bible silentbob look whose the first one here. Me. This is a very strange book that sometimes scares me. everything jesus says is red. You have to wonder... when they were translating it to english, did they leave any out? did they add anything? One time i read this part in the bible where it talks about the parable of the weeds. basically he says christians are the wheat and everything else goes into the fires of the furnace. into hell. i don't believe the scare tactics are a rightious way of making people follow you, that is, if you really want a relationship with them. 010125 ... twiggie what's even scarier, are the people that take everything out of there literally. i don't care for the book much myself, but it does teach some good morals and such. when people go and insist that every word is historically acurate, and then take the meanings the wrong way... and do their whole "you're going to go to hell with satan and suffer in your afterlife if you don't believe what i do" it makes me very upset. the fact that some automatically don't want to know me because i'm not their religion, and on top of that, i'm agnostic. *gasp* sometimes i really don't understand people. 010125 ... florescent light what he left me for 010315 ... mikey most people dont understand the bible. thats whats annoying. they grab a SINGLE verse and use it stand alone. to their own advantage. 010315 ... jem the bible can be interpreted as many things. you can prove any point you want with the bible, which is one of the reasons i chose to not fret over that book. if one choses to look into the bible, i think they should do so contextually, considering the time and people it was written for. it was not made for us and our time and i personally think we've grown out of the bible. and keep in mind that the bible was passed on through word of mouth before ever being written. the torah was even coded while Jewish leaders were captive by babylonians. considering the translation, substitution, and contamination of the book, i feel that it should not be taken literally or as religious proof of anything. it does contain some good morals and some historical interest, and should not be discounted fully. "The Bible is a book, but its not the only book." -Inherit the Wind, a 1960 movie based on a 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee. a school teacher taught, against the law of Tennessee, the theory of evolution. the trial is to find him guilty, but is the reflection of the ongoing battle between science and religion, believers of opposite worlds. one of my favourite movies. 010315 ... Aimee The bible is a book I've been trying to read through for years, but seeing as how it can't really be the true bible I can't really get into it. Think about it, there were books that were left out. Someone ultimately decided what we were going to believe. I must agree with Bobby, what if they really did remove some of what Jesus said, because it seemed irrelevant, or maybe just because it was too real and whomever was editting it decided it would be too much for anyone else to hear. You would think that Mary Magdeline (sp?) would have gotten her own part in there too, along with the 2 sisters Mary and Martha, but rather there is only one book by a woman, Ruth and that's before Jesus ever showed up, but however was already prophesied to be coming along eventually. In truth, the bible is not complete, and never will be because of those missing books that have been lost with time... or have they? 010315 ... jem .insert spooky conspiracy music here. 010315 ... silentbob and you're not supposed to add to it either what does that tell you? 010422 ... Lime Rider Yes, so bible is dangerous. But science against religion is also dangerous. Some things of non-materialism and de-hasting (that a word?) of the bible still apply. But it's just a book. Use common sense. Don't focus on the koran, bible. Don't give in to all the applied order. Be nice. 020404 ... lulie My sister and I saw Jesus Christ Superstar about a million times because we thought Jesus was damn cute. 020404 ... silentbob that is SO blasphemous. Jesus didn't have desciples, he had groupies 020404 ... raze i keep meaning to read this, to see if it inspires any interesting imagery in dreams or writing. all i really remember is it has something to do with a long-haired guy, he turned water into something everyone could get drunk on, and you're not supposed to kill people. 140730 ... flux to be honest, i grew up in a reform jew household, with a bit of catholicism thrown in on my mother's side for good measure. i heard the main parts of most of the old testament many times over, but only got a glossing of the new testament from my own gleanings. a woman recently accosted me on the ny subway while i was reading (a_winter's_tale, i think) shortly after i'd been diagnosed w/ depression and medicated, and asked me if i'd ever read "the book". which "the book"? i asked. so i talked to her for a bit, but she made me promise to read the thing, which i suppose i'd been meaning to for a while. and either i'm focusing too much on the weird bits, or it's far less of a reasonable moral compass than i'd ever assumed. endless lying, murder, slavery, and mountains of foreskins. i'm not done poking at it. i've just finished reading the old testament, which is far longer than i'd imagined... but what i can see makes the idea of basing a system of morality on it even more absurd than ever. 140730 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Of all the things to come from the Bible, the word "sodomy" for anal sex is one of the weirdest. 140731 ... e_o_i Let me explain a bit. Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities already slated for destruction because of their general badness. Abraham's relative Lot takes in two guests, who are supposed to be angels warning of this destruction, and then men from the city surround the house and demand the angels be brought out so they can have sex with them. This story and other ceremonial laws seem a pretty shaky basis for anti-gay beliefs, even if you took the Bible somewhat literally. No. Yes... If you took the Bible literally, "sodomy" now should mean "rape threats to angel guests" not "(hopefully consensual) anal sex between people of any gender." And what's Gomorrahmy? Perhaps Rick Santorum has ideas about this? I don't think I'd want to know, in any case. 140731 ... flux the practice seen w.r.t. the angels seems to have survived the destruction of sodom. e.g. judges 19 140801 ... e_o_i Yeah, there are narrative conventions that repeat - even the theologians don't just say "these things happened." I'm not one of those, but it's interesting too on a literary level to have a collection of so many writing genres in one book, even if they're frustrating and don't make sense. That's one of the reasons I'm drawn to The_Atrocity_Exhibition (which I'm slowly reading) and Ulysses (slowly rereading). When I was walking through McGill on the way to their library, someone (part of Hare Krishna or another Hindu offshoot) offered me a free copy of the Baghavad Gita and I didn't even take it. Why not, if someone's giving it to me for free? Silly preoccupied e_o_i. 140806 what's it to you? who go blather from