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According to Rendalen, the story claimed not only that the cursed well was real, but that a bat-like apparition (a common pictorial representation of demons, such as in Michelangelo's The Torment of Saint Anthony or the more recent Bat Boy by Weekly World News) had risen out of it before blazing a trail across the Russian sky.
You are not getting it. I was talking of you quoting John 3 to me.
The Iron chariots was nothing to do with that, so don't try to connect them. And you had that wrong, anyway.
I don't care whether you debate us or not, though as I recall, you couldn't wait to jump in until you got your ass kicked, and now you want to run away pretending that you won but we wouldn't listen.
You have been shown wrong so far, so you are fooling nobody but yourself.
So go and run away if you want.
I need lifestyle recommendations from you as much as I need your scripture quotes. It's plain to all the believers out there cringing with embarrassment at the mean - spirited put -down attempts of a putative fellow religionist, that they are intentional barbs under the hypocritical mask of sympathetic concern. As for us goddless bastards, we twigged that on the first day a Biblesucker grated "I'll Pray for you!" at us tjhrough gritted teeth.
Have a nice life. I will.
I think the key to the fact that we non-believers know more about religion than believers in general is because we are not limited in our rights to explore, learn and critique than believers are.
Growing up , in a baptist church, we were told what we coulsd and could not read, see, listen to ...etc
Of course, i did not follow any of those rules, hough many did. By isolating the followers, it was easier to control their thinking, which was a major goal. By censoring what we read, they could hope to prevent having one of us uncover something which would contradict them....(which was easy)
But I remember frequently hearing "oh those buddhists believe such and such" or "those catholics do such and such..."
Well, ok, but if I wanted to know what Buddhist`s believe, Id ask one. If I wanted to know what catholics practiced, Id ask a priest or a catholic practitioner
I did in fact
But many in our church did not. They blindly accepted what they were told
What i found was that other religions were not really like we had been told
I remember one Sunday when someone mentioned beliefs, the Moron said something like
"OH NO dont ask others what they believe. Come ask us and we will Tell you what they believe"
As mentioned, what the moron taught about other beliefs was not accurate which made me doubt whether he was accurate about anything else he sid
After all, he was one of the least intellegent humans I have ever known, but a purrfect fit for baptist Sunday schools.
But that is the idea behind religious censorship and isolation. Kind of like the way kim jung-loon runs north korea
He isolates his flock, spoon feeds them what he wants them to believe
Same with that church.
And the rest of the educated world, who can see the "bigger picture" just sighs at how gullable and easily controlled people can be
Yes. Essentially Dogma vs. enquiry. I guess there is an attraction in being told that if you believe This Dogma, you will know more than anyone else without having to bother to learn anything at all.
However, that only works if anyone who knows a bit more is kept silent. That's why the whole agenda is slapping us down and shutting us up.
As an American Non-believer, I can go to the Library and read any book about anything that I want to read. I can access articles on the internet at my leisure, and I can search for books to purchase and keep at home at my will and pleasure.
Christians, though, may not have that luxury. We were told that we could use the Bible only. (of course, I did not but others did) We were to read religious books ONLY approved from our small. limited church library. (mostly written by baptist types such as Billy Graham)
We were often cautioned "to be careful when reading commentaries about the Bible" and it seemed that the church people were paranoid of other ideas to the point that they did not want us even exposed to them. So many people admitted that they would not and had not read Darwin's On the Origin of Species For example...although they acted as experts onto what it said.
Of course, I was intelligent enough to know NOT to believe everything I read, compared, to , say, my MOM who seemed to believe EVERYTHING she read...be it ads in woman's day or the king James Bible.
Some people do not understand that some of us are smart enough to be able to separate fact from fiction. But even so, we want answers based on evidence. And we want to FIND our answers, not have them spoon fed to us.
as far as religious "truths" just remember: Anything that is good and true will be obvious,will be demonstratable and provable... but that which has to be forced onto others, through threats, empty promises, coercion and manipulation is neither good nor true.
As an American Non-believer, I can go to the Library and read any book about anything that I want to read. I can access articles on the internet at my leisure, and I can search for books to purchase and keep at home at my will and pleasure.
Christians, though, may not have that luxury. We were told that we could use the Bible only. (of course, I did not but others did) We were to read religious books ONLY approved from our small. limited church library. (mostly written by baptist types such as Billy Graham)
We were often cautioned "to be careful when reading commentaries about the Bible" and it seemed that the church people were paranoid of other ideas to the point that they did not want us even exposed to them. So many people admitted that they would not and had not read Darwin's On the Origin of Species For example...although they acted as experts onto what it said.
Of course, I was intelligent enough to know NOT to believe everything I read, compared, to , say, my MOM who seemed to believe EVERYTHING she read...be it ads in woman's day or the king James Bible.
