As always, there's another side to every coin:

When Good Legislation is Abused - Fix It!.

I'm not a constitutional lawyer but it would appear to me that there might be some middle ground over here where all of this should be leading to.

While Judaism may be the only monotheist religion that has God speaking directly to a large number of people, that in itself cannot be interpreted as proof of accuracy. The basic premise of the article is that a large number of people supposedly witnessed a supernatural event, so it must have happened or else someone would have called whoever made it up. However, there are hundreds of religions that have large numbers of people witnessing one or more supernatural events. Just a quick google reveals this American Indian story in which a bunch of people go through some big caves and talk to animals and such:
http://www.indians.org/welker/howtheho.htm

There are many more, and I bet the Greeks have some in writing. Religion does not have evidance. You need faith to be religious.

By the way, I found a site that explains the "thou shalt not kill" vs. "thou shalt not murder" question here:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Shok...NotMurder.html

You have missed several essential points here:

1. Can anyone document the age of this story? Its origins?

2. Do you personally view this story as:

- Definitely true.
- Possibly true.
- Possibly false.
- Definitely false.

And what do you base your decision on?

3. Where and by whom were the Hopis commanded to hand down from generation to generation, since the time of creation according to this, this story and with these particular details? I'm not articulating myself well here. The Torah's text is addressed to those that were there at Sinai to convey everything in exactitude to all future generations. It is not written in a tense stating that such and such happened so much time ago.

Again, think about it. :hmm:
It's too bad he did not footnote his claims from Maimonides and Abravenel. I would then have been able to look them up. However, regarding the outstanding verses in Numbers 35, I can quote Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the light of 19th century German Jewry, from his Torah commentary on the 6th Commandment:

Good link there AL! Here is the link for the actual bill from Library of Congress

Sex and God: Is Religion Twisted? :hmm::hmm::hmm:

From: ---> http://www.holysmoke.org/haught/sects.html

""" (Free Inquiry, fall 1997)

By James A. Haught

"Christian endeavor," H.L. Mencken wrote, "is notoriously hard on female pulchritude."
He was right, of course, and he should have included Jewish endeavor and Muslim endeavor in his observation.
Western religions have spent millenia inflicting shame, guilt, repression and punishment upon human sexuality -- especially upon women's sexuality.

Asian faiths aren't so punitive. They generally accept lovemaking as a natural part of life.
Some Hindu temples are covered with statues of copulating gods and goddesses.
Millions of Shiva worshipers pray over models of his erect penis. Tantric sects practice ritual intercourse.
But the West presents an opposite, ugly story: a long chronicle of religious hostility to lovers -- for no rational reason.
The Old Testament raged against "whoredom" and decreed brutal penalties for unapproved sex. It commanded that non-virgin brides be stoned to death (Deut. 22:21).

Until recently, thanks to church pressure, nearly every U.S. state had Old Testament-style laws against "fornication" and "sodomy" and the like.
It wasn't until 1972 that the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that all American couples have a right to birth control.
The clergy's opposition to contraception is based not so much on a desire for limitless breeding as a desire to prevent people from enjoying the sexual freedom brought by birth control.

Sometimes the ministers who rail loudest against "filth" and "pornography" are cloaking their secret sins.
Television evangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker both fell to private sex scandals.
Georgia revivalist Mario Leyva went to prison in 1990 for sodomizing more than 100 church boys, and two assistant pastors likewise were jailed. Numerous such cases appear in the news.
As American clergy endlessly strive to censor sex from public media, an odd contradiction has arisen: Ministers raise little objection to a movie containing 50 murders -- but a glimpse of a woman's nipple brings their wrath.
A popular song commented: "Bullets fly like popcorn on the screen, recommended wholesome, nice and clean.
Making love's the thing that can't be seen. Why?"

Meanwhile, the sexual hangups of Christianity today are trivial compared to those in the Muslim world, where suppression of women continues at Old Testament levels.
Some examples:
-- In Muslim Somalia, an estimated 98 percent of girls are genitally mutilated to inhibit their sexual pleasure throughout their lives and keep them "pure" for husbands. But it doesn't always work. In 1993, a United Nations team found five women being stoned to death for adultery. They had been condemned by mosque leaders, and the execution was carried out after evening prayers.
Cheering villagers videotaped the killing. U.N. observers who tried to save the women were driven off by threats of death. U.N. agent Cecelia Kamau said bitterly: "Fundamentalism is really catching on."
-- In Muslim Algeria, zealots shoot high school girls in the face for not wearing veils, and cut the throats of professors who teach boys and girls in the same classrooms.
-- In Muslim Iran, morality patrols flog women who allow a lock of hair to show beneath their shrouds, and clerics laboriously black out women's faces in imported magazines.
-- In Muslim Saudi Arabia, a teen-age princess and her lover were executed in public in 1977 for the crime of making love.
-- In Muslim Afghanistan, a major mujahideen (holy warrior) leader -- one of those praised by President Reagan as "freedom fighters" -- got his start by throwing acid in the faces of unveiled college girls. Now that even-more-puritanical Taliban religious students have seized Afghanistan, they've decreed that all windows must be painted black, lest someone look at a woman through one, and they stone women to death for being in the company of a man who isn't a relative.

