What? You mean every word in the Bible isn't supposed to be taken literally as the divinely inspired word of God?

Oh, great. And here I went and became Pagan for nothing. I thought I had to buy all of that stuff verbatim, and I just couldn't do that. :neutral:

It's the wool that tickles you. :D

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Well now, don't you feel silly? :rolleyes:

I know and like several pagans, but I just don't see the point of going pagan. Ethical monotheism (viz., Dennis Prager) seems to me a step up.

The point, I think, is that we have a different direct experience of diety, and also a sense of the web of interactions between all things that is sometimes referred to as the Life Force.

What she said. That, and not having your dogma handed to you in a package.

I think monotheism is lazy. :)

Sounds like a couple people here have no experience with the Unitarians. With that lot, you have to order the components separately, which demands that you have to have enough sense to choose good ones.

Now, for a different approach, the Episcopalians would hand you a package, but you're rather expected to open it, take out the contents, and fiddle with them your entire conscious life, examining them closely and intelligently -- the popular Episcopalian metaphor of the stool with three legs applies here: tradition, reason, and Scripture, and that it doesn't work too well as something that would support you if one of the legs is lost. Thinking is not merely allowed, it is downright encouraged, and getting rigidly dogmatic about anything is not the via media the Episcopalians and the rest of the Anglican Community so cherish, and so frequently find the way forward in. This does, however, often produce the effect that for any three Episcopalians there are four opinions, or so.

In my opinion, the best Christians credit dinosaurs and the dumb ones don't, and the poor bastards miss out on the vaster picture of creation thereby. The anti-evolutionists seem all to be wasting their time trying to use Darwin as a straw man. It comes of thinking that science is just another belief, which happens to somebody when they are educated only in belief systems. Science itself is not a thing of beliefs, of faith -- what science is, pace Stephen Jay Gould, is a way of knowing. Yet even the least spiritual of scientists is no stranger to faith -- faith in the integrity of his colleagues, that they are speaking such truth as they know.

If you've an ambition to create, and literally all the time there is, where's the problem with taking thirteen billion years to get it done right? Certain people should stop trying to nail God into a crate built to human specification.

Monotheism has a virtue of being nice and clear: it's binary; there is God and there is not-God. "On this hangs all the law and the prophets." It's as simple and as not-simple as chess. And that's my smiling remark.

Well well well, how did it happen that UG and I discover something ELSE we have in common? First it was the solo gourmet cooking and now I find out we both read Steven Jay Gould and were raised in the same denomination. I still remember the Confirmation classes where they told us what he just summarized. So true, that. QED

........or do away with dogma altogether.

nutty church billboards?

Redundant?

Should be simple given that hate doesn't exist any more than evil. Well, that depends on your definition of evil I guess, but I'm sure it can be rationalized away.

Evil is debatable, but not hate. The World is full of hate, often irrational, but it's there. :(

I don't think I understand exactly what you mean.
Could you expand on that a little?

In front of a Catholic church, I once saw "boys wanted for sex with preists". Ok, not really :D

I don't see any possibility of a rational argument that hate doesn't exist. Maybe that it shouldn't, or that it's not logical, but to deny it exists is whistling in the dark. :confused: