Jesus Camp

Maybe so. But there's often more fiction that fact.

 

n.t. ...new testament ,sry....fairy tales are well codified in the usa ..hansel and gretel ,jack and beanstalk,goldilocks...lil red rideing hood...none of those are made up in ones imagination ...mythology ..to most of us in the west means zeus ,posidon ,hercules...ect.....greek thought ,government,democracy...IS the cradle of the west, micrus ..my point about religion is that it acts a reason to fight...most of the worlds ethnic tension comes from which dogma one is imprinted with as a child...my mom tried to make me a good roman catholic...it just didnt take .

 

I can't speak for the Koran, but that ain't true for the Bible. Large chunks of the NT were written by people who had actually met Jesus...

Sadly this is how it has worked out.

Funny, isn't it, how people can see "Love thy neighbour" and take it as "but only if he is exactly the same as you", despite all the parables etc to the contrary, :roll:

This is one of the things that gets me really het up. I would like to invent a time machine to go back and slap a few people...

 

Interesting reading.
My point of view:
OK bible (NT) was written 2000 years ago old Testament is even older. It must be taken in this historical context. One also must not neglect that bible was "cleaned" up by official church (Chatolic, Orthodox...) to prove some points that had nothing with religion but had more to do with power over poeple and rulers.
This new christian fundamentalism (basicly all religious fundamentalists) realy bothers me becouse i think that religion must be taken with open mind and with a bit of rational thought (i.e. by using ones own brain).
Last time we saw christian fundamentalism in Europe on such large scale was in middle ages. And we all know what that means. From those times we now understand that religion and belivers can be twisted to do the bidding of some corrupt individuals. One can not so easily twist those who think and not so blindly obey commands of their "religious" leaders. Poeple shoud understand that they don't have gray matter between their ears for nothing (i.e. God gave you your brain so you can use it).

 

TISO, this is quite a rare occurance, but I actually agree with pretty much all you have written there.

However, one should not forget that 'Fundamental' does not necessarily equal 'violent nutjob'.

a Fundamentalist is one who returns to the Fundamentals of something, thus a Fundamentalist Christian is one who lives his whole life by what Jesus summed up as the 2 greatest commandments:

1) Love the Lord your God
2) Love your neighbour as yourself

Anybody who does not live by that (or who does not strive to live like that) is not a Fundamentalist, and in fact can easily be classed as 'not a Christian'.

 

Very interesting is the fact that Pope Urban II actually let the phrase "Love thy neighbour" to be interpreted this way during his speech at the Council of Clairveaux...

 

He is high on my list of people who need a slap.

I would love to have 5 minutes of theologcal debate with the guy...

 

I'm getting prompted to ask...

Who's next in the list?

 

Pretty much anybody who did something similar. Which sadly means a sizeable proportion of the Church leaders through history

 

I don't know if I can speak for anybody else on this topic, but personally I mock Christianity precisely because I know more about it than I do about any other religion. It is the only belief that I can claim to really know the fundamental issues and premises of, and since these still do not sound convincing to me, I mock them sometimes. However, my mockery is not intended to insult a religion, most often it is meant to make people consider exactly what it is they are believing in, because it is precisely that which I am poking fun at.

As much as I respect everyone's right to say what they want, I always put a reasonable and argued post before a loose and unsupportable statement, and I will always put knowledge before belief as a means of supporting a statement. This may be why I come across as highly cynical towards all matters of religion, but rest assured that I am not trying to limit your freedom or deride you in expressing your beliefs.

About the New Testament - some parts were indeed written by people who had known Jesus personally, but then, some parts were written by people who had never met him, even people who didn't live in his time. All these people (especially Paul of course) gave their own spin on the events and ideas they were told of. Finally there is a big chunk of New Testament that was written by a man in hallucinatory trance of some sort - and his writing seems to reflect his state. I am not saying that for these reasons the words of the New Testament can be written off entirely as untrue, but it does show that we need to look at them with caution and scepticism.

 

If Jehovah's Witnesses have the right to tell you that Christianity is the way, then I have the right to tell you it isn't.

