Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> I'm not saying religion can only have absolutes. I'm saying that as it's 
>> written in the Bible, it's pretty absolute.
> 
>   Yes. Take one single verse, remove it from the rest of the book, and
> state that single verse, all by itself, is absolute, without even
> understanding the context in which it has been written.
> 
>   Why is the concept of a principle being written over a larger span of
> literature so difficult to understand or accept?
>   You have to take *everything* that is written about the subject. You can't
> take one single verse, rip it off, and take that as the absolute truth.
> It's no different from taking individual words from the Bible and creating
> sentences with them.
[snipped more of the same]

Thanks Warp, finally something we can all agree on. Of course you can 
not take a verse from a holy book out of context and interpret it in any 
way you like. Problem is that too many people do that. There is a big 
group of fundamentalist Christians that take the bible for an absolute 
truth. What they mean is that their particular selection of texts fits 
their current set of values. If their favorite selection happens to 
include e.g. some anti-homosexual texts and not the more liberal ones, 
then they feel fully justified to attack any gay people they meet, 
because of their 'religion'. Same mechanism with that group that had a 
vision of a better world, found their verses in the holy book and flew a 
couple of planes into buildings. OTOH there are also fundamentalist 
Christians, Muslims and Jews (etc) that have a more pacifistic set of 
morals, they choose other texts. Which brings me back to the point I 
tried to make in the post you highjacked to start a discussion on the 
death penalty: In practice it starts with people thinking about ethics 
and only after they decided what is good and bad they find their 
selection of holy texts to base that ethics on. If you agree with their 
opinion you generally won't notice, if you disagree it leaves you 
flabbergasted.

So, given that we agree you can not take just a couple of verses, we 
might agree also that you can not take a couple of verses from genesis 
and claim that the earth was created in six days and that women are 
inferior to men. Though somehow I think you won't go as far as that.

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