who wrote the Bible?

[Yggdrasil]

Was that really the best response you could come up with after a day and a half? Hahah!

I think you lost.

There's life outside this forum vashti. Endulging your pet topics is rather low on my priority list.

It's also not my problem you see this as a contest instead of a debate or exchange of views.

[doppelgaenger]

The fat man has been launched.

[vashti]

Ahahahahahah!

Nice try Ygg, but you never bothered to address my response to your assertions about "major religions". Instead, the term "ad hominem" is thrown around as if using an impressive-sounding Latin term somehow gives one the decisive edge in an argument.

Why don't you instead tell me how you suppose a spiritual leader is supposed to support themselves and their families if they don't work for some degree of personal gain, or how a house of worship can exist without money to pay the mortgage, and tell me how you know that spirituality is not seriously encouraged by any mainstream religion? Because as far as I can tell, you are simply backed into a corner with no way to support these assertions.

[doppelgaenger]

You can't be serious.

[Yggdrasil]

Ahahahahahah!

I will simply put some stuff here as a reply, because this is not something that can be answered on one post.

Read them or don't. That's your choice. It's probably not going to be to your likings but I really don't care.

Either way, I have better things to do as to argue about this.

And I'd really appreciate it if you could refrain from personal insults (ad homs).

Healing the Soul After Religious Abuse: The Dark Heaven of Recovery by Mikele Rauch (Author)

The Child's Song: The Religious Abuse Of Children by Donald Capps (Author)

The Meek and the Militant: Religion and Power Across the World by Paul N. Siegel (Author)

[url]http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,100175,00.html[/url]

[url]http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=narisetti_27_4[/url]

[url]http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/157/5/696[/url]

[url]http://www.maledicta.com/library/ccabuse.html[/url]

[url]http://dannimoss.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/it-is-time-to-being-speaking-the-church-and-domestic-violence/[/url]

[url]http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/1007/biblical_battered_wife_syndrome:_christian_women_a nd_domestic_violence[/url]

[vashti]

Your first link is about weird sects that refuse medical treatment.
The second article discusses child abuse in the name of religion.
The third article discusses how religion "thwarts" the efforts of psychotherapists. (Plus domestic abuse.)
The fourth article lists a bunch of incidents of sexual abuse by Christians.
The fifth article discusses the lack of intervention by churches in domestic violence.
The last article discusses how soem Christian women suffer domestic violence.

What I DON'T see is how any of these articles are even remotely related to the topic at hand, nor are any of them representative of mainstream religious thought.

Additionally, I don't see where you are under personal attack at all. Asking you to support your assertions doesn't ususally constitute ad-hominems.

[Yggdrasil]

What I DON'T see is how any of these articles are even remotely related to the topic at hand.

You said it yourself.

So.. who wrote the bible?

[vashti]

You said it yourself.

So.. who wrote the bible?

And yet another red herring. In case you "forgot", THIS was the topic we (you and I) were discussing.

Why don't you instead tell me how you suppose a spiritual leader is supposed to support themselves and their families if they don't work for some degree of personal gain, or how a house of worship can exist without money to pay the mortgage, and tell me how you know that spirituality is not seriously encouraged by any mainstream religion? Because as far as I can tell, you are simply backed into a corner with no way to support these assertions.

Admit it, you lost.

[Yggdrasil]

Admit it, you lost.

Whatever turns your crank sweetiepie.

[Gribble]

See, I always thought the New Testament was pretty clear. Material possessions have no meaning, no true value. To pursue them is hollow and empty.

A true Christian would cast aside all superfluous possessions and live humbly in service to his god and to his neighbors.

I mean, aren't we supposed to emulate the life of Jesus?

And yet very, very few ever do.

[Sonrisa]

i disagree with Gribble. if Jesus had access to Internet he would have to buy a computer to preach his studies. he would be able to reach more people on the net than by sitting on a corner.

[Gribble]

The key word is superfluous.

[Yggdrasil]

i disagree with Gribble. if Jesus had access to Internet he would have to buy a computer to preach his studies. he would be able to reach more people on the net than by sitting on a corner.

His website probably would get nuked

[DoesntMatter]

Arghhh part of me wants to respond to this but it's nice just watching other people duke it out..

[DoesntMatter]

Gottfried, kudos to you for continuing your tradition of making exceptionally intelligent posts. Particularly-

I'm attacking the very question, "Does God exist?"

Your post was probably the first time a non-religious person on this forum passed up the opportunity to be vainglorious and self-congratulatory for their mastery of 1st grade logic in exchange for being actually intelligent. Although that probably has more to do with a lack of choice than a conscious decision

I want to comment on this-

Aside from the logical fallacies involved in omnipotence (to the extent that we can process "logic," which is all we have to work with)

The ardent atheists who claim to possess so-called "logic" spend a lot of time making lengthy and frequent rebuttals to theists, proudly citing inconsistencies between Biblical passages and the law of conservation of mass or some other scientific principle you learned in middle school

It seems to me like people genuinely possessing so-called "logic" would be more interested in pursuing activities of intellectual merit like proving Gauss's theorem on a slide rule or abacus, rather than forming online love triangles with their fellow atheists