Gis, you make several points that I think are fair and deserving of a response, but we both know the rabbit hole this usually takes us down lol so im just gonna pick one or maybe two and we'll go from there
if i dont pick the ones youd rather discuss then bring them back up and i will do my best lol
i dont believe that any particular religion is exactly right - so the points that i focus on are a little different from what a "traditional" christian or muslim or jew might say
while i do believe that these ideas of god point to something which doesnt change, at least by the standards of our own sense of time
what i do know is that peoples UNDERSTANDING of "god" changes - that it has evolved hand in hand with culture and that it continues to do so
i admit that many religious people dont seem to be aware of this and as i said before i consider that a valid critique of the religious climate today, and probably throughout the ages - the very fact that our understanding evolves and grows over time may itself be a modern revelation, i dont know
but what i really want to address is the idea expressed here:
Gisteron wrote: Some insist that the Bible or the Qur'an were written in a different time by people of a different time and for people of a different time.
....preposterous is the suggestion that there was ever a time when something as vial and evil as these overrated attempts at desert literature were morally acceptable or that people of the time .... didn't know any better. We know for a fact that this is false, and so do you, OB.
everything i see of history indicates to me that life was incredibly cheap to the minds of the peoples of the ancient world
in fact it is misleading to say that it was "cheap" as this implies that people believed that individual life had any real value in the grand sense
from what i can tell, that idea that life itself is valuable is quite modern - and that its appearance into popular thought was found within the context of religious speculation, particularly Christianity in "the West" and Buddhism in the East but these are just where its most noticeable
in other words, that life itself is important enough to think that there is anything wrong with slavery at all may actually be a religious idea, if not in origin then in considered articulation
not to say all religions espouse the idea - look at the caste system of india - which is only just recently beginning to be reconsidered
for thousands of years it was commonly accepted that you were born into a place in society and that was that - youre life had the value of whatever class you were born into
look at the arenas of rome
the sacrifices of the aztecs - 20,000 a year!
the collectivist fatalism of fuedal japan
ancient egypt, greece, all the way back to smaria and mesopotamia, civilization was built on the backs of slaves and the blood of the everyday man
i dont see that they did actually "know better"
history doesnt indicate that they did as far as i can tell
from what i have seen, history indicates that human life was worth little until religious people started saying otherwise
which is not to say that religious people didnt often act in contradiction of the idea, most certainly they did
things are sometimes both A and B
