Easy comebacks ?

[ignoramus]

Hey OP, when anyone mentions the word God here in Australia, we generally just say: You still believe in invisible friends, how old are you?

[Cod]

Ask about.

James 2:24
Rom 3:28
Luke 10:26-28
Matt 19:17
Gal 2:16

Then lick your finger and straighten your eyebrows.

[GGG]

Easiest - Bible says if you know that someone is gay (male gay ofcourse, primitive people who wrote the bible didnt knew about lesbians) - kill him. Why religious people don't kill gays?

Because, according to Christians, they're not under the Old Covenant anymore.

And by the way, maybe be more specific with your wording instead of saying religious, since not all religious people follow the Bible.

Exactly where it says that christians don't believe in old testament now (or in some parts of it) ? it's idiotic. So any more examples? - they don't believe in world created in 6 days, don't believe that Moses existed? (thats all in old testament too). They just wanna pick less gruesome parts now, right? Where god says that "gays is good now" in  any of religious christian texts after old testament?

[Belacqua]

Exactly where it says that christians don't believe in old testament now (or in some parts of it) ? 

Most Christians believe in the Old Testament, but not all of them in the same way, and not as a set of laws that are binding on them. 

they don't believe in world created in 6 days, don't believe that Moses existed? 

It would be interesting to discover what percentage of modern Christians believe in a literal 6-day creation. Certainly not all of them. Are you thinking that all Christians are sola scriptura literalists? That would be an oversimplification. Augustine, for example, wrote a whole book on Genesis, advocating a more careful and allegorical reading than modern creationists.

Moses may have been a historical figure. Some Christians believe so, and some don't. Some see him as the representative of a type, and don't care whether a real person of that name lived. 

They just wanna pick less gruesome parts now, right? 

For a very long time Christians have interpreted the Old Testament in different ways. It has been customary, for example, to read each statement in a four-level hermeneutic. So while the literal meaning is the most obvious one, it may be that the message they want to take away is a moral, allegorical, or anagogic interpretation. 

So Christians who limit themselves to the literal meaning will have to accept the gruesome parts, but since non-literal interpretations have been common from very early on, it's common for less simple-minded Christians to reject violent meanings. Warfare may be seen as internal, spiritual struggle, for example, just as jihad in Islam may be a moral struggle within oneself. Or Plato's Republic may not refer to a real city government, but to a well-ordered mental state in an individual. 

It's also worth mentioning that for many Christian readers, the level of interpretation they call "literal" is not necessarily a simple reading of the obvious sense. When Augustine talks about a literal reading, he means he wants to interpret the sentence according to the intention of the original author. This means, paradoxically, that if the original author meant a statement to be metaphorical, the literal meaning would be metaphorical.

It's not as simple as you may be imagining.

Where god says that "gays is good now" in  any of religious christian texts after old testament?

I think I wrote before that "gay" is not a concept that people in biblical times could use. They condemned acts, not orientations. It's true that people of that time looked down on sodomy. But it's also true that many many Christians in our own time are accepting of different sexual preferences. It would be a mistake to assume that all Christians are the same as the worst ones.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Most Christians believe in the Old Testament, but not all of them in the same way, and not as a set of laws that are binding on them. 

Then they're hardly proper Christians, are they?

Boru

[Belacqua]

Most Christians believe in the Old Testament, but not all of them in the same way, and not as a set of laws that are binding on them. 

Then they're hardly proper Christians, are they?

Boru

It's not really my call to say who's "proper" or not. 

The standard Christian view is that the law of Moses was "fulfilled" by being converted into a single great commandment and written in the hearts of the believers. The detailed 613 mitzvahs of the Old Testament are not demanded of Christians.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Then they're hardly proper Christians, are they?

Boru

It's not really my call to say who's "proper" or not. 

The standard Christian view is that the law of Moses was "fulfilled" by being converted into a single great commandment and written in the hearts of the believers. The detailed 613 mitzvahs of the Old Testament are not demanded of Christians.

