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Neon Genesis

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Everything posted by Neon Genesis

  1. The problem is that people don't really understand what the separation of church and state means. The separation of church and state doesn't mean that you can't turn to religion for guidance when voting. It is perfectly acceptable to vote for a candidate who's values match up with your own but you can't pass a law that requires the president of the United States to be a Christian and I would argue it's unconstitutional to force a president to swear on a bible in order to become president. I'm not saying this is what you're doing GeorgeW but when most Christians say you can't separate your religious values from their politics, what they really mean most of the time is that they want to use the government to discriminate against non-Christians and ban non-Christians from being able to run from office or to justify forcing their religious beliefs on non-Christians.
  2. I think the real question at hand is why did the early followers of Jesus felt like they needed to label themselves to begin with.
  3. I still consider myself to be a Christian atheist because I believe that being a Christian is about following the Way of Jesus rather than the beliefs of Jesus.
  4. It should also be noted that in the authentic writings of Paul there are many women leaders in the early church which Paul praises such as Priscilla and Phoebe, who was a deacon in Paul's church, and the controversy over the gender of Junia.
  5. In Romans chapter 16, Saint Paul lists Junia as being a prominent leader among the apostles. Most bible scholars today believe Junias was a female name which was later censored by NT manuscript copyists who didn't like the idea of a prominent female leader being apart of the early church, so they made up a non-existent male version of her name to cover up her gender. But if Junias was so prominent a leader among the apostles, why don't we have any gospels about her? We have non-canonical gospels about other women leaders in early Christianity like the Gospel of Mary and the Acts of Paul and Thelca yet there is no Gospel of Junias to the best of my knowledge.
  6. I would say that following the teachings of Jesus is what being a Christian is about. I don't know why so many Christians think Christianity should be defined by beliefs instead of actions.
  7. Welcome to the forums, Vridar! The word atheism literally means without beliefs in god; -a means without and theism means beliefs in god. An atheist is merely someone who doesn't believe in God and says nothing about what they think about theism. An anti-theist is someone who is opposed to religion. Not every atheist is opposed to religion and there are even many religious atheists though they may not be as popular as the anti-religious variety of atheists. If we're defining Christianity by popular opinion, then you couldn't be a liberal Christian who doesn't believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ because most Christian denominations require a belief in the divinity of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead but I don't think Jesus was about following what the popular crowd thought.
  8. And when the apostle Peter tried to fight back against the Roman soldiers who were going to unjustly arrest Jesus, Jesus stopped the attack because his kingdom was not of this world.
  9. I'm also curious why it's a specific demographic of Americans who seem particularly obsessed with guns, namely very conservative evangelical Christian Republicans. Wasn't there a Jewish dude in the bible that said something about loving your enemies and turning the other cheek and stuff?
  10. I should think that the the Sikh Temple attack disproves the notion that knives are just as dangerous and violent as guns are.
  11. Again, I point to this Harvard study that shows a clear connection between the number of guns people own in a state and the amount of homicide rates in that state: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2007-releases/press01112007.html Is Harvard using "oversimplified" arguments?
  12. The free speech protest is in response to a mayor that threatened to ban Chickfila from their city because the CEO was opposed to gay marriage. The mayor later apologized for saying that but that doesn't seem to stop the Religious Right from dragging this out forever. I sincerely doubt that most of the Christians in the protesting actually know what the situation is about. They just know it has something to do with evil gays, Huckabee, and freedomz.
  13. Who are the gun control extremists in the United States?
  14. Likewise the majority of gun control proponents do not want to ban guns yet there was evidence that sales of guns increased significantly after Obama became the president because of right wing paranoia that the scary black man was going to take away everyone's guns. Only about a year or two ago the Tea Party organized a gun march towards Washington to protest Obama even though Obama had actually expanded gun rights and the Republicans keep trying to paint Obama as a radical anti gun nut and insist that having background checks at gun shows is somehow an infringement on our freedoms.
  15. From my reading of various gay blogs, the LGBT community doesn't seem to care one way or the other about the issue. This is more of something that's been blown up by the media, a couple of overzealous heterosexual male mayors, and paranoid right wing Christians getting their panties in a knot.
  16. What doesn't seem to be addressed in this thread so far is why are Americans so obsessed with owning guns anyway to the point where they seem to think if they can't carry them everywhere at all times then it's an assault on "freedomz!"? Are other countries just as obsessed with guns as America is or this just an American thing?
  17. Thomas Jefferson lived in a different time and culture where they were fighting off the British imperialists for American independence. It isn't quite the same to compare fighting for American independence to our modern democratic society where people can buy enough power to murder dozens of people just off of Ebay with zero restrictions.
  18. Do you seriously, truly, and honestly believe that if the Colorado shooter had a knife instead of a gun, that he would have killed just as many people?
  19. I don't know if this has been posted yet but here's an interesting study by Harvard University: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2007-releases/press01112007.html
  20. I don't understand why this suddenly became a hot button issue in American politics. It's not like we didn't know for decades already that Chickfila thought gays were evil. You know that all of Europe is laughing at us.
  21. Just because I don't believe in the supernatural doesn't mean I can't find value in the supernatural myths of the bible. As Marcus Borg has argued in his books, it's a matter of viewing the bible through a literal lense or a historical-metaphorical view
  22. It seems to me that the difference between Christian atheism and a non-supernatural theism is more or less a semantics argument.
  23. I accept your apology and I agree with you completely that people brandy about the label Christian too much as a mere marketing label and yet behave in the most atractious ways to each other and others. That is why I have said before in this thread that being a Christian should be about your actions and how you treat others than what people believe or not believe.
  24. It seems to me that a non-supernatural theism would be just as incompatible with Jesus' worldview as an atheistic point of view would be incompatible. It's clear from the gospels that Jesus did believe in a supernatural theism. How exactly is a non-supernatural theism any different than atheism other than semantics? How do you love a god that's not literally there and is just a symbol? You're missing my point. My point is if you don't believe the bible is the literal word of God and if you insist all Christians must believe in some kind of god, but it's ok to reject Jesus' teachings on divorce, by what standard are you using to decide what Christians must believe in and what's ok for Christians to reject? A fundamentalist Christian would say that Jesus' teachings on divorce are just as important as his teachings on loving God and they would accuse you of "gutting" the gospel. You're not being "rebuked" for saying that but for your implication that Christians who disagree with you on this point are somehow not honest. Why is it so important for Christianity to have "central" beliefs?
  25. Jesus also taught that divorce was only acceptable if your husband was caught cheating on your wife but you weren't allowed to divorce for any other reason, even if you were being abused by your husband. And even if you got a divorce, you were required to live alone the rest of your life because remarriage in Jesus' eyes was a form of adultery. Do you accept Jesus' view that abused women should not be allowed to divorce their abusive husbands unless they're cheating on him? If you reject Jesus' views on divorce, why do you still call yourself a Christian? Why do you reject Jesus' teachings on divorce but you demand that we must follow everything about his theology? Fundamentalist Christians say that to be a true Christian you must believe the entire bible is the word of God and you're not a real Christian if you don't believe in the entire bible. If you reject some parts of the bible as true but believe in other parts as true, why do you still call yourself a Christian if you're rejecting God's word? Don't you believe God's word? By what standard are you defining what parts of the bible must be believed to be a Christian and what parts it's ok to ignore if you don't believe in God's word?
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