(September 22, 2014 at 2:36 pm)C4RM5 Wrote: Oh I have just started to do that. I have made it to numbers.
If the bible (or the kerrang) was nothing more than characters saying "hey, everyone, just calm down and be copacetic to each other, m'kay?" then the thing would be the size of a cigarette paper (or The Wit And Wisdom Of Margaret Thatcher) and we'd all be xtians or similar.
The fact, uncomfortable to some, is that the damn thing has been and still is being used to justify the most terrible of atrocities. From slavery through to genocide, the book makes a perfect shield for the psychopath. Yes, there are good things in it, but they aren't good by virtue of being in it. They are good because they coincide with our own common morality. There are true things in it; but they aren't true because they're in it or because some certain character allegedly said them. They are true because they happen to be true.
None of that makes the Abrahamic mythologies wrong or right, all else being equal. Where they fall down, spectacularly, is when they are held to be pronouncements of divine authority that must never be questioned. You only have to stroll through these very boards to see prime examples of people who cannot see reality because their special book is in the way.
(September 22, 2014 at 2:42 pm)C4RM5 Wrote: I do care whether it is true or not true, it is just the only way I can argue for it is through the Bible.
Then your arguments are dead in the water. Your god is like a genie trapped in the pages of the bible. Close the book and your god vanishes in a puff of sub-mediocre literature.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'