First of all, I am a confused christian, and I am creating this thread to see if I can clear out some fog in my head. So lets start.
Claim: The bible is false in the sense that it was not written with the guidance of "god"
Reasons for my claim :
Originally there was a lot of contradiction in the bible because it was written by humans
These contradictions were refractor-ed by a humans, specifically some committee of who's name I can't recall
If it wasn't for all of these refractor, more and more people will be aware of such contradiction and hence people will start to question and possible see the problems with the bible. Which could cause a tremendous loss in the business of selling bibles and spiritual objects
There are things in the bible, still, that regular people find disturbing, such as the topic of homosexual, or parsing men more important than women.
Really, if it was written by god's disciples, and were the words of god, then such discrimination shouldn't exist, because god is suppose to love everyone of every type.
It also says that unless you follow him specifically, you will live eternity in hell? WTF!!! My family members are hindu, they are one of the best people that I know. My friend is not a believer in jesus, but possibly of a believer of there being a creator in general. He is one of the nicest and caring person that I know. Should he goto hell? For what? For some minuscule sins? So the bible is saying, I could kill thousands of people, and ask for forgiveness with all my heart and be truly sorry, and from there be the best person I can be, then I will goto heaven, but my friend who does nothing* wrong, tries to pleases people before him, will go to hell because he didn't believe in jesus in particular! Come on now, that does not sound like "god's words".
There is no type of evidence that supports the bible and anything in the bible
Most events declared in the bible are "fairy tale" like, and nothing supports their claims.
Some events, were explained by science and thus was not a supernatural. It was an actual explainable event with some probability.
In factual sense, the bible is no more true than the Quran( the religious text of Islam) . The reason why many people believe this book than others is because they were brought up by it. When they were little, they had no intelligence to rebuttal and question the content of the bible deductively. And thus the result is that they take it true for granted from day one. Honestly, imagine you were a christian brought up with parents who believes hinduism. You would most likely believe this hinduism, especially if you were never able to leave india( assuming thats where you were born) which in turn would cause you to never find christianity with a high probability, because of their strict culture.
So in desperate help, I ask you to prove me false. I ask you to rebuttal each and everyone of these statements. My mind is going crazy these last few nights. The more I think about it rationally, the less I believe.
1. You're probably thinking of the first council of Nicaea. They sat down and argued about different interpretations and agreed upon some things that were disputed, e.g. the date of easter and the nature of the trinity (is Jesus God or was he another prophet).
2. There's plenty of that in the old testament particularly. Like Moses telling his followers to go kill all the men, married women and children of their enemies, and take their enemies unmarried women as sex slaves... Yeah, that's no God I want to follow....
However, depending on which church you follow, this stuff might be interpreted differently.
Regarding Hell for non-christians, I've heard that
* We go to Hell (the eternal torment kind)
* We go to purgatory where we'll get another chance to learn the right path.
* We just die (the atheist's death) as hell is simply the destruction of the soul.
* We go to heaven as long as we followed our own vision of god and upheld Christian values.
As another example, in the Bhagavad Gita, the main character is a warrior who doesn't want to fight any more because he'll have to kill people he knows and respects.
In response to this, "God" basically just tells him to harden the fuck up and get on with the killing!! However, it's generally agreed that this entire story is a metaphor for the battle for ones own soul, not an actual battle between men.
Below are some quote quotes that your Hindu relatives could relay to ease your confusion. Religion should be about your own personal relationship with God, not about blindly following another's interpretation of scripture:[quote name='Gita 2:42, 2:52-53, 9:23']There are men who have no vision, and yet they speak many words. They follow the letter of the scriptures and they say "there is nothing but this".
When thy mind leaves behind its dark forest of delusion, thou shalt go beyond the scriptures of times past and still to come.
When thy mind, that may be wavering in the contradictions of many scriptures, shall rest unshaken in divine contemplation, then the goal of union with the divine is thine.
Even those who in faith worship other gods, because of their love they worship me.[/quote]
3. Things don't have to be true to have meaning. There's no imaginary numbers in the real world, but without believing in them, we wouldn't be able to build space shuttles.
If the fairy tales give people wisdom, then it doesn't matter whether they're true or not.
