So What Are Those "Christian" Values, Dickwad?

[Minimalist]

I'd rather they value the part where Jesus said to keep their beliefs private, and not try to push it on others like the hypocritical pharisees did. Then we wouldn't have nearly as much of an issue with christianity, if it even managed to get off the ground.

Yeah.... the pharisees.  Now there is another interesting part of the fucking NT.

The most important of the three were the Pharisees because they are the spiritual fathers of modern Judaism. Their main distinguishing characteristic was a belief in an Oral Law that God gave to Moses at Sinai along with the Torah. The Torah, or Written Law, was akin to the U.S. Constitution in the sense that it set down a series of laws that were open to interpretation. The Pharisees believed that God also gave Moses the knowledge of what these laws meant and how they should be applied. This oral tradition was codified and written down roughly three centuries later in what is known as the Talmud.

The Pharisees also maintained that an after-life existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They also believed in a messiah who would herald an era of world peace.

Pharisees were in a sense blue-collar Jews who adhered to the tenets developed after the destruction of the Temple; that is, such things as individual prayer and assembly in synagogues.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/phar...nd-essenes

You would think that the bolded part would make them natural allies of jesus and his bullshit but in the early first century it was the Sadducees who ran the temple and called the shots.  After the revolt there was no temple and the Sadducees disappeared from the scene.  As the discussion above notes it was the pharisees who developed rabbinic judaism in the aftermath.  Not so coincidentally they turn out to be the bad guys in the NT in spite of the fact that they would have been sympathetic to much xtian bullshit.  I regard this as evidence that the gospels were second century compositions written after people had forgotten the basics of first century Judaea.  Just as fucking "luke" forgot that making joseph and mary leave Bethlehem for a non-historical census in "Nazareth" made no sense because they were in different fucking countries at the time.

[vorlon13]

The amazing pliability of Bible verses and the words of Christ especially, seem, to the theists to be of considerable value. I can't help but wonder, by way of example, why this might, on fact, be wrong.

Let's say, just for the moment, the words of Reverend Martin Luther King were as flexible as so much of the Bible is today. We'd have folks asserting King supported segregation, opposed integration, and repudiated non-violence in the pursuit of his cause.

Is that the Reverend Martin Luther King we know of ?

Why is the Bible (and Jesus) perceived so often as saying/attesting/witnessing the opposite of what so many plainly worded Bible verses state ??