Re: the stupidest Bible story -- "God's nature" -- THE CHAIR

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bob Crowley) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Billy Goat) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
>
> I suppose in the end the whole lot of us live an existentialist
> existence.  That is religion has to be lived.  The amount of doctrine
> floating around in someone's head will have little bearing on the
> criteria on which they are finally judged.  I state categorically to
> have had certain experiences which I would claim to be spiritually
> caused, although a lot of them were probably demonic in origin.
> 
> In one of them, when my father turned up to apologise the night he
> died (having died, completely unknown to me, a good ten miles away),
> he made the comment that "Careers" were not "even important."  When I
> challenged him on that he said that what was important was "how you
> treat people".  The problem with "faith alone" is that the business of
> how you treat people (called "works" in some quarters) is less
> important.  Thus we have Luther on one hand advising it is faith
> alone, and then urging Hutten and von Sickengen and other princes to
> absolutely butcher the desperate peasants.

I agree that some moral instruction would be welcome in schools. But
you can't force people to believe things. As children grow, they often
reconsider the religions they were brought up with. There's no
guarantee they will stick to the religions of their families. So if
you truly want a generation of moral children, the safest bet is to
teach them moral lessons that stand on their own, *without* religious
beliefs.

Religion teaches obedience, not morality. Look at the story of Abraham
and Isaac. God tells Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham is willing
to do it without question. Sure, it was only a test, and an angel
stopped him from actually doing it. But what kind of test was this? If
it was an obedience test, Abraham passed. If it was a morality test,
Abraham failed. In the end, God was pleased by Abraham's willingness
to kill his own son. What kind of lesson do you think children really
get from that?

> Now if what my father said was correct, we live in a society which
> advocates one's success in business or career areas above all else, in
> which an entire education system is devoted to material success, only
> to find out when we die we have been completely barking up the wrong
> tree as far as God is concerned. 

It depends on what you mean by material success. I think the education
system, at least before college, is set up to teach survival, not
greed. People gotta eat, and unless they're farmers, they gotta buy
food. If God doesn't like it, He shouldn't have given us stomachs. I
hope you're not suggesting that God would prefer the world to starve
to death.

(College seems more geared toward people with a love of learning or a
vocation. A thorough knowledge of Shakespeare is not a survival skill,
and I don't think people get into radio-astronomy for the money or the
babes.)

> And as "religious education" is more
> and more dismissed from the agenda, then if my father's appearance was
> anything to go by, the system is setting more and more of us for
> eternal destruction.

What are you talking about? There are still plenty of schools that
teach religion. The last time I visited a Catholic school, religion
was still being taught there.

The only schools that religion is being "dismissed from" are public
schools. And that's as it should be. Teaching religion is a church's
job, not a school's. A school's job is to teach facts. A church's job
is to teach beliefs.

Which particular religion do you think should be taught in public
schools? Who gets to decide? I'm sure churches would rather keep an
eye on what religious beliefs their followers are being taught, rather
than let public school teachers teach whatever they want.

> My father is in Hell incidentally, an item I cannot avoid due to the
> end of the "vision" or whatever it was.  He even said during the
> "vision", "It's too late for me!". I am not even sure about my mother,
> who was a good person, and a very good mother, but not religious,
> although at heart she believed.  By Protestant interpretation she
> would be in Hell, by Catholic I suspect she would be in Purgatory.  I
> believe the second.
> 
> Such conflicts about the fundamentals of judgement, heaven, hell and
> the rest within Christianity itself are not helpful.

All the more reason to keep it out of schools. It would only confuse
the students.

> And you won't find God in doctrine.  That is the method of the
> Pharisees and we know what they did.

It's interesting that you want religion taught in schools, but you
don't like doctrine. Without doctrine, what else is there to teach
about religion?

--Billy