Quote:
Originally Posted by concheet
In fact it is silly to cite these passages to prove anything at all. When was the last time a man was forced not to divorce someone? And to pay the father for the privilege of raping her? When was the last time in a Christian country a man legally sold his children into slavery? Or when was the last time a Christian country stoned a woman to death for adultery? Christians and Jews no longer follow these laws, if indeed they ever did. They were written thousands of years ago.
Yet they still stone adulterers in Islamic countries. They cut off the hands of thieves.
Is it really fair to make a comparison between a book that was written 2000-3000 years ago against a book written 1600 years ago? Would you expect the Koran to be more humane than the Old and New Testaments? I would. But is it?
By the way, translations of Zech 13:3 say nothing whatever about 'freedom of speech' -- they are talking about lying 'in the name of the Lord' . Not sure exactly what that means, but when was the last time that Christians killed someone for lying in the name of the Lord???
Oh and laugh all you like. Most doctors will tell you that what makes one person live and another die from the same illness is totally unknown. And that "faith healing" sometimes actually works. The mind is a powerful weapon.
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Interesting you take a position of debate when I didnt offer any position I stood. I simply copied and pasted text and BAM, you offer many emotionally based rather than rationalised points. Not sure how to interpret that. You use the word "prove", when I havent offered a debatable point.
Let me paste some more text...how the
American forefathers really felt:
Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
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Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.
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Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
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John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815
As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?
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John Adams, letter to FA Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
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James Madison, to William Bradford April 1, 1774,
Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, said:
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion...has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble."
many years later...
Ulysses S Grant was a huge advocate for seperation of church and state and tried several times to life tax exemption of any and all religious organisations, his logic being that if the community can not support them, like a business, it should fail.
Declare church and state forever separate and distinct, but each free within their proper spheres; and that all church property shall bear its own proportion of taxation." -- Annual Message to the Senate and House of Representatives, December 7, 1875
Current American Christians believe the fallacy that their forefathers and the USA was established on Christianity and/or religious rites. Absurd an