http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1228728195450&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull This is a great summary of the way the press influences public opinion. Wake up people.
Barry Rubin is coming to the table with a very specific bias...he is hardly an unbiased source...so essentially he is equally guilty of massaging the facts to influence your opinion.
Just because he imagines it, doesn't mean it actually happens. oh. I didn't even notice this is from the Jerusalem Post. I don't even know why you bothered posting this.
What does it matter what religion it is from? They are all lies, all just built to grasp and manipulate people for power and money. Religion has been responsible for more human against human caused death by far than any other source. When are people going to wake up and realize this bullcrap is holding us back, and leave it behind. The human race will be better for it.
Most reformed theology is based upon the premise that mankind is by nature corrupt, and the good things only come as grace from God. Most others like to think that people are good, and that there are just some bad apples. Once you start letting things go towards the "benefit of the one" rather than the "benefit of the society", you start down the slippery slope of people becoming the gods of their own little worlds, defining morality and actions out of selfishness, and discounting and disregarding the interconnections that make us human. I prefer to see this as "regression", or a sign of a fallen world. I know that it's hard to accept that you aren't sovereign over your own life...I've been there. I know that it's hard to accept that mumbo-jumbo you don't understand could in fact be the way the world actually works, and it's not an "I'm ok, you're ok" world. It's a battle. There IS good and evil. Don't look at televangelists or pastors or Christians or Reformers or Puritans or anyone else as justification of if there's a God or not. They can't do it for you. If you can study God and His Son ("Theology") and get away from "Religion", you may understand better. Or not. But building a "religious" straw man isn't going to help.
I think Cancer, heart disease and AIDS kills more people than religion. I think Stalin and Mao killed more people while being "godless communists" than combining any religious dictator in history (and yes, I'm including Hitler in there). I think more Americans died in the Civil War over the issue of slavery and state's rights than have been killed in the entire history of American over "religious" issues EDIT: Sorry, didn't see "human-on-human".
I've asked this before: Disprove a "Christian Lie" for me. Just one. Then we'll talk. I'll pre-emptively strike: I would suggest not bringing up Creation, because that would cause the thread to get hijacked under a lot of science and engineering that I imagine most on the board wouldn't understand or appreciate. (You can PM me, if you like) I would also suggest not bringing up dogmatic things. (I also disagree with the Southern Baptist Boycott of Disney...that's not a "Christian Lie"). From the Bible, if you please.
I've already said that my views are based on faith. You take what you see as the "high road" (which is fine, btw) and say they're "myths", though DYM says that they're "lies". That passed the threshold for me. If you're going to call something a lie, you should know the truth. The truth is unidentifiable, according to the two of you, since I can't prove it without a belief in the Bible and no one's EVER disproven it. So the discussion that you and I generally have that centers around "myths" and "faith", etc. is fine. But when they're called lies, then the burden of proof goes to the one calling them lies. IMO.
i may be less blunt about it but i take no high road in that respect. myths ARE lies. that's just semantics. i certainly do believe the fundamentalist tenets of christianity are lies perpetrated on society, and are for practical purposes demonstratably false. the trouble is most christians are more than happy to resort to and hide behind impractical validations for their belief, such as citing "faith" (belief without objective reason) or making the burden of proof absolute rather than probabilistic then shifting it. for practical purposes the bible has been disproven. anthropological and geological evidence rather directly show the OT is largely mythology. the NT is rife with contradictions, dubious authorship and obvious plagiarism, and the jesus story follows typical patterns of prophet/savior mythology (still going on today in modern hindu society) and completely lacks any form of contemporaneous historical support beyond the gospels. the origin and spread of the christian religion is nothing unique or special, paralleled closely by islam. all claims of modern miracles have been debunked or shown to have more reasonable alternate physical explanations. and ALL modern evidence points to humans being nothing more than highly evolved soul-free animals. in short there simply is no practical, logically valid reason to believe the bible. if you say it is true, whether you are sincere about it or not you are perpetrating a lie.
I think the basic stories of the bible are based in truth, if one follows this paradigm: Over tens of thousands of years, truth becomes legend, legend becomes myth, myth becomes religion. Did Noah build an ark, gather two of each animal and save them from a catastrophic flood? No. But I'd be willing to bet somewhere in the region, some kind of catastrophic flood occurred that served for the basis of that story. The same principle applied with Jesus. How long after he died until people started writing about him? And I'm not saying he didn't exist or that he didn't preach what he preached. But no one saw the dude cure the blind or walk on water because (duh) those things didn't happen.
