[Falcon X]

If you don't believe in God fine, but don't go around trying to make all of us NOT believe in God with this ****.

I mean that's as bad as Mormon's converting people.  Your faith is YOURS.  If someone wants to explore it, they'll ask.

SO in other words... Atheists STFU about YOUR faith as I don't go around making posts like this trying to convert you to Catholicism.

[Sesquipedalian]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
Why does everyone accept the bible as the unfalable, 100% truth?
I'm not an aiethist (sp?), but I take the bible with a grain of salt. After all, after about 400,000 years, there are bound to be mistakes, caused by people writing it down in different ways. Hell, someone could've boo-booed on the translation, and changed the original text a lot. It's not as if God himself wrote it.

Well, as a matter of fact, there is a whole field of scholastic work called textual criticism that deals with exactly this sort of stuff.  Basically, textual critics compare and analyse the many different manuscripts in order to determine what the original reading was.  And with some five and a half thousand different manuscripts for the New Testament and I forget how many for the Old Testament, there is such a vast pool of resources (as compared to, say, the two or three manuscripts that we have for Plato's Republic) to work with that these guys can be pretty darn sure that they know what the original said.

The texts actually are for the most part very uniform.  You have to rememebr that the scribes who copied the texts dedicated their whole lives to this task, with a system of double-checks and cross-checks by other scribes to ensure that errors were not made. Of course, some still managed to slip through in the various manuscripts, but they are usually quite minor, and when they are not they are usually so obvious that it is patently clear what the original was.  A typical error is that found in 1 Peter 2:25, where some texts would read when translated "For you were wandering like sheep" and others "For you were like wandering sheep."  The difference in Greek is between this one word ending in -a or ending in -oi.  The critics are pretty sure that -oi is right, but even still, look at the translations of the alternatives and you'll see that it doesn't make much difference anyway!

So in all, thanks to these textual critics we can be quite sure that the final "critical text" they have put together by comparing all the many ancient texts actually is 99.95% what the original authors actually wrote.

[Galemp]

God created Man in his own image. To create Woman he dressed in drag and again created beings in his own image.

[Bobboau]

the problem is that many of the older scripts were not writen down for quite a long time, and many of them were changed during the babalonian captivity,
these older scripts are the ones that tipicaly have things like "stone the ***** who made a shirt out of cotten and wool!"
so...

[Unknown Target]

*cough, politically correct bible, cough, cough*

Yes, 'tis true, somebody put out a Politically Correct Bible, with women, blacks, etc.

[an0n]

To put it simply:

The Bible is a great book. It tells a nice story and hammers some morales into the reader's head in the process. Kinda like an Easops Fable but with more oomph.

The bible is a ****ing ****ty book. Corrupted over the years to such an extent that it is completely different from the original. With each new copy, everything is reinterpreted to suit the beliefs of a particular religion, then the bible is re-written to "help peopl understand it better" and to make sure it keeps people believing what the priests and popes and wizards want them to believe.


Presuming the Bible is 'real':
God has layed down the law of man and heaven. And as such, we cannot simply ignore the parts we do not wish to still be true. If the Bible says homosexuality is wrong, then it is wrong. regardless of how politically incorrect or inconvenient that may be. Until the Earth stands still and a divine light from the heavens tells us otherwise the Bible is the truth. No matter how socially acceptable it is to be gay, no matter the length of time since the bible was written, we cannot dismiss unpopular facts simply on the basis that society now so readily accepts sin...........


I am right. The rest of you are wrong. STFU.

[Unknown Target]

touchy...

Anyhow, God is what you believe he (she, for all you "empowered women"). I know that's been said a billion times, so much so that everyone thinks it's bull****, but it's really true, at least I think so.
If you believe in some obscure religion with about 20 Gods, he will appear to you as 20 different Gods...
If you are Christian, you might meet Jesus when you go to Heaven (I really doubt there is a Hell, if he loves us all as his children, and has planned everything, why would there be a hell?).
If you're a Jew, hell, you'll see the same thing as a Christian, just without Jesus.

[Shrike]

Ugh....