Matthew 5:18.

And yet, modern Christians selectively pick and chose which mitzvahs they keep and which they discard - they still 'remember the Sabbath and keep it holy', but they're not terribly keen on burnt offerings. 

Boru

[Belacqua]

Matthew 5:18.

And yet, modern Christians selectively pick and chose which mitzvahs they keep and which they discard - they still 'remember the Sabbath and keep it holy', but they're not terribly keen on burnt offerings. 

Boru

Right. And exactly what Jesus meant by "fulfill" the law is something that's interesting to discuss. There is much disagreement among Christians. Simple accusations which treat all Christians as sola scriptura literalists only shut down that conversation. 

One view is that the requirement for detailed laws is a sort of human childhood. In this view, people graduated into a more demanding relation to the law, by being required to follow its spirit rather than its letter. That's what the whole "cast the first stone" thing is about. 

There are also Christians in a minority antinomian tradition who say that the God of the Old Testament is Satan, and it was the giving of the law, not the breaking of it, which caused the Fall. 

So we can say they "cherry pick," or we can say that a major part of Christian tradition is working out precisely what relation to the law we should have. It varies widely according to group and era.

[GrandizerII]

It's not really my call to say who's "proper" or not. 

The standard Christian view is that the law of Moses was "fulfilled" by being converted into a single great commandment and written in the hearts of the believers. The detailed 613 mitzvahs of the Old Testament are not demanded of Christians.

Matthew 5:18.

And yet, modern Christians selectively pick and chose which mitzvahs they keep and which they discard - they still 'remember the Sabbath and keep it holy', but they're not terribly keen on burnt offerings. 

Boru

Only select groups of Christians try to keep the Sabbath nowadays actually. Christians generally celebrate the Lord's Day, namely Sunday.

But that aside, the New Testament is generally about the spirit of the law rather than the letter. Though it's true that nevertheless select Christians today still hold to a legalistic interpretation of the Scriptures, such as seventh-day Adventists.

[mordant]

Most Christians believe in the Old Testament, but not all of them in the same way, and not as a set of laws that are binding on them. 

Then they're hardly proper Christians, are they?

Boru

Not in the view of fundamentalists. As a former fundie, I still tend to have a bit of trouble seeing liberal Christians as "real" Christians. But they are not a monolith. And evangelicals, much less fundies, are a minority. A significant minority with an outsize influence in some places, but a minority just the same.

My estimate is that at least two-thirds of self-styled, "cultural" Christians do not take their religion literally or hold all that fast to it, have not read much of the Bible or studied it in any significant way. They allow it to be a general influence, but mostly live according to common sense like the rest of us. Which is to say, a mixture of quasi-objective, semi-intellectual, sloppy, inconsistent and emotionally tainted thinking. But nevertheless they function well enough to hold down a job and pay taxes and largely keep out of trouble with their fellow man.

We fundamentalists used to decry that two-thirds as "Easter and Christmas Christians" or "cafeteria Christians" or "baptize them, marry them and bury them" Christians. I even heard them referred to dismissively as "our weaker brothers in Christ". The only use we had for them (especially the Catholics!) was when we needed their numbers to bolster our argument that the capital-C Church was triumphant in the world (even then apparently what "triumphant" looks like, is only a third of the world on-board after 2,000 years of promoting the value proposition).

Christianity is a pretty big tent, encompassing countless hermeneutical systems that produces everything from Catholicism to Calvinism to Arminianism to Pentecostalism / holiness and each of those have a range of conflicting dogma (e.g., does one baptize infants, or adults only? By sprinkling or partial or total immersion?).

It is absolutely true that most Christians regard some aspect of the scripture as "not for today". The Old Testament is generally regarded as superseded by the New Testament, and as a source of general moral instruction but that today we are free from the letter of the Law. It is true that some cherry pick differently (e.g. whether homosexuality is sinful or not). Some fundamentalists say that one should expect miraculous signs and wonders from god, some say that is "not for today". Etc.