For those times when scripture-based Christians try to back out or give up on someone when asked difficult questions/ issues, then according to the bible, christians must patiently debate.
"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behaviour in Christ may be ashamed of their slander."
1 Peter 3:15-16
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why is "do not commit adultery" ill-founded advice?
Human's natural state is polyamory and endless suffering results from our suppressing this powerful sexual instinct. A few religions allow multiple wives - do Christians want to offend them?
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the 10 commandments (ie book of leviticus), they are social rules that almost all modern christians would tell you are not the word of god. i challenge you to find any christian who follows the rule about not shaving the hair on the side of their face.
See this is what pisses many people off, that the fact is that the old bibilcal text is overwritten by the new, and a common Christian arguement to say why they aren't as significant now is that it was designed for a nomadic society. Likewise, it is obviosuly seen that the new testament was clearly written for a roman and Jewish audience, so even parts of the New Testament are ignored because it is not relevant to todays' culture. The 10 commandments are supposidely instructions for christians. Realistically, some are merely advice. I challenge any christian to isolate a single moral "absolute" that isn't a contradiction for in the very same book. For instance, in the bible it states "do not steal", yet later in the book we see that people have stolen, under direct orders from God.
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religion is just somewhere they are written down in broad terms
See thats where the problem exists.Cynic, I know what your trying to express, in that all Human beings within their societies gravitate around certain morals. But the problem with christianity is that the reading of morals from the Bible involves in all situatutions a judgement of which morals you find most important - In particular you have to choose which text is most important morally, at the expense of other contrary morals. Which defeats the purpose and intentions of the biblical text in itself. In addition when studying the bible your imagination is forcefully used in order to arrive at any moral at all because of its frequent obscurities. The FACT is, and I think we can conclude together that, as far as religious texts go, they have all been written within cultural contexts and at specific times, sometimes edited over a period of time (such as the Bible). You can't ignore that fact, because the bible has been written according to its historical and social context. In the latter case we end up with a text that was written during times when different morals were dominant amongst society. The other FACT is that the bible is not ONE set of morals. It is many books written over a large time scale and therefore is an agglomeration of different morals from several different cultures. As a result there has been the obvious appearance of many many obscurities and contradictions with the morals laid down within the bible.