 

forensic text,handwritting experts today can contend that much of the gospel as ascribed to one writer ie. paul or luke was in fact often written by 2 or 3 different writers..the good book has been tampered with many times...what today reads "a servant shall obey his master " used to read a SLAVE shall obey..the old book was used by southern proslavery advocates to point out that god and christianity was quite nonplussed about owning slaves...of course once the south was defeated in 1864 ALL new bibles in the usa used the term" servant"...you can rest assured that this isnt the only time text was changed for convenience.....THE BOOK OF MORMAN WAS WRITTEN BY A GUY peering into the darkness of his top hat and reciteing to his freind the text god had emailed him..(comeplete with grammer errors and lots of misspellings) apparently god also gave him a tablet made of solid gold with lots of text too..when people asked him to show them the golden tablet ,he led them back to the woods where he left it ...but dang it!...it was no longer there....pesky indians,prolly

 

There is a difference between the originals and the later copies that we have found, which probably were all copied out by one man, many years after the events. And yes, 2,000 years of copying, translations* and darn politics have resulted in a plethora of different translations. Which is why most Christians will have a variety of different translations to hand, and why looking at the Greek words used in the earliest known versions is becoming so popular these days.

* This is the big one, how do you translate not only across language but also across culture and time? Adages and sayings that would make perfect sense to a 1st Century Jew (or Greek, or...) generally make a 21st Century reader slightly puzzled.


As to people like Paul putting their own slant on things... yes and no.

The letters were written to specific churches with specific advice in them. While most of it is 100% applicable in all situations, it all really needs to be looked at in the context of the needs of the church it was sent to, otherwise some of it seems to be slightly odd. A good example of this (it is argued) is the whole thing about women being church leaders...

 

there is plenty of misogony in christian doctrine...i think self enforced celebacy is bound to make any guy a little bit nutso when it comes to the subject of women...get thy jiggleing points and curves out of my sight evil jezebel!....the soft timbre of their voices and sway of their hips as they walk makes me break out in a cold sweat.....harlot temptresses!!! its all their fault..... { this is why god hates women } ..notice its always the celibate catholic priests who keep getting caught whith their ...er ...hands in the altar boy cookie jar.....and .not the married reverands...hopefully ,ricky,one day we can be openminded accepting ,and kind to women ....you know ,more like the muslims...

 

The Bible was written long before Christian monks began living in celibacy, since this very concept was (correct me if I'm wrong) introduced by Saint Augustine, who practiced it himself. It is likely that celibacy itself was a result rather than a cause of Christian writings about women.

And if you think living in celibacy without going mad is impossible, you obviously haven't tried. In the Middle Ages, an average of 15-20% of the population never had children - not all of those went mad, surely...

 

Smeg.

What J.W's pedal is NOT Christianity.

 

david...they arent jews ,muslims ,hindus or satanists...what are the j.w.s if not christian ....what i always hear them going on about is the bible ad nauseum...

 

J.W's if u really want to be pedantic,doesn't even practice christianity.

The last i heard,there are many people who creates their own religion and mentions Jesus and God,but do we call them Christians?

 

The book the J.W's use is a corrupted & altered version of the Bible.

I don't really feel qualified to say exactly what J.W is, only what it isn't. And it isn't Christianity.
Perhaps it is a sect or cult. :-?

A book I once read by an ex J.W, near the top of the organisation, claimed that Jehovah is a profit making organisation, with it's H.Q near the Brooklyn bridge in N.Y.
The organisation asks it's members for 30% of their income. (A Biblical tithe is 10%).

Certainly the organisation is not what it seems. A few years ago, when I lived in Weymouth, I was contacted by letter, by a recent ex-member, who used to door knock us. In his letter, he apologised to us (He sent a letter to every person he could ever remember door knocking) for misleading us with his J.W doctrines.

 

well..it seems to me that devout christians have been murdering each other in droves since martin luther broke away from rome ...not unlike the shiia and sunni sects of iraq today ,over what would seem rather minor differences in doctrine and procedure.....i would guess the authors of the original ot and nt would be quite puzzled by much of the modern king james bible were they able to view it today...