h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>Or do people just pick out certain parts of the bible to suit their own purpose?

Is the bear a Catholic?

##Still a high tally on the murdering people scale, ##

kill 10 people and your a mass murderer

kill 10,000 and your a politician

#Is the bear a Catholic?#

i know when he goes camping the pope ss in the woods

But youre expecting God to give preference to humans. Many a religion (again, Islam springs to mind) hold that were all puny and should be grateful for what we get. Amongst all the chaos, isnt it simply fab that he finds the time to be so beneficent and merciful, etc etc? God moves in mysterious ways, etc. etc.

The test of it is...on balance...is the world an OK place?


*******

NOTE: I dont believe any of this God malarkey myself. Not for one second. I just think that before youre going to demolish a belief system you should a) take time to find out what people actually believe and b) take it on at its strongest. Granted, religions are human made. But wouldnt it be insanely counter-intuitive that something human-made didnt have *something* in it, at a level better than chance?

I don't know that many christians now but those I did know used to take the bible as the scriptural equivalent of chinese whispers. God said "send reinforcements I'm going to advance" and the bible says "send three and fourpence (about 16p in new money) I'm going to a dance".

They see god as an ineffable mystery, and the bible as an all too fallible indication of how previous generations interpreted that mystery.

If you are going to believe in the christian god, then this of course is the only intelligent view to take of the bible.

Believing in a personal god who shines his grace on believers is entirely tenable if you haven't come across things like confirmation bias and the inability of most people (myself included) to understand things like probability and coincidence. Without those, it's easy to ascribe all the good things in your life to the grace of god and all the bad things in you life to his mysterious ways. Where it falls apart is when you start looking at the bigger picture (Why 15 billion years into the life-span of the universe? Why Roman Judea? Why not Mithras or Osiris?, etc etc etc).

B

Well said, Mrs Zen.

The bible isn't the 'word' of god. It's a collection of stories written hundreds of years after the supposed events took place. No wonder it is full of magical tales. Just like chinese whispers stories have been exaggerated.


It's just a compendium of fairy stories. You would do just as well living your life by the stories of Hans Christian Anderson, or the Fables of Aesop.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!


I jest.

Fact is I have long believed that Eurocentric folk tales
and children's fairy stories have more Truth in them
than the collected works of mad visionary Hebrews.

At least it's practical stuff about the failings of straw
houses when compared to brick and about never trusting
foxes or scorpions and recognising the difficulties of
re-assembling big broken eggs that fall offa walls.

Thanks to these tales of life in the Northwoods I have
never tried to eat a bear's porridge or kiss a wolf in a
nightgown posing as my granny. I know that pumpkins
are for pies and not to be used a coaches and that a
cow is worth more than a mere handful of beans.


~jwf~

God saved the Jews from slavery in Egypt. Or robbed the Egyptians of a perfectly good workforce, depending on your viewpoint.

Come on, folks. I thought everybody knew that god doesn't Do good - he just IS good.

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The plagues and blights weren't very nice

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