On 1/7/2014 11:29 PM, John VanSickle wrote:
> He gave them in order to accomplish a number of purposes which He
> regards as good and just.  However, now that those purposes have been
> served, the commandments are no longer good and just; therefore they are
> no longer in effect.
>
No, people created them, for specific purposes, most of which involved 
trying to control other people. The irony being, they never seemed to 
grasp that, sometimes, trying to forbid something stupid, created an 
even worse evil as a consequence. There is a comment in one of the Disc 
world novels, to the effect, "Its too bad that gods only ever seem to 
come across shepherds, instead of goat herders, because sheep have to be 
driven, while goats can only be *led*."

>  > And if you are completely honest (as you should be, if you
>  > are a Christian), then you would agree that you do *not* think those
>  > commandments are good and just.
>
> I am glad that the commandments were not given to me, but whether
> something is right or wrong does not depend on how I feel about it.
>
It has everything to do with how you feel about it. Heck, if I was going 
to rewrite one of the silly "the devils greatest trick" statements, it 
would be either, "The devils greatest trick was convincing man that he 
wasn't also god.", or maybe, "The devils greatest trick was teaching man 
to believe in sin." Good is what causes the least pain, to the most 
people, or, preferably, any. But, its also a dream. A thing to be 
striven towards, to be believed in, and when necessary, revised, not 
because its *real* but because its what makes all of us feel better, in 
the long run, and you can't create a thing that doesn't exist, until you 
believe in it enough to try to make it real. The mistake religion makes 
is in not just claiming that it is real, but that they know what it is, 
refusing to abandon it, until forced (and there has never been a time 
that the church has not changed "because" the world did, instead of 
changing the world, where the outcome has not been terror and pain, for 
someone). Or, as someone else put it, religion claims to know the 
unknowable.

If you didn't "feel" that the things you believe where good, or had 
value, or could achieve something worth the effort, you wouldn't believe 
in what you do, any more than the list of things that, as Warp points 
out, other similar people have opted to believe in, but you now reject. 
That both you and them hold on to things that... I, and others, find 
absurd, irrational, and/or even dangerous, and are horrified that people 
still believe them... well, we are trying to build a better world. You.. 
are trying to crib together a dead one, so you can justify keeping the 
carpets.

> "Any circumstance"?  Sir, you do not know me.  There are some crimes for
> which I regard stoning as too merciful a punishment.  But in this era
> God has reserved those things for the secular authorities.
>
>  > In other words, you disagree with your God.
>
> I certainly do disagree with God (and as a result have wronged Him on
> numerous occasions).  There are a number of commandments, which apply to
> me, that I would have left out if I had written the Bible, and it is
> only with careful consideration that I recognize that they really are
> better than what I would have come up with on my own.  And thus I
> recognize that my disagreement with God is proof of a flaw in me and not
> in God.
>
Not to mention a whole lot that, I somehow predict, you "think" can be 
somehow justified by the Bible, or are in there, if you quint just 
right, or should be, yet, somehow never quite got written into it, in 
nice clear, hard to confuse of misinterpret, language. You, I suspect, 
would find the silly, "A fetus is a bit like a wad of chewing gum, so 
the god of the Koran told us about embryology!", nonsense, as, well... 
nonsense, yet, there is so much that is claimed, by Christians, who 
reject all the old, "no longer applicable" bits of the Bible, which are 
just as absurdly justified, by stretching the language of what is in the 
Bible so badly you can read whole libraries through it (i.e., nothing of 
the original meaning being retained in the process).

This doesn't impress people who look at the way people actually lived 
when it was written, the conflicts they had with their neighbors, the 
way religions actually worked back then, or note funny little 
absurdities, like how Jehovah was, at one time, one of three brothers, 
under the God El, and a war monger (The other two where Chemosh and 
Baal, one a god of farming, and the other one of commerce, and slave 
trading. Did Jehovah, later one, decide to bang his own sword into a 
hammer, and take up carpentry? lol), and the Jewish version fairly 
explicitly hinted at there being more than one god.

You don't get around those annoying little inconsistencies with the 
"core" idea behind a religion, any more than you can ignore 20 lines out 
of a passage listing everything from what sort of socks you should wear, 
to how many stone to throw at your son, if he calls you names, just so 
you can, for example, do what the right wing self-claimed "literalists" 
do, and insist that gays are evil, because of one single line in the 
same bunch of idiocies. (And, yeah, I know there is nothing about socks 
in the Bible, but.. are some of the other things in that passage any 
less silly?)

Your god is a variation on Terry Pratchett's Nuggan - an endless list of 
new things declared abominations, by one priest or the other, until, at 
some point, even children, rocks, and the color blue, get declared, 
"Evil in the sight of god." But, at least Nuggan filled in the pages of 
absurd declarations himself (until he died, and it kept filling itself 
with, instead, all the fears and anxieties of people that he once godded 
over), a page at a time, magically, instead of relying on something as 
unreliable as people to decide which new things to claim are bad, which 
ones suddenly became OK, and to tell everyone, "But, this isn't just my 
*opinion*. Its not like I say these things are true because I merely 
feel they are!", just like the other 20,000 contradictory versions, all 
of them disagreeing with each other, on almost every single thing that 
is, or isn't, bad, or is or isn't still in effect, or is, or isn't 
merely allegorical.

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