RE: the nature of sin
April 30, 2020 at 7:28 am
(This post was last modified: April 30, 2020 at 7:28 am by Fake Messiah.)
(April 29, 2020 at 5:47 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Neither do I. Neither do a surprisingly large number of Christians. "Sky tyrant" is not an accurate description of the God of Dante, Aquinas, Augustine, Boehme, Blake, etc.
Actually God is a tyrant in relation to heaven because you can't get to heaven if you commit a thought crime - if you think differently you get brutally tortured. And it doesn't help your case to mention Aquinas and Augustine because they were also advocating brutally extreme punishments for people who think differently.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