4. The "as long as we followed our own vision of god" interpretation resolves this... If you follow the "we go to hell" interpretation though, it's pretty messed up.
Use your heart, and not your ears, when trying to gather spiritual sustenance from scripture.
First of all, I am a confused christian, and I am creating this thread to see if I can clear out some fog in my head. So lets start.
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Obviously this will be an opinion thread, so here goes for me...
Claim: The bible is false in the sense that it was not written with the guidance of "god"
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I disagree.
However, I will re-order your support items just a little.
There is no type of evidence that supports the bible and anything in the bible
Most events declared in the bible are "fairy tale" like, and nothing supports their claims.
Some events, were explained by science and thus was not a supernatural. It was an actual explainable event with some probability.
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This I think is the most important.
You wrote it as one item, but I see about five in there.
First, you would need to accept the existence of deity in some form. You would need to accept that "God" represents that deity. And accept that God has an interest in our affairs. If you assert that the divine guidance was never involved, then your claim "that it was not written with the guidance of god" is pretty clear.
You said you are Christian, so I'll make some assumptions that the above is not the case.
I'll assume that as a Christian you do believe in God. And that God has an interest in our affairs. And that God communicates through prophets and through inspiration. And that those prophets and inspired people have recorded their inspired stories, and that other people have recorded stories of inspired individuals and prophets as they have heard them.
My belief is that God does indeed communicate to man.
Analogy time: A baby starts eating mother's milk, then gets weaned to mashed fruits and veggies, and slowly expands their diet to cover a full range of foods; you don't start by stuffing steak in a newborn's mouth. Next analogy: School children being with basic concepts and simple statements, gradually expanding in detail, depth, and nuance as the child's capacity to understand it increases; many times the concepts are incomplete or only partially true. You start a first grader on basic addition and subtraction, you hold off mathematical proofs of basic operations until number theory courses in college and have the capacity and background necessary to understand. And yet.... when science reveals that the food we give our babies is actually toxic and causes cancer, and new scientific theories completely destroy those currently being taught, what will people in the future think of our basic actions?
So too with how God would communicate to man. The recorded word says that God spoke with Moses, and Moses was shown the entire world from beginning to end. Do you suppose that Moses would understand the world as we see it today? Or that he would understand the world as it was seen in the 1400s? Or that he would understand the world as it was seen 2000 years ago? Or 4000 years ago? No, that isn't reasonable. Moses would have interpreted what he saw and experienced in terms he was familiar with. He would have recorded (or caused the scribes to record) his own interpretations of what he heard and saw. He could only process it in terms of what he already understood.
There are many things that we see and experience today that are completely outside the realm of understanding of people even a few decades before. How would you explain the Internet to those who have no concept of electronics just a century ago?
Next up, the concept of literacy. Many of the people in Bible stories were illiterate. Many prophets and kings relied on scribes to record their words. Many stories were not immediately recorded at all, traveling through many people before getting recorded. Some, like the story of Job, were written in poetic form. Does that mean that they cease to be divinely inspired? I don't believe so. Instead, you must take that at its value and accomidate for it within your beliefs.
You say they are fairy-tale like, and several are. I tell my own children stories of my own life and they enjoy them; I often start with "Once upon a time there was a little boy named Bryan, and one day he went out on an adventure..." These are stories of my life being recounted to my children, they are true to my memory, yet they are in fairy tale form. Would you say that immediately makes the story false? Would the life lessons I learned the hard way become less true simply because I use a format they enjoy? Does it harm the facts to reduce the story down to just those most relevant details expressed in a way they understand? I don't think so.
Finally in this group of claims, the issue of it not being outside the realm of probability.
Are you saying that all miracles must be outside of a particular probability? Are you saying that miracles must lay completely outside of science? I don't see how that works. Why would we need to be surrounded by mighty miracles that defy description?
