Lou FCD
Posts: 5455
Joined: Jan. 2006
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| Quote (Lou FCD @ Feb. 14 2008,16:01) | Well this ain't so very agnosticy.
So much tard, so little time.
Hey. Djy'all know that God gave us the printing press?
ETA: I wasn't gonna, but what the hell. It should be saved (and so should you, apparently).
| Quote (DaveTard the Agnosticator @ 2/14/08, 1:31PM) | cmpilato
If we believe that the account of man’s creation in the image of God in the Garden of Eden is a true account, then we have a picture of what creation was supposed to be like in a state of perfection. No death, no destruction, a paradise of plenty where man and other animals live together in harmony without hurting each other. Man, through the gift of free will, defied God and fell from perfection as a result. Existing apart from God as independent free agents brought death and destruction into the world. God was saddened by this and promised that someday again the world would be restored to a state of perfection where the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, the lion shall eat hay as the oxen, and there would be an end to death and destruction on all the holy mountain. But it was given there’d be a long tough row to hoe between the fall and the restoration. Christ was given to us as a path of redemption in the meantime so that those of us living and dying in the interim could be received before God restored to a state of grace. While Christ lived he set us an example of how to conduct ourselves. Christ didn’t kill things and eat them as near as I can determine. In fact the least ambiguous case is where he is described as eating meat is after the resurrection when he nibbled on a piece of fish to prove he was real and not an apparition to one of the disciples. There’s also some controversy which appears valid that even then it’s questionable if he ate meat as the word for “fish” in ancient Aramaic can describe any edible product from the sea including both plants and animals. Objections to Christ the Vegetarian usually take the form of inference in that Christ was a practicing Jew and must have eaten meat in the performance of Jewish ritual. But even that’s debatable as the Jewish sect he was possibly born into, the Essenes, were very arguably vegetarians. We have further support of this in the various Christian monastic orders that have practiced strict vegetarianism in ancient times right up through the modern day.
Being a vegetarian in the past was a difficult if not practically impossible thing. If that had been a strict requirement of Christianity it would have died on the vine or at least been restricted in scope to monks and monestaries. In my opinion eating meat was edited into the transcript as a matter of practicality in spreading the religion to those who would otherwise reject it.
The connundrum we are left with is a clear vision of God’s creation in a state of perfection which is definitely vegetarian, a savior who lived a sinless life as man and God together who for all the witnessed evidence we have was argualy a vegetarian, various ancient and modern day Christian monastic orders who are vegetarians, and for most of the rest of us a life where we are red in tooth and claw like a lion rather than free of blood like an innocent lamb.
Of course the story goes that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross absolves of us sin and that would include the unnecessary slaughter of animals to consume their flesh. But that doesn’t mean we should be reveling in the killing. We’re supposed to do our best to live a life free of sin. If one accepts the possibility that animal slaughter is indeed a sin then the safe bet is not to do it if hedonistic pleasure is the only real motivation for it. I don’t want to find myself standing before God someday explaining why I took the lives of things when it wasn’t necessary. Do you want to take that risk?
That’s my take on it anyway and it’s as valid as anyone else’s. God gave us the printing press so we could all read the bible for ourselves and not have it interpreted and dictated to us by an elite few. This is the basis of the Protestant Reformation, the idea that we can each have a direct relationship with our God and Savior without going through the self-annointed intermediaries of the Catholic clergy and all its ritualistic practices. It’s what being born-again is all about. Sincerely invite the Lord to come into your heart and He will. From that point on just follow what’s in your heart. What’s in mine is deep compassion and empathy for the pain and suffering of other living things. The only deep desire I have is to help and heal the innocent not kill and eat them. I’m far from perfect but I try. Unless it was an act of compassion to end suffering I’ve never killed a warm blooded creature and I’ve become so averse to killing that I gave up fishing. If I don’t need to kill anything I don’t although I make an exception for more annoying insect pests and even then I take no pleasure at all in it. If something is already dead I’m not averse to eating it but I won’t kill for food unless there’s no other choice and in this day and age and place where I live it’s quite easy to avoid killing for food. There’s no compelling reason for it other than hedonism. I won’t disagree that meat tastes really good. I like a good steak as much as anyone else but if had to kill the cow I’d be out-of-luck. If it dies of natural causes I’d butcher and barbeque it. It would be a waste of perfectly good meat that the cow no longer needs. |
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Took me a while to find it, but I wanted to put that comment in the context of this classic bit of DaveTard (emphasis mine):
| Quote (DaveTard the Agnosticator @ August 9, 2006 at 2:48 am) | | Josh is right about me banning him. He was close to the first! Tribune7 can’t be him unless he got a new IP address. I caught Josh “The Cunt” Bozeman in several guises by his IP address. Josh was guilty of way too much bible thumping. I can only give so much leeway to a book written 2000 years ago by lice ridden beduins, after all. Especially after 9/11. Everyone knows those Arab beduins are a bunch of liars that like buggering camels and young boys but won’t admit it. |
ETA: This was DaveTard a few comments later (Italics in the original, he was quoting JanieBelle):
| Quote | Jesus Christ, you’re dense.
JanieBelle McKnight you stop calling Jesus dense right this minute! Shame on you. Just because he was a lice ridden beduin doesn’t mean he was dense. |
Edited by Lou FCD on Feb. 22 2008,08:58
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“Why do creationists have such a hard time with commas?
Linky“. ~ Steve Story, Legend
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