[lincpimp]

I hope that everyone here does realize that by attempting to push your own view points and possibly get some sympathy or aggreement, you are in fact attempting to make YOURSELF feel better about your own view points...

Just throwing that out in case anyone was trying to fool themselves into thinking they are 100% correct.

I do often laugh at the old testament, cause I have read it in its entireity (talk about a hard read, makes shakespeare easy), in order (taking things out of context would put me on the same plane as the religious wackos) and it just keeps contradicting itself. I understand that it is a tool to keep people in line, and that it was written in a totally different language and at a completely different time of human existance. So it may vaguely apply right now, IF you interpret it a certain way... There is the rub, you should not be interpretting gods words, they should be pretty clear.

Did the OT work? Humans are still on the planet, so I guess it had some positive effects? Looks like it got the Jews somewhere?

As for the parables, well they are there so that church elders can interpret them to mean whatever they want, and thus use this to steer their masses to feel guilty and pay more when the plate goes by. Notice how the preist/preacher/minister cannot just read the bible out loud and the congregation just gets the meaning? No chance, he then has to spend 45mins "explaining" how matthew 123:1245 (or whatever verse) is a direct order from god that he needs money to buy a new mercedess/add a wing to the church building/or buy raffle tickets.

As far as good old fashioned direct rhetoric goes, the 10 commandments are about it in the bible. Everything else seems like modern day lawyers wrote it so they can find a loophole or something when necessary.

Here is my take on the origins or christianity:

So Jesus may well have existed and done everything that the new testament claims (save for the "miracles", as I am not a beliver in magic). Not a difficult thing to belive, a guy who walks around pointing out the current corruption in his church (he was a jew after all) and generally attempts to get people to be more moral. We have people that do this today, so very beliveable.

Ok, so since the new testament was not written down at the time, and did not really get finalized till 300ad by the now organized catholic church, we can pretty much guarantee that a little enblishment was added here and there. They were humans, after all.

Here is where I get way off the beaten path. So christianity catches on, the romans adopts i, and generally the jewish faith takes a back seat in popularity. I think that the creators of the catholic church were just the same leaders of the jewish faith attempting to put a new spin on their old idea and Jesus and his teachings were a great thing to hide behind. Look at the catholic dogma, it is very similar to the Jewish dogma, and it does sometimes irectly contradict Jesus' teachings in the NT. So they moved from one name to another, but kept the corruption and money and power grabbing ways they had already perfected.

And for all the christians who are not catholics, consider that your various religions came directly from catholicism. So they are all based around the same thing.

Just my thoughts on the matter. I am not an expert at anything, but can often see the forest despite the trees blocking my view.