Hi John Clark
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 7:22 AM, Roger Clough wrote: ROGER: >Intelligence ? I don't think the word was available back then (Bible days). JOHN: Welll, they certainly behaved as the didn't know what it meant to be intelligent, but then why is the bible worth reading today? Why not read something with a little more intellectual meat on its bones, like a Donald Duck comic book? ROGER: To understand the Bible you have to read it as a little child, JOHN: And there can be no better place for a child to start reading the Bible than "And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend"; stories about how God likes to force people to eat their children and friends makes such charming bedtime stories. ROGER: That's from Jeremiah 19. Jeremiah was a prophet, preaching fire and brimstone to the people. ROGER: ?> God did order a few massacres. JOHN: But only a *few* massacres, and hey God is just like the rest of us, He sometimes does things He will regret when He gets into a hissy fit. I mean we all have bad days. ROGER: God loved the Israelites and hated their enemies. > Those slaughter statements are mostly based on the old jewish laws in > leviticus and numbers. JOHN: I will say this, the God of the Old testament may be the most unpleasant character in all of fiction and He may have enjoyed forced cannibalism and torture but at least once you were dead you were dead and He was finished playing with you; but not so in the New Testament of Jesus the Prince of Peace, Jesus is going to use all His skill to torture you as horribly as He can for all of eternity if you take just one step out of line. ROGER: God did heap down fire and brimstone on the enemies of his people. ?> Jesus did away with them (the fire and brimstone). JOHN: So you look at Jesus as a mass murderer who has reformed, or says He has. ROGER: God and Jesus are two different people, although paradoxically both are parts of the trinity. > The forgiveness of Jesus also did away with the need for them. The Old > Testament is the problem. The New Testament is the solution. JOHN: Christ was a jerk. I refer to the character portrayed in the bible, whether there really was a historic figure who impressed the rubes with card tricks and other stunts I don't know. Personally I'd be a lot more impressed if he had taught us about the second law of thermodynamics rather than hear a report of questionable accuracy about some water into wine trick. It took the human race another 1800 years to learn about entropy and although it teaches us nothing about morality neither do Christ's stunts, and unlike the fermented grape juice bit you can't fake thermodynamics. Christ was a nut, nutty as a fruit cake, or to put it in more politically correct language, he had a mental illness that produced delusions of grandeur. I don't think it was an act, I think he really thought he was God. Christ was a martinet. His words "You serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell" sounds more like a typical flame you can find anywhere on the net then it does the wisdom of a great sage. Buddha, Lao-tse, and Socrates all had a much more enlightened attitude toward those who disagreed with them, and they had it 500 years before Jesus. Christ was a creep. He believed in hell, he talked with glee about "wailing and gnashing of teeth" and "these shall go away into everlasting fire". He thought that torturing somebody, not for a billion years, not for a trillion years but for an INFINITE number of years would be an amusing thing to do to somebody he didn't like. I think cruelty on this monstrous scale proves that Jesus Christ of the bible is morally indistinguishable from Satan of the bible. Christ was a idiot. He believed that God, that is to say himself, was furious with the human race (something to do with fruit trees) and even though he could do anything the only way for him to forgive the humans would be for the humans to torture him to death, even though being a god he can not die. Does any of this seem very smart to you?? ?ohn K ClarK ROGER: Jesus' bark was much worse than his bite. He was angry at sinners and sin, as you might expect him to be. But He died for them -- and us as well -- at Golgotha. The meaning of anything in the Bible has to be considered against the context of the Bible as a whole. God's wrath was for sinners and enemies of Israel, but in the New Twestament, much of his wrath was replaced by grace. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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