(April 2, 2017 at 10:03 am)Chad32 Wrote:(April 2, 2017 at 9:12 am)Brian37 Wrote: Both conservative and liberal Christians are wrong, there is no deity or man with super powers, but damn people, if you are going to cherry pick the bible, "If you cant afford health care, die quickly" would not be the NT Jesus I would want to buy into if I had a belief. The GOP wants to drag us back to the dark ages. At least liberals have some empathy.
Yeah, you have to cherry pick if you're going to keep your sanity, so why not just cherry pick the nice parts? Granted Jesus wasn't always nice and enlightened, but he said some good things now and then.
I cannot stress this enough, but keep in mind this is not for skeptics but any theist of any religion who may read this. You can find motifs of compassion and giving and kindness in ALL religions worldwide. Every religion has members who point to those motifs to say "see see see" as evidence they are on the right track. Most humans get sold those ideas when they are too young to formulate critical thinking skills.
Humans fail to consider that our ability to be compassionate is in our genes, not in mythology, not in god claims not in religion itself. There are most certainly decent human beings who are kind and non violent in every religion in every nation, but their individual empathy is not collectively handed down to our species by the divine world. It is merely in our evolution.
I love the part of our species evolution that produces compassion and empathy, but I simply do not assign it to magic, I don't assign our ability to be cruel to magic either. Humans do good and we do bad and none of that requires superstition to explain.
