If you want someone to take the side of Christianity, or better yet the bible, I actually believe in a lot of that book. Mostly the new testament though. If you are trying to find truth in the bible you have to take everything in it with a grain of salt and weed out the bullshit. There is stuff in there that is completely stupid, and there is stuff in there that is 100% on the mark. For example, a lot of the stories in the old testament can be found in other religions only with different characters and shit, but basically the same. And by other religions I mean ancient religions, ancient Egyptian mythology and stuff like that. The stories in the bible are just the middle eastern version of that, and God is portrayed in a completely different way than he is in other parts of the bible.

And there is also the endless pages of crap with no meaning that people desperately try to find meaning in. "And you shall have a son, and you will call him Isaac. And his son shall be named Nathaniel. When his son is born, it shall be named Ezekiel, who will have a son and call him Micah. And his son will be given the name Joseph, and Joseph will found a country and call it Aramathea, because of its wide and vast space. In that country Joseph will have six sons born of two different women, and blah blah blah etc." It's a bunch of useless tripe that was for some reason retained.

Anyway Jesus was the main guy who knew what he was on about in the bible. I do believe he was the son of God, although I do not 100% believe in the circumstances surrounding his birth and death. If I was a religious leader in charge of that kind of shit hundreds or thousands of years ago, that would be the first thing I would fabricate. It was most likely an attempt to entice people into listening to what Jesus has to say. His miracles may also not be true, in the literal sense, but a lot can be taken from them. An idiot would consider his miracles literal, and just sort of be awed by them and go "Oh wow, Jesus was really amazing," instead of learning something. "Turning water into wine," "raising the dead," "curing the blind." From my point of view the meaning of those stories is not that Jesus was a magician, it is the deeper meaning that can be applied to our existence.

And this is one of the major problems with religion...

It would be very easy to write a philosophical manual with all the bibles teachings and exclude the bullshit... But before any of it gains acceptance.. we really need to, as a species, abolish these dogmatic religions and step out of the dark ages into an age of freedom for secular science...

The problem is the nature of people. They like to group together, so even if every religious denomination disbanded somehow, people with similar beliefs would still band together and form a community. Following that, different people within the community would have different beliefs, and would still be arguing. They would break off into different sects, different new religions, whatever it is... Even modern philosophy and science is full of that kind of thing. It just can't be helped..

Really? That's interesting logic. But incorrect. Just because two things are similar doesn't mean they are the same, wouldn't you agree?

I do agree with most of this post. Except the part about the miracles; the miracles are meant to be taken literally. I don't know whether to believe them or not, but if you believe that Jesus was the son of God, I don't see how it is hard to believe he could perform miracles. They aren't completely symbloic though, like some other stories in the bible.

Yeah. I was just using that phrase "same shit", but I probably should have said they were similar instead of the same.



I believe that Jesus was the son of God, but that isn't really anything special. Everyone is apparently a "child" of God, Jesus was just a really wise one that knew his stuff. It is hard for me to believe in the miracles because I don't see people performing miracles very often in modern times, and miracles are often made up and stories exaggerated to make the person in question seem more amazing (i.e. Greek mythology). I don't actually know any of this though, and I'm quite open to the possibility of the miracles being literal. Their metaphorical meanings seem more in accordance with the rest of Jesus' teachings than if they were just taken literally.

I think this way particularly because people love to worship things, and they like the thing they worship to be higher than themselves. Jesus didn't really fit the bill, preaching equality, loving everyone, hanging out with lepers, prostitutes and outcasts etc. The bible and Christianity portray Jesus as this amazing God who gracefully bestowed his teachings onto us lowly mortals, when in fact his social status was the complete opposite to that. It would not surprise me if some of the details surrounding his life, and especially his miracles, were not completely true.