What good does religion offer the world today?

God melees his/her many distractions and plays the lute for Esperanza.

Does God bleed?

No, but he probably feels damn lonely at times.

You read a lot more than I do into that story.
But if God instructed them to do all that you say, why do you suppose he punished them afterward?

Really? What part do you think I've read too much into? Be specific.

Why did god punish them? What was it that Moses did concerning the Midianites that pissed the god off?

That's what I was asking you. According to your reading of the story, God had no reason to be pissed off at Moses or the Israelites because they did just what he asked of them.

What I'm saying is that your reading of the story does not make any sense. You could say that there IS no sense, that God is capricious and gets pissed off randomly and for no reason. But if that's the case, why even bother debating this stuff?

None of what you have said is an answer to this: Really? What part do you think I've read too much into? Be specific.

What part of it makes no sense? Be specific.

What was it that Moses did concerning the Midianites that pissed the god off?

It is because of what you have said here that I asked you what it was that Moses did concerning the Midianites that pissed the god off?

I like this observation about the bible.

That statement reveals a lack of knowing just what a metaphor is.

Any legitimate metaphor is immediately obvious. If not, you are either incapable of metaphorical thinking (I guess that's possible) or you DO have a preexisting agenda. But for any objective observer, there is no question about metaphor.

Maybe you mean 'allegorically' in which there can be disagreement. But in the case of allegory, it does not matter whether the allegory is based on fact or not. The object of the story remains the same.

Hey Leadfoot, I liked your conclusion about religious folk being quite advanced in their ideas for the era they lived in. Back in history esprcially Europe, it was only Judeo-Christian clergy and monks who knew how to read and write. Common folk were not familiar with reading and writing. The monks were the inventors and scholars of the day back in their era...

The powers of self-delusion among christians is just amazing. During the middle ages, the church told people not to bathe because it would allow evil humors into the body. When Thomas à Becket was murdered in the cathedral at Canterbury, his body was stripped for the laying out, and he was found to be horribly infested with fleas and lice--that was considered a sign of his sanctity. When someone was injured, or became ill, they would be treated with "holy water," which, of course, did them no good at all. Often relics were brought to them so that they could be cured by the touch of the "saint's" bones. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many of these were identified by naturalists as pig bones or deer bones--hucksters made a good living gulling the rubes, including those in holy orders. During contagions, people flocked to churches to pray, thereby more rapidly and effectively spreading the disease.

The Protestants partook of the same follies, and even in the 18th and 19th centuries, evangelicals refused to wear glasses, considered a rebellion against god's will that their eyesight must fail. Good middle and upper class evangelical women visited the poor and advised them not to purchase good cuts of meat or imported fruits such as oranges, because god had willed that they be poor, and to seek a better diet was a rebellion against god's will.

Monasteries did not preserve learning, the Muslims did. One of our members many years ago, an historian who used the screen name of Hobbit Bob, pointed out that the works of Greek scholars were in their libraries. But no one read them, and many were prohibited because they had been written by "pagans." Crusaders brought back to Europe the works of the ancient Greek scholars, and of Arab and Indian scholars, which the Muslim world had preserved. In Spain, and in Salerno and Naples in Italy, Muslim centers of learning took christians and Jews as well as their own scholars. Isabella of Castile put an end to that sh*t. But those books filtered out and sparked the renaissance.

What a crock of sh*t you're spreading.

I love your A,B,C,D, of causal conectors....more, you are sounding like a good crusader yourself...there is no more dangerous strawmen then the well guised use of half truths in an apparent erudit and well formed speech/lecture. You are to the best of my judgement ability the best case in A2K of a deep dystopian desynch between wisdom and some information..
Now go ahead and bark back fool.

My earlier point is that man was given all the tools needed without being educated about the intricacies of bacteria, viruses, etc. The universal problem is denial of reality. If you don't use your common sense to know that when your body stinks and crawling with pests and instead listen to some half baked BS, you are guilty of denial of reality.

Same thing happened in London during the plagues and cholera outbreaks. They knew the smell of **** was bad but listened to idiots who thought it was the vapors that were the only problem, so they dumped it in the river then drank the water from the river. It took a guy that plotted the deaths on a chart to figure it out but common sense should have been good enough.

Common sense and experience should tell you that blood is vital for life, but doctors at the time bled people to death when they got sick. I think George Washington suffered that fate. Denial of reality.

I'm sure you will scoff at this too but the reality is that all men in some way and at some time feel the need of God. It's not just whackos that say so. It's just an acknowledgement of reality.

Sense of unity in reality, something bigger then yourself as a whole, is what the common men call the "sense of God", but they are not the same. If anything the personalization of Reality into a humanized God is a convenient form of ditching the abstractness of the problem and looking for a more tangible relation.

In trying to avoid the trap of being completely ego driven, I think people make the mistake of trying to deny that they are ego-centric beings since that is said to be selfish, bad, evil, etc. It is not.

We should stop denying that we are ego-centric individuals and accept that there is nothing wrong with that. To attempt to deny it ends up in tying one's self up in a Gordian knot and self hate.

This does not mean we can not look at things from outside our egos and objectively see ourselves. It is vitally important that we do. As Socrates said, 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. But ultimately we return to our personal being and there is nothing wrong with wanting that personal, tangible relationship to God who created us as ego-centric individuals.

Leadfoot I was merely complimenting your conclusion about how well recieved the Genesis would have been in the era it was written and years after it was written. No one back then would have been talking about scientific rationale let alone big bang theories. It was a masterpiece in its time.
But I did add that the academic state of medieval Europe belonged mostly to Catholic clergy and monks. Especially when the Roman Empire turned Christian(Catholic). The only ones with books and libriaries were the religious who could read and write. Most common folk didn't know how to read and write.
But yes the Catholic Church was a corrupt empire where they would have the sole possession of historic arts and literature.
But the clergy / monks were the scholars, inventors and scientists of that era. Todays idea of universities developed from the monks and their monastic schools of scholarly, I was reading it on wikipedia. Some interesting reading...
I always say the spirit of God is all about our sense of family and procreation...

Yes, but Setanta's point was that Muslims were at the forefront of the movement to catalog knowledge, and that is true.

Unfortunately there was a schism in Islam at one point. One side decided that reason was part of God's character and the other decided that dogma was 'King'. Not too much different than what happened in carious sects of Christianity. It's all kind of a mess today. I can't fault you for dealing with that mess by gravitating to the words of Jesus to make sense of it. Setanta deals with it by saying '**** it all, it's a mess and I don't want anything to do with it'.

That's not what the difference between Shia and Sunni is. That was the big schism. Since then there's been all sorts of different groups, different traditions. Islam isn't one big homogenous lump that's suddenly split into fundamentalist and progressive. To suggest that's what's happened is oversimplifying it to absurdity.

I was responding specifically to what Amoh had written. I am not interested in the self-serving superstitions of M. Pascal, nor of you either.

Shi'ism was established by Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet. His was an attitude of intolerance. The Companions would tolerate those who were not outright pagans, and had already established the sunna,j the modus vivendi for living among the unfaithful, decades before when they had gone into exile with the prophet. Theirs was an attitude of tolerance. That's ironic now, because ISIS, just as is the case with Al Qaeda, represents the forces of bloody-minded, murderous intolerance, although being Sunnis. Before you pontificate about Islam, it might be useful to learn a little about it.