You talking to me?
Yes I have, I exactly addressed it. You're just not answering because you can't.
You have a commendable but hilarious belief in your beliefs.
heh, no the reason I didn't answer is because I was blind drunk. heh heh What a Christmas, actually no quite a very bad Christmas.... just sorta coming around now.
Let's look at the posts again:
peace loving but you're a member of a church that is founded on violence and forcing your beliefs on people? Come on.....that doesn't add up. People have to be judged by their actions not just by what comes out of their mouths, and if they're happy to lend support to such an organisation whilst claiming to be peaceful they're obviously not thinking or they're not as peace loving as they say they are.
Are you peace loving? Would you lend your support to an organisation founded on murder and controlling people's thought (I have no idea what denomination you are btw)?
I think the foundation of the religion, is and always will be God. The divine. All man has tried to do is purport this "message". Jesus did a pretty good job, and radically changed the church. But the fault's with the church; where murder, corruption and dirty priests have crept in, has always been the fault with us, not God. It's routes are true, we've just obscured that here and there on it's road to fruition.
Owen/Catinthehat said:
As for the second bit, you really want me to go and find sources for the roman catholic church's refusal to allow homosexuals to occupy certain positions in their organisation? Or are you claiming that isn't homophobic?
A fundamental belief of the church is that homosexuality is curable, through Jesus Christ. So if someone is to claim to be homosexual and lead some kind of promiscuous lifestyle, it's contradicting the church's belief. I would say this is not homophobic because it is not a way of condemning the individual, just suggesting they are not suitable. For instance, someone wanting to join the Army or police force must be above a certain height. This is not prejudice against smaller individuals, just that they are not suitable for the job.
I can accept that religion and superstition serve some evolutionary purpose, by reinforcing certain behaviours even without knowing the scientific explanation for why they are desirable. (Example: Funerals. It makes little difference in practice whether you bury a dead body, burn it or just leave it somewhere far away from the village. What's important is to get rid of the thing any way you can before it breeds germs and attracts scavengers. A tribe that develops a funeral rite will have a definite survival advantage over a tribe that dies not. None of this requires any knowledge of medicine; just the ability to learn to repeat behaviours which are associated with favourable results.) Theists often (mis)interpret this as somehow saying that humans are hard-wired to believe in (their own particular version of) God.
But what I really can't get my head around, is why anyone would continue to accept superstitious / religious explanations for phenomena whose true explanations are known. Why does anyone still take seriously the Genesis creation myth, when we know, better than we ever have yet not as well as we will one day, how the universe really began?
Well disbelieving the findings of science is not totally unreasonable.
500 years ago we 'knew' that the world was flat because science told us so.....
150 years ago we 'knew' that the newtonian view of physics explained everything....
Science gets things wrong all the time, and certainly isn't even close to explaining how the universe works. We don't even have any evidence for what 95% of the universe actually is. We 'know' precisely fuck all really.
In this mini-skirmish I think Julie was initially correct, that science does disprove Genesis. The argument is still very primitive in regards to theological discourse however: most modern Christians see the genesis stories - like much of the bible as allegorical, rather than a scientific document. For philosphical reasons also it makes sense that God would make it allegorical, because proving his existence with science would negate our choice of free will.
Raas - i think that you are far too preoccupied with twisting the chinese-whispered third-hand english bible to some intellectually-correct worldview that magically answers all questions, and you're in danger of missing the real message of jesus: love one another and the rest will sort itself out (i paraphrase).
No not really, I was concisely quoting from the Bible accurately. I highly doubt translational errors are so great that the meaning these basic verses has been lost. Rather, I suspect you're looking for excuses not to accept the obviously pointed out: The Bible is in no way homophobic, and teaches of love towards those who Sin - and no human is without sin.