson. They are also regularly recited in the belief system of that part of the country called the 'Bible Belt,' in which I was reared as a child. This claim is not, therefore, unfamiliar to me.

Yet when I hear this evangelical rhetoric today, I am still stunned. It is so uninformed that I cannot believe that people who make this claim actually read the same Bible I read. Is it the word of God when Paul writes to the Galatians, "I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves (Gal. 5:12);" when women are ordered "to keep quiet in church (II Cor. 14:24);" or when the Bible calls for the execution of all homosexuals as it does in Leviticus (20:13)? Do fundamentalists not know that the Bible has been quoted to justify slavery, to encourage war, to diminish women and to vilify Jews, among many other evils?

The claim is even stranger when one inquires about which version of the Bible is the inerrant one? Is it the New International Version, clearly the favorite among the fundamentalists? Or is it the Jerusalem Bible that Roman Catholics prefer because it does not challenge the dogma of that Church in regard to the Virgin Mary? Is it the King James' Version, that the traditionalists so love or the Revised Standard Version, that scholars seem to prefer? Is it the New Revised Standard version that attempts to remove sexist language from the various texts? How can there be an inerrant Bible if there is such variety in the available translations?

When pressed, the fundamentalists will generally say that inerrancy is in the original text not in the translations. Fair enough, I respond, so now allow me to examine that claim. Does anyone have a copy of the original manuscript of any book in the New Testament? Perhaps fundamentalists do not realize that though we have earlier fragments, the oldest full text we have of any book of the New Testament dates only from the seventh century C.E. In those days, without printing presses, the Bible had to be hand copied by a scribe. Is it possible that no scribe in seven hundred years of copying ever made a mistake or added a clarifying word? The fact is that in various ancient texts of the Bible, there are thousands of places where the oldest texts we possess disagree with one another. In the notes at the end of the chapters in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, time and again there is a statement informing readers that other ancient manuscripts differ on this particular word or passage. John 7:53 - 8:11, in most Bibles is, for example, the story of Jesus rescuing the woman taken in the act of adultery. Yet this story does not appear in manuscripts of John's Gospel until very late in medieval history. In other ancient documents it comes after Luke 21:28, but with a number of variations in the text itself. In Mark 14:24, where Jesus is described as instituting the Last Supper, he says, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many." Some ancient texts, however, add the word "new" before covenant. A minor change, one might say, but an example of how a word might have been added by a scribe, to address a later conflict between the followers of Jesus and the traditionalist Jews. Does the original text of Mark's Gospel open (Mk. 1:1) with the words, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ," as the majority of our available manuscripts suggest or does it say, as others argue, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God?" I can think of far more reasons why that phrase would have been added than I can for a scribe leaving it out. Surely some scribes took liberties in their copying by inserting words to make the text conform to later teaching. No passage from any book in the Bible can be guaranteed to be the exact copy of the original author's work. How then, knowing this, can anyone claim inerrancy for a text, the accuracy of which could never be guaranteed?

Beyond these truths, fundamentalists must contend with the fact that Jesus' earthly life seems to have ended around the year 30 C.E. Mark, however, wrote no earlier than 70 C.E. and John the final Gospel is dated at the turn of the century, so every word attributed to Jesus in the gospels, and every gospel story about Jesus, floated in oral transmission during that 40 to 70 year period. Were the words or stories always repeated identically? Hardly! The gospels themselves are not even in agreement with one another. Both Matthew and Luke had Mark in front of them when they wrote their later narratives. Yet they omit some things that Mark had included, change others with which they do not appear to agree and add new things to Mark that perhaps he had not known. Where there is a clear textual disagreement in the gospels themselves, can the claim be made with any credibility that any particular version is the inerrant word of God?

The difficulty does not stop there. Jesus spoke Aramaic, yet all the gospels were originally composed in Greek. So every word of Jesus that we have has undergone a translation. Is there such a thing as a perfect translation? Of course not! Every language is deeply acculturated so that few words in any language can be translated exactly into another language. Anyone ascribing inerrancy to the Bible apparently has no knowledge of these elementary facts.

