[monster]

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

You're quite ignorant of the Bible if you believe a couple of the New Testament books can speak for the whole of it

I am not talking about a couple of New Testament books. I'm talking about people who spread the word of God, which was what you said. But even if you go to the Old Testament, Moses and most of the others who spread the word of God were not exactly what I would call people in power when they were called to do so.

Read carefully: It was not "easier for them" to understand the Bible. They understood it differently. What we cannot do is take that understanding literally and apply it to today's standards--because it just doesn't work that way. Our society is vastly more different than what it was during the time the Torah was completed.



Let me just clear this up once more, and to put it in prettier words: society has progressed. We don't condone slavery anymore, for example, which was a perfectly acceptable thing during biblical times.

I really don't understand how everyone got the idea that I didn't support making an effort to understand people of the past. However, understanding people of the past also means understanding how much has society in general progressed since then. Even coming from me, a Marxist, capitalism is much, much better for the collective whole than what the monarchy of biblical times was.

Alright, let me get this straight (please correct me if I've misunderstood you).

But your whole argument boils down to: Whatever bad things were acceptable then is no longer acceptable in today's society.

If that is what you meant to say, then I don't see what the problem is. The way God deals with people have changed throughout the Bible, leading into modern times. It's called dispensation.

Christians were not asked to kill non-believers, quite the opposite actually. And no one was told to pillage, rape, etc. Whatever bad things people do in the name of God nowadays is unfortunate, but it's not a case to blame Christianity itself. They have simply misused it. There is a distinction between what God gave to specific people in the Bible and what God gave to all of us now.

Again, I was talking about the Old Testament. But tell me, what made you give me the example of Jesus and the New Testament? Couldn't it be that there's a clear difference in origin and cultural construct that gave way to the writing of the gospels and the books of the New Testament? Could it actually be that they were written by different people in different historical moments?

That's what means trying to understand the Bible.

I used the New Testament because that seems, to me, the appropriate answer. Why would you use the Old Testament when talking about a God-given right to war as it relates to today's society when those rights in the Old Testament were given for a specific group for a specific reason? (This is what I meant before about the distinction that exists.)