Halo,
>>>”I've posted my views on this... If the site search engine works you can easily find them.”
Well, I don’t know under which name(s) you posted this stuff. Besides, if I bothered to find these previously posted views, would I be able to understand them? I mean, if they’re like most of your other stuff -- presented as bad poetry, or bogged down with double entendre -- should I trudge through them until the point is obvious?
>>>”If I you get something that doesn't ask that you . . .”
What? Is this a typo, more bad poetry, or are you just as reckless with your pronouns as you are with your screen names? I mean, you’re the one demanding literal precision here (“You . . . can't count either, apparently”), so how about it, hmmmm?
;)
>>>”If you can write a better story . . .”
Me? Or are you saying you wrote the Bible?
>>>”I can discern from my own criteria good from bad rhetoric.”
So can I:
at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt Exodus
the man that lay with (a virgin) shall give unto (her father) her fifty shekels of silvers Deuteronomy
she doted upon their paramours . . . whose issue is like the issue of horses Ezekiel
the daughter of any priest, if she profaneth her father, shall be burnt with fire Leviticus
Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces Malachi
he slew all the house of Baasha: he left him not one that pisseth against a wall 1 Kings
--sounds like a Quentin Tarantino plot to me!
(watch yourselves, o filters of webspeak; for the LORD himself hath coined the word “pisseth”)
>>>”How do your views about the story itself stack up against all the freethinkers”
>>>”free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists . . . No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”
(from http://www.ffrf.org/nontracts/freethinker.html)
Also, see:
http://www.freethinkerscs.com/
http://www.mtfreethinkers.org/
http://www.freethinker.co.uk/
http://www.rthoughtsrfree.org/aof.htm
http://www.secularhumanism.org/yfa/
http://www.sos.mtu.edu/far/
http://www.nobeliefs.com/
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/4614/
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/lewis/lewis07.htm
While you're alluding to some of the men who called themselves freethinkers 200 years ago (i.e., conveniently ignoring the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson), you don't really seem to understand the term itself. Today's Ben Franklin would scoff at your ignorance.
-LH
”Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking, coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression . . . The road to (science) was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.” - Albert Einstein (emphases mine)
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