re: #67 LudwigVanQuixote

Well doesn’t it make you feel proud and loved and respected when people come and get to tell you what your book, written in your language, by your people says?

If I believed the secrets of creation, the messages of a divinity lied with the Biblical scripture, I would drop every earthly pursuit and learn the original language in which they were written in order to study them, and thus get closer to the word of God. But not so with these people.

Also, any conservative who claims that Biblical Scriptures should dictate the morality of society while claiming that such morality be one of free enterprise and individual rights is insane — which is why I always maintained that the social-conservative and free-market camps were irreconcilable due to contrary essences. The Bible is a very socialist document; it deals with an agrarian, collectivist society. Both the Old and New Testaments are rife with self-less ethics, feeding the hungry and tending to the poor and many many more similar lessons. In fact, I maintain that socialism and the Left in general represent distilled ethical norms from the Bible stripped of their theistic aspects.

That there are Christians and Jews of all political denominations should be ample clue, in and of itself, that religion does not dictate a political orientation, and thus basing a political movement on the supposed core tenets of a religious creed to which people of other political orientation may lay claim to, is a very foolish idea. Does Christianity or Judaism necessarily lead to conservatism, however defined? No, since there are plenty of liberal and socialist Jews and Christians out there. So stop trying to claim those religions as the source for your political ideology!

The conservatives tend to focus on the gay bashing and other sexual repressiveness as exemplified in the Bible. The liberals tend to focus on the extreme altruism presented therein. Two different sides of the same coin. Rather than revise ancient texts to fit with their dementia, they should be advised to stop molesting any scripture and start thinking of politics, economics, and social ethics independently from any religious system.

Of course this will fall on deaf ears…