I believe the opening pie sequence has been on poeTV at least a couple times.

I'm withholding stars until I can watch it on something I don't have to sign up for.

FUCK VEOH (yeah, I went there)

Duper

:-(

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=56717

I boiled it down to a sentence:
"Try not to be such a dick all the time."

See, but that doesn't work. Religion is one of those few things that will make good people do bad things for reasons they think are good. Mormons who oppose gay marriage don't think they're being dicks. Creation Scientists who try to dismantle highschool science don't think they're being dicks. These people, in their own demented way, think they're helping.

My parents had both decided to stop going to church by the time they had me so the whole concept of religion was pretty foreign to me until I was old enough to experience Pat Robertson running for president, Oral Roberts being beckoned home, the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, and the PMRC's crusade against "occult" references in rock music (against other stuff too, but that's the religious angle, natch).

There is no "taking good from the bible", though. The Bible, in its crudest form, was essentially created as a way of imposing doctrine and social laws on people through fear of God, which is why so many of the oldest parts of it (most of which are omitted or cleaned up in modern versions) are about things like how best to subjugate your wife or daughter or when it's ok to kill people or what animals to sacrifice on what day and when it's cool to encourage the genocide of people who aren't like you. THAT is the core of the bible. The milder moral messages of peace and love were shoehorned in over hundreds of years to make the book more palatable.
As it stands now, the bible is wildly contradictory, which Jesus preaching love thy neighbor one moment and then preaching death to non-believers the next.

You're not taking what's good from the bible, tater. You're looking at this lengthy, evolved document that's full of a little bit of everything, and taking what's left after projecting your values onto it. The great skill of religious leaders is in convincing you that the good (neat that you can tell exactly which parts are good and which aren't, by the way) in the bible is somehow special or sacred, when it's just a badly written, poorly organized collection of frequently contradictory stories, some of which you take as literal (Jesus sits in a chair in a magic place where we go when we die to be always happy), some of which are symbolic (no see when Jesus said sell everything you have and give to the poor what he really meant was...) and some of which are just absolutely psychotic (wait how was it the fucking fig tree's fault and why was zapping it to death the answer).

No one's figured out how to take those parts out without causing more trouble for themselves in the process. Luckily for them, people like you are willing to give them a pass by being absolutely intellectually lazy.

Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?

perhaps my meaning wasnt clear enough on how i felt on the bible and people who have absolute faith in it.

i have never ever been able to take the bible or anything in as fact, even at an age i believed in santa. it boggles me that other people can take it at face value and accept it as absolutely true.

love it or hate it, it is a significant aspect of our culture and i think as with most things of course every person who reads it will analyze it with their own set of values. i dont use it to win arguements, i dont use it as a basis of my character or moral base, but there are passages that, despite being placement hundreds of years ago to make it softer, that speak to me and so i live my life best i can taking it for what its worth. it is no different that a book of khalid gibran's poetry. there are passages i like, and passages i dont and when im done with that book ill read another.

"taking what's left after projecting your values onto it"

"Luckily for them, people like you are willing to give them a pass by being absolutely intellectually lazy."

Oh ok.

I think that's what's frustrating about it. From an early age I was taught to read and to think and to analyze but now that I'm old I realize just how little reward there is for doing so. Sure, you can be successful by taking advantage of these people, but by catering to them you're just legitimizing their way of life.