What?
And, you are very biased. This is not an attack on you, it is a formal complaint. Since you approve of male headship...take it like a man. Fused jumped through hoops for your you and your brother; he does not deserve disrespectful asides like that, even if he disagrees with you. Keep that "you're off my top ten worst debaters" stuff to yourself.
Let's see how much I care about your lists:
...
Okay. Now, if you would like to maturely counter my philosophy ("If you don't want to be ridiculed, don't be obnoxious") then please, by all means, present an actual argument to it. You don't see me call you a dumb-dumb poo-poo head or putting you on my "Cranky People's List" and yet, for some reason, you feel you have the superior ability of doing it to me. Give me an actual argument or don't bother posting, because all of this "You're on my list" is so ****ing thrid grade. All you're doing right now is reinforcing people's beliefs that the religious are zealots who force people to believe what they do or else pass judgment on them. Put me on your list - I don't give a flying ****. I'd rather be dead than be judgmental and intolerant.
Oh. I apologize, because I in no way intended to indicate that your statement was not mature (because it most defintely was mature), or that I actually keep a list. I apologize for not making my comment about sarcasm clear enough, and will edit that post to add a clarification (if the forums don't prevent it like they did yesterday when I tried to edit). However, I did not say what you quoted me as saying--
I did not say you were on a list!
Although now, to immortalize this incident for humor and not for misunderstanding, I should actually make a list of worst debaters:
1. Ed, Edd, and Eddy
2. The guy from that "Is Cable Better than Gravity?" commercial
3. TheFightingPikachu (for epically failed sarcasm)
Please. There is an obvious Shinto influence in Johto. The Japanese name for Sinnoh is "Shinou" (sp?) and so the Sintoh (Sinnoh / Johto) ruins, where Arceus is obtained, are named the "Shinto" ruins in Japan. Arceus is likely based off of the Shinto creator God.
Your only rebuttal for that point is down.
Thank you for pointing out something in the
4th Generation to prove that Pokémon is
based on Shinto, despite the fact that you haven't shown that Shinto involves
collecting spirits, and that Pokémon has been shown multiple times
on these forums to be based on bug collecting.
Your claim that our legitimate qualms with religion equate to "hate", especially since some of us are still giving it a chance, like Ethan and I, is complete hyperbole and rather self-victimizing. Dissagreement is not hate.
That title was selected specifically in response to Tim the turtle's express statement that he hates religion, coupled with his inaccurate statement about secondhand reports. It was not meant to imply more.
BTW, there's absolutely no problem with a woman president. I don't know where that came from. The Bible also reports that there were prophetesses (though there are no prophets
male or female today).
Well for a start, I never once claimed I was talking about Christianity in my post, I was talking about religion in general, so even showing that a few of the parts of the Bible are not second-hand does not really diminish my point. I also did not state that all religious reports are second hand (or at least I didn't mean to imply that) but you must admit that most certainly are.
As to your Jesus Seminar... I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove. The Jesus seminar is using the gospels to form their ideas of what Jesus said... the Gospels are second hand sources. They got most of their information on what Jesus said from this lost 'Q' text which contained his sayings. That makes them second hand by definition doesn't it? Second-hand sources are not necessarily inaccurate, but deserve scrutiny than religious people tend to give them.
Well first of all, you did say that was part of your reason for hating religion. You didn't say, "some religions," but "religion."
You know, the use of Q in The Five Gospels was one of the first things that jumped out at me when I first flipped through it in the library. But the odd part is that Q is merely a hypothetical document, of which we have no manuscript! It is inferred by parallels between Matthew and Luke, and it is quite logical to believe these literary parallels signify a common source, but it is only for some parts of these two gospels. Q doesn't stand behind Mark or John, and it doesn't even stand behind all of Matthew or Luke. (And, BTW, Luke starts out his Gospel saying he investigated sources. To call this secondhand would be like calling the USA Today articles I've clipped secondhand.)
I would argue that we undoubtedly should scrutinize what the Gospels say. But this goes for the critics as well as the believers. For example,
this page from the Skeptic's Annotated Bible alleges a contradiction between some of the Gospel accounts, but it misreads the text in Luke (Luke only said "about eight days" which can't contradict "six days"). The title of
this one indicates the author read the word "always" into the Lord's Prayer where it does not occur.
How about
this guy? J.T. linked to this page, apparently believing his every word--despite known historical error. (I really like the part where he makes a conspiracy theory out of Strobel explaining the positive changes in his wife's life when she was saved. Because M. Willett or Kush K. would never have published anything negative if either of their wives had become abortion clinic bombers because of Christianity, right?)
Here are a few quotes:
I ask this to Christians and have never received a satisfactory answer: If God is in control and the coming of Jesus Christ was all planned, then how come God forgot to leave eyewitness accounts of such an important event?
There is not a single eyewitness account. There is no archeological evidence. No corroborative evidence. All we have are a few fragments that even when put together reveal nothing.
But there
is corroborating evidence! One of the best examples is
Lucian of Samosata, who confirms the crucifixion, and even idea that Jesus was worshiped early on. (A better source is found
here; it might be useful to compare the two pages.) And that isn't even the end of non-biblical corroboration. I've mentioned some of it on these forums before, only to have it dismissed as rumors--as though pagans and Jews were trying to establish Jesus!
I already mentioned how even the extremely skeptical Jesus Seminar knows that some sayings undoubtedly go back to the historical Jesus. But they operate under the assumption that he didn't claim to be God or do any miracles. But as several Christians have noted, if Jesus were just a guy who told some interesting little parables, why did the leaders condemn Him to death? How did that ever happen if He were such an uncontroversial figure?
Too often the "quest for the historical Jesus" actually
presupposes that the Gospels do not have any eyewitness material. The Jesus Seminar would do well to follow their own advice: "Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you."
