winter wrote:  That's what I would call an 'activist atheist'. Someone who spends a lot of time researching, who can spout chapter and verse from Scripture, and delight in exposing the contradictions of religion. I find those folks tedious, because they cannot grasp how fully 'faith' dominates the discussion.

There are a lot of us who walk the line between atheist and agnostic too. I think there is something else beyond our physical senses, but I am reluctant to ascribe conventional descriptions of 'God' to it. And I also think it is possible our spiritual experiences, including paranormal activities, are constructs from our unconsciousness. We are discovering new things about our brains every day, like the placebo effect, for example. Our brains may know things we cannot process on a physical level. Maybe I'm a Jungian in that respect, I don't know.

 buzz wrote: 
I would make every effort to save my daughter without killing her attacker.

 hippiechick wrote: 
That's not what the Bible says. It says murder. It means murder.
 
Question for ya-
If your daughter was being attacked and the only way to stop it was to kill the attacker, what would you do? If you don't kill him, he will surely kill your daughter. Would you watch your child die because you believe it's always wrong to kill?

Just to be clear: not all atheists are of the "religion sucks, and here are the shortcomings of your preferred religious text that prove it" camp.

 mzpro5 wrote: 
It's all hooey to me

 hippiechick wrote: 



No because that is what the God of the old testament did mean.

Our ideals that all killing is wrong is a relatively new idea from a historical perspective.

As usual our need to impose our current values on other cultures, be it historically or geographically, leads to much misunderstanding.

 mzpro5 wrote: 
Didn't anyone hear god yell "That's not what I meant!!!"

Believe it or not, I taught Sunday School for many years, mostly art classes, but the last year I taught 4th graders. I was teaching a unit on Exodus, and I had made a game called "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho." That actually turned me completely against religion and god, because I could not morally teach children that it's okay to kill people that don't believe what they believe.

I quit teaching, quite the temple, became an atheist.

 hippiechick wrote: 



No.

The "murder" stipulation allows killing in the name of a righteous cause. Thus the Hebrews were "allowed" to kill those that stood in thier way to take over Canaan/Israel, the "Promised Land".

I don't need a book to tell me when it is alright to kill. I have something far more valuable than all of the books in the world, common sense. 

 mzpro5 wrote: 
The interpretation would not be "Though shalt not take another life"?

 hippiechick wrote: 



Which brings us back to buzz's point.

The correct translation of the commandment is "Thou shalt not murder" not "Thou shalt not kill"..

 buzz wrote: 
I learned that murder is a legal term, as opposed to kill. You can kill someone, but it may not be murder.

 buzz wrote: 
What's the difference, when killing can be justified through intellectual paradigms? Like religion, for example. All you are doing is trading one word for another... but it's the same thing happening. The euphemism makes it okay.

 buzz wrote: 
I didn't go there because I felt it would make a difficult entanglement of semantics difficulter.  In terms of the judaochristianislamic tradition, the difference between kill and murder is that of sanction (either way) by the deity.  IF Moses lied, then that difference is a point of human reason.  IF Moses didn't lie, and he believed he was divinely instructed, then my prior argument of vagary and ambiguity still holds as lack of evidence for an omni-inspired revelation.

 brandonjosborn wrote: 
kill is an incorrect translation. it is actually murder.

 kurtster wrote: 
Coming up with ideas to help people be happy; by committing certain acts toward one another which are supportive, and omitting other acts which are destructive is what civilization is about.  The difference between ethics and morality is that ethics are reasonable considerations of what those various acts should be, while morality is an imposed set of behaviors not derived through reason but, by a claim of divine revelation.

Whether or not Moses lied about his experience (if he even existed), it would behoove us to ask as many questions about those 10 commandments as we could think of "What does 'kill' mean, and when is it acceptable?", because, there's been a LOT of killing done in the name of that god - and he never stepped in to stop any of it - so, does that imply that god approved of the inquisition and the crusades and the Croat's murder of dozens of thousands of moslem men and the rape of 20,000 moslem women?  Or, does it mean that particular god can or cares to do nothing about those sorts of violations?  Or, does it mean that, whatever the case (god or no), we are responsible to think our way through whatever seems to be a good list of ideas for preserving life and advancing civilization - because it benefits everyone to do so?

The fact that these commands were ambiguous and (claimed to be) selectively issued to a very small group of people, who went on to wreak absolute havoc in their region - such havoc that, even today, the bloodshed continues, ("By their fruits ye shall know them"), seems to me evidence for great doubt that those commandments were handed down from an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and / or omnibenevolent being.

 kurtster wrote:  
I love chocolate... but not that deeply. No... it was deeper than even chocolate, in a chocolatey high kind of way.

 Umberdog wrote: 

Only if you consider chocalate to be a religious experience.

... and there are many who do  ...

Wow... that got deep.

 buzz wrote: 
is that an istic thing?