let them believe what they want when they die as i typed before they'll be disappointed

Deuteronomy 15:12-15
12 If a fellow Hebrew, a man or a woman, sells himself to you and serves you six years, in the seventh year you must let him go free. 13 And when you release him, do not send him away empty-handed. 14 Supply him liberally from your flock, your threshing floor and your winepress. Give to him as the Lord your God has blessed you. 15 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you. That is why I give you this command today.
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Ephesians 6:9
And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him
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Colossians 4:1
Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.
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As you can see it's not the same as the slavery the world has seen in the past recent of years. It's quite different, it wasn't cruel or evil, it was fair and caring. And it also if you notice wasn't "forced" these men and women sold themselves to the person, thus it's like employment to an extent. These people were willing to be this person's slave, or that person's slave.

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That great nation is not the country of Israel or the Jewish people of today. The name, "Israel," was given to Jacob, Abraham's grandson. Jacob's 12 sons were literally the children of Israel. The word Israel in Hebrew means: "He strives with God and prevales." Christians are figuratively or symbolicly the children of Israel. Christians have become children of Israel through Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant.
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This is supported by the bible, which is why i said it.
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You are a perfect example of why Christianity truly sucks. It only serves to create people like you. People who think that only THEY can speak for God and everyone else is mistaken, confused, and blind.
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I never said such a thing. I didn't say i speak for God, the bible is God's word. Thus only relaying what the word of God says, not in anyway saying i speak for God.
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You are a perfect example of why atheists truly suck. It only serves to create people like you. If you don't believe it, fine move on. Nothing personal taken. But no atheists sit and debate over and over. If there is no God fine, move on. Let us people that believe in the father waste our time. So we may talk about God, preach if you may to atheists. Just let it roll off your back and move on, we won't hunt you down i promise. Why stick around causing problems and foul emotions amongst two people debating? What do you gain? As you can see this or that person isn't willing to bend in their beliefs, why not just move on to another and not waste your time with this person that is steadfast?

Just look at what's happening here.

This web site was kind enough to provide the Christians with their very own forum where they can discuss their religious beliefs among themselves without having to argue with non-Christians.

Yet what is happening? Christian proselytizers continually come to the General Religious forums to proselytize their religion harass the non-christion and call them "Morons" for not believing that the ancient Hebrews speak for God.

Here's what Cowboy had to say:


Move on?

What is this? The Crusades all over again?

Christians invading the General Religion Forums telling everyone who doesn't believe that the ancient Hebrews speak for God to "Move On"?

This is the problem with a totally intolerant proselytizing religion. Anyone who refuses to believe in your religious mythology is a moron, an atheist, etc, etc, etc.

It's disgusting.

Is Cowboy even speaking in terms of "General Religion"?

No he's not. All he ever posts here are comments that demand that the Bible is the infallible word of God and that Jesus is the Only Begotten Son of God who must be recognized as God. Anything else is totally unacceptable to him. He won't consider anything else.

He's basically breaking the rules of the General Religion Forum by using them to constantly and relentless proselytize his religion.

The Special Rules for the General Religion Forum state:

"Also, topics which are designated for response exclusively from one religion or belief system, or which may cause that type of polarization, will be deleted. The concept behind these forums is to encourage anyone to participate and post their opinions and thoughts as long as they are on-topic. Topics which do not adhere to that philosophy will be removed, and the poster may lose his/her posting privileges."

Yes Cowboy is telling me that if I don't accept his Biblical Views I should "Move On". And all he's doing is proselytizing Christianity.

He totally ignores all of the absurdities and contradictions that are brought up by other people. He simply refuses to acknowledge them, pretends they don't exist, and continues his proselytizing campagine.

He's just abusing these forums and using them as a pulpit to preach Christianity. He's clearly not open to any "General Religion" discussions. As far as he's concerned Jesus is the Christ and that's that. There's nothing to discuss. Just accept that Jesus is God or "Move on".

There are many topics worthy of discussion in world religions and spiritual philosophies.

I have presented very sound evidence of why it makes far more sense that the old fables of the ancient Hebrews are totally ungodly.

1. They support male-chauvinism
2. They support slavery
3. They support bigotry
4. They support violence and bloodshed
5. They contradict the very nature of the God they describe.
6. They contain totally unrealistic stories (like Noah and the Ark)
7. They have their God directing people to mass murder "heathens".

The list goes on, and that's just the Old Testament.

In the New Testament we have a man who taught moral values that didn't even come close to matching the moral values in the Old Testament. Instead, the teachings of this man match up far better with the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism and the actions of a Bodhisattva. So the idea that Jesus was teaching from this perspective is a very valid idea.

I think the Christians don't like this scenario because it make far too much sense, and therefore does indeed pose a genuine potential threat to their current belief that they can trust everything the authors of the New Testament had to say in Jesus' Name.

