Czar: Feel free to intepret this comment as mindless loyalty to Lib or whatever you like, but I’ve found it very difficult to interpret your comments here (and particularly in a few other religious debates) as anything other than ‘hateful’ - I don’t believe that Lib has done anything more than identify hateful words as words that appear to be hateful.
Now perhaps it is wrong to infer that hateful words are indicative of hateful feelings, but I don’t think so; text is all we have to go on here.
Is this an example of the “those who are not with me are against me” mentality that permiates some belief systems? Believe me, if this conversation were about Santa Claus or Batman you would be getting the same attitude from me. “Hating” fictional characters is silly-about as silly as attributing “hate” to those who refuse to believe as you do, and have the unmitigated gall to tell you why.
OK it must be a persecution complex :rolleyes:
It truly is a sword that He brings, isn’t it Mange? 
No, Czar. It was many years thence before that happened. It is only later that I understood the full context of that experience. The man whom you claim said this
deserves nothing but contempt.
Jesus seems to have taught some sort of mixture of folk Judaism, call for reform, and apocalpytic teaching. He fit into that niche of itenerant teacher/magician that was common in the region at the time. In some ways, his teaching was of the school of the Pharasees, but with less emphasis on religious ritual and community and a more rigid intepretation of some of the ethical aspects of Torah.
Sorry, I don’t have time to answer; I’m too busy burning heretics.
he turned water into wine
and insisted we eat swine
and thats the sum of it
Cite?
My impression is that Bar Kochba, Tsaddekai whatsisface that converted to Islam, and the other self-proclaimed Messiahs taught quite different messages from Jesus’s. Oh, and by the way, when did Jesus ever say anything like what you paraphrase him as saying? I know that it’s a pretty good sarcastic take on what some of his followers have to say, but it doesn’t match anything in his message that comes readily to mind.
More later – I had a wonderful statement of my own understanding of his message that went into the bit bucket when I lost connection.
Borrowing from a previous post of mine –
Although the letter of the law is important and must abide, people should mainly concern themselves with the underlying spirit of what the Law actually says, its real message: forgive people if they do you wrong, share what you’ve got, love your neighbor; forgive them and forgive them again, not expecting or demanding compensation of some sort for forgiving; share without keeping track of what you’ve shared and forget about getting any of it back; love not only your loving neighbor, but even your hateful neighbor who isn’t loving you back. And don’t be doing these nice things in front of an audience to impress folks with how Lawful and righteous you are, and don’t go around pointing fingers at people and telling them they are doing it wrong.
So his other main message (the first main one being the bit about love and forgive and share) was therefore that Goodness, although it can be described and codified in a good Law, is always more important than and primary to the Law itself.
He’s so Beautiful.
Its been said, but I’m going to say it again. His message is love. Love those who spurn you, love those that welcome you, love those who ridicule you, love those that complement you, love those who believe, love those who don’t believe, simply love all. For we are all called to be like Christ who is God and God is love.
I’m sorry if the sarcasm hurts, really, but he was not the only one in history to perform “miracles”, tell his followers to be nice, promise a vague reward “soon”, then get killed. Miracle workers were springing up all over the place at that time, and if one of them had converted a major politico or two at the time, I can pretty much guarantee you’d be singing his(or her) name. Luck of the draw, pretty much.
I don’t wish to challenge Libertarian’s and other’s religious beliefs any further, though. Just wanted to state what I believe about the signifigance of Jesus’ teachings.
Lib-why did you hate your Spanish teacher so much? And why the hell didn’t she send you to the principal’s office for speaking like that? I don’t think anyone in my school would EVER have gotten away with that.
Ahem.
Cue man changing a tire in a thunderstorm.
Cue voiceover: “Jesus is not dead…but he must let the world think he IS dead…Until he can learn to control the raging beast that dwells within him.”
Cue gigantic roar…
Lemur, are you confusing Jesus with Bruce Banner again? Sheesh!
Well, if you believe Douglas Adams, God’s final message to his creation was–“We apologise for the inconvenience”.
The hatred I had for her was pretty much as I explained. Because of manifold infirmities and the social stigmas of poverty and race, I had a chip on my shoulder the size of Rhode Island and it just came out in everything I said and did. I didn’t trust nice people because, inevitably, they would turncoat and drop the bomb of their real feelings.
In this small space, I really didn’t have room to convey the internal struggle that constantly went on inside me. But I wanted just to go ahead and get it over with, the turncoating I mean. If she was going to blow up and tell me how my daddy couldn’t be trusted (you know, Indian givers and whatnot), I wanted it out of the way and behind me. Teasing her was my feeble method of trying to push her over the edge.
As to the principal’s office, I was in there quite a lot (though never from her class). I was something of a hot potato. I was denied editorship of the school paper my senior year even though I would have been the traditional choice because of my tenure and position for the two years prior because, as he put it, “You just bring too much controversy.”
As to Mrs. Hale, I always wondered myself why she didn’t give up on me, and as I say, I certainly did my part to help her do just that. But I think it was her intrinsically gentle spirit of loving kindness. I didn’t know it, weeping on her shoulder that day, but I imagine that her Christlike behavior planted a seed that grew over the years eventually to overcome the choking thistles of my life.
I went through I don’t know how many belief systems (including Satanism) until that fateful day in the back of a hippie microbus when I realized that Jesus is God. My whole world changed in an instant, and that day with Mrs. Hale and Susana was one of the first of many memories that I thought about over the next several days and saw in a new context.
No, Czar, I don’t know whom you think you’re fooling, but you’re not sorry that it hurts. If you were, you wouldn’t do it. You would tread with a bit less hostility if you gave a damn about people’s feelings for their Lord. It’s not enough for you to say that you believe Jesus to be a fictional character. You feel the need to portray Him as a charlatan, a snakeoil salesman Who deliberately abused the trust of His followers for the sake of… what, living in poverty and being crucified?
What you don’t understand (and I have no idea whether you would care if you understood) is that we love the person Whom you ridicule more than we love our own mothers. I would sooner hear you describe my sainted mother like this
than to hear you hurl insults at my God.
Careful Lib; there’s arguably a similarity between Czar’s apology and your mumbled ‘sorry’ to Mrs Hale.
Possibly. Unfortunately, I don’t share Mrs. Hale’s endlessly patient temperament. It’s hard for me to forget the character called “Slythe” who introduced himself into my first Great Debate, The Atheist Religion, by proclaiming that, had he a sword, he would tear into my God and slice Him to pieces. Or words to that effect. The monicker changed, but the stripes remain the same. I stopped taunting Mrs. Hale. We’ll see what Czar does.