Peterkin

I asked for only one thing under the sun: slavery, which you claimed the bible had plenty of texts against. You haven't cited a single one. You made two unsupported statements. We can and do argue against those things. The Bible does not. And some religious sects do. Not most people, and certainly not atheists. Secular legal codes do a much better job of spelling out what a society considers unacceptable.

I wish people did that with religious tenets. Save a whole lot of money given to churches - and stones! Every time I see a cathedral, I'm flabbergasted by the number of stones workmen had to quarry, transport, cut, place, mortar and carve to put one of those Disney concoctions in place. Plus save a whole lot of trouble fomented by prelates. "The lens of human nature...." I wonder what that is when it's not being a metaphor.

By which time, six more referenda have muddied the issue beyond recognition.

This would mean laws change from week to week, according to popular opinion. Problem 1: nobody knows what's legal today, since there isn't time to publish the information before things change again. Problem 2: the legal system can't keep up with the changes. If what was illegal and carried a 2-year sentence three weeks ago and it's just become legal, do all of those prisoners have to be let out? Problem 3: News broadcasters, tabloids, celebrities and social media personalities would have immediate influence on everything. Even women's fashions last at least six months! Shouldn't the law of the land be at least as durable? This is completely different from elections. How is it a lie to prefer one candidate overwhelmingly? If I had to rate the current presidential candidates in the US, I'd be hard-pressed to refrain giving one of them a -10. That's no lie. What percentage of voters is likely to feel this way? A large percentage doesn't indicate insincerity, it indicates the relative popularity of candidates. In no way does this follow. It's unlikely that the majority of voters prefer a candidate who would enslave their fellow citizens. Why not also punish them for vanity, procrastination, lust, ambition, a short temper and a taste for chocolate? It's not the state's job to second-guess why each voter made the choice they did and correct them.

Yes, all of them, such as they may have been. I wish you could make your points in a language other Tamarian, so that I could translate it.

I don't read that either in the Bible or the Koran. I don't know exactly where Judaism 'started off' - you can see the formation of an organized cult with Moses and Aaron in the desert, but the Hebrews already had their own god back in Abraham's time. The stories prior to that are nebulous and not specific to Jehovah or the tribes of Israel. Islam starts off with Muhammad in a cave and there is nothing contented about it - except death. This is roughly the same situation with Christianity.

Only if that person were a dictator. That's personal whim. When a society makes laws, there has to be broad consensus, at least among the top three tiers. Otherwise the law cannot be enforced. Of course, priesthoods can also make up laws - usually against things people can't help, so they'll always be guilty of something, and keep buying the indulgences, or equivalent in penance. They've certainly made up enough rules the breaking of which expressly demands a death penalty - like stoning; that's a religious crowd-pleaser. Please cite three of them. If I recall correctly, even Paul, who came along later and got appended to the NT, had no objection to slavery, which was common practice in Rome. While you're at it, show where the Bible forbids rape, incest, pandering and genocide.

I'm glad you realize this. However, your largely irrelevant paragraph about heresies doesn't get anywhere near the core beliefs of Christianity, either as it's chronicled by the apostles, or as it was adapted for Roman consumption by Paul. Not even as it was institutionalized by the Roman Catholic church and later the major Protestant branches. The central icon of all of these variants is the gruesome death of Jesus, which is deemed necessary to the redemption of all earthlings born of women and thus tainted by original sin, which was disobedience. The whole point of Christianity is guilt and the only way to expiate guilt is sacrifice - that's a carry-over from the OT.

It does for scientists: doing research and making discoveries is what gives some people a meaningful way to contribute to society and also benefit from their work. Religion provides a meaningful occupation to clerics, monastics and theologians. For everybody else, the world is full of ways to be meaningful and productive. Many people find both their religion and scientific knowledge useful in navigating life. Some immerse themselves in art, or scholarship, or invention or sports or gardening or teaching or healing or saving endangered species, or.... whatever else people do. And of course, human relationships. No, but scientific information can direct them to appropriate action in the service of their values. The values themselves are constructed over time, on the from one's personality, environment, education, experience and social interactions.

I mean humans. It was tight there in the sentence. They don't have to speak for one another in order to commit crimes, brutalities and atrocities, which they do. Humans, in case you're still not sure. So? Has savagery been eradicated from the christian world? No. People were good and bad before Paul; people are good and bad after Paul. He made no difference to human behaviour. Which part of this are you unable to understand?

