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Statements like this would carry a little more weight if so much hadn't been suppressed early on.
Like almost all of it.
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This is why your religious leaders justify ignoring certain passages while adhering to others.
Right back at you. The "pick and choose" method is so astronomically, overwhelmingly popular in both daily religion as practiced as well as in academic study that finding a non-biased commentator with no particular axe to grind is like having a meteor fall on your head which grants you the power to shoot bees from your ***** as weapons.
Do you even know how the "bible" came to be? Do you have any idea of how much christian, undeniably christian literature was debated through various councils? Are you aware that the bible as you know it exists because some sweet thinking emperor of rome decided that he could use christianity as a tool to unify the empire under a single belief which he could manipulate directly as a highly effective means of controlling and appealing to his population? Have you ever heard of the marcionites or the pelagians? Have you read the gospels where jesus voodoos some birds out of clay and slays children for provoking him on the street?
The only movement in the study that I know of to read even the bible wholisticly (read: not picking and choosing passages) is by Stanley Hauerwas (a pacifist, by the way) and that still doesn't take into account the virtually limitless volumes of text and scripture that didn't make the cut.
Edited, Aug 11th 2008 12:27pm by Pensive
