Pat Robertson suggests God Smote Sharon for giving back land

[mburbank]

"Christianity wouldn't be what it is today without the works of Paul."

I know. I favor the Gospel of Thomas. While there's plenty of room for disagreement, I don't think Jesus would even recognize the church today, and probably would have stopped recognizing around the time of the Nicean Creed, when the doctrine of salvation surpassed The sermon on the Mount (or wherever) in importance.

"Then we should dismiss ALL scripture references from this conversation, there are a lot of biblical scholars who think the entire Bible is bullshit, so we probably shouldn't be citing the Bible to support or dismiss Christians using their 1st Amendment rights, right? "

Don't be abdsurd. I understand you're irritated. I assure you I do not equate Christianity since the creed with Pat Robertson. But there is a point here, and to me it's this. A lot of Christians of all denominations focus so much attention on Salvation and damnation, much to the disservice of the bulk of what Jesus had to say about how God wants us to behave. I'm fairly dissinterested by any Biblical scholar that says 'the bible is all bullshit' but to date I haven't read any. It seems like an odd field to go into if that's your opinion. A generally accepted working argument is that if a passage can be found that is fairly similar in content in all four canonical gospels and various Gnostic gospels, you go on the assumption it's something Jesus said. That doesn't mean to me tat the Virgin Birth for instance isn't interesting, meaningful, possibly true, symbollically key, That belief in hasn't strongly influenced the course of history, etc. etc. etc. What it does mean to me is that I would place a good deal more of my focus on the content of the sermon on the mount, since aspect of it appear in almost all texts. Even if that doesn't mean it's true, I think it's clear that there was wide spread agrement among early Christians of it's importance to the movement and that the virgin birth (or in the case you sited, the concept of a trinity) were concidered of lesser importance.

As for baptism, John the Baptist and Jesus were both Jews. Todays evangelism seems to me awfully far removed from their reform movements.

And as far as Christians witnessing on campuses and bringing the good news to local coffee shops, I'm sure there is a great deal of sincerity in many of them and a great deal of pinched, self righteous superiority in others. In some cases I even think that their true, uncluttered, primary inetnt is to teach something. If my Christian friends are right, God already knows the content of their souls better than they do themselves.