I shall slip on my satin mask only for a moment here. As I have whined before, I am doing this in
lynx with no way to check my spelling or grammar. I just wrote an incredibly "scattered" rebuttal (if you could even call it that) to your compadre,
knifegirl. It's hard to be morally indignant when you’re spelling sucks. At any rate... ;)
As I pointed out in my write up in
the Catholic view on the hypothetical tribesman, my main problem (as far as I am concerned) is my faith in man. I once read a fantastic fictional novel called "Requiem" by Graham Joyce. He asserted (fictionally?) that the Catholic Church is sitting upon the vast majority of the Dead Sea scrolls. He also asserts that perhaps we only have a portion of the "instruction manual". I cannot believe in man. I do not have faith in the original Catholic Church or even the Church a thousand years later. Jesus did not tell me all of these things. I got the version that the church either completely made up, or if Jesus truly walked this earth, the version they felt was right. It sounds like the gist of what you are saying is that my soul is between “God” and me. But I propose that due to the incompetence and greed of man, I know nothing of my creator. I cannot trust them to tell me. When it comes right to it, to have faith in the Jesus you "know", is to have faith in the Jesus
that you were fed. For me that’s still not too difficult since, when all is said and done, he really was a good guy. My problem isn't with you believing, or anyone else for that matter. You seem like a nice guy too. If being a Christian makes you a better man, why would anyone want to talk you out of it? But for me at least, its not just to believe in god. You are told of God. God is in a book. If no one told you of God, you would live never "knowing" God. He asks us to believe in him, and that seems simple, except that I cannot believe in man that way. And it's not God that I am buying, it's what they tell me god is. I hate to sound pessimistic, but really, history is pretty scary. People were born to be fooled. We, as a generic glob of humanity, have been duped! We have been conned into EVERYTHING. Hitler conned millions of people into commit atrocities that I can hardly fathom. Supposing that "God" is our true reality, that would mean that every person that ever believed anything else was duped too. Every
denomination that isn't the "true" church...all duped. America! We practically invented fooling people. You think we are bad now? We have phones, radios and TV. We have the Internet, we are globally informed! We are duped day in and day out. We buy what they are selling. Now I am supposed to believe because of a book written out of oral tradition. A book that was first censored by a church that not only later fragmented into a million and one denominations, but that when it did everything but rule the entire planet, used its power to do awful things? Now
that would be a leap of faith. It would be no feat what so ever to believe in a god I have seen. The not seeing him isn't the problem. Even the fact that NO one has seen him doesn't bother me. It’s that all we "know" of God comes from a distant and uncertain past.
About things being relative, its not good and bad being relative, its what constitutes being good and bad that is relative. For example, I have sex with my girlfriend. A lot. We like it. It’s fun. We love each other. Ok, so that is great and fine, but we are not married. That’s pre-marital sex. Pre-marital sex, from my perspective at least, is not evil. Sex is never evil in my opinion. What can be evil are the circumstances and actions surrounding sex. Sex under false pretenses is bad. To lie to get sex is bad. Sexual assault is bad. But two grown folks who know what sex is, and know the repercussions that can come from sex, making a decision to have it together... bad? Some people believe that sex is just to make babies. That’s fine. I have no reason to buy that at all. I like sex. Nothing evil comes out of what I do with my girlfriend whom I love. If anything it brings us closer together. I don't believe in getting married just so I can get laid, and as crass as that sounds I am sure it had been done many
a time before we as a society allotted ourselves more personal freedom.
I don't know, even if I saw the church try to evolve with the times it would be a nice gesture, but it doesn't, it is dragged kicking and screaming into the future. I would say a lot of the changes it makes are simply to keep attendance up. Bahh, ok lynx is making me nuts. Its hard to remain objective when you can only see about 5% of what you have written at any one time. :P
I will come back and put links in after I spellcheck it (and probably re-write half of it) tomorrow.
Ok all spellchecked. :P