So, uh, which parts of the Bible do people generally not follow?

[ThinClient]

Leviticus? Numbers? Deuteronomy?

I did a quick search for "stone to death" and came across these, and from biblegateway.com no less.

http://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=stone+to+death&qs_version=NIV

Leviticus 24:16
New International Version (NIV)
16 anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them. Whether foreigner or native-born, when they blaspheme the Name they are to be put to death.

Numbers 35:17
New International Version (NIV)
17 Or if anyone is holding a stone and strikes someone a fatal blow with it, that person is a murderer; the murderer is to be put to death. (so capital punishment for sure is *required* in the Bible)

Deuteronomy 22:13-22
New International Version (NIV)
(If a woman is found to not be a virgin shortly after she's married, provided she lived previously with her parents)
21 she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you.
22 If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel. (so cheating gets capital punishment, as well as polyamorous relationships)

Do people just ignore these sections nowadays?

The "Abrahamic Covenant" fulfilled the old law. Old Testament law doesn't matter anymore.

At least, that's the bullshit excuse Christians use to not have to follow the bits of the Bible they don't like.

 

[88keys]

and what exactly does dividing the roman empire into two empires due to the (at the time) extreme distances involved have to do with christianity?

I never said that it did. Like I said, look it up.

 

[Juddog]

http://youtu.be/CE8ooMBIyC8

A classic but still awesome to watch over again.

 

[sdifox]

The inconvenient parts

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Maybe he wants to know?

ding ding ding!

It's a sad state of affairs when something as simple as this is the last thing that people assume of others.

 

[Broheim]

I never said that it did. Like I said, look it up.

Ron jeremys autobiography, look it up.

it has nothing to do wih the subject, but you should look it up...

 

[biostud]

The inconvenient parts

This. Basically you just choose which works at certain situations, then discard them at other. And that's why fundamentalism is such a f*cked up way of practicing religion. I'm not religious, but I can understand that some use religion as a guide through life. But using it as a guide shouldn't abolish common sense and independent thinking.

 

[zerocool84]

Plus, the fact that many books have been removed from the Bible entirely, funny how many can also edit the word of god.

 

[BigDH01]

In the interests of not writing a library I over-simplified some things, but the main points are correct. All of the monarchies in Europe before and after the Enlightenment were Christian, but the interpretation of the religion changed as populations began to migrate to cities, and people began to do other things besides being either a serf or a royal.

They were Christian in the sense that they claimed their powers were derived from God. The ideals of democracy and representation have their roots in societies that existed before Christianity. Religion was adapted as people moved to cities to conduct commerce, etc, because religion is adapted to man and not vice versa.

The ideas were present in the Bible long before any of the monarchies. It's also not as if this evolution of thought was some static one-directional thing either, there were periods of backsliding.

If by ideals you mean omnipotent rule by one individual (the Monarch), sure it's present in the Bible. But Monarchy was also around before Christianity.

The Hebrew culture was not in isolation, and itself underwent an evolution. Perhaps they were not the first nation or culture with laws, but in that pre-european time period, laws were something novel and not ubiquitous.

Civilizations all over the world had laws long before Christianity arose, with the primary and universal law being based on the Golden Rule, from which basically all rules for the Bible and modern civilization flow. It's the basic recognition that if you do bad things to others, they'll do bad things to you and civilization can't exist. By the time Christianity rolled around, these ideals and the concept of the social contract and law were hardly novel.

Some other cultures that developed them died or were isolated (Minoans, Egyptians). What I am saying is there is an unbroken chain of cultural and philosophical events that stretch from pre-hebrew cultures all the way to the present day. The biggest change in the Enlightenment was the introduction of the printing press, so that everyone could essentially read the ideas for themselves. Suddenly a new wave of brainpower was aimed at understanding the Bible's message, and it didn't always jive with what people were told by their overlords.

While the Age of Enlightenment is associated with news ways of spreading ideas, your understanding of how these ideas came about is completely inaccurate. The men that shaped these times gathered their ideas from a variety of sources, including religious texts and earlier democracies and philosophies (ancient Greece and Rome, who, again, made their first attempts at Republics before Christianity). Some of these philosophers like Locke were Christians but some hated Christianity, like Voltaire. This is the reason your argument is ridiculously myopic. It ignores every other influence that every other philosophy and event has had on Western civilization. It's the type of view that a Sunday school teacher might give you because it's small enough to understand and swallow without having to think too critically about it.

Would we have come to where we are today without Christianity, possibly, but impossible to tell, but the fact of the matter is that our American ideals are all rooted mainly in Christianity, and all of the sub-ideas that sprung up were reasoned out with that god in mind.

