Your God

I was talking with this guy who passes out pamphlets at school, all filled with homophobic, hate, and fear propaganda. I decided to talk to him. Try and show him what he was preaching.
As I began talking with him, he came off as a nice young man. Sharply dressed, and intelligently spoken. I began telling him that i am a believer in God, but I think what he was shoving in our faces was hateful religion. He seemed to challenge me in a game of quote the bible. Each verse he threw at me, i showed him how many different ways it could be interpreted. To my surprise, he listened. Perhaps not with an open mind, but he waited till i was done to respond so I did the same.
But after a few minutes of fair and well debate, he said something that struck me the wrong way and sent me on a bit of a tangent. He said "we can all see gods wrath on the earth today, as the aids epidemic is his holy hand smiting the sinners of this earth." And the conversation went from a friendly discussion to me beyond insulted by the ignorance and hateful bullshit that just came out of his foolish mouth. I quickly responded "so your god allows rapists, killers, and thieves to live without their own disease, but people sharing their love with those they love are struck with gods 'holy hand?' Are you telling me your god kills people on a daily bases, both hetero and homosexual mind you? If that is your god, i am proudly an atheist who will join hands with all the peaceful loving homosexuals in hell." I stood up and bid him farewell and walked away.
And admittedly, got teary eyed that this is what my Gods image has become.

 

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Its hard not too. His entire church is spreading this garbage.

 

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Is the title supposing that I'm god... as if this were a commandment?

It doesn't take an athiest to find where a thiests morals lie. The same can be true for any person of morals. But if a religious man has to go to the streets and beg for people to join his church, maybe you should invite him into yours. If you don't have one, well a-the-least you have a person with experience to help you build.

Would you not be proud to lead a cult that changed the face of all other peoples beliefs?

 

There are insane Christians as well as insane atheists.

 

and also there are insane snow sled riders

 

first of all, why is this guy allowed to spread hate propaganda at a public school?

and secondly, i know it sucks when people stamp jesus and god's name all over their hate, and use a pulpit as a sounding board for hate. it pisses me off too. but ultimately, everyone's relationship with god is a personal one. if someone uses religion, or another person's behavior, as an excuse to not seek this relationship, it's their own fault, whether it be a religious person, a homosexual, or anyone else.

 

God is truly mysterious. We don't know if He watches out every move or no move at all (or whether He even exists, which He does).

God's word to men over the ages has always been imperfect. It was perfect for that time and place, but little of it resonates down through the centuries without getting a little obscure. (And I don't want to hear from you Catholics- if it weren't for the Council of Nicea, Christianity would be dead today.)

For example, the Qu'ran is a perfect book that describes the perfect way to live- provided it's the 7th century. A lot of their edicts simply don't hold water anymore as civilization has flourished and we have the Internet today.

One thing is for sure- God never intended to strike down a people just because they were a people. Sure Moses robbed and killed aplenty, but those were godless heathens who deserved it (as the book says). Apart from that, I see very little of God's edicts relevant today- this is where the gays fit in.

I am old enough to remember the emergence of AIDS as "God's punishement" and was put into a dark corner somewhere, ignored. Turns out God had nothing to do with AIDS- we were simply ignorant.

We are all still a little ignorant of gays and that is our problem. Me- I have no problem with gay people. Just keep your hands off my ass!

The entire issue with gays will become mainstream in the next decade- I wonder who the next group of people religous nuts will ostracize-

 

Well, i defended him at one point. The admins tried to stop him and I said, "Hey, i pass around the Anarchist Manifesto all the time, you cant stop him!" and then we had our talk XD

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K_xZcjsVuw

 

my pastor gets really irritated when christians start quoting Old Testament stuff to back up their prejudices..and so do i..the new testament is supposed to preempt the old..

i do not want to hear anyone ranting about how a particular group of ppl need to be punished..

fortunately i have not seen any believer do that here..
(can't say the same for non-believers..)

 

OMG thank you Jesus XD
People look at me crazy when I try to tell them that.

 

um..which?

 

Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is an abomination.
Leviticus 18:22, King James Version

I am an atheist but if you are a Christian, that passage seems quite clear.

 

Sorry, I should have added this to my previous message:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fufil.
Matthew 5:17, King James Version

 

The Old Testament contains numerous instances of what I'd call savagery. It has God ordering his Hebrew people to commit genocide against their neighbors. God orders fathers to kill their daughters if they have premarital sex. Sons are to be killed if they habitually disobey their parents. Blasphemy is a capital offence. Aspostasy is a capital offence. Breaking the sabbath is a capital offence. Trying to convert Hebrews to another religion is a capital offense. Practicing magic is a capital offense. And on and on. (It's interesting that many of these religious laws and penalties also exist in Islamic law and are still practiced in more hard-line traditionalist Islamic communities.)

I think that it's kind of odd how so many people parade around the OT passages condemning homosexuality, while always remaining silent about the other nasty bits. It seems to me that these Bible passages are being seized upon in hopes of providing justification for preexisting anti-gay attitudes.

 

I am an atheist and interested in logic. I agree that there are lots of questionable rules in the OT. However, my assumption is that, if people call themselves christian, the bible is their guide. The OP was about someone being upset that a fellow christian was preaching against homosexuality. The bible supports that stance.

I do not care what two or more consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom.

 

to be honest I've been questioning wether or not I believe in god at all. But I will say this, if god is this murderious being that orders genocide, I'm an atheist.

 

Sure, but that doesn't mean that Christians necessarily have to take everything written in the Bible as coming straight out of God's mouth. It's entirely possible for Christians to believe that the Bible was written by human beings, presumably in response to some supernatural inspiration, and subsequently expressed in the context of ancient cultures, prejudices and presuppositions. In that kind of view, the real lesson in the Bible might be in how Biblical ethics evolved, again presumably in response to God's inspiration, from the kind of primitive savagery that I referenced in my last post, through the various prophets, and ultimately to Jesus whose message was significantly different. As for me, I'm not a Christian and I don't believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, and I see that ethical evolution continuing after Jesus right down to today.

Remember that the scholars that pioneered what's called the 'higher criticism' of the Bible were overwhelmingly Christians themselves.

The relationship between early Christianity and the OT Hebrew law is a complex one. There's a huge theological literature on it. As far as I understand, even Paul, and if the gospels accurately transmit his views, Jesus himself, seem to have criticized religious legalism in favor of perfecting one's deeper motivations.

I'll add that Judaism has gone through similar changes over the millenia and while Jews continue to devoutly honor the Torah, few of them today are Islamic-style legalists.

Put simply, my point is that it isn't necessay to be a Biblical fundamentalist in order to be a Christian. Most Christians aren't.

 

Thank you, that clarified things for me. My emphasis on logic is a bit too "either or" sometimes.