Originally Posted by
Tarzan
Back when I was about 10 years old I had a paper route. Me and a few other guys would meet up at about 4:30-5 AM and load up our bikes to go deliver papers. I made friends with one of the guys that also had a paper route, Wayne... that's how we met.
Up to this point in my life I had been raised completely devoid of religion in any form although I was a 4.0 student and had literary and math skills beyond anyone else my age due to intense additional studies at home via my mother. I was invited to go to church with my friend Wayne and his family one day so I took them up on it. It was a southern Baptist church and oh BOY could I tell these people were heavy duty into this stuff! By about the 2nd or 3rd week of going with them, the Pastor gave the ol' "Fire and brimstone burning in hell you vile sinner" speech! He gave a graphic lecture in which he described hell as a physical place (under evil Satan's leadership) and described it well enough that you would have thought he had gotten the guided tour of the place! He went on for about an hour or two and went into great details of Heaven, Hell, the pitfalls of hell, etc., etc. He topped it off with how if you just play your cards right, when you croak, you go to this other place that is the EXACT opposite of hell where all is wonderful and you get to hang out and have tea and crumpets with Jesus, etc., etc....
I was alarmed, devastated even! How had I not heard about all this before now if it was all so critical!!!! I went to my mother, just about crying and asked about this whole thing. She instructed me to not believe everything I hear at face value and to study extensively on my own, making an objective evaluation rather than being coerced into any belief system. Still quite alarmed, I read the bible and studied various religious outlooks for some years to try to come up with conclusions. The more I read and evaluated in detail, the more I came to realize that a whole lot of this just didn't add up and make sense and there was much that was either open to interpretations or flat out falsehoods that didn't pan out. There were also "differing views" of various religions that completely contradicted one another. Eventually and not without intense studies on the subject, I ended up going with the idea of religion as being "War and genocide throughout recorded history based on differing imaginary friends".
At this point in time all these years later, scientific studies and exploration, physical evidence, forensic evidence and empirical data all seem to show that the bible was written by mere mortal human beings who put together this book based on their very limited understanding of the universe around them at that period in history.
Organized religion even went out of their way to stifle and hold back scientific studies and advancement for as long as they possibly could for they feared it would undermine them or disprove them! When Galileo said, "Uhmm, gee guys... it really looks like earth is not the center of the universe and that it's a planet not unlike the other planets that orbit the sun" and put this in writing, he was immediately put under house arrest and told that if he did not retract his statement, he would be imprisoned, tortured or put to death for "Crimes against God"!
There were others, why just look up Hypatia of ancient Alexandria. She was a scholar, a mathematician and worse yet a WOMAN scholar whom the early Christian movement (around 400 AD) saw as a threat so she was brutally killed by a mob run by a guy who was later named a SAINT!hahaha PRAISE JESUS! Scientific advancement was seen as a threat to the absolute power that organized religion had at the time for fear it may come up with findings that would undermine them, so they dealt with these threats severely.
Now we know. The earth is not the center of the universe. As a matter of fact our entire solar system is but a tiny speck among billions of other stars and solar systems on the outskirts of one galaxy. Our one galaxy is but another tiny speck in a sea of galaxies, hundreds of billions of them! Our entire solar system is about 4.6 billion years old in a universe that is estimated to be over 14 billion years old. Not only is none of this information in the bible (as it would have been if God himself had a hand in writing this book, I mean, why would he leave this stuff out, right?) but the bible's account for the "beginnings" are completely different from what we now know for a fact to be true derived by scientific method rather than myth and superstition. No, the bible was obviously written by mortal human beings without any help from "divinity" because it lays things out in accordance with what man's concepts and levels of understanding of the world around us were at the time. If God himself had truly "inspired" what was written in the bible his knowledge base of the universe would have provided information that went beyond the very limited understanding of the universe that humans had at the time. If God created the universe specifically for man whom he created in his image, then what the heck is all that extra real estate for?
