jefferiah

What are the perceived hate crimes?

Jennie, you are beginning to act like a spoiled child on just about every thread you post on. Not only that but you are becoming rather self-deluded. Everyone else is a white supremacist because they don't agree with you, and you seem to think that you are so important that people feel a need to attack you. You are flattering yourself. You make a claim there is a video of this or that, and then you don't back it up. When people point this out, you do not come back with a good answer but with another allegation of white supremacy or something like that. When someone presents an argument or a question you cannot or sometimes blatantly refuse to answer your only comeback is another allegation. You, Jennie, have been publically denigrating this chat site. And you know as well as I do that you are going overboard.

Oh please, arguing that Lord Durham's picture ought not to have taken down is not hatred, nor is it or should it ever be illiegal.

Wow thats a quite a piece of evidence.

If you don't agree with certain people that makes you a white supremacist didn't you know.

The Gospel of Matthew 19:4. Who answering, said to them: Have ye not read, that he who made man from the beginning, made them male and female? And he said: 19:5. For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh. 19:6. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. In all Jesus definitions of marriage and union, male and female are present Jazzer. Why didn't he mention homosexuality? Perhaps, as you say, a mute Jesus doesn't cut it.

I would say your own view is quite the assumption. In fact it is an assumption that comes into play almost 2000 years after the fact. If he did not commend stoning the adulteress or plucking out the eye of your enemy, what does that say about his view of harsh punishment. You are mixing up the moral with punishment. Two different things. It seems quite apparent to me that he would not mention homosexuality. Why on Earth would the topic come up when it was commonly accepted to be a sin in Judean society? There would be no need to mention it. Just as there is no need to mention everything else that is a sin. Jesus preached love and forgiveness of what???? Sin. So did Paul. But the fact that sin can be forgiven does not mean that sin is no longer sin.

You can choose to interpret differently. And I would disagree. And that would be the end of it. Some churches do consider it acceptable. I am not going to make a big war over that, or even over some guy in a Harry Potter book. For my part all I ask is that the belief of homosexuality being a sin will remain uncensored for those who choose to believe it and wish to say this is what our faith or our sect says. If pork eating is acceptable to many of us we certainly do not blow a gasket over a Jew believing that pork is unclean. And on the flip side I dont think that the assessment of pork being unclean means that a Jew is a pork-eater-hater.

Its funny you should mention this one case since the New Testament states that gentile circumcision is not required.

If it were not a big deal for him then it makes no sense that he never mentioned it. Having grown up in a religious culture where homosexuality was considered wrong you would think he would have cleared that one up Jazzer. Your logic here is a bit backward. His non-mention of the mores concerning this seem to speak volumes about his support for the idea of it being a sin, rather than the opposite. He would not mention it because the idea of it being a sin was a given. However, when it came to things such as putting to much emphasis on ritual cleanliness he was quite outspoken.

That's true too. There were various schisms. And I think that council was called mainly because of certain sect called Arianism, not to be confused with white supremacists. So while there is a great deal of conjecture about how certain things were decided upon here and certain things were tossed from the mainline faith, and what was tossed it is no more than conjecture. I think that probably the most orthodox of the ideas and that the most orthodox of the books in the Canon were probably chosen with good reason. Things like the Gospel of Thomas for example. Having read that I think you can easily say its sort of an odd man out. It reads less like the Gospels and more like Khalil Gibran's The Prophet. No story, just a bunch of The Master said this and this and this.

Excellent work Dancer. And I am pretty sure this bit about Constantine ordering Eusebius to write a new New Testament and to merge this Hesus with Krishna did not come from the Catholic Encyclopedia either. As KENGs pointed out there was persecution of Christians well before the Council of Nicea and that in order for this religion to have become so popular by this point it had to have existed and had an established doctrine well before this point. Rue is trying to say that after generations of regular believers, Constantine then changes the religion and apparently no one notices. Now I sort of think Rue might be kind of on the right track with the centralized power thing, but that he is getting the wrong conclusion...or perhaps a bit of an exaggerated one. That's just my opinion. At this point, after we know that there have been generations of Christians (who in order to be Christians must have some idea of what it is Christians believe and what the theology is basically about). We also know that these Christians were probably quite serious about what it is they believed because they were willing to die for it. And now all of a sudden these serious Christians who refused to change their religion in the face of death, just readily accept Rue's Eusebian New Testament with Hesus and Krishna. I don't buy that myself. But what I do buy is that since Christians were surviving and the religion was spreading that there may have been attempts among the powerful to ride the coattails. You can't actually change the theology with a few pen strokes because believers will notice it. But power can be gleaned by making additional documents. There is very little in the New Testament which would be ideal for solidifying great political power. In fact the philosopher Aldous Huxley (and others who were his contemporaries in sci-fi rather than philosophy) seemed to be of the opinion that such a book would have to be destroyed or hidden from the public in order for absolute power to be solidified. But if the Christians could not be persecuted, and if one could not change their faith on them, perhaps one could add to it. The ideal dogma to be used for consolidating power is not to have people believe in some Jewish guy. Its to have the Godman head of State. If you can't sell to the people that such a Godman exists. Perhaps you can attempt to give the Jewish Godman they do believe in an infallible representative (a Governor General if you will ) on Earth.