And the hypocritic side is...
"Last year Americans spent more than $8 billion on hard-core videos, live sex acts, adult cable programming, sexual devices, computer porn and sex magazines -- an amount much larger than Hollywood's domestic box office receipts and larger than all the revenues generated by rock and country music albums.
Americans now spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional and nonprofit theaters, at the opera, the ballet, and jazz and classical music performances -- combined."
If Americans rent 665 million X-rated videos each year, as the report said, while conservative churches still say sex is "filth" or "intrinsically evil," someone is out of step with reality.
And it isn't the billions of people who know, deep in their psyches, that lovemaking is intrinsically good.

"The churches are in danger of evolving into havens for the sexually suppressed or, worse, communities of profound hypocrisy."


Sexual repression is the mother of perversion. :yep::yep::yep:

http://img445.imageshack.us/img445/37/z008oe3.gifhttp://img416.imageshack.us/img416/1484/z101io3.gif

Gizzmoe, we need a "yawn" or "snoring" smilie for posts like Von Capo's last one above.

http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/3...gsmileyje3.gif

Boy Capo, you may know whats in those texts but you sure don't understand them!

You mean that he's superstitious?

Anyway. There is an interesting event going on here.

Gizzmoe asks from the rest of us to quote a part of an article and leave the link to it instead of posting the entire thing.

Using a character counter I have noticed that VON_CAPO has posted more or less than half the size of the original articles.

Now if I had to guess why, considering he goes through the hassle of editing the font size and marking parts in bold and underline, plus the additional use of visual images, I'd say it's simply his handicapped way of expressing himself, just like a mute person relies on sign language, and thus the reason why Gizzmoe tolerates articles being copied by half without a single following comment to them: it's his own special way of communicating with the rest of us. Though this is only a hypothesis.

So I'd like to ask for more respect and tolerance from the Avon Lady and especially Yahoshua.

My knowledge of English is not complete.

And it is impossible to answer and / or rebut each idea posted by your team.

To ensamble with words a complex idea is a huge job to me, add to this to correct misspelled words and grammar errors. (this is the reason almost all my post are edited) :damn::damn::damn:

Additionally, I have got a career to develop, so, I am very limited in time.

I hope you & Co. and Gizzmoe understand this. Thank you. :up:

I second that.

My question is, if religion is to blame for all perverse sexual acts, then I guess rapes, pornography addiction, prostitution and things of this nature would never happen where there is no religion. But hmm, I seem to recall this happening in many Asian non religious countries too!!! But wait, they have no religion, so this shouldn't happen there!!!! Matter of fact, pornography, prostititution, etc. runs rampant in non religious asian communities.

Sorry, if very non religious countries like China, this still happens. It even happened with regularily in the Ex non religious Soviet Union.

To put it into perspective, the most sexually perverse communities on the Earth happen to be the very places where religion is forbbiden!

Von Capo needs to go have his head examined by a shrink. Something is wrong in there. He is blinded by the fact that all religion must be the root of the worlds problems. Quite frankly, its the opposite. Atheism is the root of all the worlds problems simply because it lacks moral boundaries.

-S

Yep. It´s ok to post a non-copyrighted article if it´s not too long.

Please note my original post regarding Capo's last one with links to all the preachers wrong doing.

EDIT ADDED: The evil one is attempting to suck you into the trap of "exposing" your hipocracy.

The classic quote here is...

Romans 3:23

for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.

Yeah, right... :roll:

You & Co. have the option to ignore my posts, isn't it? ;)

This premise is false. The idea exposed is that religion exacerbate perversion, because of repression.
About pornography, should I understand that you stick to the idea that images of humans having sex is bad? :hmm:

That is just a personal consideration.

Another false premise. Not all, but some (or many?).
About moral, should we follow common sense's moral or a ancient books ruling death and harsh punishments to anyone?

I believe that shrinks, religious, atheist or otherwise, are a major cause sexual perversion. :smug:
While atheism isn't the root of all world problems, it's a major potential to cause many because the bottom line is anything goes, as it's assumed that humans and paramecium are both nothing more that biological beings, with no other purpose than to survive, reproduce and die, at the most. Life's red lines can constantly be raised or lowered to suit the whims of the moment or the continuous degradation of moral behavior.