Unconventional Religion

[genkaus]

If it took suffering to be a saint, we would all be canonized.

Obviously it has to be suffering in the name of your religion.

It's misery if you can't find joy in anything but your bank account.

For a rational person, the size of the bank account is a cause for joy.

So the nuns are good people while the rest of us are damned. You'd think that a priest might have given us sinners a heads-up of some sort. They do any other time.

They do. They keep telling you that giving up stuff makes you better. The more you give up, the better person you are. You give up everything - like the nuns - and you are the best.

For reasons known to you alone, if there are any.

You'd know it too - if you knew how logic works.

Because that's the only way you can maintain your Christian caricature?

Its not a caricature if its twisted and grotesque at its core.

You know that my interpretation, as well as pretty much any interpretation from any Christian anywhere in regards to THEIR OWN HOLY BOOK sets the record straight. It makes Christians look less than crazy. You can't have that. No aspect of Christianity can appear slightly OK because if it does, we fit in. Atheism shares its glow with another belief system. But atheists alone are good, and no one else is. The bigotry that started the Crusades.

That's very amusing - coming from you. You started this thread with the intention of showing that Christian morality - in its original and pure form - was something good and it was the constant reinterpretation that made it twisted and grotesque. And here your argument is that it needs to be interpreted in a different way to make it less crazy. The irony here is simply delicious.

You are literally interpreting a simile, a device ancient literature is riddled with. If you wouldn't do it while reading the Aeneid, why do it with a Bible?

That's because nobody is telling me that the Aeneid is anything but a piece of fiction. If you present the bible in the same light and I'll consider all the 'interpretations' you care to provide.

All bums go to heaven. You know you can't prove that. A Bible verse that says you need to be poor to be good, in the Bible, please. Not a supposed condemnation of the rich.
That a complete lack of ownership of goods is inherently good, in any way.

According to your bible:

Luke 6:20-21. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours in the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.

James 2:5. Did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?

Let the rationalizations begin.

I did not say that murder had a fixed gravity as an offense. The loss of a life is a fixed loss. However much of the loss needs to be paid back depends on how it was lost.
And the murderer didn't kill me by accident. I don't know where this claim even came from.

That's where you are wrong - once again. If loss of life was a fixed loss then the re-compensation would be fixed as well. The factor of how it was lost would be irrelevant. The fact that the recompensation is not fixed indicates absence of any fixed value for life.

Isn't giving away ice cream good already? Don't you want to be a good person? But are you a bad person whenever you don't show up at a friend's house with an ice cream cone?

That's your morality - not mine. I don't think of giving anybody an icecream as good - so even if I want to be good, I'm not going to go around handing out the ice-cream.

Christ's life was a sermon. Which is why he did not list the theological implications of his death while hanging from a cross.
Christ did practice what he preached. He didn't practice what YOU preached. The morals you are criticizing are the ones you invented, not mine.
You are winning a fight against a dummy that you truly believe is your challenger, who is watching you and telling you why the dummy can't beat you or him.

Hey, you are the one giving examples of him not practicing what he preached. You keep telling me that Jesus preached self-sacrifice as being universally good and then you are giving examples of times when he didn't practice it - so either you are lying about the first or about the second. If its about the first then you should accept that self-sacrifice is not universally good - which means that in many cases, it is bad. So, which one is it?

What an extraordinary assertion. It's not a lack of opportunities or financial resources, nope, it's THE CHRISTIANS! The little boy without a lunch threw his quarters into a garbage dump after a Sunday Mass. The solution to the world's problems is atheism. How coincidentally favorable to your views!
Now you just sound Christian, nearly WBC Christian. "The gays are responsible for pedophilia! 9/11 happened because of abortion! Gay marriage is why soldiers are dying! Atheism caused the Holocaust!"

I'm sorry - I was being too narrow. Its not just the Christians - its all the corrupt religious philosophies. Christianity just happens to be one of them. The reasoning is simple - once you give up the crazy irrational religious morality - such as Christian morality - you open yourself up to reason and logic and the opportunities to make your own lot better become much more apparent and available.

But what's really amusing here is that you are trying to insult me by saying that I sound like a Christian.

Um, can you explain why Christians donate money to the poor?

I told you already - their bible tells them to.

It's OK, guys, the poor aren't THAT bad. They all have homes and jobs, and all they get are common colds.
And guess what? The RICH are also doing a whole lot better, making the relative improvement of poor lifestyles zero, to be optimistic.

Except, we are not talking about their improvement relative to the rich, we are talking about their actual improvement. Which is huge. When you measure the height of a building, you don't say "relative to the middle, there is as much above the middle as there is below - the same as in a shorter building - so there is no actual height difference".

This is evidence for how much humanity has grown - the rich are doing much better compared to the past, the poor are doing much better compared to the passed - therefore, humanity as a whole is doing much better compared to the past.

Of course. The poor don't REALLY know how poor they are, or how bad they have it, they need prime ministers and stock investors to punch their calculators in ties on leather armchairs in air-conditioned rooms to tell them.

Oh they know how poor they are - what they don't know is how to solve the poverty problem. If they did, they wouldn't be poor. So yeah, they need prime-ministers and stock investors for that.

I don't think Jesus came to preach Creation Theory.

No, that was the goat-herders. Jesus tried his hand a anthropology and made a complete pig-shit of it.