So it's important for people to realize that Jesus did not write the New Testament, nor did he even instruct anyone to write any such documents. The whole entire story is hearsay that wasn't even authorized by the man named Jesus.

This is important information that people need to become aware of.

It's called "Education and Enlightenment". Something that Christianity, being a product of the Dark Ages, has little or no understanding of.

Now, Cowboy would like me to "Move on" from the General Religion Forums because I refuse to accept Christianity on Blind Faith.

Peter_Pan just likes to call people "Morons".

However, I'm confident that people who read my posts see the wisdom and many years of education behind my words. I'm not preaching blind faith. I'm asking people to take an open-minded intellectual look at an ancient fable that is truly absurd, IMHO.

And I'll be the first to confess that all of this is indeed "my opinion and view". But isn't that what the General Religion Forums are all about?

Cowboy is just frustrated because I do make so much sense and he knows it. I show the flaws in the ancient Hebrew mythology that he's trying to sell to people in the "Name of God".

As long as I have the power of FREE SPEECH I will continue to share the wisdom I have learned.

By the way, Peter Pan, are we also supposed to believe that men like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and many other great minds of humanity are "Morons"?

Everything that I say about the ancient Hebrew mythology is true. It's ungodly, inconsistent, and truly utterly absurd in places.

That's my personal view after having been exposed to this religion for 61 years of life.

Albert Einstein had this to say about it:

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbour such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms." (Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955)

He also had this to say:

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism." - (Albert Einstein)

So I'm in good company in my views and thus I am not bothered by religious fanatics who call everyone a 'moron' who doesn't buy into their blind faith religion.

You people are clearly losing the intellectual debate. When you resort to asking other people to "Move on" and calling them "Morons" it's a clear sign that you recognize the truth they are speaking and that you cannot address these point intellectually. So rather than confess defeat, you attempt to slaughter the character of your "perceived enemy".

Christians resorting to their "Crusade" tactics once again. History repeats itself. Just destroy the non-believers, either have them removed physically, or assassinate their character.

Today's world has moved into an era of Free Speech and with the advent of the Internet, freedom of speech will soar to an even higher level. These religions that rely on keeping people oppressed through the silencing of the lambs will soon die out and Einstein's vision of a world that moves onto a more philosophically sound spiritual view will finally come to pass.

umm...I've been "hunted down" by "good" christians before. I've had my property stolen, damaged, destroyed by "good" christians before.
So, indicating that won't happen, again, fails to alleviate MY apprehension(sp?).

Arcamedes wrote:

The only moronic behavior I've seen of you is your inability to apply your brilliant logical and deductive reasoning skills to your own brand of mystical claptrap.

Well, that and not knowing when a battle is unwinable. But I'm guessing most people on here are guilty of that.

Einstein was brilliant. Of that, there can be no doubt. However, as far as scientists go, he was, more or less, a flash in the pan. He spent most of the latter half of his life trying to prove a theory that was impossible to prove. Impossible because he was wrong. He ignored evidence gathered by other scientists. Which goes to show that brilliance is no guarentee of wisdom.

You are just plain wrong about the internet. I wish it were not so. The current bills being considered by our "wonderful" government will see to it that free speech becomes a thing of distant memory.
More's the pity.

Just look at what's happening here.

This web site was kind enough to provide the Christians with their very own forum where they can discuss their religious beliefs among themselves without having to argue with non-Christians.

Yet what is happening? Christian proselytizers continually come to the General Religious forums to proselytize their religion harass the non-christion and call them "Morons" for not believing that the ancient Hebrews speak for God.

They just were not strong Christians, please don't let them paint the picture as to how a Christian is to be.

Never said the bible was science. All i was doing was bringing people's attention to the knowledge the bible contains even before the secular world knew it. How would these people have known such knowledge if not given by our father? Where else would they have known things we're fairly recently learning now?
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"1. Only in recent years has science discovered that everything we see is composed of invisible atoms. Here, Scripture tells us that the "things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." "
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Again, how would people in that day and age have such knowledge without someone informing them of such?

Would be nice to be decussing the topic not the op's weaknesses, who doesn't have them

Peter Pan wrote:

There is no "invading" of the general religion forum, the topics have been universal for the most part. Those that aren't, are moved...

Peter Pan wrote:

There is only one here that I call a Moron. It is you for your delusional ideas that pagans are Christians. Have you forgotten that post already?

Peter Pan wrote:

What, you can call people delusional, assinine, un-intelligent and then cry like a baby when someone says you must belong to the Roman Moron Church???? Cry me a river Wang Chung, I don't buy your false indignation.

LOL @ Dawkins, you should read this:
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/the_god_delusion1.html
So you think dishonest people are brilliant? I think he must be a Moron too, he has the same tactics that you have..... Or most likely, you stole all of your material from him, no originality, really there's NONE.

