Life is a job. You get $14.50 a day, but after you die, you have to pay for your sins. Stealing a hub cap is around $100. Masturbation is 35 cents (it doesn't seem like much, but it adds up). If there's money left when you subtract what you owe from what you've earned, you can go to heaven. If not, you have to go back to work. (Sort of like reincarnation -- many nuns are Mafia guys working it off.)
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.
There is little question that the holocaust had it's origin in the centuries-long hostility felt by Christians against Jews.
According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen—the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves.
The lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted — at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations.
I am a Christian and I enjoy attending church. I consider myself to be sensitive, caring, and kind-hearted. I´m currently serving a life sentence on the charge of murder.
Susan Smith, in an Internet personal ad, June 2003. (Smith murdered her two sons by locking them in her car and rolling it into a lake. In 1994, she tearfully pleaded for the return of her sons on American national TV -- having just murdered them.)
The poor should remain poor ... Without them, we will lose our jobs.
The Pope may act outside the law, above the law, and against the law.
Anyone who says God is on their side is dangerous as hell.
from a lapel buttonA man can have sex with animals such as sheep, cows, camels and so on. However he should kill the animal after he has had his orgasm. He should not sell the meat to the people in his own village, however selling the meat to the next door village should be fine
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Whatever good you would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward hereafter, the Atheist would do simply because it is good; and being so, he would receive the far surer and more certain reward, springing from well-doing, which would constitute his pleasure, and promote his happiness.
My captors stole everything from me...Those who captured me, in front of me, divided up my money, and later they led me into the hands of the torturers. In the long hours of torture, they asked me constantly about other pastors...of some churches in the capital; They asked me also about my views on liberation theology and about the liberation of the people of Israel. The torturers, tired of doing so much damage to me, rested for awhile; then, I recognized some of them: two are members of a singing duo from these churches [Verbo and Mission Elim]; I begged [them] to recognize me because I recognized them; then they asked me questions about my capture, my complete name, my address, my church and my activities. When they realized I was not the person they were looking for, they begged my forgiveness, saying,"Brother, we are also Christians.
When you can turn people on their head and shake them and no money falls out, then you know God's saying, "Move on, son."
Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner of later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.
I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized by its churches, has been and still is, the principle enemy of moral progress in this world.
Christians always write to me threatening me with Hell. Strange how they think this vindicates them and thier religion. Threats are the hallmark of a wicked creed.
(his trademark saying)Religion I find to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.
With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.
Neither as an ethical code or as a religion has Christianity any point of contact with things as they actually are.
The Christian decision to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with thier own desires.
Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places where evil people are most likely to be found is within the Church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself, as well as from others, than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture?...I do not mean to imply that the evil are anything other than a small minority among the religious or that the religious motives of most people are in any way spurious. I mean only that evil people gravitate toward piety for the disguise and concealment it can offer them.
Any psychologist, social worker, and prison warden can easily explain the simplest way to make a criminal. Take one otherwise normal child, or adult, and repeatedly humiliate him until he has no pride, dignity or self respect left. We then have an ideal Christian. We also have a criminal. A person who no longer respects himself can no longer respect anything. One who does not love himself, cannot love anything. If he hates himself, he hates the world.
One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do...
Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise.
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes--a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slave holders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me... I hate the corrupt, slave-olding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
The idea of a supreme being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then passes a law saying "Thou shalt not kill", is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained it or given it house room all this long.
Christianity is really a man's religion: there's not much in it for women except docility, obedience, who-sweeps-the-room-as-for-thy-cause, downcast eyes and death in childbirth. For the men it's better: all power and money and fine robes, the burning of the heretics - fun, fun, fun! - and the Inquisition fulminating from the pulpit.
When we speak of the Christian religion at it's most rudimentary level we must always be caustious to reserve our estimations as to who and what we are dealing with. You see, were it not for it's followers, there might have been some value to these Christian virtues. However, with what this dogmatic system has become as a result of it's spokespeople, it is best to steer clear of this bastardized religion.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/9104/quotes.html
