A small correction, Christ never met Saul, the tax collector, later Paul the most prolific "evangelical" that ever corrupted a faith. A game of mine is to show a Christian a picture of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and have them point out which one is Paul to me. And the woman on Christ's right hand everyone is trying to say is a man.

The bible has gone a lot of places. Find the book "Misquoting Jesus." The bible itself is a political manifesto. At least, according to the head of the department of religion, University of NC at Chapel Hill.
Thank you for your posting Mercedes

It pisses me off to see these lies spread in Christ's name. Every. Single. Time.

Since it looks like the fundies are going to keep attacking this law for the foreseeable future, I think it's important to point out that this is not "new" legislation. SB200 simply updated Colorado's existing public accommodation law to add sexual orientation and to update some other language in the bill.

Challenging this law means challenging long-standing legal protections based on race, religion, gender, age, etc. as well.

I think that is some of what is really getting the fundies riled up...SB200 added us as a protected class to existing legislation (which protects them too) rather than being a stand-alone bill giving us "special rights". When their attacks on Colorado's anti-discrimination laws, if successful, effect more than just gay and trans people, I think it puts their bigotry in the proper light and will bring more people to our defense.

Thanks for posting this, Mercedes. The louder they complain about not being able to legally discriminate against people based on their religious beliefs, the more ridiculous they will continue to appear to average Americans.

It pisses me off to see these lies spread in Christ's name. Every. Single. Time.

Amen, Bil!
I believe in Jesus Christ. But I am not a Christian.

Actually, the tax collector in question was Matthew.

I agree that Saul / Paul made the first major detour in that faith. All of a sudden, the message of peace and turn the other cheek turned into "put on the whole armor of God," stuff about the "sword of righteousness," etc. Good ideological fodder for Crusaders.

The sad thing is that the flock believes this stuff, wholeheartedly. I remember back in the 1970s, my mom was telling me how someday the antichrist was going to send his soldiers along and they'd take away our Bibles and put us in concentration camps for possessing them. Everything new is old again. *yawn*

Mercedes, thank you for the illumination, but the problem remains that the "gospel of Matthew" was ghost written many years after his death.

Does make one wonder though how long this house of cards can prop itself up?

You sang it in Sunday school. So did I:

Tell me the stories of Jesus, I love to hear. Things I would ask him to tell me If he were here. Scenes by the wayside, Tales of the sea, Stories of Jesus, Tell them to me.

The thing is, have you read the Gospels? Was there one single verse when Jesus tells of a scene by the wayside? Does he tell a single tale of the sea?

What did Jesus talk about on every single page of the Gospels?

Religion. And himself.

That's a pretty good definition of religious fanatic.

He never talks about real things and real people. He talks so little about his own apostles that even today we don't know all their names. What did he say about his own family?

Was he the kind of guy you'd want to hang out with who nd what did he care about besides himself and his message?

Blighting the fig tree, swiping corn from somebody's field on the Sabbath, taking a whip to temple officials, horse theft? Condemning every last man, woman and child ever born and ever to be born to an eternity of agony and torment?

No doubt, we want Jesus to have been a better, more humane, more human person than Ayarolllah Khomeini.

But search all four Gospels: where's the evidence he was?

I knew a woman whose father was an alcoholic who was never there for her. Yet she adored him. As we talked we figured he was such a blank in her life that she filled in the things she wanted him to be and called that her father.

Is that what we're doing with Jesus?

The thing is, have you read the Gospels? Was there one single verse when Jesus tells of a scene by the wayside? Does he tell a single tale of the sea?

Um, yes.

Scene by the wayside = The Good Samaritan parable
Tale of the sea = Walking on water and calming the sea

And as for "real things and real people," I'd say Mercedes summed that up quite succinctly:

...when I look at a person who preferred the company of the poor, homeless, vagrants, prostitutes and tax collectors (I didn't make that up!) and then look at how that message has been turned by a small elite into one of hate, submission, marginalization, power to a select few, and control of the masses, I have to scratch my head in puzzlement.

Those all sound like real people to me. Which, to me, was the entire message of Christ. Help the people and not the institutions.