I wanted to pick up the book, but now can't remember the title or author, and the Daily Show site is giving me no love.

Allyson, it's Misquoting Jesus--I only remember that because Connie Neil mentioned it a few weeks before the TDS appearance.

Don't forget the stuff that was added by later scribes, including the end of Mark (the original ended with the discovery of the empty tomb, and the phrase "And they were afraid," which was too much of a bummer for later Christian scribes, so they added the Resurrected Jesus as seen in Luke and Matthew to make it a matched set).

what I meant, which is that I don't think you can divorce one part of your world view from another.

That's a complete 180 from the statement you began with, which is probably why I didn't pick it up from anything else you've posted until now. You started with causality, but the above suggests you meant correlativity.

I think one true test of whether your religion informs your morals, or vice versa, is whether you would behave in a way that's contrary to your morals if dictated by your religion.

Don't you think most people behave in ways contrary to their own (professed, at least) morals at least once in a while, though--sometimes because of weakness or fear, or an impossible situation, or because a situation arises in which two principles are seemingly in conflict with one another? Doesn't that say more about character than about which informs what.

That's a fair argument, but I would modify my previous statement with how you feel you should behave when your morals and religion conflict, not how you actually would behave. IOW, which do you feel should trump the other. For example, imagine you are a devout Muslim of a sect or following that believes that apostacy should be punished by death. OTOH, you feel that freedom of religion/beliefs is a basic human right and killing someone for rejecting Islam is against your morals. You are Hamid Karzai. Or a prominent cleric. Or the executioner. What do you do? If you say, obviously you don't kill him, then your morals trump your devotion to your religion. If you don't know which should trump, then you're in the middle group where some of your morals are separate from your religion.

For example, say a crazed (but dumb) child murderer shows up at my door, and says, "Are your children home? If you say they're home, I'm going to enter your home and kill them." Now, I still think truth is good, and lying bad. And in fact, given my particular religious beliefs, it may even be that I should answer truthfully or at least not answer and try to thwart the killer another way. But I'm on the spot, and I think my duty to protect my children's life is more important than being perfectly truthful, in this circumstance.

Here's where we disagree, at least semantically. I feel it is good to lie to protect your child's life. In fact, I feel you have a moral duty to lie, and it is in no way a conflict with the assertion that lying is bad. Another way to say it is, lying is bad unless it is serves a higher moral purpose in which case, lying is good.

Don't forget the stuff that was added by later scribes

I like the guy who just wrote a poem about his cat.

tommyrot wrote the Bible?

ooh, thanks for the title! The Amazon reviews are craxy.

Will you guys promise to write non-craxy amazon reviews for me if you read my book?

Timelies all!

Happy Birthday libkitty!

I have managed to demonstrate my major klutziness in two different ways this week. Sunday I slammed my right knee into a door frame while getting dressed, and have a large bruise in various shades of green and purple to show for it. Last night I got my left ring finger caught between my computer desk and chair and scraped a good amount of skin off the knuckle. Really talented I am...

There was a Daily Show guest recently who was a fundie, and was studying translations of the bible, and then became an agnostic when he discovered how completely different some copies were from others. Like a massive game of Telephone resulting in what we have today.

My minister Grandfather, on the other hand, had a bible that was six different translations. Each page had three columns, so when you opened the book to, say, Matthew 1 verse 3 you had it in six different ways right there in front of you.

And since he was learned and stuff he had some sense of the motivations behind each approach. And he could look over to the Greek column and see what the original word was and ponder for his darn self the various interpretations of it in prep for sermons or discussions or whatever.

Will you guys promise to write non-craxy amazon reviews for me if you read my book?

this bk suxx!!!1!!11! Allyson thinks she is ALL THAT bcuz some teevee writer is all in love with her and she used to have that lesbian witch's old smelly futon and she has friends with Mars rock robot arms and deadly pinkies and shit. SO WUT???? I wrote her begging to help my campaign for a brand new Farscape/Firefly/LOTR xover series which was BRILLIANT and she never even anserd my email! she sux!

But she has really pretty hair, so i give her book 4 stars.