It's perfectly logical. To me it seems illogical that you either have to follow something someone else made up completely or not at all. How much sense does that make? The superstition I'm talking about isn't "don't lust after another woman," it's more like, "magic all seeing man in the sky will send you to eternal suffering if you question his infinite love."
I don't see any problem here. It's like the GM bankruptcy. You keep the good bits, dump the bad bits, and move on. If it is no longer recognizable as GM, so what? GM was too ossified to survive. barfo
If you found a car you really really really liked and someone put some ugly wheels that you hated but could sell to make enough money to buy some you like, would you decided not to buy the car? If you found a killer house for sale cheap but someone else painted the bathroom pink and green, would you buy a more expensive house to avoid painting one bathroom? DO YOU BUY EVERYTHING THEY SELL AT THE GROCERY STORE EVERY TIME YOU GO? No, nobody does and nobody would expect you to. Yet, we are to believe every word in a book written eight billion years ago that has been translated ten thousand times. The bible was probably the first Harry Potter book and just got lost in translation.
I do have a bit of a problem with what I feel are preachers and churches that try to move towards the future and change what they preach. Wouldn't one think that they should probably take a more literal approach to the bible so as not to look like cherry pickers? Gay marriages and birth control and other modern stuff, if they change their beliefs on this who is to say that what they are preaching now will be right in 20 years?
Fair enough. What about the ones for the greatest commandment? In the same speech: Or this one: how is humility causing someone misery or not? If you didn't think that 2+2 was 4 to begin with, and a crazy person told you that 2+2 is 4, how would you know that he's right? And what possible excuse could you give yourself to listen to what he says, and then change your beliefs to what he just told you? I'll put it a different way: if I was to say something like "O'Reilly on Fox criticized Congress doing X today", there would be multiple people saying something to the effect of "you can't trust that lousy station, they lie" (this could be just as true about something like the Huffington Post or NYT or whatever). Most won't say "I generally think that Fox/NYT is a pile of crap and don't listen to it, but they DID criticize Congress today in a way that makes me think I need to change my views about politics". That's kind of ridiculous. Here's another one. Very few people in here can come close to matching my education, experience or research in the realm of radiochemistry and nuclear engineering. And yet, when I talk about the scientific backing I think explains a lot of Young Earth Creation, nobody in here says "that guy's a crazy believer in imaginary friends, but he does have a point with those facts." But you're saying that for 2000 years just about everyone in the West has been cool with adopting a wholly different moral code whose genesis was in Genesis (pun intended) and whose most popular adherent was a carpenter from backwater Palestine who claimed to be the Son of God and the Immaculately Conceived Mary? If I could get personal, why is it that you specifically think that Jesus is telling you 2+2=4 when he says "cause as little harm as possible", but he's wrong when He says that you have to love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength or that He is the Son of God and will be resurrected? Is it because you know that to be false? That that's 2+2=6? How do you know he's right about the causing as little harm as possible? Is it b/c there's other corraboration of that through history? Then do you believe in the Flood, too? I'd like to hear more on that. I don't believe it, but not strongly enough that I won't listen to what you have to say/read about it. It seems as if you're saying that it's intelligence that overrules our animalistic tendencies, but even animals don't generally commit incest, eat their own, etc.
Wow, I took too long to write. Good discussion, and I'll try to write more later. It's past 2am here and I have a week of conference meetings.
It's certainly a valid opinion to believe that being humble is related to not causing harm to others. Breaking the "looking out for number one" mindset, as you put it, has a large part in not seeing one's self interest as the only end. This is definitely not unique to Jesus; Buddha taught similar things, for example. I'm not all that interested in debating whether everything Jesus said can be boiled down to not harming others. I believe that was the primary message around which his teachings coalesced, but it's valid to think otherwise. The point is, a person coming from that ethical foundation can see a lot of value in what Jesus taught (or is claimed to have taught) without believing in the mysticism. You're reading too much into the "2 + 2 = 4." That is a literal mathematical fact, whereas moral/ethical teachings are not. My point was not that Jesus' teachings were objective fact like "2 + 2 = 4" is (because it isn't), but that one can find correctness or something they agree in what a person says with even if they don't like or believe in the person saying it. I'll listen to a lot of people, even FOXNews personalities. It can be interesting to listen to the worldviews of other people. Being a rational being means taking in what you hear, processing it and accepting the things that are consistent with what you see as the evidence in life. I'm extremely puzzled by your shock and confusion that one can not believe that Jesus was the son of God but still agree with other things he said. That doesn't strike me as confusing at all. Some things that people say make sense to one, some things don't. Do you either have to agree with everything I say, or nothing at all? If you actually have empirical facts, those should be accepted whether you believe in "Imaginary Friends" or not. Of course, there is the problem of lack of expertise. If someone doesn't have the knowledge to know whether your claimed facts are true or not, they either have to "believe" you or not. If what you say goes against what most scientists say, it's reasonable to reject what you're saying on that basis, not on the basis that you're a "religious nut." I think many people believed Jesus as the son of God (just as many people have believed other religious leaders). What does that have to do with anything being discussed here? This is about the reaction of people who don't believe (due to lack of evidence) that Jesus was the son of God. As explained above, I don't believe it is like someone saying "2 + 2 = 4," but I do think Jesus' teachings (which, again, didn't start with him, as they've been formulated by cultures throughout history before and after Jesus) are pretty solid. Why do I think that? Because, at some fundamental level, I believe that causing harm to others is a bad thing. All thinking on ethics and morality does have to start from some unsourced belief, because there's no universal ethics to start from. Religious people start from some variation on "holy scripture" as their unsourced belief (the scripture has no verified source, just ascribed without evidence to "god"), secularists start from what feels right to them. The difference, to me, is that religious adherents don't start from that unsourced foundation and then apply rationality. They are told completely what to believe, lock, stock and barrel. There isn't any thinking, any flexibility to incorporate new evidence, new information. A secularist who starts from the foundation of innate principles can rationally build his/her actions on that foundation and, as he/she encounters new situations or good arguments, can adjust to better live in peace with life and people.
There really is no One True Christian religion, because even Christians have been picking and choosing which parts of the bible they want to believe in for 2000 years. Why else do we have Puritans, Episcopals, Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, etc? Why did the Catholics (after several centuries) finally have to apologize to Galileo? Sure, they all agree that Jesus was right. But Jesus was also plenty vague enough so that a pacifist Quaker and the torturous Catholic Inquisition could each pick and choose his words to justify their own agendas. It amazes me that both are considered Christian, and nobody really finds it odd.
I know it is weird for sure. What I am bothered by is the same church preaching way different stuff 20 years later. I was taught that people who haven't been exposed to the bible or religion who die are considered innocents and therefore unable to be sent to hell. It struck me as a little mean to see missionaries out in the jungle exposing innocent people to the bible and thus making them eligible to go to hell. Mean IMO.
I'm not at all religious and haven't been to church in literally years, but I believe the missionary would tell you that all of those people "in the jungle" will certainly be going to hell if they don't teach them the word of Christ. Hence 'spreading the word of Christ', or whatever it's called these days.
The Greek epics are quite similar. The gods frolicked while the mortals (especially the heroes) were most virtuous.
