Dragonlord Stephi :

True, inquisition was a catholic thing and back then there were no other christian churches in Europe at least. Actually the other day when I wrote that, I realised afterwards I am not much aware how the armenian, coptic and orthodox churches dealt with people who they considered as unbelievers or heretics at that time. If somebody is willing to share a light on that, I would be happy to know.

In my country if I remember right, the last person to be burned alive was around 1720`s but like I said, I cant remember exactly but around 200 years after we converted away from catholicism.

They handled it largely by burning at the stake. All denominations did that. However, it wasn't only Christians who killed "heretics." Christians were also killed and murdered until the Catholic church gained dominance for a couple hundred years in Europe. Many other religions have killed and still are killing not only Christians but other religions as well. Thus, it is important to remember that every religion has had a period of persecution. The main question is, were those people really believing Biblical Christianity or something else?

Dragonlord Stephi :

Well the original question in the original post was... well a lot of rambling, but about chirstianity, not about religions in general. But you are right of course, other religions have killed people too. Biblical christianity? Every christian domination believes their interprepation of the bible is the right one so of cource they believed in it. Both the killers and the victims.

Brigand, I'm not saying whether or not THEY believed it was biblical or not but whether it WAS, and that just starts up a whole new debate.

Understand that a large portion of the population was illiterate during the time of the Crusades.  For interpretation of the bible, they relied on the heads of the church.  They believed anything the leaders told them was in the bible (as they could not read it for themselves).  So the Crusades was started by a few individuals who had their own agenda.  Which is terrible yes, but you can't put the blame on the religion OR the general populace.  It was a few people, leading a illiterate populace who trusted them.

The same can be said about many of the killings in religion.  Even now there are more illiterate people then you think.  People will always find an excuse for killing.  Religion just happens to be a convenient scapegoat.  Race, sex, economy..so many excuses..but it boils down to this.  People make their own choices, and should be held responsible for those choices.  Their race, sex, religion, etc is just a 'red herring'.

Play4fun, it looks like your summons failed.

NordicWarrior :
Brigand :

KG : arrgghhhh....trying to get used to this new post editor since spell check actually works here.

play4fun :
The definition of rightly(interpreting bible) varies from person to person. You could call creation a core belief, its pretty integral in my book, but probably more people now believe in evolution.
Point being, christians disagree on both core and secondary aspects of the bible.
Although for the example I dont know if you'd class that as integral to salvation.#

Summoning nord dosent matter much either, since hes banned and when hes unbanned he will see he has reply's to this thread

Dragonlord Stephi :

True, it could and maybe would belong to the theological debates on the christian conservative forum more

play4fun :

True. Though where you draw the line about being careless can be debated a lot. And if we go talking about salvation here, we might go off topic a bit even though I don't want to bother to comment on any juvenile satanist rants that I have heard thousand times before.

And I myself define the core of Christianity as the belief in the holy trinity. All the jewish conspiracies, witch hunts, inquisitions and satanism come after that.

thenumberone : Not necessarily. There is such a thing as interpreting the Bible wrong because there are people who don't take the context and background of a specific verse into consideration. Obviously this can be prevalent when someone is too quick in making a post on a forum by finding one verse that sounds like it would support them when the context is contradicting his interpretation. Or if someone has a life verse when in reality it cannot be applied directly towards the person. There is also the error of misusing interpretation and application. 

play4fun :
Even with context though, theres also interpretation. Two people could see the same passage, read the full context, and arrive at 2 different outcomes. They wouldn't necessarily be completely different, but they wouldn't be the same either. Even those who mostly agree have minor disagreements as to the true meaning and purpose, regardless of how many times they may re-read it.
Equally, a lot of it comes down to the person, their traits, beliefs, upbringing and experiences.
When I read sections of the bible, clearly I interpreted them differently to you, but I didnt start from random points, I saw it in context, and I thought it was wrong, and obviously I think youre wrong (obviously, or else id be christian, im not trying to say that as an attack). Obviously you would think im wrong too, or else you wouldnt be christian.
The point being that whilst either of us can state others are interpreting it wrong, You cant actualy prove you are more correct than they, just as you cant irrefutably prove god, and I cant irrefutably disprove him(im sure we both feel pretty certain we are right, but so does everyone on this planet).
The certainty you feel, is felt by most other people. My disbelief is as strong as your belief. Catholics, muslims, jews, protestants, likewise. Many spend their entire life studying their texts, fully, scrutinising them from every possible angle, every context, analysing every outcome.
Obviously some people do clearly miss the mark by a long shot, but there are many people who take their time with it, any interpretation will vary.

i dont really have a religon, honestly I didnt care for it and now i feel like it is almost a dictatorship, sorry if i offend some, but this is how i feel, it caused so many wars, it tells u what to do or its a sin and this is a result of a sin, no offence but isnt that like saying (EX: if you dont do as i say, your going to die.). Its like being lead bya king or by a dictator.

mister sandman : That may be your opinion, but I definitely do not believe that. Yes, humans penned the words down, but all scripture is God-breathed and inspired by God. 

