These comments were in response to my previous blog called I Support Human Rights and were posted on a blog of Josh’s called My Comment on Angie’s Blog and I just felt I should share them.
Josh said the following:
Max brought up and interesting point the other day. He said “the LDS church has been kicked out of how many states and be persecuted against for years and they constantly whine about it and they are willing to persecute another group extremely quickly. It doesn’t make sense!” I don’t know a whole lot about the church. I did when i was younger just so i could argue points but then I realized I didn’t need to argue and since I don’t believe in “missionaring” I didn’t see the point me trying to change peoples minds. Laissez faire, if people choose that faith and those beliefs that is their choice, I don’t agree with them but I don’t need to change them to my thinking because that would be just like them and I don’t believe that way. Love is what I believe in and anytime there isn’t love in that space it’s not the best space to be in, so going from their beliefs if god is love what is the other? I throughly believe that inhibiting the rights of a human being is not love and I implore christians to ask WWJD? Remember Jesus loved everyone and did not discriminate and never said anything about people being evil, shellfish being a sin, or beating your wife is ok, or homosexual acts being a sin, read your praised book Jesus never said any of those things so think “judge not least ye be judged” and “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
My reply to this, that I felt I had to share:
I know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either, even back when I was actively attending church and trying very hard to believe it, I didn’t see how the rest of the congregation didn’t see it the way I did. I think that’s one of the main points that allowed me to rethink my believe and my choice of religion as a teenager. I had friends that were gay, and friends that weren’t LDS, and I was constantly taught “Jesus said love everyone no matter what” and in the same breath “Don’t associate with sinners, and being gay is a sin. Also, try and convert those friends that arent.” I didn’t see how the two could go hand in hand, because they can’t.
They can use their bible, and find millions of passages to throw at you. Like 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 – “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” OR Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” But they also say “We believe in the bible so far as it is translated correctly.” But it can’t have been translated completely correct because it was originally written in ancient Hebrew, and even with more modern languages things don’t always transfer over with the same meaning. Even look from French to English, there are so many things that don’t have the same meaning when translated.
Not to mention it’s been translated how many dozens of times by how many dozens of different men who could have let their own bias get in the way of what they were translating? I mean look at how many different versions of the bible we even have available to us now, there are about 11 and each christian religion chooses a different version to base their beliefs off of. Even the Book of Mormon (as per their own legends) was translated by Joseph Smith using glowing stones inside of a hat, while he dictated it to Martin Harris who scribed for him. There are two different men translating an ancient text (that neither of them knew previously) by “the power of god” allowing them to understand.
The way I see it, the entire religion (and most Christian religions) are based on bias. No person is completely unbiased in their beliefs, and no person can translate anything without putting a tiny amount of their own biased into those pages. So yes, Jesus really could have existed – I personally believe he did and he was a good man with a good message to spread. I don’t beleive he died for my sins, but I classify him with Ghandi, and Buddah, and other great teachers/prophets who had a good message of love and peace to spread. But somehow that message gets lost in translation, and even if they get the basic meaning of it, they don’t seem to understand that what he taught, and what they teach now days – are two totally separate things.
