You need to understand the historical context "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was written in to understand it.
wow!! that is the almost the same policy that Alexander the Great used when he pulled up to a town. he peacefully offer to the city or town if they would just surrender everything would stay the same, everyone could keep their positions and jobs as they were but in the end they would have to be under his rule. the leaders of those towns could either play ball or fight, and if they fought, we all know what happened to them. Alexander never lost a battle. Alexander overall was actually a little less harsh than these oprders from God, and he was a blood thirsty murdering savage haa haa!! He was a "Son of God" too, the son of Zeus to be exact. There were over 30 sons of god before Jesus, it was a term thrown around quite often.
A lot of people don't accept Jesus H. Christ as their Lord and Savior. The number of people who believe in any fairy tales are getting smaller by the year. As technology gets better and more information becomes available, the fewer people believe in mythology.
I think that we should all be done with any further conversation with Truth until he acknowledges the pedophile priests.
What you posted here, was what some random dude wrote as a comment to a slanted article, yet you post it as if it is news. Your posts get more and more laughable. What is even more hilarious is that you are basing your claim of, "4 allegations in the last 60 years were actually legit", on this random person. Sorry but what KenW, random internet poster, said in response to an obviously biased article means absolutely nothing. But wait it gets better, your claim that "4 allegations in the last 60 years were actually legit.", from some random guy on the internet, WAS JUST FOR KenW's DIOCESE. There are over 194 diocese in the U.S. which if that 4 cases per was accurate would amount to almost 800. Much higher numbers have been reported by reputable sources but we'll let that go for now. But you know what, I don't really trust what KenW had to say because he goes and slips up towards the end of his rant and reveals that he is a priest. That right there makes me throw everything he said right out the window. Basically everything you posted is garbage.
Sometimes I get stuck on a topic I shouldn't and spend way too much time at it. I think I am done for a while, of course I said that before also.
fuck, i live on the beach in southern cal, i only post in the rangers thread here for the most part, and when the season is over i bail until fall when the jets start and the rangers get back in october. ive been watching this thread and checking in regularly, its highly entertaining. i can't stay away.
Truth, translate this reference to car pooling: Philippians 2:2 Make full my joy, that ye be of the same mind, having the same love, being of one accord...
As an academic I can tell you that this applies to most science as well. The truth is that religion is a way to explain the world around us, give it meaning, provide an ethical guideline, and so on. Starting in the enlightenment the philosophies led a rather radical attack against religion and this attitude has stuck with us today. As such, people who define themselves as "progressive" look at religion as inherently backwards. And even though many of these critiques were warranted, they whitewashed a massive amount of good done by religion. Here is my personal favorite example: Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire the Roman Catholic Church became the dominant social and political organization of Western Europe. One of the top priorities of the church at this time (roughly the 500s on) was the ending of slavery. In this they were largely successful! However, it was secular authorities in the form of Frankish nobility and others in the west that subverted the abolition of slavery by then substituting serfdom in place of slavery. Now you can critique the church for backing down on slabery a thousand years later, but that doesn't erase what was accomplished in the early Middle Ages. Moreover, it sets the tone for the future and creates a western civilization where slavery is open to question (this is not true is other societies). This is ENTIRELY because of Judaeo-Christian teaching. After all, look at who the abolitionists were in the mid-nineteenth century and earlier and they were, by and large, people of faith, not the secularists. Admittedly you can counter by arguing that there were those who used faith to justify slavery as well. Here is the problem with that argument: essentially every human group has advocated slavery in the past, but very few advocated its abolition. Jews were arguably the first to argue that slavesmust be given rights. Christians went further, albeit much later. Save for a Denis Diderot, few of the philosophes were concerned with slaves. So I contend that religion has done much more good than harm in the world by giving people guidance in their actions (where you see control I see guidance). Are there abuses? Absolutely. And any human system will be abused because that is what religion ultimately is: a human system based on our understanding of what we believe our chosen G-d has asked of us.
Here's the problem with the telephone analogy: you and I haven't been raised in an oral society. Your society has written records and doesn't require you to memorize tracts of information verbatim lest that information become lost in time. In oral societies studies have found that this skill can be remarkably advanced (although once it is lost it take many years to recover). The concept, for those of your who are aware of it is similar to the book Fahrenheit 451. This doesn't mean that ancient oral history should be taken uncritically, but the era of assuming that oral records are fallacious is over. So long as the oral tradition has remained intact, or remained intact until such a time as the oral history could be recorded with paper and pen, then it is quite often that the stories have changed very little. Amazingly, sometimes they haven't changed at all because they are memorized verbatim! Here is my favorite anecdote about this phenomenon: for years the Australian aborigines had stories of extinct megafauna (sorry, I don't recall which) where they described what they looked like and how they acted. It was assumed this was fiction until recently when skeletons of said megafauna were unearthed. Lo and behold the animal seems to have had an appearance much like what the Aborigenes described. Now here is the real kicker... apparently this animal went extinct something like 20-30,000 years ago. That means that the oral tradition passed down this information, intact, for upwards of 30k years! And we can't relay a message in a game of telephone...... kind of sad, eh?
I don't get why so many people are hostile to religion. Attack the abuses, I have zero problem with that, But when invalidate and entire "system" based upon its abused parts you tread a dangerous line. After all, how many people have wanted to end welfare because some people abuse that system? How about voting? Historically it is terribly easy to abuse voting systems and get unfair outcomes. This gives the veneer of public support to politicians who are crooked, right? So why don't we do away with voting? You see the problem with this tactic? No doubt some will reply by saying these are false analogies but I disagree. Just as religion has been denigrated today, and voting been elevated to an unassailable right, it was once thought that voting was just as laughable an idea as the so-called "mythologies" of religious belief systems. Something like voting rights are based on a BELIEF that such a thing as a commonwealth (Thomas Hobbes) exists, or some other political construct, and this construct needs to measure the will of the people. As it is I too believe in this system, but make no mistake that this is a belief system. So why the scorn for religious systems of belief? My guess is that, as I mentioned in an earlier post, this is because of the bequest of the enlightenment: that religion is backward, corrupt as well as corrupting, damaging to society, and based on a series of "myths." While some of these critiques have merit, it is a shame that more people don't search more deeply for themselves. It took me many years to reach a point where I felt even moderately well enough informed to feel I had a grasp of the real histories at play here. Once I did that I had a much more sympathetic eye toward the concept of religion--something I was not really raised with.
I don't really think people are that hostile to religion as a general rule. People are just hostile towards it in this particular thread because Truth, the person who started this thread, is a jackass. After that its been a combination of pointing out his stupidity/hypocrisy and trolling a little in their own right. Most people in society can recognize there is a difference between a religious system and the assholes that use it for the wrong reasons
