Christianity began 800 years before Jesus? Since he was the inspiration for it, that's a pretty neat trick. Which method of time travel was used?
"Lost in the weeds"?
I'm not blind to how religion affects people. Some religious people are actually not hypocrites. They don't do despicable things six days a week and think everything's okay because some preacher or priest forgives them on Sunday. Some of them actually keep the vows they made at their weddings. Some of them actually
don't use the bible as an excuse to discriminate against other people, or insult them, or (here's the biggie!)
kill them. And some religious people can do all this without bragging about it.
The ones who can't seem to do these things are in the majority, in my experience. They're hypocrites. They mouth the words but don't practice what they preach, harass women at clinics, go doorknocking and insist on inflicting their preaching on people at 8 am, make laws to prevent women from accessing adequate health care, scream and rant about non-heterosexual people wanting to marry and adopt children, impose their own views on patients who want a dignified, assisted death by refusing to allow it or refer the patient to another doctor/facility (apparently they believe, like Mother Teresa, that suffering is "beautiful"), and they can't seem to understand basic ethics or honor.
You know what one of the things that put me off religion at a very early age was? Some school kid puffed out her chest and said, "I'm BETTER than you, because I'm CATHOLIC." As if that makes a good person. Henry VIII was Catholic some of the time, when he wasn't something else, and there were times when it varied from day to day depending on what his mood was in the given moment, and he had two of his wives murdered (might as well say three, since his abominable treatment of Catherine of Aragon led to her death), and he was planning to have his sixth wife killed - luckily for her, he died before he could carry through with it. And all because they either couldn't provide him with a healthy son, or they broke their own marriage vows (something Henry did regularly with all of his wives), or in the case of Catherine Parr, she dared to have her own opinions about religion and wrote books about it.
yourself. If you don't want to give that impression, you should choose your words more carefully.
Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds? Somebody believes in God and suddenly someone can just magic up a pile of fish and bread out of nothing? That's
Star Trek: The Next Generation and
Star Trek: Voyager. Check out the episodes where a couple of greedy Ferengi got stranded in the Delta Quadrant and found a planet of gullible people who revered them for being able to create stuff out of nothing. Turns out they had a Federation replicator and used it to make the locals believe they were gods.
At this point you're going to do "rolleyes" at me and accuse me of being literal, right? So explain what
metaphorical thing is being talked about by the multiplying of fish and bread. It's a gathering, there wasn't enough food, Jesus snapped his fingers and POOF! Suddenly there's enough food. If that's really a thing, why do these supposedly loving supernatural beings let famines go on? Aren't modern Africans worth zapping up some food to at least keep the kids from starving? Funny how the miracles slowed to a crawl and then stopped, as more sophisticated BS detectors were developed over the centuries.
BS. Augustus was real. The Emperor referred to in the "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" is Tiberius, Augustus' successor. King Herod was real (although he was already dead by the time Jesus was said to have been born, so there goes that whole "kill the male children born in such-and-such a year" schtick; remarkably similar to the Moses story, right?). Evidence was found to confirm the existence of Pontius Pilate.
But these individuals being real is no reason to expect people to accept the nonsense of a virgin giving birth ("God got me pregnant" sounds a lot like Zeus and Leda... or a story made up to cover an unintended pregnancy that was achieved the normal way... or just a normal birth that was embellished), or the other "miracles."
Never assume you know my goals, because it's abundantly clear that you really don't have a clue. They're the same as they've always been, whether we're discussing religion or a long list of other things you and I have discussed - or tried to discuss - over the years.
People can believe whatever they want. But to shoehorn religious fantasy into science classes, law courts, parliaments (and other places where elected officials draft bills intended to become laws, government policies pertaining to health, marriage, adoption, the environment, sex education classes, and so many other public areas is just not ethical.
Did you know that in my province, Catholic schools are allowed to violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and discriminate in their hiring practices? They claim that it would be against
their Charter rights to have to hire non-Catholics, but please explain to me why a math teacher or a phys. ed. teacher or a janitor would need to be Catholic. Math is math, no matter the religion of the person teaching it or the student learning it, gym classes presumably don't require religion (although there's a lot of "thankyoujesus" that goes on when an athlete wins a race or game; I wonder if these same people are bothered when Jesus doesn't feed the starving people in Africa or turn the hurricane aside - probably not; after all, a race is
much more important, right?), and why would a janitor need to be Catholic? Is he or she expected to pray the dirt away?
My
goal is to get the fantasy out of these areas. As I said in one of my comments on CBC.ca earlier, religion has no place in Parliament. It also has no place in the laboratories, or the courts, or a doctor sticking his nose in the air and preaching at a terminally-ill cancer patient who would prefer to die with dignity and not be forced to suffer because of "God's will." It has no place with nurses refusing to provide proper care to women who have had an abortion.
