Inconsistent, Not Hypocritcal

No one believes in Greek gods. The most common interpreters of the Bhagavad Gita say it is a human work.

The evidence is the testimony of eye witnesses in the Bible.

My question is, can you believe the testimony of witnesses?

Nedbrek,
Where's this divine evidence? You could make the same argument for the Illiad or the Bhagavad Gita.

Any church or nation that tries to limits the Holy Spirit working in people gets into trouble. Two excellent biblical scholars from the evangelical Gordon Conwell Seminary, Richard and Catherine Kroeger, have done a fine online Bible study on women serving as leaders in the Church, check it out at http://www.pcusa.org/womensministries/history-theology/women-elders.pdf

Grace and Peace,
Bruce Gillette

Bruce & Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, Co-Pastors
Limestone Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, DE

Yet, no one today believes in the old gods.

What proof would you require?

"You must review the facts as we have available, and consider how much you trust the source."

Other ancient works such as the Iliad and the Eddas make assertions about the supernatural, and modern readers rightly recognize that these are mixtures of fact and myth. There's no reason to treat any religion's scripture any differently. Assertions about the supernatural are so extraordinary that they need much, much more substantiation than simply a willingness to trust the asserter.

Tonio, history is not testable. You must review the facts as we have available, and consider how much you trust the source.

ZZIM - for once you begin to make sense. Are we convinced that McCain/Palin will honor said separation of Church and State? Certainly Bush and his colleagues never have.

BTW, a church is not really necessary in the realm of the Spirit - how could you make such a subjective assumption? Churches (and religions) are social organizations.

But by all means, let's keep churches and their congregations out of civil and governmental affairs altogether.

Freedom for religion and freedom from religion is at the heart of the 'Separation of Church and State' concept.

JohnD,

Setting arbitrary and indefensible restrictions on people according to gender has nothing to do with "tradition and stability." How can one place such limits on a gender, implying that there is something inherently wrong with the gender, and then expect the gender's members to have their spirits nourished?

NedBrek,

The evidence you offer is not testable, and does not rule out the likelihoods that the similarities were coincidence or human-intentional. Anyone can produce a work and assert that divine beings inspired it.

CCNL, are you a good person?

Nedbrek,

The conclusions of many contemporary NT and historic Jesus exegetes:

Jesus was an illiterate Jewish peasant/carpenter/ simple preacher man who suffered from hallucinations and who has been characterized anywhere from the Messiah from Nazareth to a mythical character from mythical Nazareth to a mamzer from Nazareth (Professor Bruce Chilton, in his book Rabbi Jesus). Analyses of Jesus’ life by many contemporary NT scholars (e.g. Professors Crossan, Borg and Fredriksen, On Faith panelists) via the NT and related documents have concluded that only about 30% of Jesus' sayings and ways noted in the NT were authentic. The rest being embellishments (e.g. miracles)/hallucinations made/had by the NT authors to impress various Christian, Jewish and Pagan sects.

The 30% of the NT that is "authentic Jesus" like everything in life was borrowed/plagiarized and/or improved from those who came before. In Jesus' case, it was the ways and sayings of the Babylonians, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, OT, John the Baptizer and possibly the ways and sayings of traveling Greek Cynics. www. earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html

For added "pizzazz", Catholic/Christian theologians divided god the singularity into three persons and invented atonement as an added guilt trip for the "pew people" to go along with this trinity of overseers. By doing so, they made god the padre into god the "filicider".

Current crises:

Pedophiliac priests, atonement theology and original sin!!!!

Luther, Calvin, Smith, Henry VIII, Wesley et al, founders of Christian-based religions, also suffered from the belief in/hallucinations of "pretty wingie thingie" visits and "prophecies" for profits analogous to the myths of Catholicism (resurrections, apparitions, ascensions and immaculate conceptions).

Current crises:

Adulterous preachers, "propheteering/ profiteering" evangelicals and atonement theology.

Tonio, of course there is evidence for divine inspiration of scripture.

The man Jesus Christ claimed to be God. He promised his followers that God would aide them in remembering his words. Those words are recorded for us in the bible. A book which has survived for thousands of years with only tiny copy errors (which we have measured and accounted for).

Look up the Dead Sea scrolls, or Google "ancient manuscript evidence". There are more ancient copies of the bible than any other ancient book. Compare the Textus Receptus (basis of the King James bible) constructed from a handful of manuscripts, with more modern Greek texts (using thousands) - they are nearly identical.

The evidence is out there. :)

A reality check for Kwaayesnama:

Our War on Terror and Aggression:

An update (or how we are spending or how we have spent USA taxpayers’ money to eliminate global terror and aggression)

The terror and aggression via a Partial and Recent Body Count

1) Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

2) 9/11, 3000 mostly US citizens, 1000’s injured

3) The 24/7 Sunni-Shiite centuries-old blood feud currently being carried out in Iraq, (3,371, combat 778 non-combat) and 86,664 – 94,561 Iraqi civilians, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ and
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf

4) Kenya- In Nairobi, about 212 people were killed and an estimated 4000 injured; in Dar es Salaam, the attack killed at least 11 and wounded 85.[2]

5) Bali-in 2002-killing 202 people, 164 of whom were foreign nationals, and 38 Indonesian citizens. A further 209 people were injured.

6) Bali in 2005- Twenty people were killed, and 129 people were injured by three bombers who killed themselves in the attacks.

7) Spain in 2004- killing 191 people and wounding 2,050.

