since he is such a big dick.

I wanted to but your post made me Thanks.

as why did he have to murder his son by torture in order to forgive us?

BTW, I tried that "asking Jesus Christ into my life" repeatedly - it never happened.

I have repeatedly asked Jesus to join me for lunch, and I still end up sitting there along.

makes killer fajitas. Who needs god when you have fajitas?

And all of Christendom rests on it. Without that tidbit there would be no reason for Jesus to "die" because there would be no sin.

I do remember that in his great book,* Charles Freeman covered it in detail. Including the fact that a Bishop wrote Augustine a letter, telling him Original Sin was an insane idea. And not only un-Xian but inhuman, IIRC.

*The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. An excellent read, and not to be mentioned in certain DU groups unless you want to experience Death By Google Nitpicking. "Wait, he said 436 years but it was actually 435 1/4 years. He obviously knows NOTHING!" Etc. etc. That's just an example I made up.

Now bend over and spread 'em, here comes a big hot load of Sophisticated Theology:

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) taught that Adam's sin is transmitted by concupiscence, or "hurtful desire", resulting in humanity becoming a massa damnata (mass of perdition, condemned crowd), with much enfeebled, though not destroyed, freedom of will.

When Adam sinned, human nature was thenceforth transformed. Adam and Eve, via sexual reproduction, recreated human nature. Their descendants now live in sin, in the form of concupiscence, a term Augustine used in a metaphysical, not a psychological sense. Augustine insisted that concupiscence was not a being but a bad quality, the privation of good or a wound.

He admitted that sexual concupiscence (libido) might have been present in the perfect human nature in paradise, and that only later it became disobedient to human will as a result of the first couple's disobedience to God's will in the original sin. In Augustine's view (termed "Realism&quot , all of humanity was really present in Adam when he sinned, and therefore all have sinned. Original sin, according to Augustine, consists of the guilt of Adam which all humans inherit. As sinners, humans are utterly depraved in nature, lack the freedom to do good, and cannot respond to the will of God without divine grace.

But as we have subsequently learned, dead racist white guys aren't qualified to be sources, and Aquinas was islomophic.

... it occurred to me that, no, I was not inherently evil and sinful. I realized that in my deepest nature I am a good person. In that moment I also realized that if my religious leaders were wrong about that then they might be wrong about other things as well. It took a number of years after that to work through the details, but by the time I was a teen I had finally freed myself from the nonsense that is religion. So in a way, I owe my freedom from delusion to the doctrine of original sin. It was that particular bit of nonsense that awakened me to the realization that the whole religion thing was all nonsense.

but, better late than never. Finally giving up the charade is freedom, and it's great! Over 20 years god free, and I just keep getting stronger.

Christ on a cracker, I can't even fathom what that must be like. Poor girl...

Hope things are going okay for you, don't be a stranger.

Yeah, life is getting a little less hectic. It's good to check in every once in a while to make sure no one has been banned!

Continuing the war on Christmas as always!

Onward heathen soldiers!

"Jesus loves you", but sorry you are going to have to burn in hell for eternity because you rubbed same bits together instead of opposite bits.

Not that any of the other major religions are any better.

As Constant Readers know because I yak about it all the time...I am a Constant Watcher of stuff like the Investigation Discovery channel and "Snapped" on the Oxygen Channel.

Just checked some cable demographics out of curiosity. ID Channel appears to be the most-watched cable channel for women aged 25-54.

That's a huge slice of Middle America - the demographic Graham thinks he has on his side, I'd guess. Hasn't this fool watched TV (broadcast or cable) since 1980 or so?

All those ID Channel shows have been doing stories about gay and transgender people for years. And they're never sensationalized any more than the stories about straight people, AFAICT.

Well, OK, if you have a series called "Wives With Knives," you aren't too worried about sensationalism. And that series, over the weekend, just ran a story about a transgender Black woman. I was amazed that she still had her sense of humor, or any sense at all, after everything that had happened to her. Including 3 years in a men's prison.

Anyway, Franklin, you already lost this war. But please keep fighting it, so everyone can see what a clueless bigot you really are.