BluePhantom
Educator (of liberals)
In Luke Jesus helps us understand Gawd's relationship with humans by telling us that Gawd treats people the way people treat their slaves...they beat some more than others. Then Jesus gets really crazy and condemns a fig tree, simple because the fig tree stopped producing figs. Yet, here you are, blaming me for not being able to suck enough meaning out of the Bible.
To date, I haven't run out and murdered any of the people I dislike because I feel that living in such a vigilante society would be a step back in societal evolution, and thus less good a life for me and for everyone else. The old "Wild West" of America was such a lawless, vigilante society, even though its denizens were steeped in religiosity. Everybody "open carried", and a careless word taken as an affront could cause a shootout in the public streets, resulting in death. Common in those days, even though nearly all of those Western gunslingers were Christian born and raised. I think society has come a long way since then, for the better. And it's due to secular law and personal ethics, not religion. Obviously.
I'm sorry you feel that I'm an elitist simply because our ethics and morality have evolved.
Well again, what I question is your perspective. It seems to me that you are quite focused on finding things in the Bible that you disagree with in order to ignore what you can agree with. It's important to understand that there is a difference between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of theology as well. That we know of we have no first hand accounts of the life of Jesus. The gospels are traditionally attributed to the Apostles or their companions, but they almost certainly were not written by them. The letters of Paul have some problems associated with them...many are pseudopigraphic and those that aren't reflect Paul's interpretation and message and not necessarily the message of Jesus. When looked at critically, there are many things attributed to Jesus that don't make a whole lot of sense or are historically implausible.
As far as morality and ethics, see my immediate post above