All religions books are mythological and contain errors. The Tanakh of Judaism and Bible of Christianity are books besides being operational manuals that provide instructions and guidelines for the enslavement of humans, including children–also is filled with major scientific errors, fairytale events that are unsubstantiated, historical errors and contradictions
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I don’t know why you are replying to me - perhaps you mean someone else? Your post is precisely of the “stating the obvious to any reasonable observer” variety that I describe as “not terribly useful or interesting”. You won’t persuade the bigots, because they don’t believe in science and they do believe in magic; and the rest of us either know this stuff anyway or are not interested. It’s essentially a 19th century argument about religious books that was settled then for all unprejudiced observers, and we really don’t need to rehash it in the 21st century. No amount of Biblical criticism will fix white Americans shooting black Americans or fanatical Sunnis massacring Shias and Christians; we need the tools of the 21st century to fix 21st century problems.
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Are most gods supposedly omnipotent, or all-creators? People often bring this up in criticisms of religion, but my experience is that this is not the case. Although it is more or less true of the examples in the topic’s title.
I think this is relevant as people arguing either for or against religion cling to this description because it is non-falsifiable. Once you open the definition, the whole debate becomes meaningless, because anything may or not be a god, which may or not make any difference. But most people seem to hate this position because it “misses the point” of arguing about it.
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I like this thread too much to take part.
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Granted, I only mean that I, as a non believer shouldn’t attempt to interpret the inherent morality in religious law if I’m also going to dismiss the truth of religion, not being initiated, I’ll very likely wind up dismissing whatever straw man I have made of a persons beliefs and get nowhere.
I can, however, suspend belief that a religious law is merely good because its religious and attempt to understand why it might be good for a society.
Yes, I am saying that engaging with religious law as a non religious person should not be on religious terms. otherwise youget something like this:
I realize you are driving trollies.
It is meaningless to say that, for example, a society that believed in god and organized itself around this shared (as of then) understanding of the world should not have let religion inform its morals.
But I won’t try to infer further meaning from your comment if there’s a point to it, then please, make the point yourself.
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I replied to you because you posted in this forum topic.
You posted;
Christianity is effectively the synthesis of a progressive strand of Judaism with the Roman State religion, which is indeed wildly synthetic. The early Protestants tried to sort out the mess and [from a theological view quite correctly] wanted to get rid of “superstition” like Christmas and the elaborate nature festivals of the Catholic Church. Modern Protestants seem equally determined to bring the superstitions back again so long as they can be used to sell something.
Jesus is the central figure of Christianity–since you already know, why don’t you explain to readers of this forum topic how the bulk of the myth of Jesus was stolen from African-Kemetic history/religion and astronomy.
Second since you already know, why don’t you explain the African origin of end of year celebrations like Christmas and why it was considered to be pagan.
Third, since you already know, why don’t you explain the African-Kemetic connection and influence on the Catholic Church.
Someone may find your answers interesting.
You also posted
“The synthetic part of Judaism is really limited to a few books - Bereshit[Genesis] hints more or less darkly at the origins of Judaism, but a succession of prophets tried to get rid of the fluff, telling anyone who would listen that God was quite uninterested in sacrifices and obedience to a lot of nitpicking rules,”
What prophets? you mean crazy men who hear voices talking to them
You posted
“No amount of Biblical criticism will fix white Americans shooting black Americans or fanatical Sunnis massacring Shias and Christians; we need the tools of the 21st century to fix 21st century problems”.
The long violent history of fanatical Muslim’s killing each other is rooted in religion.
The sexism in the books of Islam, Judaism and Christianity is one of the root causes of why women are still treated like second class citizens around the world and are still not treated as equals to men in America.
The still extant slavery scriptures in the Bible and Tanakh of Judaism was used to dehumanize Africans to justify enslaving them. However, because they were being taught about Jesus, saving their souls was more important.
This Biblical dehumanizing of Black people, along with schools refusing to teach (or selectively teaching) the contributions of Africa to the world, especially the formation of America—is a big part of why some white police officers see no value in a black life…
When a white police officer kills a unarmed black man or woman it is because they don’t see a human being of any value–they have dehumanized them and that black life has no value to them.
Religion and history are critically important.
How often do you see a black police officer shoot and kill a unarmed white man or woman? Given the long history of whites killing black people in America, how many white people in America who have murdered a black person has ever been executed for exclusively killing a black person vs a black person exclusively killing a white person?
I am sure you know and are aware of this.
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What tools do we need in the 21st century to fix the problems of the 21st century–especially the neverending religious quagmire known as the Middle East.
“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause”. [George Washington, letter to Sir Edward Newenham, June 22, 1792]
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I have read your post and my reply can only be
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Sciptures? Relgious? Proofreaders needed!
