casting the first stone

I have nothing against stories, I love stories. I like them more for being entertaining than for relating facts. They are useful for providing a framework for discussing ideas, but that’s about it.

What I was talking about as anecdotal evidence was things like somebody cites an instance of somebody foretelling an event that later turns out true and from that concludes that it is possible to foretell the future.

Those early church conferences were not occasions where everybody got together and hammered out their differences, they were basically power politics where the strongest party became the church and the weaker party became the heretics. Maybe like our current day political conventions.

In that next to the last paragraph I can’t tell whether you are speaking for yourself or just explaining what you think the Christians are all about. That whole idea about people being born with the taint of sin is from that awful Augustine who thought it up around 400 AD, linking it to the fall of Adam, which because we are all his descendants we are born with. It is nowhere in the bible.

Well I can’t be sure of that because I am not the biblical scholar that you are. There is that line about he who is without sin casting the first stone, which implies that none of us are without sin, but I don’t think that implies that we come out of the womb with sin on us. I don’t think Jesus ever said that he was going to die for our sins. And that whole idea seems suspect because it implies that if we hadn’t sinned Jesus would never have had to die for us, but then he would probably never have been begotten, because wasn’t that his whole purpose, and if god hadn’t given us the proclivity to sin we wouldn’t have sinned, so doesn’t that make god complicit for the death of his son, but then he didn’t really die, he spent some hours on the cross, but so did a lot of others, so what’s the big deal?

I never understood why pride was a sin? It always seemed like it was one of the best parts of us. Don’t we behave well so that we can be proud of our behavior? Aren’t we always exhorted to show pride in our work? Aren’t we proud to be Americans?

Let me introduce an anecdote from the mouths of babes. A kid, being told that he was here to serve others, then asked, what is everybody else here for then.