What if man's archaic beliefs that we humans are the sole "masters of the universe" since we have a "soul" and we were created in the image of a divinity by a divinity are completely false? What if other life forms are relatively prolific throughout the universe as the staggering mathematical logic of it all would dictate? We have proven that the "building blocks of life" are in fact free floating in space from analysis of meteorological specimens. In our solar system it took 4.6 billion years to come up with a (somewhat) technologically advanced species (us)... but other places in the universe has had a considerable head start on us, leaving lots of options for other intelligent life in the universe. It becomes pretty clear that all is not what it seems or what is depicted in the bible and in the rhetoric of religion.
Let's take a moment to step away from the logical factors and the scientific evidence factors that all add to up an overwhelming result and take a hard look at the geographical and common sense factor!
Interestingly enough, back in biblical times a particular geographical region, namely Europe and the Middle East, only knew Christianity. If almighty Jesus who was the son of God and could do miracles and had God backing him up with all this, why weren't they able to reach the Americas, where Native Americans had no knowledge of Jesus, had never read a bible had no concept of God in the manner that the Christians did? How about Australia who had only the aborigines for a very long time before any whites ever came there? Nope... they never heard about Jesus until a white man came ashore waving a bible around at them! The truth is that many of these people had never seen a white man or some of the more advanced technology they had (at least compared to their own); They were unlike anything these people had ever seen or known of and some of these people even thought the white man WAS some sort of God THEMSELVES (at first)! They got their rude awakening once they got fully indoctrinated in Jesus... and then conquered.
Communication capabilities of God and Jesus should be miraculous and all that, correct? If Christianity was a man-made thing it would be limited to the geographical regions it could be spread to that were in contact with each other (often by force by the way, get in with Jesus or die by our hand because we are in good with Jesus).
Now if God and Jesus handled it all, well that's different! All the people's of the world would have had Jesus and God show up to them all about the same time as the capabilities of such miracle-performing beings could EASILY do, right? How could the internet, twitter and Facebook today have more communications capability worldwide than God and Jesus did back then, right?
· Christianity spread by word of mouth, by a movement that gathered steam as it went. It essentially started as a small cult and grew, spreading rather quickly because to not convert to Christianity back in those days (or to whatever "powers that be") often meant bad things were going to happen to you! God and Jesus did not kill you for not going with the whole Jesus plan... mortal humans did as they were "doing God's work". The expansion of Christianity was however limited to the geographical regions it could spread to easily enough via the conventional means of mortal humans at the time.
After white Europeans started coming to the new world, the Americas they pushed it hard there also--- Why hadn't Jesus and God have already BEEN to the Americas and told Native Americans all about Jesus though????
That is unless you want to go with some of Joseph Smith's little twists on it all because he proclaimed the garden of Eden was actually in Missouri and that God himself told him that! This only adds to the contradiction factor though... and we are sticking with the common sense angle on this.
Common sense tells us that obviously Facebook, Twitter, Satellite TV and modern communications mediums work much more efficiently than God and Jesus did "back in the day", which is odd because you wouldn't think that God and Jesus, who created and run the entire universe would have geographical obstacles in communications on one tiny little planet and that is something only mere mortal humans would find an obstacle during these time periods!
The truth is that geographical separations of humanity allowed for completely different belief systems to form in geographical regions isolated from one another that were completely foreign to each other. Man's curiosity and trying to make sense of the world around him, explain elements of nature in the world around him led to many varied unfounded, unproven theories that became bona fide religions over time, all with supernatural, mythical qualities about them because they lacked rational or scientific explanations of the world around them.
Had I written this publicly just a few hundred years ago, I would have been burned at the stake.
My religious beliefs or lack thereof
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WTF? You mean to say Jesus ignored China, Burma, Bangladesh, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Taiwan and god knows who else? Double WTF? Are you suggesting Jesus was a dork? I mean WHY did he apparently ignore all those... AND Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and AUSTRALIA? Frankly, I reckon - like the christians and jews - you made it all up. 
Your verdict would have been GUILTY; sentenced to death by fire (so that no blood would be spilled. That would have been after some Dominican or Franciscan priests tortured the bejesus and crap outta you.) 
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