Simple question?

Quote: FrGamble

Again your conception of doing the right thing and best thing for yourself as somehow inhuman servitude is scary.

It was a prominent Christian apologist who first used the term "slave to God," not me.

Quote:

Your view of God is very warped.

Yeah, I guess from one with blinders and rose-colored glasses, clarity seems warped.

Quote:

God is not a tyrant

Shall we rehydrate Lot's wife and ask her what she thinks? How about those who drowned in the flood, the children living in Sodom and Gomorrah, an entire generation of first-born boys in Egypt, and too many more to mention. Or shall we look at the justice inherent in carrying a grudge across four generations, at least one of them yet to be born?

Tyrant doesn't even come close. But as yet we have no word for a passive-aggressive psychopath fond of committing atrocities.

Quote: petroglyph

For the believers it is a cargo cult.

You know, as fascinatingly wrong as cargo cults are, at least they have a tiny basis in fact. The cargo is indeed real :)

Quote: Nareed

Until the advent of modern medicine and widespread sanitation practices, well into the XIX Century in other words, the families that didn't lose a child to premature death were a very tiny minority.

And that makes a good trick question
that nobody ever gets right. Up until
1900, what was the single biggest
killer of humans in the world.

The answer is, child mortality. More
humans died before the age of 5
than from any other cause.

Second trick question. What was the
biggest killer of women in the world
before 1900. The answer is, childbirth.
More women died that way than from
disease or old age. We saw men of 40
marrying 16 years old girls, not because
they were perverts, but they needed a
young wife who had a chance of surviving
childbirth.

The world we live in now would be a mystery
to our recent relatives.

Quote: Nareed

You know, as fascinatingly wrong as cargo cults are, at least they have a tiny basis in fact. The cargo is indeed real :)

Cargo cults make a lot more sense than
Christianity does. At least they're based
on something real. Original sin is why
Jesus died, supposedly, yet the concept
is nowhere to be found in the OT, the
Gospels, or from anything Jesus said.
It's a bogus myth invented to reel in
uneducated converts.

Quote: FrGamble

I wonder how such obvious things as Original Sin

I think Original Sin would actually be the first unverified claim of the Bible. I guess that would be the first sentence.

Quote: rxwine

I think Original Sin would actually be the first unverified claim of the Bible. I guess that would be the first sentence.

Allegedly the "sin" of the original human couple is transmitted somehow to all descendants.

What I wonder is:

If original sin is something every person has carried with them since the beginning of humanity and into the indefinite far future, then sins in addition to this one are derivative sins? If so, as they take actual choice, thought and in some cases creativity, these derivative sins are far more original :)

Quote: Evenbob

It's about as far from free as you can
get. Stop saying it is.

It so completely and absolutely free, there is nothing as free as the gift of salvation from God.

Quote: FrGamble

It so completely and absolutely free, there is nothing as free as the gift of salvation from God.

What would it benefit anyone to gain Heaven and lose their soul?

Quote: Nareed

Have you any idea how many animals we slaughter every day. Not even in the wild, but in farms and ranches made for raising animals for slaughter.

What I meant is that in nature we are not a very good predator. Our eyesight is not as good, nor our hearing and smell. We have no fangs and no claws. We are slow compared to the other animals. If you were going to weed out a species based on survival of the fittest we would be in trouble. However, we are absolutely extraordinary! Far and above every other animal we succeed with a gift of intelligence and reason that boggles the mind when you look at the evolution of everything else.

Quote:

Until the advent of modern medicine and widespread sanitation practices, well into the XIX Century in other words, the families that didn't lose a child to premature death were a very tiny minority.

Again what I meant is that we care for the poor and needy. We protect our young and revere our elderly in ways not often seen in the animal world, again where it is survival of the fittest. We are very different and seem to play by different rules.

Quote:

Medicine and sanitation were human discoveries, not a divine gift from a deity.

Nature itself is a gift from God as is our amazing intelligence to use nature and science to develop medicine and learn about sanitation.

Quote:

So before non-existent Adam and non-existent Eve had their non-existent fall, the laws of physics were nothing at all like what we know them to be now? How about biological imperatives like hunting and parasitic behavior? I warn you we have solid evidence of floods, ice ages, predators and even infections going back millions of years.

Adam and Eve were real and so was the fall. However you raise some very good questions that I need some time to think about and research. Thank you.

Quote: Nareed

Shall we rehydrate Lot's wife and ask her what she thinks? How about those who drowned in the flood, the children living in Sodom and Gomorrah, an entire generation of first-born boys in Egypt, and too many more to mention. Or shall we look at the justice inherent in carrying a grudge across four generations, at least one of them yet to be born?

Tyrant doesn't even come close. But as yet we have no word for a passive-aggressive psychopath fond of committing atrocities.

Again you fail to realize that in all these cases God did amazing things to warn and guide the people away from such disaster. They probably like you said something like, "Who is this God to tell me what to do I will continue to sin and do whatever I want!" Well they choose to not listen to the wise friend who loved them and look what happens. Why you seem to want to blame God for respecting your choice to ruin your life if you want is beyond me.

It's like someone who says to you over and over that it is not good to run across the street without looking and you continue to ignore him. One day you get run over and your family blames the friend who warned you. It makes no sense. God is not the one committing atrocities He is the one desperately trying to help us avoid the atrocities we seem hell bent to experience.