Are you claiming that rape is unknown in christian civilizations? That was the question: What savageries don't humans commit because of St. Paul? Precisely! They don't an never have. If he was trying to fix mankind, he failed. Utterly. Lots of behaviours are punished by law when humans do it. Like not covering their face, or going to school, or a smoking a joint, or driving while Black.... Humans make good laws and bad laws, do good deeds and heinous ones. Nothing Paul said or did prevent humans being savage, civilized, decent and brutal.

Oh really? What barbaric things do other animals do that humans don't? Neither pre-civilized humans nor other animals engage in torture and rape for profit. By 'tolerated', do you mean that it's not against the law? Yes, this is rumoured to be true among the aristocracies of some contemporary nations, and certainly true historically. If you mean that the practice of human sex and organ trafficking is carried on in wealthy nation where it's against the law and the traffickers always have customers - so it's obviously more than tolerated, it's positively welcomed - by a segment of the higher socioeconomic elements. If you mean, within the culture of outlaw groups, yes, that is also true. The lectures of the sainted Paul did nothing whatever to curtail this human proclivity.

It didn't work out terribly well in the long term. Men kept right on getting drunk, knocking up the servants, beating their wives and children, right through the Christian era. The 'savages' managed their social relations considerably better than 'civilized' peoples do. So do animals.

The ones who tolerate it are as good at making war as the ones who punish it. Nothing to do with exclusivity: just a simple fact that the punishers are wrong. Roman and American prisons notwithstanding. None of those ancient peoples understood the causes of disease, or based their religious dicta on scientific information.

He exists in the story that pervades all of Western culture. It doesn't matter whether there was one special man who performed all those actions attributed to Jesus, and whether that was his name, or whether some of the accounts are of several itinerant preachers over a spread of years, or how many of them were put to death for blasphemy or inciting to riot. All that matters is the narrative. Paul is not part of that narrative; he merely hijacked the nascent cult and replanted it in Rome, imposing his own rules. The Jewish Revolts were not influenced by Christianity - the Christians in Jerusalem, a small minority, just got caught up in Jewish rage at the corruption and mismanagement of Roman administrators.

When you spend most of your adult life in prison, the choices are limited.

Poor Saul/Paul was a deeply troubled man. He disapproved of sex, and had a low tolerance of women. It's been argued persuasively that he was homosexual, but the biblical condemnation forced him to sublimate his urges into a celibate religiosity. Hence the seriously conflicted history of the Catholic priesthood. And it was that same terrible influence which caused his personal correspondence to be included in the Bible, where it has no business, given that he was 50 years too late even to watch Jesus die, never mind hear him preach.

Everything would become a source of sorrow. Genesis 3: 16-19. Right away they started having kids, and the first one killed the second one. Nothing but trouble, kids! Gods are even more trouble. (What I find interesting in the Cain and Abel story is that there are other people in the world, who had to be restrained from killing the fratricide. You'd almost think there was a human society out there, with laws.) They wouldn't need to. They lived their whole lives - 130 years - in Paradise. So would their increasingly long-lived children have done so. Without sin, there is no need for damnation or redemption: no need for heaven and hell. I think they're fun.

How can you tell whether it does or doesn't have an evolutionary advantage ('purpose' is an incorrect term when referring to evolution)? If it were a handicap to a species, I suppose it would have bred out. Huh. I wonder why syphilis and gonorrhea haven't put a hex on heterosexuality. It's because some idiotic Middle-eastern warmonger figured there might be fewer baby soldiers next generation, and/or the troops might not fight as fiercely. The Greeks put that notion to rest quite decisively, but the lesson wasn't learned.

Considerably short of mass murder is therapy. It's more expensive but doesn't reduce the population so drastically.

No, it's not.

Equality under the law is simple: no individual has immunity from crime; the same criteria of proof apply to their trial and the same guidelines for sentencing are followed in every case. When it comes to 'other qualities', however, you'd need some metrics and standards to decide how much of each quality each person possesses and what each quality is worth. What measurement are you using, and what is the standard you apply?

Do you have 'better' evidence to support the argument that rape is right than the evidence supporting the argument that rape is wrong? OTOH, we have seen a great deal of reliable evidence supporting evolution and nothing but opinion to disprove it.

I sincerely hope your mundane thought is less chaotic than your virtual thought.

Looks like common field cap. Not poisonous, but not not recommended to eat, since it looks similar to several mushrooms that could make you sick. If you tasted one, you're probably fine. If you have small children, don't let them play in the yard until you've picked or raked up all the mushrooms.