Now let me come back to the punctuation exercise with which I opened this column. The final thing that fundamentalists do not seem to understand is that in the earliest manuscripts of the gospels, there is no punctuation! They have no chapters, no verses, no paragraphs, no capital letters, no commas and no periods. There is not even a space between the words. These manuscripts are simply row after row of Greek letters. If a word could not be completed on a line, it is simply broken wherever the space ran out, without a hyphen, and the remaining letters of that word continued on the next line. There is nothing to indicate to the reader that a word has been broken. So when we read the gospels today, we need to be aware that every paragraph, every comma, every period and every word division that we find in the New Testament today has been imposed on the text hundreds of years later by interpreters. Did those interpreters always get it right? The suggestion that they always did defies rationality. Punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence dramatically as we saw earlier.

This brief analysis of textual problems we have with the Bible is not designed to be an attack on the Bible that I treasure. It is rather an attack upon an idolatrous, irrational attitude by which fundamentalists seek to transform the words of the Bible into some magical, inerrant authority for their religious claims and thus to be able to use that authority as a weapon with which to attack their religious enemies.

One can only hold to a fundamentalist view of the Bible if every rational faculty is suspended. This mentality also requires a refusal to acknowledge any idea that destabilizes one's prejudices. That is why fundamentalism is always marked by hysteria, defensiveness and hostile attacks on those who do not share that point of view. Fundamentalist religion is ultimately a search for security, not a search for truth. This is what makes real dialogue with fundamentalists, whether it is over evolution or homosexuality, so unbearably difficult. No rational basis exists upon which to explore an issue, if one believes that quoting the Bible is the way one arrives at conclusions. Those who are convinced that they possess the whole truth of God will always be imperialistic. For those who disagree with fundamentalists are, in the minds of the fundamentalists, disagreeing with God. That is also why fundamentalists will ultimately employ violence - whether that violence is expressed in 'Holy' Wars, by burning heretics at the stake or by using suicide pilots to destroy the World Trade Center. I wish our world could understand this very simple truth, since it is that mentality that operates today in the flames of Iraq, on the West Bank of the Jordan River, in Ireland, in Bangladesh and in the murders that take place at family planning centers or in other hate crimes in the United States.

– John Shelby Spong

 

[CityChicker]

As far as the one thing that really first made me start questioning, it was simply the core messages of Christianity being illogical to me (which led to years upon years of studying the Bible). In addition to a lot of the other things mentioned, I just never got the whole dying on the cross for our sins aspect of Christianity. That is still one of the main things that keeps me from accepting Christianity fully.

It just doesn't make logical sense to me and I have questioned this since I was very young, like early childhood. When I would hear that Christ died for our sins and was sacrificed on the cross, my fist thought was always- To whom? He is God right? or at least the son of God? He is all powerful right? Who was his death payment to, himself? I just can't wrap my mind around it. I still hear other Christians constantly say things like, "Christ died for our sins". "God loved us so much he sent his son to die for us"., and on and on and on... I have never met a Christian that can make this seem logical to me. Him dying for our sins implies that he was making payment to someone on our behalf. WHO? Again, he is God, right? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Even when I would just resign myself to accepting it, the next question in my mind would be- well if he died as payment for our sins, how could there EVER be a hell? Again, it made no sense to me. All of these basic issues led to years of questioning and as so many other people, reading the Bible has always pushed me further from Christianity (for so many reasons, I wouldn't even know where to begin). I still think the core message of the new testament is good and Christ if he existed was someone to aspire to be like in many ways. The problem is that a lot of Christians are not at all like Christ and they apply the new testament to themselves, but the old testament to others and are not even successful at living by the new testament.

Again, none of this is meant to be offensive of course. Most of us probably single out Christianity simply because we were raised Christian. Another thing that to this day disheartens me with Christianity is that you cannot question these things. If you do, people will lash out at you in anger rather than listen to your concerns. That is no way to earn followers and "save" people if that is really the goal.

 

[Jena]

John Shelby Spong

Brilliant.

Thank you Joe.

Just to add that from my studies I can say that the same problems with language and interpretation can be ascribed to most languages and writing forms and methods of transmission. It is not only Christianity that this applies to and it is always a matter of focus and interpretation, these books are so extensive in their range that it is possible to find a miriad of "verses" that will justify many diverse things and actions. It is purely personal how we chose to see things or believe.

In the study of history any evidence has to pass certain questions:

Who produced it?
Why was it produced?
Who was it for?
Who paid for it?
What were their aims? Why?

When you apply these questions to Holy books, you will find that their aims are to teach us and to encourage us to lead good lives, at some times we need to know fear and at times we need kindness. So many reasons and so many ways. not for us to question but to try to understand. For some it brings answers and for some it does not.