bwahaha

funny, but I would never trade porn for a bible.

I would argue that sex has been the inspiration for a great many more of the significant pieces of art in history, be it books, painting and sculpture, and especially music.

And far fewer wars.

it's trading one fantasy world for another.

The basic ideals of the Bible are fine. Don't kill, etc. However, the Christian Church has skewed it, and if you actually read it, you'll find several contradictions, and very confusing rhetoric. Either way, the Bible isn't the problem, it's the people propagandizing it.



On a side note, funny story. I was sitting in Panera with my boyfriend Vaughn, my best friend Chrissy, and her current toy Bryan. We were sitting there bashing on the Catholic Church and the hypocrisy of it and most of the Christian religions.... when this slightly past middle age woman asks us if we were Christians. We felt so bad! She looked so mild mannered and earnest. So while normally we'd have said "Hell no", we politely said no, and that we were simply having a scholarly discussion. We busted out laughing once she left.

i wonder what i could get for an "adventure bible"

Certainly that's a factor, but I wasn't necessarily saying it was a majority. Just that if you look at art history, the subject of most great paintings up until a certain era was religious.

That's really because the Church was the only place that had the money to pay an artist to make something.

Whether this demonstration is serious or tongue-in-cheek, it paints Atheists in a bad light, with sweeping brushstrokes, and the resulting portrait lacks definition. There are as many types of Atheist as there are those who have some sort of spiritual or religious belief, and my guess is that these students are the worst kind – ignorant hedonists who are more interested in varieties of marijuana than in Atheism as a philosophy. [Yes, I do realize that I have just smeared hedonism and hedonists unfairly and stereotypically.] At any rate, I am usually offended that I and my fellow Atheists must be thrown in with the likes of this particular student group.

Now, I for one consider the Bible itself to be one of the world’s greatest books, and its story the richest of myths, particularly the Gospels. If you pick up a Red Letter edition and find a significant portion of those parts in red to be words that you should not live by, well, then I can only think you must be an evil person who does not value peace and love. To take such a book and condemn it as a negative force is the sort of thinking that caused the Cultural Revolution; fundamentally good people such as Mao can go down in history as monsters, all their good works overshadowed, because of such thinking. I don’t believe that books are negative forces. Mein Kampf sits right next to Night in one of my bookcases, which is as it should be; I seriously doubt Elie Wiesel ever burned a book.

There are many ways in which spiritual and religious belief are negative forces. Fundamentally, if the basis of one’s life is false, all the rest comes falling down just like in the Biblical parable of the house built on sand. The malicious part, though, comes in the nature of power, in the way institutions of power can use people’s false belief to manipulate them to commit acts of evil, e.g., fighting in a war. IMHO, the most evil government in history has been the Roman Catholic Church, at least so in the history of the West.

My suggestion to these students is that they go make some eggnog just overflowing with whiskey or rum or whatever, sit down and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas and/or Scrooge and/or It’s a Wonderful Life a few dozen times, making certain that supply of eggnog never dwindles. Then, they should go to bed, sober up, get up the next morning and find a Bibles-for-porn campaign and try actually reading the Bible they receive, and ask themselves if, taken as myth, it is really such a bad thing.

Hmm, the christian union at my university is currently having an advertising drive with a photo of clubbers on fire and the slogan "I can't wait to go to hell, all my mates will be there" Yoink.

now, see, if it was me it would be more like a "thump your bible at me, in exchange for i chop your head off" program. but that's just me, not all atheists.

Because bibles for science books is just not as appealing.