Exactly, Kevin. If there is something that is truly evil, it is the pernicious doctrine of Original Sin, which has probably caused more human suffering and justified more evil than any other falsehood.
The doctrine of The Just you refer to below is interesting. Andre Schwartz Bart wrote a novel called "The Last of the Just" where, if I remember correctly, the last just man dies at Auschwitz. (read it 40 years ago but I think I have that right)
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That's the thing, Kevin, there are no good men. >
>Tamar will be proud of me for this one (I think): from the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah, Jewish scholars evolved the idea that God would destroy the earth if ever it lacked some minimum number of good people. The exact number needed to avert his wrath was hotly debated, and finally settled as 36. :)
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>Rick, I disagree - there ARE good men and women. This has always been the root of my opposition to most religions - the notion that the highest concepts possible are usurped and placed beyond that which men can reach.
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>The second is the entire idea of the sacrifice. Christ represents that which man should strive to emulate - but supposedly he died for sinners. To me, sinners are killers, rapists, thieves, men who beat their wives and beat children. If I were a Christian, nothing would make me more indignant than the idea that the ideal must be sacrificed for the non-ideal
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If men are fine then there was no need for such a sacrifice. >
>I actually agree with you on that.
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>Man is born "tabula-rasa", with the free will and the choices to be good or bad, to try to make a benevolent world or something less. Man is not perfect, but it does not follow that lack of perfection = sinful and in need of "saving"
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>I would like to ask you a question. It's a question I posed to someone here on the UT years ago.
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>In Nazi Germany, approximately 1.1 million Jewish children died. Since you believe in the after-life, what happened to those 1.1 million who likely were never baptized and who likely did not accept Jesus as a savior? What happened to them on their "judgment day"?
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
