African Witch Children

Fix it in the real world, don't just gripe about it here.

You wasted years of your life and probably wreaked a mess of damage as a pastor misleading people.

And I like you, I really do, but enough is enough.

This is the reason that when a person says that God is a hateful asshole, I get angry. It's not God that does bad things, it's people. I agree.

Oh, but I am fixing it in the real world.

Alerting people to the nonsense that is going on in God's name is one way of doing that.

The 85% of the Bible that most Christians in the developed now ignore is just this sort of nonsense.

Spread the good news of Reason and this will happen less and less.

Here's some of God's love, straight from his own mouth. Hosea 13:16

Hosea 13:16 "The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
their pregnant women ripped open."

This is one of many instances where God commanded every man, woman and child die. Babies are smashed against rocks and pregnant women's bellies are ripped open, all at His command.

Why do people think the Bible is Pro Life, anyway?

This isn't the real world. There are maybe a handful of Christians here.

I don't mean to sound like a jerk, I really don't, god knows (ouch) that you have had a lot of pain in your short life, cancer, and now, possibly losing your community.

But like I said, fix it, better. Not just here with threads. Undo the damage that you did as a music pastor.

oh, I sound like I jerk. Crap. I really don't mean to, but for the most part you're preaching to the converted here, ya know.

People are retarded? The hell you say!

no, just people's threads.

I know mirka. That's why I had the Clean Slate Project blog for a while. It had more readers that were still all over the map religiously, as it were. It's sort of the back-burner for now, though.

Just read some news articles recently that got me going on this one again.

I guarantee, if I could go to Africa and do something about this, I would. Tomorrow. This stupid cancer thing keeps me from traveling to third world countries for the time being. I'm still etching out exactly what I can do here.

Tele-Rationalist, maybe?

The world is hilrious!

I was hoping the nonsense wouldn't start until at least the second page, but given the source material, I guess we're not really dipping any lower.

But really, doesn't this make anyone mad?

I mean, are we really so immune to inhumanity and injustice that things like this happening to children don't make us want to jump on the next flight to Nigeria and beat the living fuck out of someone?

No more boring or old than jumping into a thread only to say it's boring and old.

I'm immune to you now. Get used to it.

P.S. I only hope I'm never at a point where children being burned alive is boring and old. What a sad, pathetic place to be in.

Candy stripe a cancer ward--it's not my problem!

Dude, I spent four hours at the food bank yesterday boxing up CRAP that I wouldn't feed to any one I love, but it is fuel, and people are hungry in my hood, so no, so yeah..I don't even know about jumping on a plane to fix problems I don't have the means to fix.

You lost your faith! Okay! I never had any, and I yet, somehow, I am a moral and decent human being anyway.

I simply can't stop sounding like a jerk! I have no idea what is wrong with me.

Parka...the problems of the world would overwhelm me if I let them. That is all.

Much love, Tony. Good luck figuring it all out, and I'm sorry for being such a jerk, post threads as you wish.

Mirka, I'm right there with you. I do what I can.

I guess I don't get the whole "I only jumped in to say I've heard this before" thing. No offense, please understand me. You're not even doing that so much anyway. And I respect you and I have the impression the feeling is mutual. But this is something I really do care about because it does hit so close to home. I have relatives that are missionaries in Africa right now.

Why can't I just write about it? I mean, if nothing else, it helps me get it off my chest. And if someone here doesn't know kids in Africa are being tortured and killed, then now they do. That's a little progress.

I mean, you're at least being polite about it all, and I thank you for that. But there are others who don't necessarily disagree this is bad, but still feel the need to somehow either be snarky or attempt to hump me into submission with disdain.

Snarkiness I can handle, for the most part. If someone just doesn't care, fine, but why insist I not care as well?

Mirka, you're not being a jerk. I guess maybe I do let the problems of the world (that I can't necessarily change) ... well... they get to me.

It's the bible stuff that bugs me. I think that organized religion wreaks so much damage. Now, most of the threads you start are a mix of how god sucks and there is all this suffering. The suffering was always there. It didn't start when you lost your faith.

As for the part where you quote the Bible, that only works if people actually believe it's the word of God. I certainly don't, and parts where it calls for the death of every man, woman and child are most certainly written by man.

Reason and rationality lend themselves to violence just as well. Hammurabi's code, and eye for an eye. Rationality begets law, the same laws that demand a person be sentenced to death. You might think this is different, that a murder or rape call for death, but that's unfortunately just subject to your belief system, just the same, as these acts are committed for whateer reason these people believe.

Godless nation or not, violence between people will always exist, things like this will happen because of land, power, marriage, sex, all over the world.

Of topic: If it's not too forward, can I ask which sect of Christianity you once belonged to?

Six, can't we just call a truce?

There are all kinds of threads you post that I see no reason for, that I have no interest in. But do I jump in there and say "God this is dumb because I disagree... boring... yawn... "?

No. I don't. All I'm asking is that if you really don't care, then don't care enough to NOT say it.

