How am I missing his point? It's a very clear one: the bible's ideals are good. I'm just asking if those ideas I listed are good, they're ideals in the bible.

His point was that the only ideals anyone cares about in the Bible are the good ones. But since they're so open to interpretation, it's pointless to try an follow them.

Your first sentence doesn't make much sense...and people still do follow them and justify their bigotry because the bible says so. You can't honestly think the bible doesn't justify homophobia can you? Or shape American foreign policy in regards to Israel?

The Bible condemns homophobia all right... in 2 or 3 verses. You've got to admit that most of the Bible teaches good lessons.

I fixed my previous post.

Okay, earlier you said the bible didn't justify homophobia...whatever. So you think that the bible only justifies good ideals now because Christians pick and choose and you admit the bible justifies homophobia? So you think that's a positive idea? Do you really believe that the externalization a blame, something that's been with Christianity for a long time and continues to be with it, is a positive thing too?

As somebody else has already said, I dont follow the bible at all, im very much an atheist, yet to my knowledge i havent murdered or raped anybody. Though this isnt true for all cultures, rational, sane human beings know from being a product of the society they grow up in (and by that i mean day to day interaction with other human beings) that rape and murder is wrong.

Christianity is, ultimately, a set of moral ideals constructed by educated men from the inspiration of a schizophrenic who believed he heard voices from an ethereal being. Some people choose to follow this, in my opinion (note that) because they lack the confidence to tackle the true nature of life, that of human beings being driven by desire and passion. Christianity, through its moral codes, seeks to extirpate these completely natural desires and passions of which they see as a threat to social order. Through promises of heaven and eternal happiness, people are encouraged live their life by these codes or face eternal damnation. I personally find it absurd that, in an age of scientific totality, human beings, these supposedly highly intelligent creatures, can still be coerced with such fairytales... but thats just me.

Well, as mentioned before, science does not explain reality, it only is capable of describing it. Anything that relies entirelly on testable procedure that exists within human means will never have the answers to questions that involve the meaning behind the contradictory physical universe that we are currently dwelling in.

Ultimately, I've always found it justified to pick and choose what I wish to follow from the Bible, if for no other reason than the fact that I know it is an imperfect text to begin with, for anything God supposedly would say to mankind would get ****ed up in translation to begin with, and that doesn't even take into account the human error that went into the hundreds of thousands of times the Old and New Testaments have been copied in monastaries over the last two thousand years.

Goddamnit, why do I keep making errors in my posts... tired I guess <_<

How do you know which is god's will you follow and which isn't?

Reconciling my everyday logic and sense of morals with whatever text seems appropriate I suppose. Also, I assume that it is perhaps God's will that I simply follow my own will through life and face the consequences of the choices that I make, as I was born with a mind and sense of self after all.

In any case, a Christian by definition is simply someone who believes (or perhaps accepts) that Jesus died on the cross so that human beings could enter paradise after death without paying some kind of rediculous penance for their mistakes in life (such as sacrificing animals or valuables). Foolishness ensues when a person takes their faith and puts it in place of the common sense they were born with.

I, thankfully, have not fallen into that particular pitfall despite the culture I grew up in, for I realized quite early on that as God lies beyond human experience and that the Bible is contradictory. Hence, it's a waste of time struggling to change one's natural way of living to appeal to It. :)