And If I were you, I'd be cautious of bringing up the forum rules as you break them with just about every one of you irrelevant posts.

"In this forum, we will not allow users to bash other users for either believing or not believing in a specific religion."

Here, I will show how you are either senile or a liar:

You say:
"No, I'm not the one who tries to apply humanistic traits to him. That's done within the fable itself. Just as Albert Einstein had recognized in the quote in my previous post. This fable clearly assigns human traits and weakness to this God.

In fact, here's a verse from the Bible I just learned from MiddleEarth yesterday.


Exod.32:14 And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.


So here we have the Bible telling us that even God has evil thoughts and that God himself is in need of repentance at times.

Thus we have no choice but to conclude that God has human frailties."


WOW!!! it only took you 7 sentences to contradict yourself!!!
So which is it? Senility or compulsive liar?

Really, if you want to try something new, try dealing with the relevant topics and try being honest. Let's start with the virgin birth....

Do you still believe that is original doctrine after the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary?

They just were not strong Christians, please don't let them paint the picture as to how a Christian is to be. No where does our father tell us to do as such. Actually tells us to do quite the opposite. The father doesn't teach us to treat anyone in any special way, as in treat atheists, people of other beliefs, and Christians the same way...... with love and respect.

That would be your opinion. I'm quite certain people like that think they are fine christians doing God's work. What's more christian than trying to beat the fear of God into a non-believer?

Well, they certainly taught me. Taught me that christains aren't to be trusted. That minor acts of terrorism is oky doky w/ their god.
It took a long time and much soul searching, so to speak, for me to get over just hating anyone or anything christian. I still have to make a conscious choice to, at least, remain neutral in opinion of someone upon learning of their christianity.

And yes, I understand you, my dear Cowboy, aren't like that. However, there are quite a few "good" christians that are.

I never really get a chance on these forums to discuss the brilliance of mysticism. Any conversations along those lines almost always deteriorate into Christians arguing for the Biblical picture of God.

When it comes to pure atheism, as you portray it, I have many reasons why I feel that mysticism is a wiser picture, even from a purely "scientific" point of view.

I tried to discuss this with you before but to no avail. As long as your happy with the idea that your essence is nothing more than an 'emergent property' of a bunch of spiritually inert stuff, then there isn't much sense in attempt to convince you otherwise.

I'm not having a "battle" with anyone. It only appears that way to people who don't understand what's going on here.

I'm just bouncing off the comments that religious zealous make to reveal how absurd their claims truly are. I'm not actually trying to convince the person whose posts I'm responding to of anything. I realize that he is not going to see the light.

In fact, Cowboy would like for me to "move on" because he perceives me to be an obstacle in the way of his goal. I, on the other hand am tickled pink that Cowboy continues to post in the GR because it just give me tons of thing to respond to.

As I've said many times. I'm not "debating" with Cowboy. I'm just pointing out the fallacies of his claims for others to see.

I fully realize that he is not going to change his view. His view is that the Bible is the word of God and Jesus was the Christ, and that's that. Period amen. Blind faith all the way.

Well, that may be true, but it hasn't happened yet. Although as stupid as governments have been, and continue to be, that wouldn't surprise me at all.

I personally can't see anyone preventing free speech at this point of technological advancement. It would be pretty hard to keep people from saying what they want to say with all the means of communication available today.

In truth, I don't see where any government could prevent free speech at this point. Maybe on an individual basis. If they started arresting individuals and giving them horrible punishments they might be able to scare the masses into silence. But to actually control what's being said on a large scale? I personally don't believe that would even be technologically doable.

If you know much about the Internet, you'll know that even the expert technologists are having a hard time keeping things "under control" as it is. Much less trying to monitor individual speech.

I just heard on NPR radio that in India over 800 million people have mobile phones. Yet only 300 million have toilets!

So free communications is running wilder than diarrhea.

Just a little joke there, but not far from the truth.

I call b.s. If you didn't have such a need, you wouldn't have argued so passionately for you own brand of mumbojumbo superstious nonsense. That's what true believers do. That's what christians do. That's what muslims do. That's what you do. Argue against everyone else's belief system and for your own. Because you just know you're right and everyone else is wrong and only if you could just make them see...
But hey, it doesn't matter. My main reason for being here is to debunk b.s. and people's misconceptions of what it is to be a an atheist.



If it walks like a duck...



And so your point in responding to him at all is what exactly? To cause him as much mental anguish as possible? Just curious.

These days Christian is usually just a title. Doesn't mean they follow God's word, doesn't mean anything along those lines. That is why i don't claim to specifically Christianity in the exact tense. I follow God's word, weather you want to call that a Christian or not is your choice. So again please don't let people that call themselves "christian" destroy the word of God for you. There is no such thing as HOLY wars, nor Christian crusades in it's exact sense. Jesus has told us to turn the other cheek, thus the crusades and anything of such does NOT support anything our father has instructed us to do or not to do.

