Unconventional Religion

[Consilius]

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

Oh, now there's a qualifier.

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

Good to know, considering I never said that.

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.

I really can't see why you are still doing this. I don't believe that, and I'm not preaching it. But you want me to look like I do.
And it isn't holding up. Why is it that the priests don't make us give everything away, and kings are canonized? Why don't we shun people who wear clean clothes to church?

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

No matter how sassy you are, it doesn't change anything. Your comments aren't any different from those of a medieval Christian on a polytheist.

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.

Nothing is wrong with interpretation. Sometimes its done rightly, and other times its done wrongly, and out of context with everything else. Hitler ran afoul of Christianity by taking the Crucifixion out of context.
Jesus Christ led a compaign against worship that comprised only of outward signs. Like burning down your condo and shouting, "Jesus."

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.

So metaphors aren't allowed in historical narratives.

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.

So you can ignore them? Fine. Unless you can prove what I said wrong, you have no reason to dismiss my words unless you don't want them to be true.
Just because the poor are favored doesn't mean God doesn't like the rich.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit."
The qualifier you introduced for being 'good' comes into play here. Poor people have the tendency to put morals over money because they don't have the latter. They have a clearer view of the world and realize that morals are more important than money because they don't have luxury to distract them. Their revelation is not exclusive to them: we can all share it; we just have the added task of letting go, mentally and, for some, physically, of what we have.
That's what all suffering is: a way of weaning us from the material so we can realize the immaterial.

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.

The extra compensation murderers have to pay is punishment for what they did.

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.

Fine. Think of a good deed. Now ask yourself why you wouldn't perform it for just any reason.

Hey, you are the one giving examples of him not practicing what he preached.

You can't have too much of a good thing.

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 starving communities Christian charities are feeding? Yeah, we build schools for them so we can burn them down later.
This should seem like an obvious question-what happened to all the poor atheists?

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.

The reasoning is simple - once you give up violent immoral heathenism, - such as polytheism - (you sound like a preacher here) you can OPEN YOURSELF UP to GOD and JESUS and the opportunities to make your own personal relationship with Jesus Christ a lot better.
The response to something as condescending and insulting as this would be: "I know how to be a good person, dumbass. I'm not buying what you're selling."

In the same way, I know how reason and logic work. I am not closed up in a shell that I desperately need you to crack. You don't need your soul to be saved, and I don't need you talking to me like a caveman. And yet you insist on condemning my beliefs, something you can't do without first misrepresenting them, like a bearded Presbyterian with a pitchfork and a Bible going after a Native American.

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

That's no mistake. You are being the door-to-door evangelist no one likes. The person who comes to your mind when I say the word, "Christian."

I told you already - their bible tells them to.

The Bible told us to give our money to the poor. Then it told us God will strike you down if you're caught with legal tender. Either Christianity is an ongoing game of hot potato, or you need to choose which sermon to stop preaching.

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".

The gap between the poor and the rich shouldn't exist, period. The king of Babylon didn't have indoor plumbing. Kids in Africa do. But they are underprivileged, and we are not. And we haven't stopped helping them. And the only way to help them is giving money to charity and not getting it back.

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.

The poor of Babylon were unemployed. People today are unemployed. Having a toilet in Babylon would be prestigious. Having a toilet today isn't impressive.

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.

A poor person knows that he needs help to accomplish his goals. When a stock investor or a prime minister doesn't step up to help, he remains poor.

Jesus tried his hand a anthropology and made a complete pig-shit of it.

I have no idea what you're talking about.