Quote Originally Posted by Oneironaut
Well, I think most civilized people would say that killing people to keep your tribe pure is a morally disgusting act. The Germans tried that once. Didn't go over so well.

These are not people who did anything morally objectionable. They had premarital sex or male homosexual sex, they worked on the Sabbath or disobeyed their parents. Such people do not deserve the death penalty, no matter what tribe you come from. As far as I'm concerned, this is not a matter of debate. If I killed someone for doing any of these things, I would be punished, and rightly so, because that would be a case of senseless murder.

I don't really see how the two can really be reconciled. It's just mythology. When stories are told and retold about mythological figures, details change. Whether it's Osiris or Mithra or Hercules or Jesus, no two accounts of a worshipped figure are exactly the same story, and that's exactly what we should expect from any ancient mythological scriptures, be they Hindu or Jewish or Zoroastrian or whatever.

These aren't real stories of shit that actually happened. People don't really walk on water, rise from the dead, and cure people by exorcising demons out of them. Why should the Bible be considered literally true but not the Bhagavad Gita or the works of Homer? There is no objective reason to prefer one over the others.
well then clearly you came into the question with an enormous weight of preconception, and weren't really open to an answer in the first place; i'm not sure about everything bobby is saying, but you can't apply your preconceptions to this question first, and then ask for an answer; you assume that from the first that these things are impossible, so what kind of argument could be made to dissuade that view?

i hope you're wise enough to understand this; your preconceptions are blocking the objective searching for an answer. of course this could easily be said for the christians too; their preconceptions that the bible is from god and true, could block their searching for an objective answer

it's hard, but taking a step back and looking at the whole thing, without church, without sunday school, without carl sagan, is what's needed; but it is very difficult to do that.