8) UK in 2005- The bombings killed 52 commuters and the four radical Islamic suicide bombers, injured 700.

Other elements of our War on Terror:

1. Saddam, his sons and major henchmen have been deleted. Saddam's bravado about WMD was one of his major mistakes.

2. Iran is being been contained. (beside containing the Sunni-Shiite civil war in Baghdad, that is the main reason we are in Iraq. And yes, essential oil continues to flow from the region.)

3. Libya has become almost civil. Apparently this new reality from an Islamic country has upset OBL and his “crazies” as they recently threatened Libya. OBL sure is a disgrace to the world especially the Moslem world!!!

3. North Korea is still uncivil but is contained. With the opening up of rail traffic between North and South Korea after 50 years and with the assistance of the US Navy in retrieving NK ships and personnel, a fresh sense of civility is afoot.

4. NK has finally started to destroy in nuclear weapons’ capabilities.

5. Northern Ireland is finally at peace.

6. The Jews and Palestinians are being separated by walls. Hopefully the walls will follow the 1948 UN accords and the Annapolis Peace Conference is at least somewhat successful.

7. Bin Laden has been cornered under a rock in Western Pakistan since 9/11.

8. Fanatical Islam has basically been contained to the Middle East but a wall between India and Pakistan would be a plus for world peace. Ditto for a wall between Afghahistan and Pakistan.

9.Timothy McVeigh was executed. Terry Nichols will follow soon.

10. Eric Rudolph is spending three life terms in prison with no parole.

11. Jim Jones, David Koresh, Kaczynski, the "nuns" from Rwanda, and the KKK were all dealt with and either eliminated themselves or are being punished.

12. Islamic Sudan, Darfur and Somalia are still terror hot spots.

13. The terror and torture of Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo and Kuwait were ended by the proper application of the military forces of the USA and her freedom-loving friends. Radovan Karadzic was finally captured on 7/23/08 and is charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the law of war -- charges related to the 1992-1995 civil war that followed Bosnia-Herzegovina's secession from Yugoslavia.

14. And of course the bloody terror brought about the Japanese, Nazis and Communists was with great difficulty eliminated by the good guys.

If you think of religion as just another form of politics, then women should be ordained as well as elected. But that kind of "religion" is not divine, it doesn't nourish our spirit, and it's little more than talk at one of Sally Quinn's dinner parties. There is nothing inconsistent about voting for Sarah Palin and relishing tradition and stability in religion. Perhaps a hundred years from now, things will be different, but now, at the age of 64, the ordination of women is too much "in your face" politics for me.

Mouw has a valid point about inconsistency versus hypocrisy. And he is probably right about addressing the way that opponents of ordination read scripture. Perhaps we should go further and address the assumption of a divine source for scriptures. While I point out that there is no evidence for the assumption, the real issue is that it discourages many people from forming their own opinions about the teachings in scriptures. For example, would a fundamentalist Muslim reach the same conclusions about Sharia law if he had no particular belief about the origin of the Qu'ran?

In my bible the fifth commandment reads simply and clearly: “THOU SHALT NOT KILL”. What is your view of a nation invading a country under false pretenses and killing and maiming thousands if not millions of people? Is that MURDER?

IS THIS ELECTION ABOUT JUDGMENT
Sarah Pahin uses poor judgment and the GOP makes her out to be a hero!
This election should not be about Sarah Pahin not having an abortion.
This election should be about her not using the good judgment to use birth control.
Any intelligent person knows that when you choose to have unprotected sex at 43
you have a very high probability of having a child with Downs Syndrome.
The republicans are making her out to be a hero because she used the bad
judgment not to prevent the pregnancy in the first place.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives and mother of six children, is only two heart beats away from being President of the USA so obviously JM's choice of VP is not a shocking development.

With respect to the few women in leadership roles in the Christian religions, thank "Saint" Paul, the Prude, for this.

e.g. "He (Paul) feared the turn-on of women's voices as much as the sight of their hair and skin..... At one point he even suggests that the sight of female hair might distract any "pretty wingie talking fictional thingies" in church attendance (1 Cor. 11:10).

Simply add Paul's thinking about women to the list of flaws in the foundations of Christianity.

Of course the koran's allowed mistreatments of women are 24/7 news' items. And it explains the problem of women being imams/clerics in Islam.

A few excerpts from Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book about the problem as additional evidence:

p. 47 paperback issue:

"Some of the Saudi women in our neighborhood were regularly beaten by their husbands. You could hear them at night. Their screams resounded across the courtyards. "No! Please! By Allah!"

p.68:

"The Pakistanis were Muslims but they too had castes. The Untouchable girls, both Indian and Pakistani were darker skin. The others would not play with them because they were untouchable. We thought that was funny because of course they were touchable: we touched them see? but also horrifying to think of yourself as untouchable, despicable to the human race."

p. 347

"The kind on thinking I saw in Saudi Arabia and among the Brotherhood of Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values. It preserves the feudal mind-set based on tribal concepts of honor and shame. It rests on self-deception, hyprocricy, and double standards. It relies on the technologial advances of the West while pretending to ignore their origin in Western thinking. This mind-set makes the transition to modernity very painful for all who practice Islam".

p.309

"Between October 2004 and May 2005, eleven Muslim girls were killed by their families in just two regions (there are 20 regions in Holland). After that, people stopped telling me I was exaggerating."

Perhaps we could look at it like this - separation of Church and State. The practices of one should not inform the other. Government rules in the realm of the practical and necessary. The Church rules in the realm of the spirit.