goodguy

It seems to me that in this new "home", we have taken quite a few steps backwards. Before we left our old website, the issue of the Bible as the foundation of our thinking had been most thoroughly refuted and few of us were debating "facts" based on various conflicting Biblical assertions. Now we are back to quoting scripture as "proof" and "evidence" as if the Bible had merely to be sifted through to discern the "truth" of our nature and existence. This, I assert, is folly and will lead inevitably to the same confusion that has plagued Western Civilization since mankind first conceived of a tangible diety and made up stories about the planets and the stars and Heaven and Hell and "Evil" and "Sin" and their own virtuosity as a group versus other groups' "Sinful" nature. What goodness has emerged from quoting the Bible as a source of wisdom and truth? What benefit is believing in, for instance, the Apocalypse or the symbolic assumption of guilt and atonement by one person or being on behalf of another? If sin is an invalid concept as those who wrote the Bible in their ignorance of the origins of disease have clearly demonstrated; if (as we know today) guilt cannot be effectively assumed by an innocent third party but must be negotiated by the original perpetrator, how valid are the writings of the Old Testament? And if the New Testament is based foundationally on the writings of the Old Testament, how much credence should we continue to give it? How much farther down this path of folly and error do we wish to travel, believing that Christ COULD expiate our sins even by dying for three days whether or not His mother was a virgin at his conception and whether or not His Father/self/alterego was in half His genes or not? Looking at the big picture, the Bible is wrong in so many places and in so many ways, continuing to use it as a first source in our search for Truth, Enlightment, or "Peace on Earth; Goodwill to all Men" is folly and doomed to end as most religious efforts at spirituality have ended: in conflict and war. The study of the Bible is an exercise conducted in the brain and it effects a disconnect from our true spiritual centers which are in the body and connect us spiritually to all other humans, no matter what religions or beliefs or morals they support and proselytize. Until we as a species "get" the fundamentally divisive nature of religion and the fundamentally uniting nature of spirituality, we're going to be misled by almost all religious beliefs.