Some people do not understand that some of us are smart enough to be able to separate fact from fiction. But even so, we want answers based on evidence. And we want to FIND our answers, not have them spoon fed to us.
as far as religious "truths" just remember: Anything that is good and true will be obvious,will be demonstratable and provable... but that which has to be forced onto others, through threats, empty promises, coercion and manipulation is neither good nor true.
This is very much like when I was teaching earth science back in the 1970s and we would get to the unit on evolution (this is not an evolution comment, per se). More than once I had Christian parents come in and LITERALLY say, "I don't want my child to think".
"as far as religious "truths" just remember: Anything that is good and true will be obvious,will be demonstratable and provable... but that which has to be forced onto others, through threats, empty promises, coercion and manipulation is neither good nor true."
As an American Non-believer, I can go to the Library and read any book about anything that I want to read. I can access articles on the internet at my leisure, and I can search for books to purchase and keep at home at my will and pleasure.
Christians, though, may not have that luxury. We were told that we could use the Bible only. (of course, I did not but others did) We were to read religious books ONLY approved from our small. limited church library. (mostly written by baptist types such as Billy Graham)
We were often cautioned "to be careful when reading commentaries about the Bible" and it seemed that the church people were paranoid of other ideas to the point that they did not want us even exposed to them. So many people admitted that they would not and had not read Darwin's On the Origin of Species For example...although they acted as experts onto what it said.
Of course, I was intelligent enough to know NOT to believe everything I read, compared, to, say, my MOM who seemed to believe EVERYTHING she read...be it ads in woman's day or the King James Bible.
Some people do not understand that some of us are smart enough to be able to separate fact from fiction. But even so, we want answers based on evidence. And we want to FIND our answers, not have them spoon fed to us.
as far as religious "truths" just remember: Anything that is good and true will be obvious, will be demonstratable and provable... but that which has to be forced onto others, through threats, empty promises, coercion, and manipulation is neither good nor true.
As an American Non-believer, I can go to the Library and read any book about anything that I want to read. I can access articles on the internet at my leisure, and I can search for books to purchase and keep at home at my will and pleasure.
Christians, though, may not have that luxury. We were told that we could use the Bible only. (of course, I did not but others did) We were to read religious books ONLY approved from our small. limited church library. (mostly written by baptist types such as Billy Graham)
We were often cautioned "to be careful when reading commentaries about the Bible" and it seemed that the church people were paranoid of other ideas to the point that they did not want us even exposed to them. So many people admitted that they would not and had not read Darwin's On the Origin of Species For example...although they acted as experts onto what it said.
Of course, I was intelligent enough to know NOT to believe everything I read, compared, to , say, my MOM who seemed to believe EVERYTHING she read...be it ads in woman's day or the king James Bible.
Some people do not understand that some of us are smart enough to be able to separate fact from fiction. But even so, we want answers based on evidence. And we want to FIND our answers, not have them spoon fed to us.
as far as religious "truths" just remember: Anything that is good and true will be obvious,will be demonstratable and provable... but that which has to be forced onto others, through threats, empty promises, coercion and manipulation is neither good nor true.
Your church was more overtly controlling than mine. My tribe's approach was to accept that people had access, even in the pre-Internet era, to all manner of resources, and would be influenced at school and so forth. But ... apologist authors like Josh McDowell (Evidence That Demands a Verdict) had a cult-like status and we got a lot of the disparagement of "mere human wisdom". A favorite Bible verse cited was "let god be true and every man a liar" -- in other words if god's word conflicts with what any human says, the human is wrong and god is right. Our young people were encouraged to attend Bible Institute for one year -- it was a three-year program, the first year being termed "Basic Christian Training" or BCT -- if you didn't felt god calling you to the ministry, you went on from there to regular college or whatever, presumably already so invested in the dogma that you'd be less likely to abandon it. From our tiny church of about 60 members, I was one of no less than five young people who went that route over a three-year period. It helped that tuition was dirt cheap, around $750 per full-time semester at the time.
I lost track of the others, and often wonder how many of them stayed with the faith, and how it's worked out for them. I would guess that one or two others may have "backslidden", or quit altogether like myself. Higher education and Real Life are tough on newly-minted evangelical adults.
This is very much like when I was teaching earth science back in the 1970s and we would get to the unit on evolution (this is not an evolution comment, per se). More than once I had Christian parents come in and LITERALLY say, "I don't want my child to think".
I remember my 5th grade teacher being required to teach us about evolution. She prefaced the unit with a lecture that we did not have to believe it, we just had to know how to pass the test on it.
In a small town with a high per capita number of churches, I am certain that she had received calls from people who demanded that their kids not be taught evolution.
Evolution, we were told, was in direct contradiction to the Biblical story of the creation. Of course, no one at the church except for myself and my dad had actually read Darwin's book, but as mentioned, we had numerous self professed "experts" on the subject.
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Do you remember the report of a deep drill in Russia and the sounds of Hell? It was quite a hoot how many took it perfectly seriously.