I see a world where we are surrounded by miracles. Does it seem far-fetched that world is filled with miracles, divine inspiration, and at the same time is utterly mundane? How many stories are there where a mother feels prompted to check on her child only to discover them in a life-threatening situation? Was that divine inspiration or just some pattern of subconscious thought, or perhaps both? How many stories are there where people were protected from harm and they attribute it to God, where it can just as easily be attributed to a chaos butterfly effect? A thing can have a perfectly mundane scientific explanation and still be a miracle. Even our modern science itself I attribute to miracles and inspiration. Is a premature baby spending six months in a NICU and ultimately turning out just as healthy as a full-term child any less a miracle simply because doctors employed machines while the family spent time a few rooms away in the hospital's chapel? I spent two summers working in a hospital and saw enough for myself; go visit a hospital and ask some friendly doctors and nurses if they believe in everyday miracles.
Combining these I take it as refuting this group of claims. I believe there is plenty of evidence that supports stories in the bible, and that while the stories were told by people with a different understanding and interpretation of the world, they still contain inspired truth, and that miracles are all around us if we care to open our eyes to them.
So moving on, let's assume the stories were divinely inspired, which brings us to:
Originally there was a lot of contradiction in the bible because it was written by humans
These contradictions were refractor-ed by a humans, specifically some committee of who's name I can't recall
If it wasn't for all of these refractor, more and more people will be aware of such contradiction and hence people will start to question and possible see the problems with the bible. Which could cause a tremendous loss in the business of selling bibles and spiritual objects
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There were actually much more than one.
The bible is not a single work. It is a compendium of a bunch of records that were kept in various languages, translated many times, consolidated, and more. Errors were made in copies. Errors were made in translations. There were many times that scholars collected multiple copies, compared the differences, and attempted to resolve errors between them, or gathered copies and attempted to translate them. Many records were left out because the scholars and clerics decided against it, perhaps through revelation and inspiration, or perhaps not. Many records were lost or destroyed, for reasons I'll let you ponder yourself. Perhaps records were added that should not have been, or omitted in error.
There were many times where groups of scholars and clerics collected hundreds or thousands of source manuscripts, compiled them, translated them, studied over them, and did their best to generate a translation that better fit the language use at that time. We wouldn't have a bible in any modern language without these dedicated workers.
There were many councils of religion that attempted to resolve perceived conflicts. There were many different councils held by many different groups, the Nicene and Constantinople are the most prominent in my mind. Some tried to resolve differences between their popular culture and established scripture. Others attempted to resolve differences between differing copies and translations of manuscripts, or get manuscripts accepted as doctrine.
I'll even agree that there were translations done and councils made where people shared the purposes you mentioned, a loss of business and improvements to sales.
Does this mean that they did not seek council from God? Does this mean that individuals involved were completely exempt from inspiration? Does this mean that the inspired stories lost their inspiration?
I don't think it does.
I just think it means you should be careful with your interpretations, and especially careful about exact literal quotations in a particular translation. There have been millions of scholars across several thousand years who have collected the documents and done their work as an act of faith. I believe that much of the truth of the bible remains intact, but not in directly literal translations.
In factual sense, the bible is no more true than the Quran( the religious text of Islam) . The reason why many people believe this book than others is because they were brought up by it. When they were little, they had no intelligence to rebuttal and question the content of the bible deductively. And thus the result is that they take it true for granted from day one. Honestly, imagine you were a christian brought up with parents who believes hinduism. You would most likely believe this hinduism, especially if you were never able to leave india( assuming thats where you were born) which in turn would cause you to never find christianity with a high probability, because of their strict culture.[/quote]
I don't see how this applies to your claim that "that it was not written with the guidance of god". Islam believes in many books of the Old Testament just like the Jews. They believe in many of the early Jewish prophets like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, and Aaron. They also believe in many books in the New Testament, which is very much unlike Judaism. They believe that Christ was a very significant prophet, which is a point discussed in several early Christian ecumenical councils trying to decide if Christ was a prophet or savior.
When I have talked with some of my Muslim friends, they share a belief with me that a great deal of the biblical stories are true and have great worth. There is an extremely large overlap between Islam and Christianity, perhaps more than the overlap of current Orthodox Judaism with current Christianity.
It is my own choice to reach a different conclusion than them.
There are things in the bible, still, that regular people find disturbing, such as the topic of homosexual, or parsing men more important than women.
Really, if it was written by god's disciples, and were the words of god, then such discrimination shouldn't exist, because god is suppose to love everyone of every type.
