With the religious and political debates raging on the Current Events Board, I started to wonder-- do you think that the US Constitution and the Bible are living documents to be interpreted according to the times or are they literal documents to be interpreted as they were when they were written?

I'm as curious about the correlation people make between the two as I am about the question itself...

Personally, I view them both as skeletal frameworks applicable to the times rather than stagnant and unchanging.

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"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the Unites States. Ask any Indian." ~Robert Orben

hmm well I think you may have left out a few options. Maybe one or the other doesn't exist and the other either is living or literal.

In other words, some people don't believe any text in the Bible. So what that book tries to dictate on people has no effect on non believers....so it would be neither literal or living to them.


Of course, these days the Constitution seems to be non existant to many in our government.

Sick! It's about time you showed back up here. Stay a while.

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Do you know what it's like to fall in the mud and get kicked... in the head... with an iron boot? Of course you don't, no one does. It never happens. It's a dumb question... skip it.

Hey, good to see ya!

I noticed you agreed with kaladrew on another thread. You better be more careful. Actually, I agreed with him too, but I didn't make a point of it.


Sorry I'm off-topic, caff.

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Do you know what it's like to fall in the mud and get kicked... in the head... with an iron boot? Of course you don't, no one does. It never happens. It's a dumb question... skip it.

Once in a blue moon certain things can happen.

The bible=fairy tales
the constitution=literal.

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Catz Meow
Badly behaved.
Hedonistic Lemming.

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JW Frogen, my new favorite noob poster:

If you are such a weak jellyfish you can be bullied on a forum where you can ignore any poster you do not want to read than I suggest you move to Tibet, convert to Buddhism, protest the Chinese occupation, be killed as you will by the Chinese and hope you come back with some form of backbone.

You seem to have a natural talent for a offending people. Is it really that neccerary to insult a persons religion?

Care to take a pop at Buddhism?

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What's this i hear bed? Word has it you and Pam are sleeping together.

By the time biblical scholars get done figuring out whether gays should be allowed to marry based on combing through a book, I can simply say "They pay taxes. Judges give weddings. Governments give incentives for marriage." In the end it is a current debate based on how people wish to define the purpose of marriage. The bible becomes irrelevant.
By the time I find the VCR instructions, my wife has the thing programmed. Then we wind up with a DVD player. Things change and yet writing stays the same. Can I use the VCR instructions to program the DVD player? NO, but my wife can still program the thing.
Thumbing through life's instruction manuals may be a fun hobby and might even make you feel good and resolved with yourself, but in the end the stuff that's written down is nothing but guidelines and footnotes for those of us who don't know what we're doing.
Apply that wherever you want. I think of the constitution and bible as guidelines, apply them to current reality, and see what fits and what doesn't. So does everybody else. Some just don't recognize that awesome process and some think that the way they interpret things is the ultimate truth. All writers are fallible and all writing changes with the reader. That said, just because one thing doesn't look good in a writing doesn't mean that the whole thing is obsolete.
These things are meant to help us through life, not dominate it. Actually, they may very well have been created to dominate our lives, but I don't think that fits today. You might think differnetly. I don't care. The DVD player is programmed. Maybe I helped. Maybe I didn't.
If you don't get this stupid little story by now, I don't expect you will any time soon. So best wishes.

@#$%^!! I was trying to cover all the bases...

And I agree with you on that one... my particular favorite are the folks who want to take parts of it literally and the other parts as living... (both documents, actually, now that I think about it...)

s'OK-- I do it all the time...

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"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the Unites States. Ask any Indian." ~Robert Orben