Totally comrade, the true democratic ideal of pluralism. As long as nobody is harming one another, and tangibly infringing on their liberties why the fuss? Somebody can believe in Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, or anyone, and that in and of itself hurts no one, neither does homosexuality thank you very much your popeness. As much as the free world boasts of liberty, freedom, and democracy they practice so little of it. I think that in time it will become better, our civilizations are marching in that direction and alot of progress has been made already. I'm actually somewhat excited to see what the world will look like when I'm 80.

Exactly.

I've often pondered this... on one hand, a largely Christian nation marches forward proclaiming "democracy and freedom for all" but as soon as those same people say that they don't believe in Jesus, they are automatically condemned to hell for not believing.  Is that truly what democracy is all about?  I think not.

If they truly believe in the Democratic idea, they should say their peace, and when turned down, should imediately say, "God bless you, free will and democracy are one in the same, go in peace".

If a Christian truly believes in democracy, then they should just let that person decide for themselves how they wish to live.  I mean, isn't that what the very basic principals of the founding fathers were all about?  Afterall, they were Christians themselves, and they understood this very clearly.

So long as you do not harm someone else by believing a certain way, you completely have my blessing to live your life in peace.  Such principals are at the very core of democracy... and if we forget that, then we have also forgotten what freedom is, and that would make George Washington turn in his grave.

I understand that (your first paragraph), but my point was not to prove the truthfulness of the New Testament, but to explain it's positions; whether they are actually right or wrong was besides my point.

I certainly grant you that you are knowledgable in Hebrew, but suppose you came across a Christian who had extensively studied Greek and Arabic, the language of the New Testament; you would have to extend your own position to him.  Not that I have, but there are others who, having studied those languages, agree with me.

You say you would not condemn a Christian for spreading the truth, yet you say you take offense when they speak to you of Hell; the truth of the matter for Christians is that the unsaved are going to Hell, and our Bible commands us to tell others this, which I imagine you yourself would do if the Old Testament commanded it (and you believe it, of course).  So you're going to have to have it one way or the other: condemn them for doing what the do entirely, or let them witness without condemnation.

the pope is a twat, end of story

No, I would not have to extend my position to such a man, because his whole system of belief is founded upon my own (what Christians call the old Testament).  He cannot have a religion without both his new Testament, and my so-called, old Testament.  His Bible is his own and my own combined.

However my own Bible is simply my own Bible.  My "religion" is only dependent upon the so-called "old Testament" and has nothing to do with the "new Testament".  In retrospect, a Christian's Bible is half-his and half-mine.

Henceforth, a Christian cannot be a Christian without my Bible, but a Jew can be a Jew without ever seeing a New Testament. 

As for your last point, I do not take offense to a Christian telling me how he or she believes, as I am quite respectful to all faiths... and I do not have to agree with someone to respect their opinion.  I believe in free will and democracy.  I do however take offense to someone telling me that me and my 3 boys are going to be put in fiery furnace and be tortured for all eternity... I hope my reasons for being upset at such a notion would be obvious.  I love my kids, and the very thought that someone would tell my kids that they will be burned and tortured forever is quite disturbing.

I respect the opinion of all men, but I will never respect someone's right to beat me over the head with their idea of the truth, nor will I ever accept someone telling my children that they are doomed to be thrown into a fiery furnace to burn for all eternity and never to have rest from such torture. 

I actually find such things to be quite disturbing.

I do not expect people to believe that I am destined to be God's right hand man... nor do I care if they hope that I get hit by speeding truck.  I just don't care.  But if that same person tells me day in and day out that they want to see me and my children get run over by a car, over and over again for the rest of eternity, that's actually pretty spooky. 

What I am trying to say is, I don't expect people to believe as I do... I just don't care what people believe...

I do, however, want to be left in peace and to live my life as I feel God wishes me to live.  If you or any other Christian doesn't agree, that's okay, I respect that.  You have the right to disagree with me, 100%.  But as soon as your right to disagree infringes upon my right to choose my own salvation, then that's when your freedoms have trampled upon my own... and that's not freedom at all.

I hope we understand each other.   I respect your right to be a Christian, and I respect someone elses to be an athiest.  It doesn't matter if I agree or not with either of you... each person will face death in his own time, and that person will face their own after life... therefore, I won't waste my life bringing them hell on Earth by trying to force my beliefs upon them.

By your position I meant the one where you said your extensive knowledge of Old Testament theology would be an argument in and of itself.  For someone who has extensive knowledge of the New Testament, in the languages it was written, you would have to extend that same courtesy to them as you do yourself:a level of expertise in your respective field.

How is it a beating over the head to simply tell someone something?  I don't know how you've experienced it, but it certainly should be done, at least, kindly.  In any event, wouldn't it be more disturbing if a person who believed that others were going to burn for all eternity, and he thought he knew that he could help save them from that fate, but did not?  And we still are commanded to go and tell people about it; how can you respect others beliefs and opinions, but take offense at them when they actually do them?

Just to clarify, I certainly do respect others beliefs as well.  I respectfully disagree, and urgently attempt to convince them otherwise.

Sorry, that's not really a philosophical argument.

Are you positing a world of epistemological relativism? Is this a Cartesian position that devolves into solipsism? Are you denying the validity of the categorical imperative? Are you relying on any of the views presented by the "Science of the Mind" (apart from the actual neurophysiology) or are you doing a modernistic riff off of the implied nihilism in "Beyond Good and Evil" or perhaps something closer to Kierkegaard?

I am interested in what you mean when you say that, philosophically speaking, believing X is no more absurd than believing Y, Z or anything else. It almost sounds like you're taking the existential objectivist position, but that would be a strange pulpit to use when defending the Bible.

Sorry to rain on your parade but you missed a key philosophical argument. That's the inability to differentiate between the lack of understanding about a subjective idea and the capacity to understand an objective element of reality. ;)\

(BTW, I have no idea what you're talking about, I am not a philosopher. I hate esoteric conversations in general but I know why you did that. Philosophers are amusing, "because I made up a long word to describe a situation, that means I invented the idea of analyzing that situation.")

Well, if you want to explore the tension between the subjective and the objective, that's just fine. At this point I'm not sure that apollose made it clear that he wanted to saunter down that garden path. ;)

That sentence of yours that I bolded does capture a lot of the essence of what Greek philosophy was about and why I majored in it and learned a bunch of ancient greek. That is also what Nietzsche was most interested in, he was first an etymologist, not a philosopher. Heidegger was drawn to the same thing, i.e., trying to draw the meaning out of a word in its first and crudest sense and trying to understand what it was like for a person to first use a word in a particular context, e.g., the word "being" or "existence" used in an abstract manner to describe itself. Parmenides and Heraclitus are the two favorites in this type of philosophy with Socrates/Plato a distant second. But I digress... Pope is poopy head.

Exactly why I didn't major in philosophy. I didn't want to spend four years analyzing the nature of things in general, I wanted to spend four years analyzing the nature of interactions in particular.

And the pope, for all the good he does, can be a poopy-head...

Pope... poop... That's some etymology for you.