Reply To: Reeling from Christian friend's bigotry
He is a cafeteria Christian. Thanks goodness for that because fundamentalists are scary.
I think the part you don’t understand, @Simon, is that fundamentalist is not the same thing as Christian. Most Christians aren’t fundamentalists and not all fundamentalists are Christians (there are Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists).
So it’s not that I’m deciding which parts of my faith to honor, it’s that my faith decides how it chooses to interpret the bible, since my faith is the group that compiled the thing in the first place. I can be 100% orthodox in terms of my faith while believing the bible was written and compiled by men, because that’s what my faith teaches. Religion, Church, faith, etc. are not the same thing as the bible. The bible is just a small piece, one book out of thousands. In our creeds we say we believe in God and in the Church, not in the bible.
Again, what you all seem to embrace (and then ridicule) is biblical literalism, quoting text for Authority and Justification. You don’t seem to be atheists so much as anti-fundamentalists. You adopt the thought processes of fundamentalism (biblical quotes as authority) and even some of its argumentation style to argue against it.
My point is that you’d be better served by being true atheists, and drop the fundamentalist way of thinking about things entirely, especially your fundamentalist thinking about religion. Embrace objective reality instead!