Citation please.

Well, Rue, I guess you just won. You are a bigger man than I am . And you were right to call me out on the "you lose". Thanks for the compliments and the criticisms, Rue.

That still is quite a different matter from coming up with an exact date. Where his conjectured dates fall somewhere a little (a little considering it was 2 millenia ago) outside of the natural lifespan of the people of the day, it is not difficult for one to make the argument that the margin of error would allow for the non-existent original to have been written within the apostle's lifetime.

They actually ask on the poll "Do you consider Harper to be a Westerner?"

You are missing the major point here. I said the conjectured date of the "earliest known" edition. The earliest known edition is rarely ever the original when we are discussing ancient literature. So if there is some margin of error even for this "earliest known" edition of which we possess a concrete material copy (which is not likely to be an original given the parallels to the wealth of other cases of ancient literature--Tacitus' "Annals", Homer's "Illiad" etc.) How much greater is that margin of error when you attempt to guess the date of the missing original?

Look I am not trying to convince you of anything. I just telling you. 100 years of scholarly research or 1000 years of scholarly research---makes no difference. If you could live for a million years hence and do scholarly research all that time, there is no way you can surmise from an existing edition the date of a non-existent original that was written close to 2000 years prior to your own birth-unless you possess some paranmoral ability to see into the past. The earliest known copy of John is dated to about 100-150 A.D. Now I don't think anyone would ever say that because it is the earliest one they have that there is any definite proof that it is the original. In fact the chances of that one copy being the original would be pretty slim. That copy can be carbon dated with some margin of error. But it is a much much more inexact task when you attempt to take this copy and surmise at what time the original copy from which this one was descended was written (when no one actually possesses this parent document). And if there are even some rough techniques for doing so, the margin of error is going to be that much greater. The lines get much more blurry. Your lifespan argument dwindles. Once again I point out, a great deal of ancient literature, even some which is conjectured to have been originally written after the conjectured period for the earliest New Testament books, does not appear in existing earlist known copy form until centuries after.

But there is no amount of scholarly research which can affirmatively attest to the New Testament originals being written 100 years after Christ. You are not going to waste your time convincing me, because you can't. You know that. The earliest known copies of the Illiad appear about a millenium after when it is conjectured the original was written. Another interesting thing you must take into account is that not so long after the life of the apostles....100 years or a little more, you have appearance of some of these "earliest known" texts. Why is that important? Because it is not one copy that springs into existence at this point in time, there are a vast wealth of copies. In order for something like this to have spread and become this important that within such a short time frame we would have a wealth of New Testament, there must have been some considerable passing of time in order for the original to have gained that much import. Remember that they didn't have photo copy machines in those days. Basically we have the presence of many known copies coming into existence with a few generations after the lives of the apostles. For a great many other ancient texts we have a period ranging from 5 to perhaps 10 centuries between the date the original was written and the first known copies.

"It would be impossible for the gospels to have been written by their original apostles in many cases because some were not put to paper until well over a hundred years after Jesus's death." This is what you said. The conjectured date of an earliest "known" edition means nothing.

I did not misrepresent what he said. Read M. Dancer's post above where he addresses this fact quite plainly. Jawapunk maintained that it is impossible for any of the Gospels to have been written within 100 years of his death. Read his posts Rue. I made no claim as to when. I simply pointed out to him that there is no absolute proof of that claim. And that providing the date of some known early editions means very little.

Oh there there. I am sure you will survive the horror.

Yes, and no matter what degree of effort and intellect they exert in this pursuit there is going to be some considerable margin of error. It is not an exact science.

Oh. And who is pushing religion down your throat?

Ah but you understand that in the absence of original texts (indeed how would one even be aware if one was the original because parchments usually do not have First Edition written on them) that scholarly opinion 2000 years later is subject to some considerable margin of error. Given that, it is you who is spouting opinion--since I have made no claim as to the date of the Gospels and you have. Also you are making the claim that Jesus was gay which is essentially based on nothing. That is another opinion you have spouted. The ability to say which people from two millenia ago were gay is quite a talent. Why are you here posting with us? You could be making millions.