According to the bible, people who work together to find common ground for the common good and die without knowing Christ go to hell. The best thing Christians can do for them is to witness.

Whaaat? does that mean Clay?

According to the bible, if some angels seek comfort from an angry mob in your home, you should cast out your young daughters to be raped by the mob in order to protect the angels. The moral of this story is to not let angels in your house. Thus sayeth the bible.

Ravens530 - To bad you actually got the story wrong. No one was seeking anything it was Lot who begged them to come with him. Of course you also left out what happened in the story after the scene you altered contained the true lesson. Then again if you had included the whole story you wouldn’t have been able to make that sad joke moral would you. Here’s a suggestion try reading more than a few selected stories in Genesis. You might actually learn something.

Ok, ravensfan, youre arguing about a story that has angels coming into someones house. Are we talking about the L.A. Angels of MLB, or the porcelin angels I give to my mom for x-mas each year? sure hope so...
oh yeah and christmas - did you know that almost ALL other religions supreme leader was born on dec. 25th, not just jesus... not to mention every other aspect of the birth of jesus story is the same for all other religions of the past...
born to a virgin
dec 25
3 kings
back to life 3 days later
etc.
weird.

What it means is that working towards finding common ground for the common good is no good if we arent saved. I was referring to the statement in the article. Thanks.

Chucky – Arguing> No just pointing out someone else’s selective telling of it. The date of Christ’s actual birth isn’t known. Dec 25th was selected the date of commemoration it. It may have corresponded either with a historical Roman festival or the winter solstice. What other religions leaders are born on the 25th. I wasn’t aware of any. Maybe you could enlighten me on that one.

ravensfan- you left out the most important bits of the story- After Lot tried to give his daughters over to a mod of rapists, the Angels said, "Lot- not cool, Bro", and the girls weren't thrown to those Mo's outside. Then, after the killing of thousand by God and turning Lot's wife to salt, his daughters RAPED HIM in the desert. So the real message here is- don't LISTEN to Angels.

texaskeptic - Funny in the story I don't recall the Angels giving any instructions to Lot's daughters. The only instructions I recall them giving was to leave the city and not look back. I guess you’re reading a new translation for would be comedians.

Horus, an Egyptian Sun God, is introduced as having a number of attributes similar to that of many of the religious deities which came after him, including but not limited to Attis, Krishna, Dionysus, Mithra and Jesus Christ... These attributes include a virgin birth on December 25, twelve disciples, burial for three days, resurrection, and performing of miracles.

Also, a VERY important fact that is rarely discussed in our Christian society is that of the thirty-odd historians living in and around the time of Jesus Christ, none mention him. Three mention, in few lines, "Christos" which is a title meaning "annointed one", not necessarily Jesus. A fourth was proven to be fake over a hundred years ago. This lack of evidence for a suppsoedly important figure, underlines the artificality of the Jesus story.

"According to the bible, people who work together to find common ground for the common good and die without knowing Christ go to hell."

Now THAT is a loving god!

But we are already saved arn't we Clay? If I say in my heart that Jesus is my savior we will go to heaven. Maybe they are saved?

Pattycakes--you arguing with Clay on behalf of the irreligious? Well, it seems you are trying to win him over to the side of the reasonable religious where you probably class yourself. Good luck--he may pray to god to turn into a pillar of salt and Ravensfan you have taken on the sword against those who would mock your bible. It seems Chuckysoup has a melange there for you to swallow. Chuckysoup--remarkable your discovery about these gods-about Khrishna you are dead right. Ravensfan will be unshaken--from the shroud of Turin to the Roman soldiers who saw Jesus alive Ravensfan will try to prove you wrong with his own historical details. He is very tenacious in his faith in the myths of yore. He will tell you that the thirty historians were asleep at the wheel or that all historians are blatant liars but he will not tell you that Jesus never walked the earth.
Ravensfan Anon

chuckysoup - Could you provide some links or backup for your claims. I can't really comment on the validity since you didn't supply anything to back up what you said.

ravensfan - It is difficult to find information that does not exist to back up an argument that chuckysoup dumped on you, but it is well established that the historians at the time did not seem to know about the Jesus Cult, until many years after the death of the supposed god/Human hybrid creature. In as much as it (The Jesus Cult) started much the way most cults do, by being pumped by a small cadre of fanatics, until it dies a natural death, or in the case of Jesus cultism, catches on at a rate that outstripped the Roman effort to feed them all to lions, his statement is sound and defensible, unlike the divinity of your hybridized abomination, for which there is no proof outside the partian accounts of fanatic cultists.

Robert - So are you saying is no evidence exist to back up Chucky's "fact"? How is it that someone who wanted absolute proof for God is willing to accept this idea without such evidence? Pardon me but it sounds like you are taking it on faith or wishful thinking. Has there ever been a cult that lasted for over 2000 years and spanned the number of different empires and civilizations that Christianity has? I have a hard time that a simple cult could have survived as long as Christianity has. So Assuming Chucky provides something unless they lived in that area of the Roman Empire there would be a good chance they didn't have knowledge of Christ.