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Mindysan33, you are right about the Quakers
The date when the Underground Railroad started is uncertain. One of the earliest references to runaway slaves receiving organized assistance comes from a letter written by George Washington in 1786. A slave escaped from one of his neighbours and Washington wrote to Robert Morris that “a society of Quakers, formed for such purposes, have attempted to liberate him…acting repugnant to justice…[and] in my opinion extremely impoliticly with respect to the State.”
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) was the first corporate body in Britain and North America to fully condemn slavery as both ethically and religiously wrong in all circumstances. It is in Quaker records that we have some of the earliest manifestations of anti-slavery sentiment, dating from the 1600s. After the 1750s, Quakers actively engaged in attempting to sway public opinion in Britain and America against the slave trade and slavery in general. At the same time, Quakers became actively involved in the economic, educational and political well being of the formerly enslaved.
The earliest anti-slavery organizations in America and Britain consisted primarily of members of the Society of Friends. Thus much of the record of the development of anti-slavery thought and actions is embedded in Quaker-produced records and documents. Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College and the Quaker Collection at Haverford College are jointly the custodians of Quaker meeting records of the Mid-Atlantic region, including Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, New York and Vermont and these records illuminate the origins of the anti-slavery movement as well as the continued Quaker involvement, often behind the scenes, in the leadership and direction of the abolitionist movement from the 1770s to the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, and beyond.
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I love penguins–they are so cute and funny…
They are also tough, survivors and extremely dedicated parents.
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The Christian supreme creator god is supposed to be omnipresent and omnipotent.
Which makes it hard for me to fathom how the Bible can contain errors that any omnipresent and omnipotent supreme creator god would know–if “he” were real.
How could a all knowing and all powerful supreme creator god not know that a bat is a mammal, not a fowl/bird-- and the moon is not a crated light, but reflects the light of the sun.
One cannot even get out of the first chapters of Genesis before finding scientific and zoology errors.
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You sound oddly identical to khepra
how many sock puppets do you have?
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Nothing “is supposed” in any universal sense. I always ask: “Supposed by whom?” Things which are supposed by some are often not supposed by me.
You are mixing many different kinds of thought here as if they were readily interchangeable. Everything is “real”, being “man made and mythological” doesn’t preclude human mythology from being real. Human myths are real enough that a person can study them. Anybody but the most naive know that mythology often has, at most, a tenuous relationship with historicity. Jehovah was based on some degree upon the likeness of Mesopotamian warrior kings, who might have actually been the most “omnipotent” personalities some people of that era could relate to.
Easy - because mythology is a different domain of thinking, which is subjective, personal, and cultural. What their bible says about bats is no more relevant to zoology than than myths of centaurs are. If you are engaged in scientific thought, it doesn’t help to look for it in mythology. Just like if you are working in history, science doesn’t directly apply. And if you are involved with finance, history books are not very helpful. Scientific method stresses the objective, so it is not very useful systematizing or optimising subjective mythological perspectives, nor vice versa.
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How about the Christian supreme creator god stealing several of his Ten Commandments from Africa-Kemetic/Anu religion.
The Ten Commandments are supposed to be the only thing actually written by the Christian supreme creator god in the Bible. Actually written by men who claimed it was written by the Christian supreme creator god.
The following information has been known since the 1800’s coinciding with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
This is not new news: The Negative and Positive Confessions are thousands of years older than the Bible.
http://anu-world.com/id22.html
See: Negative Confessions
http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/egyptian/bookodead/book9.htm
Dispite the misrepresentation of the ancient Egyptians as European or Arab, do these double plumbed crowns sitting atop the heads of these mythical (and much older than the Bible) African-Kemetic/Anu gods and goddesses look familiar?
The Ancient Egyptians were African.
Looks a lot to me like the Tablets of Stone or Stone Tabelets, Moses supposedly received the Ten Commandments on.
http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Torah/Ten_Cmds/ten_cmds.html
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Thanks! Of course, I’m sure not all Quakers participated and some likely had a condescension problem, as we still have at times with white liberals… But yeah.
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When the men wrote the book of Genesis–they did not know a bat was a mammal–or that the moon was a not self illuminating.
They saw a bat flying and assumed it was a bird.
They saw the moon illuminated and assumed it was self-illuminating.
The Bible is a mythical book, and the anonymous men who wrote it could only write what they knew or thought they knew.
There are no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible (all types and all three epochs) because dinosaurs were not scientifically documented until the early to mid 1800’s
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinofossils/First.shtml
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You’re welcome!
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And capybaras and beavers are fish. This is what a fish looks like.
I think we have established that Christian dogma isn’t… What is the polite way of putting this? … Internally consistent.
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I think one way to square that circle for a religious person is that it’s written from and for the perspective of someone of that time - scientific accuracy isn’t the point, and no attempt is given to correct errors of understanding. Jesus was taken to a place where he could see all the kingdoms of the world, which presupposes a flat earth. On the other hand, even literalists are happy to write that off as a figure of speech, a vision or a statement using the limited knowledge of the time.
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