I agree with you here, and so does most informed redaction criticism. That's a camp within Christianity that strays away from biblical literalism and, in my opinion, will probably be the best possible source of any new reform within the church.

Focusing on the good parts of the Bible, mainly the New Testament and the wisdom literature, does bring about life change. Whether or not to take events in the NT literally is still up for debate, of course, but letting go of OT literalism is at least a step (or ten) in the right direction.

I addressed just as much as you addressed in my initial post. You basically read my thread title and assumed you knew exactly what I was talking about.

Fuck off. I'm done trying to make peace with you.

ahhh no! stop everyeone.

No. I won't. You're a troll and I don't care about you or your opinion on anything. I've tried to be polite, you can't seem to return the favor so...

Go. Fuck. Your. Self.

Sorry you had to see that.

I was AG for most of my life. I did the whole non-denominational thing for a few years in and after college, rounded it out with a couple years in a coffee shop church, one of those emerging-church deals, and found the exit there, I guess.

Well, thanks for that. It certainly helps the situation move toward discussion.

For the record, I have several posts in which I am explicitly discussing this matter, sharing my personal interest in the situation, and not bitching at Six in the least.

How many posts in this thread is Six not bitching in? Oh, none.

Thank you.

So I respectfully disagree with you Night.

Would it be possible for a mod to just delete all the bitching, mine and anyone else's and preserve the actual, on topic posts.

I mean holy fuck people.

I was referring exclusively to your dealing with Six, who you replied to without discussion at all, yet her initial post included discussion and the fact that you're spitting the same old tune, and you ignored the former completely.

And you jumped pretty fucking quickly to saying 'Fuck off,' if a discussion was what you were looking for. You can't pick and choose which members you allow to give opinions in your thread just because it's your thread. It's not your birthday party. Mirka isn't your mom, she can't make Six go home. You have a face, right?

If Six wanted to discuss anything in this thread, then like I said before, she could have actually responded to something I wrote initially, instead of posting a knee jerk reaction to the thread's title.

What did she write?

You call that discussion? She's basically saying this ISN'T worth discussing. At least not in HER corner of the internet.

So again, I disagree. All she read was the thread title and thought she knew where I was going and what I was talking about.

She provided a figure of thought with which to express her opinion on the thread, and then backed Mirka's opinion which was stated itself succinctly.

So again, you're wrong. Now about that face...

I'm not getting sucked into another endless, pointless, off topic debate.

I still intend that this thread discuss more than just the title and people's knee jerk reactions to that, no matter what you think.

{Edit: Now that the thread's title has been changed, I trust that we can move on. }

I believe this is where the actual discussions left off.

I think we can carry on now.

No.

That's why I changed the thread's title. I realize is was completely misleading.

However, there was never any content within the topic itself condemning all Christians because of the actions of a few, and now there is nothing in the title doing so either, which was never my goal in the first place. I apologize if I was misunderstood.

Simply put, I have no intention of defending a point of view which I have never espoused.

I am condemning the blind belief in the bible, word for word, something that atheists do not have to compel them. I am against people committing acts of violence as outlined in a holy book. Could be any holy book, but in this case, it's the bible.

Allow me to quote myself.

This has been on my mind lately. I want you to understand one facet of why I have such a problem with the Bible.

... Lay out your best arguments for defending the very scriptures that made this latest travesty in a long line of senseless acts of religious violence possible. Give me your best shot.

I did it for years when I got into Bible college and started reading the Bible for myself. I've heard all the arguments and espoused most of them myself until I slowly began to realize it was me, the Christian, who was on a slippery slope.

"They don't understand the Bible" or "But Jesus was all about love" or "This is NOT biblical."

Sorry, but it's perfectly in line with scripture. Reason and rationality (not God or Jesus or any other fanciful idea) are the only things that can save people in these terrible situations.

That last part about reason and rationality. Those are my arguments against biblical literalism that leads to senseless violence.

I believe this has already been addressed.

Now at best, you can post some scripture that contains commands to love your neighbor and not to kill anyone. However, we must realize all this accomplishes is illustrating how the bible is inconsistent.

Fano's take on scripture is the most realistic one presented so far, essentially asserting that much of the junk in the bible, the stuff the modern, developed world ignores in the OT, was probably written entirely by man in the first place. He, like millions, no longer feel compelled to follow any of those Old Testament commands that seem so barbaric now. This is a positive thing, one that I would like to see spread to these third world countries where religious violence is still a daily fear.

To roughly paraphrase Sam Harris, all I want to see is a world in which people are no longer able to kill each other over their books.

Now that I have addressed your questions clearly and concisely, can you and I call a truce for the time being? I would really appreciate that.

Stay on topic: While threads often go off topic, please respect the threadstarter’s request that that you stay on topic. (The exception to this rule is taking a thread off topic to ward off trolls which is a Cult tradition used to great hilarity in the past. Be careful with this and do not use this to abuse members you simply dislike.)

I believe this is where the *other* discussions left off.