Doesn't bother me.
Why would it?
I don't take anything on faith. You want me to believe? Show me.
OK. But I'm pretty certain you ain't gonna like my opinion nor the way I express it:
Don't be stupider than you have to be. None of those things is proof of the existence of goD.
Au Contraire, mon amie. The writers of the American Documentations were protestants all, and popular in their states/states-to-be. Including Thomas Jefferson who is widely lied about as being agnostic until we found his letter to his doctor that said that he was a Christian only in the way of Jesus Christ. Doh! That's as Christian as one can get. *sigh*
And since Christ was a Jewish Rabbi, both old and new testaments were based on Jewish cultural history, including the teachings of Christ to make clear that ordinary people could understand what God really wants his people to do: "To love your God with heart, mind, and spirit, and to love your neighbor as yourself." That is pretty much the essence of the Ten Commandments, and I could go all through them and explain why that is, but most people know, but I will take a shot at a couple of them:
3 - Keeping the Sabbath Holy -- attending corporate worship services, doing good deeds to widows, orphans, and those who mourn, resting and reflecting on dedicating your life more fully to serving other people, serving them better, not fretting too much, and encouraging others to look at the beautiful life God gave and working to keep it worth living for and picking up your own trash and promoting things like ocean clean-up so poor fishermen can continue to have healthym unblemished fish to sell at market that once provided protein for a third of the world population, but will end if we do not rid the surface of plastic which filters the sun out and wreaks havoc on every level of sea life in deadly ways. Other Sabbath activities could be looking on your own heart and making God's world a better place by giving a sad person a little bit of joy, giving a poor person tools that would help him fish, farm, or make a living somehow.
8 - Trying your best to avoid bearing false witness -- the kind of false witness that would take away a person's capacity for earning a living; false witness that would put an innocent person in jail; false witness that would discredit a person socially; false witness that would damage the relationship of 2 friends, false witness that would break up someone else's marriage; false witness that would place a low-iq person in jail for the duration of his life; and any other false witness that would harm another's well-being, life, or career opportunity; and false witness that would destroy a nation or bring genocide of a people.
These are things that God's people are generally encouraged to do. The beauty of Christ is he is the sacrificial lamb for us to maintain contact between man and God and between man to his brother man. As I understand it, and no, I am in no way a qualified minister, I just read the bible a lot to this day, and watch videos of what biblical scholars can give us. I know God requires us to allow him and him alone to judge others, and he likes it when we forgive others and ask God to bless them I have a lot of spiritual discs, and I divide them into scriptures; to scriptural stories that do not depart from the scriptures, nonscriptural stories that are consistent with the teachings of Christ; non-scriptural stories consistent with Mosaic Laws; discs that I cannot validate with scriptures that make claims that are not confirmed; discs that say they are based on scripture but fly in the face of right and wrong. I try not to make judgments, but some things, I just break the disc and throw in the trash because it is definitely not consistent with the Kingdom of God as I understand him, keeping in mind the words "now, we see through a glass, darkly, but then face-to-face," and I thank God for Jesus. That's about it. As I said, my heart's beliefs are not pleasing to those who espouse atheistic views for their own reasons. I do not take responsibility for those who blame religion for the world's ills, because I think unbelief in the merciful capacity that God's pure and simple love for mankind, whom he has given free will since the beginning. Religion is all about dealing with free will, accepting what we can't change as part of the world's diversity, and fixing what's broken if we can and being glad it is whole.
Time for my nap, and working on a charity project when I wake up. Bless you all and wishing you a happy heart.