And it's not about beating the "fear" of God into anyone. It's about revealing the truth and the love of our father to those that have been blinded by the world and it's views.

These days Christian is usually just a title. Doesn't mean they follow God's word, doesn't mean anything along those lines. That is why i don't claim to specifically Christianity in the exact tense. I follow God's word, weather you want to call that a Christian or not is your choice. So again please don't let people that call themselves "christian" destroy the word of God for you. There is no such thing as HOLY wars, nor Christian crusades in it's exact sense. Jesus has told us to turn the other cheek, thus the crusades and anything of such does NOT support anything our father has instructed us to do or not to do.

And it's not about beating the "fear" of God into anyone. It's about revealing the truth and the love of our father to those that have been blinded by the world and it's views.

You lack imagination of what governments are capable of. Right now, there's a bill being considered that would force all social networking and EMAIL sites, such as this one, to write into their computer code a backdoor so that government can, at any time, w/o a warrant, see who's saying what and to whom. It's not much of a stretch to think they won't have programs running to catch key words or phrases that anyone writes, anywhere, on the internet. But hey, it's to catch muslim terrorists so I guess it's ok. I'm sure it'll never be used for any other purpose.
Oh and don't forget the bill that says, in essence, any time you voice an opinion on the internet, you MUST include links to webpages that have a different opinion on the same subject. Yeah, that won't curb free speech at all...
Not to mention the bill that says any opinion mentioned on the radio MUST be matched with equal time for the opposition. Or the radio station gets fined, something in the 6 figure range. Good bye talk radio.

The problem I have with this is is two-fold.

First off, you keep referring to a specific mythology as the "Word of God", which I personally find to be "offensive" to both mankind and any creator we might have.

As far as I can see, by choosing to place your "faith" in this mythology you have chosen to "define" God.

Plus it goes much deeper than this. Not only do you choose to demand that everyone except a particular mythology is the "Word of God", but you go much further than that.

From my point of view, you appear to have appointed yourself to be the "Pope" of this religion. Because not only do you demand that I believe in this particular fable, but you even insist that only your interpretations of it are valid!

You reject, my interpretations altogether.

Finally, again from my point of view, you are "interpreting" hearsay rumors that have already been "interpreted", translated, and potentially even completely re-written by the time they have taken the form that you ultimately call the "Word of God".

Why should I worship YOU?

That's basically what you are asking me to do.

Why should I respect YOU to be the "official spokesperson" for Jesus? Especially when I already have serious doubts about those original authors of the this text who have already claimed that very position.

I have huge problems with their claims. And to be perfectly honest with you, I don't like your interpretations at all. From my perspective you appear to always take the most negative interpretation that makes this demigod out to appear to be a viscous bully.

I see no reason to view these scriptures in such a negative light.

So even if I were going to "accept" this Christian that Jesus is indeed a demigod, I would still find your interpretations totally unacceptable.

In short, I "protest" against your authority as "Pope". Just as the protestants protested against the Catholic Pope.



I don't see any "love" in anything you preach.

In fact, I totally disagree with many of your moral values when it comes to what constitutes "acceptable parenting" and acceptable methods of "teaching".

It doesn't surprise me that you hold these values because these are indeed the types of values that these ancient Hebrews taught. Since you worship their ideas as the "Word of God" it's no wonder that you have accepted these things. In fact, this is precisely why I reject any notion that these ancient Hebrews were speaking for any supposedly all-wise deity. The moral values they held simply aren't anywhere close to being "all-wise", IMHO.

You say that people have been "blinded" by the world and its views. But that's total baloney. My objections to this ancient Hebrew mythology stems directly from what these Hebrews claim that their supposedly "unknowable God" is like.

My objections to this fable have nothing to do with anything but the complete and utter absurdities that are claimed within the fable itself. IMHO, it ultimately teaches extremely poor moral values in terms of parenting examples via the behavior of its godhead, and it's far from being anything that can even remotely be considered to be "wise".

So I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to refer to this ancient unwise and often sick mythology as the "Word" of any divine being.

The fact that you keep referring to it as such is utterly ridiculous, IMHO.

You may have accepted such a notion, but I see absolutely no reason to follow you choice in that matter.

The picture of God revealed by Eastern Mystic Philosophers is a far wiser picture, IMHO.

I could argue that if you reject that picture then it's you who is rejecting "God". Although, I wouldn't be so arrogant, because the Eastern Mystical Philosophies don't claim to be the "Word" of any God. They are just the best wisdom of mortal men. Wisdom that far outranks the totally unwise teachings of the ancient Hebrews, IMHO.