New Pope Benedict XVI

Bottom line, religion is stupid and has caused nothing but problems.

i havent ever been pointed to any bible verse that forbids smoking, though i dont know, and as such cant say yes or no on it... yes, the goal of the church is to convert as many as possible to that particular belief, but the part you forget is that it is also a behavioral and belief conversion...

bottom line, if your religion says something is true/fact/right and you believe otherwise, you are in the wrong religion... find one that suits your beliefs and behaviors, alter your beliefs and behaviors, or discard the concept of religion... all i know is that there are something like 1.1 BILLION people claiming to be catholic, so the catholic church must be doing something right...

crippler, you believe that religion is stupid and has done nothing but cause problems, but history will show otherwise... einstein proclaimed that science and religion should never be undertaken completely seperately... who is responsible for feeding the huddled masses of the world more than any other group?? who does the best job of taking care of the homeless?? give yourself a point for each time you said "religion" or some similar word... bottom line, it does great good, despite your opinion to the contrary...

Crusades, Islamic Fundamentalism, Religious right in the U.S., Holocaust. Oh ya and the forced conversions by the christians, bringing "civilization" to the savages like the Natives or Africans

Membership isn't an indicator for something being right, it simply reflects that Catholic parents condition their children into having the same faith, you wouldn't expect otherwise. Membership of religion when about right and wrong only applies to the few. Monotheistic faiths have for all of their existence forced conversion onto others, this was how Christianity could claim to have a European subscription of nearly everyone. The same applies to Islam in Africa and Asia. If it was about right and wrong then both faiths would still be counting in their thousands and everybody else would believe whatever they want to believe.

Religion is only responsible for charity in history because no alternative group could be offered. I went to a union talk recently and the visiting speaker, a vicar, said that christianity was responsible for the advent of science, learning, charity you name it. The fact that this was undertaken in an atmosphere where there was no alternative to christianity allowed was omitted. Galileo, Copernicus, Bruno were all threatened or killed by the same christianity. The fashion of enslaving millions of black men and women was championed by christianity, then prompted by economic imperatives, had a crisis of consciense and sought to bring it to an end. I'm sure, no i am certain, if atheists and freethinkers were allowed they would have been responsible for this, but alas being such was a capital crime.

cableguy said:

You simply cannot apply your morals and ethics to the catholic church, or any other religion, because where yours may be malleable and based on personal history, the catholic church has the bible and whatever other texts from which it draws its set of morals and ethics... as these do NOT change over time, there is no reason to change doctrine accordingly...

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This is what i don't like about most religions. Not everything in a religious text is meaningful for all ages. Every religious book contains morals and ethics of the time it was written. The writers were human beings and thus subject to the morals and customs of the time they lived in. Although they may have been inspired by a divine being, the interpretation of that by humans is fallable.

Thankfully the Christian religions have had a renaissance (even the Roman Catholic church to some extent), whereas the Islam still has the same doctrine and wants to apply customs and ethics from ages ago to a modern world.

cableguy said:

i havent ever been pointed to any bible verse that forbids smoking, though i dont know, and as such cant say yes or no on it...

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In "Genesis 1:12" I believe that it sort of condones it. But you can make scripture translate into anything that you want if you spin it right, and use the most self-serving "interpretive" version or translation. I lost faith in the Bible once I realized than the central "teacher" had not written any of the books, and that most of it was written and re-written 500+ years after the fact. If you have ever tried to verbal pass information from person to person around a simple classroom you can see the difficulty in preserving any oral form of history over any period of time. The bible was always about using fear to control the ignorant masses. Now it is about using fear and intimidation to control the masses of followers, and encourage the conversion of non-followers. It is like Chrisitans are working on fucking commission or something (Muslims too, to a certain extent). Anyway, that is another rant for another thread.

Is it Judeo-Christian teaching that your body doesn't belong to you but to Dog? If so smoking could be construed as killing oneself against the wishes of Dog.

crippler, thank you for completely overlooking and denying everything that doesnt fit into your tidy and small box that is your view on religion... fact is, it has done tremendous good... there is bad to go along with it, but you simply cannot completely deny all the good that has come from it... well, i guess YOU can...

this thread is about done, unless it can be lifted out of the sandbox again... the direction this has taken is sad, considering the intellectual debates that we have had on other topics... i shall hope for at least some semblence of serious to be interjected, and soon...

cripplersucka said:

Crusades, Islamic Fundamentalism, Religious right in the U.S., Holocaust. Oh ya and the forced conversions by the christians, bringing "civilization" to the savages like the Natives or Africans

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And now there's the United States of America too!?:mallet: Shit Kill Whitey!! Who's with me?

cableguy said:

i havent ever been pointed to any bible verse that forbids smoking, though i dont know, and as such cant say yes or no on it... yes, the goal of the church is to convert as many as possible to that particular belief, but the part you forget is that it is also a behavioral and belief conversion...

bottom line, if your religion says something is true/fact/right and you believe otherwise, you are in the wrong religion... find one that suits your beliefs and behaviors, alter your beliefs and behaviors, or discard the concept of religion... all i know is that there are something like 1.1 BILLION people claiming to be catholic, so the catholic church must be doing something right...

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I don't feel like typing all the quote & /quote things today...so just goin' from top ta' bottom here....

--I'll rephrase: Biblic...in scripture, it says (and I'd give ya the verse, but I don't have a copy with me at the moment...that'd just be eerie lol) that doing any harm to ones body is sinful, as it corrupts the creation of God. Thus the smoking/junkie examples.

--I'm aware it's a behavioral modification, as well as spiritual, but the contradictions still exist. The Catholic church itself acknowledges that, thus the purpose of confession. Not to mention all the naughty priest reports in recent years. (I could go on here, example-wise...but that goes into the philosophy of what/who causes homosexuality...and that's a topic I'd rather not get into.)

--And I agree, if you question your religion, you SHOULD probably find one that suits you. But I'm not addressing Catholics questioning Catholics. I'm talkin' about the Catholic church, in essence, excommunicating people that would just like the opportunity to join the church to begin with.

*edit*

I lost faith in the Bible once I realized than the central "teacher" had not written any of the books,

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Wasn't there supposedly a text that was believed to be written by Christ? It was um...damn...what's the word...not discredited, but something close...by the Vatican, IIRC. The Gospels of somethinorother...

There's a gospel of mary magdalene, that was omitted from the prescribed choice made by a collection of conservative and chauvenistic middle-aged men in the 'Dark Ages'.

read the thread... NO, it is not true... he was in the hitler youth, but that was compulsory at the time... (that means EVERYONE was in it)

But about the Pope...he's drawing a lot of heat about the child molestation problem lately, and I for one , feel bad for him. I bet he longs for the good old days, when he was just being accused of being a Nazi...