On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 12:02:55AM -0600, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net> wrote: > Caliann the Elf <calianng_graves at yahoo.com> writes: > > I have yet to see the Scriptures of a major religion propose > > violence and harm upon others, even those not of their religion. > > The Bible does not do so. The Quran does not do so. The Talmud > > does not do so. In fact, in all of them, you will find a LOT of > > teachings that can be effectively translated as "Will you PLEASE be > > NICE to each other? Thanks, this is your God." > > Then you've never looked at the bible, in particular. > > I'm an extremely poor biblical scholar, but even I can point out that > the early Israelites were punished for being *too lenient* to defeated > enemies, and that while the injunction against letting a witch live > may be a mistranslation, that argument is about "witch", not about the > rest of it, so *somebody* shouldn't be allowed to live. "poisoner", I think, which I frankly don't have much problem with. :) As for the rest, there are certainly lots of examples from the OT of a vengeful, bloodthirsty God. I suspect most people with a Christian bent prefer to ignore the OT. > > A side note about those poor books that everyone seems to be using > > as an excuse to do nasty, evil things: Imagine some nutcase reading > > the Taltos series and deciding that he is now a follower of the > > Prophet Vlad, who speaks for God, a.k.a. Steve. Now if this looney > > goes out and kills some people in the name of the Holy Order of > > Assasination, who is to blame? The nutcase? Or perhaps Steve is to > > blame for being God? > Steve's books are identified as fiction, and identified as taking > place on a world different from this one. That makes it pretty clear > to me. It might be more useful to note that Steve's books are not actively promoted as "this is how you should live your life", complete with a system of rewards and punishments for failing to say "Shut up, Loiosh" often enough. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp