[ZNPaaneah]

Originally Posted by awareness

I have had a lot of fun with fundamentalism. I grew up with it. They shouldn't be allowed to have 'fun' associated with it. But I don't group-hate them. Much of my family here are fundamentalist types. And I truly love them. I've noticed that they aren't all the same. And that their fundamentalism is shaped by prejudices they grew up with. Thus my cousin and the Ham/slavery/God's Laws story. And by the way, I jumped all over him when he said that, right in front of all present. Pretty much the same way I jumped you for the Ishmael claim. I said, "You've got to be kidding." He wasn't. But he knows better than to debate Bible with me.

Just a personal confession, to maybe clear up misperceptions I may have generated out here so far. I grew up with a staunch Southern Baptist mother. She took me to church every time the doors were opened. My father was a rough Kentucky boy, that grew up in these necks of the woods,, in what was known as The Land Betwixt the Rivers (moonshiners) now Land Between the Lakes (LBL). He was rough and tough and mean, and was an outspoken unapologetic racist. He once kicked my sister and I out of his house, cuz we tried to explain that we had to work with, and get along with, blacks. He said, "I never raised you to be nigger lovers. Get out of my house." Yet he's my dad. I have to love him.

Maybe that's why I actually get along with people on both or all extremes of the spectrum. To me no matter how we group people it ends up that there are both good and bad in all groups.

That's why I can't buy into the Ham curse thing, or the Ishmael/Arab thing. To think that something said or written 3000 years ago applies today, is like saying the city of Damascus 11,000 years ago, or more recently 2500 years ago, was the same as it is today. It's unrealistic to absurdity.

But back to the New Man. When we become a New Man, do we look down on or despise those that aren't? Is that how it works? The New Man has a group to hate? Does that match the sermon on the mount? Or was Jesus just speaking platitudes? When did Christianity become about group-hate?

You have grown up around people who are unrealistic and absurd and use the Bible to justify their prejudices. As a result you have equated their prejudices with the Bible. That is truly absurd and unrealistic. Just because some Kentucky moonshiner bigot uses the Bible to justify his beliefs doesn't mean it does.