It also says that unless you follow him specifically, you will live eternity in hell? WTF!!! My family members are hindu, they are one of the best people that I know. My friend is not a believer in jesus, but possibly of a believer of there being a creator in general. He is one of the nicest and caring person that I know. Should he goto hell? For what? For some minuscule sins? So the bible is saying, I could kill thousands of people, and ask for forgiveness with all my heart and be truly sorry, and from there be the best person I can be, then I will goto heaven, but my friend who does nothing* wrong, tries to pleases people before him, will go to hell because he didn't believe in jesus in particular! Come on now, that does not sound like "god's words".
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I think that is a personal interpretation.
Like you, I find it disturbing that so many religions take such an exclusive view.
Love God first, love your neighbor and yourself second. Forgive others and ask others to forgive you. Seek repentance for your own sins, and call others to repentance with love and understanding. Invite all mankind to come to God through faith, hope, charity, and love. Those are just a few simple concepts I get from bible sermons.
So in desperate help, I ask you to prove me false. I ask you to rebuttal each and everyone of these statements. My mind is going crazy these last few nights. The more I think about it rationally, the less I believe.
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I'm sorry to hear that.
There are many excellent religions out there. Most have got a mix of the current popular philosophies mixed with variations on scriptural themes. I haven't found any where they aren't mixed with popular culture, but I have found one that I believe to be the most true of those I have studied.
Some of my core beliefs are that God is our father in a very literal sense, and that he loves us all just like an ideal mortal father should love his children. He has always given guidance to those who ask for help with faith. I have a core belief that God has not stopped talking to prophets and to individuals; we can still pray and God will answer, but even more than that there are still prophets on the Earth who commune with God on behalf of mankind, the same as has been recorded by many different religions across the globe through all recorded history. I believe that everyone will be resurrected through the atonement of Christ, and that every individual will have the opportunity to accept or deny all the glories God offers, and that they will make the choice with full knowledge of their decision, and that they will ultimately be allowed to reach whatever they desire even if that desire is completely contrary to the desires of God. These are beliefs that my religion also teaches.
I hope you find a good resolution to your spiritual crisis, one that you can feel happy about.
I'm considered a Heretic in most Catholic dominated churches for my beliefs. People "New" to Christianity are often lied to that they need to read the Bible and follow the 10 Commandments. That's been droned into each and everyone for as long as the Catholic Church held power. Let me go over my views and then you decide whether or not I'm a heretic or critic.
The first thing is God is not a Bible, he inspired the Bible. Some versions of the Bible don't correctly translate, and we also got people that don't understand a thing about the Bible. YOU DON'T READ THE BIBLE UNLESS YOU FIRST HAVE A RELATIONSHIP AND FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD, Jesus, Holy Spirit. If you are confused stop there, you will never understand a relationship or fellowship with God by yourself. You need to just simply talk to God, Jesus, Holy Spirit like you do your best friend, favorite family member, and you need to love Him. People get this confused with that YOU need to love God for Him to love you. As a Christian you should always remember God loves you more, and gave the best of Heaven for you.
Now, thats cute right, here comes the heretical part. God found fault with His perfect law that He handed Moses, which is the 10 Commandments. He sent Jesus to fulfill those 10 Commandments so that when you get saved (Confess that you love Jesus, and that He is the son of God, and that there is no way YOU YOURSELF can get to earn Heaven by doing good deeds, and that there is no one else that can get you into Heaven. Now the law or 10 Commandments tell you that you need to keep all 10 inside your head (your thoughts), and outwardly (your body). You break even one Commandment you are guilty of breaking them all. The problem God saw with that is that only Jews could go to Heaven and the blood of lambs and goats needed to be shed every time someone sinned. Also, you could never get close to God, so Jesus and Him got together before creation and decided Jesus would die to provide a death or escape from the 10 Commandments and then ressurect to provide the new life so that Jesus could live inside your heart.