Again, false.

I realize that I my answer is akin to answering "How do you make a table?, "With a seed", but that doesn't make the answer wrong, it just leaves out a little bit about what goes on in the process from seed to table.

No, your argument is just my friend's argument. Solidarity happened near or around the fall of the Soviet Union so solidarity is the cause of the demise of the Soviet Union. The reasoning is far too simplistic and frankly ignorant of all the others causes and events that led to a culminating event.

 

[MtnMan]

Which version?

The one that begins "Once upon a time........."

or

The one that begins "This ain't no shit.........."

?

 

[88keys]

Ron jeremys autobiography, look it up.

it has nothing to do wih the subject, but you should look it up...

But the Roman empire does have alot to do with the subject.


And alot to do with the doctrine and spread of Christianity throughout the western world.

 

[Gintaras]

80 Questions That Will Make You an Atheist

 

[raildogg]

If people lived religiously, the world would not be what it is.

 

[Smoblikat]

"Somthing about how god gave us all the plants and herbs"

Yet religious loons seem to think if they smoke pot they will spend an eternity in hell.

 

[Pray To Jesus]

Jesus came to rescue you from the law. The law is death, while Jesus is the living God.
Follow his two commandments:
1) Love God above all else.
2) Love your neighbor as you would love yourself.

Remember that Jesus is God is the Holy Spirit.

Faith in Jesus alone is enough to get you into heaven. Sola Fide!

 

[zerocool84]

Jesus came to rescue you from the law. The law is death, while Jesus is the living God.
Follow his two commandments:
1) Love God above all else.
2) Love your neighbor as you would love yourself.

Which has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

 

[Onceler]

I am a Hermetic Christian. I follow almost none of it. It has all been corrupted by politicians and the church to suit their own ends. The Torah was a health code.
Most of the books of the bible were written long after the so called author's lived. True there is some wisdom that has made it through the revisionist crap but as a whole it is crap.
It can't be trusted, question everything but seek and that will lead you to the Truth.
For instance it says that there is nothing holy except God. Why is it called the holy bible then?
And evolution does happen, I am just in total disagreement with the natural selection thing.

 

[railer]

My god a few of you bible thumpers are insane.

If Christianity never existed, then some other BS invisible man in the sky religion would have been made up in its place....and we'd be in exactly the same place that we are today.

Christianity = irrelevant.

 

[SphinxnihpS]

My god a few of you bible thumpers are insane.

If Christianity never existed, then some other BS invisible man in the sky religion would have been made up in its place....and we'd be in exactly the same place that we are today.

Christianity = irrelevant.

Every single historian that ever lived disagrees with you. That statement is absolutely bananas.

 

[Fritzo]

If people lived religiously, the world would not be what it is.

Basically, the purpose of religion was to say "There's always an authority figure watching you, so make sure you live by society's rules."

While the message is sound---follow the rules so everyone benefits---the method no longer works.

 

[MotionMan]

I look at religions like I look at unions: They had their time to come up from the fringe, become dominant and make positive changes. However, the need for them has wained, especially in their traditional roles, and they should reinvent themselves as less of a leader and more of a support.

(I probably pissed off two large groups here with one post - What have you done today?)

MotionMan

 

[Juddog]

I look at religions like I look at unions: They had their time to come up from the fringe, become dominant and make positive changes. However, the need for them has wained, especially in their traditional roles, and they should reinvent themselves as less of a leader and more of a support.

(I probably pissed off two large groups here with one post - What have you done today?)

MotionMan

Pretty much this.

When religion was created by man, it satisfied all of the answers that were unanswerable at the time. It also was a means for a semi-peaceful co-existence of people, assuming one followed the basic tenets. It remains, to this day, one of the most effective means of social programming on earth. For example, if you look at people trying to recover from alcoholism, religion-based centers are far more likely than non-religious-based centers in terms of habit reform.

Religion was the ultimate tool in controlling the ignorant masses so that those in power could stay in power and at the same time have a reasonably stable society. They were also good in terms of running charity groups, and forming social support networks for people. There were tangible benefits to society as a whole, along with the intangible benefits to the individual user that he / she had a place for themselves in the afterlife.

When religion eventually becomes obsolete and everybody but a handful abandon it, then society will need some sort of replacement to fill in those functions - which we don't have yet. Hopefully a system is developed in the next few centuries to overcome it, but I'll be long gone by then.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Ah a religion thread. They never do turn out well. There's so much that explains what was asked which is really available, but instead it's posted in a place where the topic is like a room full of arsonists given a can of gas and matches.