To the guy in Southwest Mo: The first thing you need to do is realize that Christianity in the Main was instituted to control people. It is supposed to be a religion of Love and Peace yet has spent the past 2000 years spreading hate and war.
Find God for yourself. The divine spark will show you how if you stop trying to follow convention. Start with Religions that don't tell you it's wrong to love more than one person, a person of the same sex, etc.
Good Luck!
I am curious as to what you mean by this. Do you mean you admire people who have faith in a humanist religion?I admire people of faith: those who live by the highest tenants of religious and humanist philosophy and behavior, however they choose to express it or celebrate it.
I am curious as to what you mean by this. Do you mean you admire people who have faith in a humanist religion?
The reason I ask this is because I heard someone recently talk about the virtue of belief and faith. However, Fred Phelps (of the God Hates Fags fame) has a lot of belief and faith, yet most people would not consider him a good person. So I started to wonder about why people see value in belief or faith itself.
In most cases, I would agree. However, a deist could easily fall into that category."Humanist religion" is an oxymoron.
I agree. However, when I look at Fred Phelps, I can see that he really believes in the angry deity of the Old Testament who does kill people for petty things like working on Saturday or touching the ark. So the Westboro Baptist Church seems to follow the logic of their belief very well.IMO, we don't need a god or godman to tell us to follow this rule. It's something any sane person in any culture can see the sense of.
I find the whole religious aspect of WW II to show some of the worst stuff that religion has to offer. You have the Nazis quoting the New Testament to show that the Jews had a blood debt for killing Jesus and thus justified the horrible things done to the Jews. And that stuff was added to the Bible so that the Christians could distance themselves from the Jews. They made the Jews the villains so Pilate could be seen as sympathetic. This makes Jesus less of an insurgent and legitimizes the religion better with the Roman government.Athena said:In the concentration camps the ones who survived were not the biggest strongest ones, nor yet the ones who followed every rule punctiliously, but rather those who had faith in something greater than themselves or something good still existing. See Frankl's Mans Search for Meaning.
Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah.
Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
I am actually reading the Bible from cover to cover also (I am reading for fun, not because I believe any of it).Also, I don't think poly and christianity are mutually exclusive. I recently decided to read the Bible cover to cover and even though I am only 1/2 way through Genesis there are at least two references to poly relationships in the bible.