Now there is only 1 Gospel, its the Jesus Gospel. Grace, also known as Jesus, says you don't need to follow those 10 Commandments, but rather use each Commandment to see that you need more of Jesus. Now, the funny thing is this makes baptists mad, catholics, even most backwards preachers. Jesus ain't a book, God ain't a book, and you need to rather than sit there and read and pray like a drone, start letting Jesus and you have a relationship and fellowship. Yeah, you can read the Bible, but don't read the Bible if your not even hearing God's Voice. What is God's Voice? You'll know when you hear it, and only weak and ignorant people can't hear God's Voice. They think it comes from signs, or through a prophet, but it comes from the inside of you, sorta like the middle of your body. It's the most hard thing to do, is teach yourself to shut up and listen for God's Voice. It's not that God doesn't talk to you, but that He talks t oyou all the time and you just too used to ignoring Him.
You sir suffer from signs of False Christianity.
Now to answer your confusion, I first need you to understand that whoever "brought the Gospel to you" forgot to introduce you to the true aspect of it. You need to just let Jesus do everything through you, and provide for you. It's not God that needs to be served, but for Him to serve us so we can be a blessing for others.
1. Translation errors, and a lot of tongue in cheek. Some people need to go back to the ancient manuscripts and study for themselves. It's the only way to find out the correct translations of the Bible.
2.
A. God didn't create Adam and Steve, it was Adam and Eve. People think sexual attraction is genetic? LMAO, but if it was then you simply would not be able to like Baseball if you were genetically born to like Football. People learn to like things by thinking, yes thoughts count. Add emotional attachment and confusion to it and you get homosexuals.
B. Your friend can not earn a gift from God. Think your friend is greater than a Sin-less God, your friend can be nice as pie but he atleast broke 1 Commandment in his entire life, which makes him guilty of breaking all Commandments, and unless he never sinned, he ain't getting into Heaven.
C. Yup, God said that you can not be self-righteous or self right standing and expect to earn entrance into Heaven. Its about accepting and loving Jesus. You can find that out by talking with Jesus.
3.
A. Science and Religion go hand in hand. Good thing God is not religious and that Jesus is not a religion right?
B. They found Noah's Ark, The Ark of the Covenant, The parting place for the Red Sea, they found Mount Sinai where God gave the 10 Commandments, and they also found a lot of artifacts for ancient Jewish battles and communities. You need to do some research bro since your still a baby Christian.
C. You need to start talking with God and listening with your Spirit. You don't think thoughts and believe its God, honestly I think 99% of the newbs think that God is made up. Do your own research, once Jesus and you are cool and hanging some time together, you should be directed into what to read and what to watch. Lots of information to read, and it's not just Christian, you should be going over everything from atheism to Evolution to Muslim to even Buddha.
4. This entirely depends on how self prideful you are. I was never brought up by Bible, I came to it with huge skepticism. I questioned everything, and I did my own research. Finally when I found out God was talking to me the entire time, well things changed. The more "Rational" you think is the more you justify yourself that if you can't do it, it can't be done. I can clearly say that I'm actively smart. I spend around 7 hours of my free time in mathmatics, biology, literature, mythology, and many other stuff. If you think I'm closed minded, well then you're the one with your head jammed into your butt. I think that you should give a pause to your rational thinking (personal justification as it is also called) and go spend some time just honestly expecting Jesus to answer you and talk with you.
I can't tell you what to do, nor will I. I trust your smart enough to atleast attempt to try to talk with Jesus and not listen with your head or thoughts, the voice should be low at first and bubble from within your Inner Being. For me it bubbles up from around my inner chest, a small voice at first then it grows big.
Failure is simply denying the truth and refusing to adapt for success. Failure is synthetic, invented by man to justify his laziness and lack of moral conduct. What truely lies within failure is neither primative or genetic. What failure is at the heart, is man's inability to rise and meet the challenge. Success is natural, only happening when man stops trying to imitate a synthetic or imaginable object. Once man starts acting outside his emotional standpoints, he will stop trying to imitate synthetic or imaginable objects called forth by the replication of his emptiness inside his mind. Man's mind is forever idle and therefore shall call forth through the primitives of such subconscious thoughts and behaviors that Success is unnatural and that failure is natural. Success is simply doing something at man's full natural abilities and power, failure is the inability to act on what man wants, dreams, wishes, invisions, or thinks himself to do. ~ RED (concluded when I was 5 years old looking at the world with wide eyes)
It's great to see that you are using critical thinking and reason to question your faith. I have one suggestion for you, look up Christopher Hitchens (YouTube is a good source with many great debates he participated in), you should enjoy his rational and analytical approach to religions.
