I’ve been to Sodom and Gomorrah, but the others are all in the offing.

Of those fateful towns, my take was:

It’s no wonder that Sodom can’t scrape together 10 decent souls, if the best people they have are Lot and his two daughters.

O.T. family values are quite a standard to live up to: Lot offers up his married-virgin daughters to a vicious mob, and then the girls slip him a mickey and rape him.

Oops, I almost let slip some spoilers; have fun.

I appreciate that you are critical of some of the hateful blowhards in religion today.

I’m slowly working my way through the Bible, but as of Exodus 16, I’m absolutely horrified by the terrible messages it sends.

I’ve got a ways to go until I get to the Jesus stories, but anyone who states that “our lives must be lived in obedience to his teaching,” is selling something I ain’t buying, especially when it comes from questionably translated documents written decades after his death and thousands of years ago.

I’m always up for an “open, reasonable discussion about our beliefs,” though your definition of reasonable and mine may well differ.

Methinks faith in ancient supernatural stories is one of those places where “faith and reason *are* mutually exclusive.”

I can have faith that David Ortiz will come through with a clutch hit (usually, like any baseball player, he doesn’t, but he does it often and heroically, so I continue to have a little faith), and faith that the sun will “come up” tomorrow (a lot of documented history and science suggest it will), but having faith that God sent his only begotten son, born of a virgin, to be crucified to cleanse the world’s sins and that he bodily ascended to heaven — that kind of faith strikes me as silly at best.

I’m sorry that you and so many other people are deeply attached to profoundly believing in such myths, and I wish it didn’t seem disrespectful to say so — I don’t desire to be disrespectful — but banking so much on such a belief is a foible a reasoning person ought to find quite disturbing, and appropriate to criticize.

If you find certain Bible stories or characters inspiring (as metaphors, as fiction), I don’t have any beef with that per se, though I look forward to catching up with parts of the Good Book that strike me that way.

The only way I can see anything changing is if someone stands up for their beliefs and fight the notions like Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King.

I am very frustrated by those who, as you described, use Christianity to get political power and use their influence as a bully pulpit. It deeply saddens me that this has been most Americans’ exposure to what “Christianity” is.

Aaron, I know you were addressing vastleft, but felt I wanted to jump in here. There is so much more evil to Christianity than you care to admit. If you just read your Bible for what it actually is, and really take notice of the evil and violent parts, and then you may not even be able to follow your religion any longer. Most atheists/agnostics at this site were once Christians and we finally “saw the light” and recognized religion and Christianity for what it really is. And we often have Christians come by and apologize for other Christians and making the claim that these people are not “true Christians” when in fact, according to your holy book, the more prejudice, the more homophobic, the more intolerant, the more violent, the more hateful people are against those who are different, the more “christian” they actually are.

In his book he complains that democrats are too interested in courting the secular vote. One imagines that he holds his nose while typing the word ’s e c u l a r’.