323 Comments

What I mainly remember about the Bible is that we had a children's Bible that had all these illustrations of biblical stories in which the men were overwhelmingly muscle-y and under-dressed. So I have quite fond memories of the Bible. Or its pictures, anyway. I don't really remember what the stories were about, to be honest.

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Better that than it turns out the goddesses are all bugs. Because if that's the case, we're all so screwed.

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One wouldn't want to start any of those...

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Right? The illustrators HAD to be closet cases.

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Your awesome creation story reminds me of Marcia Gay Harden's line in "The Mist": "The day I need a [president] like you, I'll just have myself a little squat and shit one out."

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Heisemidemi- is my favourite!

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I got it wrong. It's hemidemisemi- as in hemidemisemiquaver, an outmoded (or British) term for a sixty-fourth note in music notation.

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Excellent point.

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I always look forward to your incisive commentary.

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The Old Testament does not even belong in Christianity. Neither do Paul's Pharisaic interpretations of Jesus.

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I've heard every defense in the book for a belief in Hell combined with a belief in a virtuous God. None of them ever explain the injustice of an unlimited punishment for a limited mortal being.

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If the Bible has any book that's jaw-droppingly cynical, Job would be it.

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I'm guessing that King Cyrus was the person referenced in all those OT verses.

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Too Halloween-ish.

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Or maybe whatever god that mosquitoes worship.

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When I was a kid in a churchgoing family, there were questions I knew to not ask, although we weren't fundamentalists. And one of them was the whole "salvation" thing: what were we being saved from?

I always figured it referred to being saved from evil -- most children have some concept of what evil is, though I suspect that mine was heavily influenced by movies and TV. At an embarrassingly late age (mid-30s) I discovered that the idea was being saved from the psychotic wrath of the same god you were expected to want to spend eternity with. Apparently this god created human beings with the ability to make choices but expected them to be perfect, and the first time a human made the wrong choice the god got into a snit he never recovered from.

Too much like a few family members of mine for my taste.

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