Quote:
Originally Posted by BibleGuy
Look at it this way... If one of the cells in your body isolates itself for some crazy reason and stops listening and cooperating with the whole, it spreads... infecting adjacent cells with it's ego-centric consume everything mentality. We call that "cancer" and we have two choices: convince it to "repent" (re-join the whole in balanced harmony), or eradicate it if it won't. Otherwise it will consume us and itself in the process. Now... you are a cell, and so is Bob, and Mary, and Jeanna, and Todd... but Todd decides life is all about "me" and starts raping the landscape... stealing from his fellows... stripping the Earth... acquiring everything for himself offering nothing but toxic pollution back to the whole from which he takes. He spreads his mentality and societies become unbalanced, selfish and toxic to the whole. Waddaya do? You have to get rid of "Todd" or he will kill everyone and everything. You have to restore balance for the health, the very survival, of the whole.
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so we don't kill todd, we rehabilitate him. is our society, rife with its myriad injustices, truly more just than god himself?
the bible was written and kept by people, and people are fain to use whatever means necessary to achieve their desire. we have to remember that religious writings were as much holy scripture as they were historical records, and that in identifying with their gods ancient cultures were wont to paint a powerful picture of those gods and, by proxy, themselves. the same "spin" you mention in the translation of biblical texts must be considered for those who wrote and kept the original text itself.
jesus distilled the goodness of his people's god and built from it a doctrine of compassion (really like what waves had to say
). i stand by my original sense of wonderment at people's obsession with mythology while all that separates them from eternally self-evident truths are a few pages of paper