eliveleth: I don't believe in the paranormal, I experience it. Belief doesn't come into it, it's just how things are in our family. I don't have a book that purports to explain it, and then contorts itself into a pretzel shape in order to justify the bizarre contradictions it makes.
You mention Lot and his daughters. I've heard that excuse sooo many times before, from so many people: 'I was drunk at the time, I'm not responsible for my actions'. Interestingly, the law takes an increasingly dim view of that defense.
In the bible, women who were raped but who were deemed not to have screamed enough were to be stoned to death. *For being RAPED*. However, a man that has incestuous sex with his daughters? Oh, he was a little drunk at the time. We'll punish the tribes descended from the children conceived from the incest. I'm curious: can you actually not see the hypocrisy here? How is it that something despised, be it person or practice, can be ok in certain circumstances?
It's all just made up as people go along. How is it alright to shove your daughter out the door to be raped to death in order to protect two ANGELS?? One of these can destroy all of Egypt's firstborn in one night but *two* of them can't protect themselves against a mob, so an innocent girl dies an agonising, horrific death for the sake of the FATHER'S 'righteousness'?
And this is ok by christians? There's no cry of 'hang on a minute...'? Or is it like in the b0rg, wait on 'god' to make things clear? Can you show me where god condemns Lot's part in the incest? No? Can you show me where he condemns the incest at all? No? Then if you think he doesn't like it but you can't find scriptures that condemn it, it's nothing more than something you are making up. If that's what has to happen in order to maintain a belief in some sort of god, then it answers my question 'how can people believe...?': they can't, so they make stuff up and call it divine inspiration, direction from the holy spirit or any other thing that explains away the contortions that they do. CITE the scriptures that actually support your assertions, not ones that have been skewed or taken out of context to support the argument. That's what my original post was about: is there anything in the bible that supports the christain view of god? The answer so far is 'no, they make stuff up'.
It's fine by me to use the law of THEORY when it comes to religion- sure, religion can be in the world as a THEORY, but the very rule of theories is that they don't claim to be PROVEN nor TRUE; they just work 'so far'. The bible purports a hypothesis: 'this is from god'. So far, that hypothesis has failed certain markers, so it's not even moved beyond hypothesis. That's not to say people can't keep testing it, sure they can- they just can't claim, with any degree of foundation, that it's any kind of *truth*. It isn't. It's a hypothesis, nothing more, as I see it, and the religions that sprang from it are exploring that same hypothesis. So far, the evidence is everything to the contrary.
I'm curious- why 'god'?
by rimfiredancing 34 Replies latest jw friends
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rimfiredancing
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PrimateDave
Thanks for that wonderful reply to my post, rimfiredancing! I don't have any time at the moment to post much of a reply, but I will try tomorrow. Got to go to sleep now. ;)
Timothy Campbell's "Introduction to Antiprocess"
Dave -
VoidEater
why are we here?
...is per se a question that is mind-bound, and can only be answered satisfactorily by turning inward. What you find there inside will be awe-inspiring or awful.
I don't think the fear you speak of is deliberately cultivated; I think it is habituated by culture. It is learned.
The only thing that makes me a little uncomfortable with your viewpoints so far is that you seem to hold two different standards on the issue of experience. For yourself, you seem to extoll a position immune to inquiry with:
I don't believe in the paranormal, I experience it.
Yet at the same time might you be denying the validity of others' experience:
I believe in God because of my experiences with Him.
To be fair, this I think is the fertile ground of discussion - validity of the divine through experience as opposed to ferreting out the "true meaning" of what appears to be a bloody OT record - in accord with the OP, it's hard to come to a positive view of God based on the OT record.
Belief is an artifact in the mind. Experience gets sorted and parsed by the mind to come up with beliefs.
"Why" always engages the mind, which is anathema to experience.
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rimfiredancing
void-eater: I'm totally open to and accepting of other people's beliefs. I have friends who are satanists, witches, scientists, aliens, discordians and animists, just to name a few: the difference is, they don't wave books around and *make claims that there are things written in those books that actually aren't*.
I have zero problems if people wish to believe in any sort of god whatsoever. My issues start when, by declarations contained within a book that is inherently flawed and open to misinterpretation (and interpretation seems to be the *only* way that people can use the book at all to support most of what they say), that selfsame flawed document is used to oppress, murder and dictate to others. This is what gets me going. It's what's going on in the States at the moment- interpretations of 'scripture' being used to attack and persecute homosexuals, to decree the non-availability of contraception, to try and return to the days of suppression of women, corporal punishment, the absolute right of the 'church' to dictate the rules and regulations of the ordinary citizen's life. *And they do it by manipulating what's written in a book of dubious ancestry*.
That's my criticism of what's been written to me by those who use the bible as a foundation for their beliefs. As I pointed out in my reply, they still seemed to be manipulating and interpreting scripture to support their particular paradigm and then presenting this to me as 'explanation' of biblical principles. Everyone who uses the bible to support or justify their agenda does it: Catholic, Anglican, Pentecostal, JW, whatever. That's the whole foundation of my original discussion topic- how can anyone who *has actually REALLY READ what the bible says* still believe it? -
rimfiredancing
dave: awesome link, thankyou!
:D