Robert - Here are two I found rather quickly for Christ.

Josephus, in the book Jewish Antiquities" wrote:

"At that time lived Jesus, a wise man, if he may be called a man; for he performed many wonderful works. He was a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure. . . .And when Pilate, at the instigation of the chief men among us, had condemned him to the cross, they who before had conceived an affection for him did not cease to adhere to him. For on the third day he appeared to them alive again, the divine prophets having foretold these and many other wonderful things concerning him. And the sect of the Christians, so called from him, subsists at this time" (Antiquities, Book 18, Chapter 3, Section 1).

Tacitus, in writing about accusations that Nero burned the city of Rome and blamed it on Christians, said the following:

". . .Nero procured others to be accused, and inflicted exquisite punishment upon those people, who were in abhorrence for their crimes, and were commonly known by the name of Christians. They had their denomination from Christus (Christ, dm.), who in the reign of Tibertius was put to death as a criminal by the procurator Pontius Pilate. . . .At first they were only apprehended who confessed themselves of that sect; afterwards a vast multitude discovered by them, all of which were condemned, not so much for the crime of burning the city, as for their enmity to mankind. . . ." (Tacitus, Annals, 15, 44).

Anon - I can't say anything about Chucky's 30 historians until someone actually gives me who those 30 historians are. That being said I'm not worried about proving Chucky wrong because it wouldn't matter what I produced in response. You would accept nothing short of the heavens opening up and God himself telling you he's real as proof. Even then I'm not sure you wouldn't rationalize it as a hallucination. It sure seems like you are more concerned with converting me to your beliefs than I am with converting you to mine. I guess that’s why you, like Robert, can’t simply try and make your point but need to mock me and my beliefs. You also seem to have this biased opinion that to believe in God means closing your mind to science and discovery. Just so you know the Shroud of Turin could well be a fake. I have no idea and it really has no bearing on my faith.

ravensfan - All religions started as cults and remain so as long as they continue to exist. Except for some footnotes shortly after the Christian cults arose, historians did not take much notice of Christianity until it had swelled its ranks with believers who had never seen, or heard of, the Christ pretender until after his death. I would think that if someone fed 5000 people (no small gathering), with a loaf of bread and a few fishes, that that would be mentioned in the chronicles of the historians somewhere, as there would have been a great number of witnesses. I'll bet Sun Myung Moon gets credited with a number of "miracles" after he finally dies by his followers and they are, I'll bet, as nuts as the early followers of your Jesus.

And as nuts as the later followers of Jesus Robert--in fact the later followers of Jesus are nuttier because they never did meet Jesus, they call him god, they say that the Bible is the book of god and they indulge in endless fights over the meaning of its passages--their interpretations of this book as commandments directly from the mouth of god to his babes in the woods--that takes the cake. These later cult followers have gone to the extent of telling the world that god condemned homosexuality, that god did not want women to be ordained as ministers, that god would be very displeased if lesbians are ordained--and so on and so forth ad infinitum and ad nauseum--when it comes to fruit cake-ism the later followers of Christ, in fact the most recent followers can't be beat--early Christians were mild salsa compared to the hot Jesus cult we have going all around us right now.
Ravensfan Anon

Ravensfan Anon - It is not surprising that the flat-Earther, demon caused disease believing men (no women) who formulated, wrote and edited the superstitions and myths of their even more clueless ancestors, when they concocted their Buy-Bull, used the prevailing archaic perceptions of reality as the "moral" basis of that book. What is sad is that even over the thousands of years that have transpired since then, is that "believers" are still using the bigoted foundation these clueless idiots used as a foundation for what they claim is the inerrant word of their made-up god dressed in the lie that it is the "Ultimate Truth". The believers of such rubbish, demand to be taken seriously, which is the ultimate absurdity.

Robert - That’s your opinion and you are entitled to it of course. It is not a fact so excuse me if I dismiss your opinion as meaningless and insignificant. Christianity’s been around for almost 2,000 years and survived the rise and fall of so many civilizations that your opinions on it come off sounding more like wishful thinking to me.

Anon that what I just said about Robert applies equally to you and your post. If it gives you comfort to believe that go right ahead. Opinions like Roberts in yours appeared in the Bible long before either of you were born so you really don’t make a compelling argument for why your opinion should be believed.

ravensfan - I have grown used to you embracing absurdities and treating them as being somehow rational. It is so typical of the deluded mind and so indicative of how much farther many have to go before they progress to the next tier of Human evolution. When they picture out the evolutionary trail in future text books for children, I have no doubt that the step before the one many of us have already achieved, will be preceded by a wild-eyed humanoid fanatically waving a bible in their hand.

Robert – There is nothing new in your post. It’s nothing more than another of your rants supported by nothing except your own wishful thinking. If your ideas are the future of the human race we truly do not have much of a future.