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Originally Posted by shakran
"Hey the bible says gay sex is a sin!"
And the same section also condones slavery. Funny how the religious leaders don't advocate that.
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That's an argument I have to make constantly. It proves that many parts of the bible are dated, and thus should have been adapted to the times. Sexism is another biggy.
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Originally Posted by shakran
"The bible says God is all knowing"
And yet for some reason he constantly needs to test us, even though if he's all knowing he already knows what the results will be. The bible tells us that when God told Abraham to kill his own son, it was to test his faith. But since he's all knowing and therefore knows if Abraham is faithful or not, the only logical conclusion is that God is a sadistic jerk who's playing cruel mind games with poor Abraham. Combine that with modern day "tests of faith" (kids born with horrendous birth defects, little girls getting raped, etc etc) and the only logical conclusion is that either the bible is full of shit, or God is an asshole. I'm gonna go with option 1 there, considering the bible was passed down orally for hundreds of years before finally being written down. So even if god DID dictate the bible to the select scholars who were hidden from general society and could offer no conclusive proof that what they were saying was real beyond the fact that they said it was real (catching the sarcasm here?), human error has certainly twisted the original word of "god" into something with an entirely different meaning.
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This is an interesting one. Back when I was being indoctrinated, I always figured that God tested us for our benifit. One of the fundamental concepts behind spirituality and philosophy is to know yourself. The reason that many dieties will test their followers is not necessarily for their own divine edification, but in order to help their followers reach a more enlightened state, being aware of all the facets of their self. How do you know how faithful you are? Well, God asks you to go murder your own son in cold blood for no reason. Yes, God comes off as a sick son of a...well sick, but Abrraham was able to place his faith ahead of his family and even reason. He discovered that day what it means to be a religous fanatic, and he could now prove that those traits exist in himself. While most wouldn't call religous devotion to this degree as enlightened, the idea is that Abraham was able to reconcile any doubts in his mind about his faith. If you're ready to kill your kid for God, youir faith is pretty much unshakable.