2.
A. God didn't create Adam and Steve, it was Adam and Eve. People think sexual attraction is genetic? LMAO, but if it was then you simply would not be able to like Baseball if you were genetically born to like Football. People learn to like things by thinking, yes thoughts count. Add emotional attachment and confusion to it and you get homosexuals.
A person's tastes are not within their conscious control. I'm sure there are some things that other people like that you simply could never "learn to like," no matter how hard you tried. Can't think of any examples? You're not trying hard enough. I offer you this challenge: find someone who has completely different tastes in television than you do. Now, over the next two weeks, adapt your tastes to be exactly the same as this person. Learn to like everything they do. Not just the same shows, like the same scenes that they do, be able to laugh at exactly the same jokes that they do, etc. Also, stop liking anything on TV that they don't like that you used to like. At the end of two weeks, after you have succeeded in this task, you can go back to your old viewing habits. Except, of course, you won't want to, because you need to have actually changed your taste to match up with this other person's.
Here's another challenge for you: find me someone, anyone, who used to have sexual attraction to exclusively (or even primarily, I suppose), and is now exclusively (or, again, even primarily) attracted to the opposite gender. There are some fairly reliable, scientific ways of measuring sexual arousal in response to images; I will accept the use of any one of them as evidence, provided that this "ex-gay" person was tested sufficiently both before and after their "conversion." Here's a hint: no such person exists. You can change who you have sex with, of course, but as for what arouses you (i.e. what you're saying can be changed with "thought"), it's quite telling that there isn't a single example of this changing, in anyone, ever.
Here's another challenge: spend 4 forum pages trying to convince a homophobe that their irrational discrimination based on religious zeal is exactly that -- irrational discrimination -- only to find that after 4 pages they're still clinging to their ignorance.
No wait, don't do that. It'll only turn this thread into a typical religion thread instead of focusing on the OP...
Here's another challenge: spend 4 forum pages trying to convince a homophobe that their irrational discrimination based on religious zeal is exactly that -- irrational discrimination -- only to find that after 4 pages they're still clinging to their ignorance.
No wait, don't do that.
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Hey, now, some homophobic people are still susceptible to rational argument; I have seen people change their mind on the matter. There's a difference between a person's emotional reaction to homosexuality (which is difficult to change) and one's conscious view about the matter, which I've found is not necessarily a lost cause.
3. Things don't have to be true to have meaning. There's no imaginary numbers in the real world, but without believing in them, we wouldn't be able to build space shuttles.
Ugh. Please don't perpetuate the stupid prejudices against imaginary and complex numbers.
There are no natural numbers in the real world, no negative numbers, no rationals, no reals. The only things that exist in the real world are representations of them. A natural number might be represented by the contents of a register in your computer, or in decimal number notation on a piece of paper, or in the form of a physical set, like a set of eleven beads represents the natural number 11, or in a number of other ways. Complex numbers might be represented by a pair of registers in your computer, or in the usual a + bi notation on a piece of paper, or physically by a wave.
Maybe you don't adhere to the exact same understanding of what it means to exist, but it is clear that imaginary numbers are no more or less valid or "true" than any other number system (and that includes even more exotic systems like p-adic numbers). The terms "natural", "real", "imaginary" and "complex" are an unfortunate accident of history. [1]
The underlying reason why the type of misrepresentation that I quoted ticks me off is that it indoctrinates millions of students into thinking that complex numbers are something strange, unnatural and difficult, when in fact, complex numbers are the most natural number system to work with for many types of problem. It makes people shy away from something that is elegant, simple, and useful. All that just because of a stupid misunderstanding of terms. Let's not perpetuate that misunderstanding further.
[1] Yes, the first people who grappled with complex numbers really did believe that they involve something truly imaginary and unreal. I'm sure the first people to grapple with the number zero had similar thoughts of how zero was somehow an unnatural concept or "not true". Heck, just look at all those stories about how the Pythagoreans supposedly hated the idea of irrational numbers initially. This kind of initial reaction to a new concept is understandable. But we as humans have learned new things since then, and today, there's really no excuse for thinking like that any more.
