(January 31, 2014 at 8:41 pm)BrokenQuill92 Wrote: Matthew 5:29The JWs see it as an allegory, where the "eye" or "hand" (Mat. 5:30) refer to a particular desire or activity that would result in condemnation by god. Much of the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus telling the crowd that they must not see righteousness as the rote act of following rules to the letter, but they must understand the intent of the law. Hence the stuff he says in verses 21, 22, 28, 33-47 and probably some others. The idea was to stop trying to achieve spiritual perfection via a system of brownie points, but to see spiritual perfection as a way of thinking before you acted.
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out,
and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for
thee that one of thy members should perish, and
not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
If you think about it, Jesus was codifying thoughtcrime beyond the stuff about "not coveting" from the old law. Now god could accuse you of murder if you were angry enough to insult a person. Now god could accuse you of adultery if you had a lustful thought. Now god could accuse you of false witness if you swore an oath, whether you were true to the oath or not. Just imagine the mental and emotional pressure that this would put people through!
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