BTW, I can't find the Christian Conservatives forum. Was it moved?

Dragonlord Stephi : so no way people didn't just make it up and what about other religions they have there books .......   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Tc9C-MsMk   .....im sorry you christians make no sense....

mister sandman : Show me one contradiction in the Bible. One. I can show you thousands in the Book of Mormon, the Koran, etc. but can you really find a good contradiction in the Bible that can't be explained? Just this morning a fellow colleague of mine in Bible class told me that God gave men power over women since 1 Tim. says not to put women in power. However, he clearly forgot to look at the context, in which they were discussing worship services. Thus, do men really have power over women? Of course not. It was just instructions on conducting worship. So why do I bring this up? Well, most "contradictions" in the Bible are really just misinterpretations made based on ignorance of the scripture or a failure to look at context. If you wish, we could conduct a debate over this on the Christian Conservatives forum.

I hate this debate so much...

Religions don't cause wars. No religions. Ever. People cause wars. People use religions as a tool to engage war, but this does not make religions innately bad. Technology itself is not good or bad, it just makes accomplishing goals easier. If your goal is efficient clean energy, nuclear power, while potentially disastrous, are great at providing lots of clean power. That's good, right? Using the same technology, you can wipe a city off a map, killing all inhabitants: man, woman, and child, innocent or guilty. This is bad, yes?

So what does religion do? Religion has the potential to say, "killing the innocent is wrong". Science cannot do that. Science looks at empirical data, but religion looks at morality. That is the good of religion. The bad of religion says, "we're innocent, those people are not. Go ahead and kill them". This is what people have a problem with.

If we do away with religion, we lose the ability to say "this is right; that is wrong". We can have laws against certain things, but what is our basis for making the laws in the first place? Just popular opinion? Or just those people that have power decide? We will always operate on fundamental religious principles, regardless of our claim to be religious or not.

Lets pretend I have no siblings, hate my abundantly wealthy parents, and morality is just my personal opinion. If I can find a way to kill my parents and not get caught, what reason for me is there not to kill my parents? I have just gained all their wealth for myself. Now it won't be spent on them, but on me. I have more now. Better for me. What's wrong with that scenario when there are no morals? Nothing. At all. If you say "you have to respect your parents, they raised you", you are using one of those fundamental religious principles.

This is why religious is necessary. What we need more of is better people in power. Powerful people are the ones that do evil. Everyone speaks of Hitler and Stalin and the like because they were the ones with the most power to do good or evil. Think of what the world would be like if Hitler had never invaded Austria, Poland, or any where, but instead focused on improving Germany's economy through other means. On the flip side, what if President Wilson sided with Hitler? If people would operate more on coherent fundamental religious principles, there would be less problems as a whole everywhere with everyone.

Txgangsta : That was beautifully put. I could not have put it better myself. It's men, not religion, that causes war.

thenumberone : Except what you are talking about is not interpretation. Interpretation is trying to find the meaning of the text. It has nothing to do with whether you agree with the text or not. An atheist can say that they don't believe in the text, but he can still try to interpret the text so that the person knows what the text means. That is why when anyone reads the text, we are to know what our presuppositions are before going into interpreting the text. It is through knowing how different we think compared to the author that we can look for authorial intent.

Many times I've heard different people when reading the text and they base their interpreting of scripture by this question: "What does this chapter means TO ME?" That is mixing interpretation with application and it suggests that interpreting scripture has anything to do with how the reader takes it, which is not true. The term that states how we should interpret scripture is called "exegesis", which is looking at background, history, textual, context, etc to find the authorial intent. We do not want to commit "eisegesis", which is putting one's own presuppositions and agendas onto the text. Another way of thinking of this is exegesis = draw out, eisegesis = draw in.

Sometimes a certain passage may have more than just one thing to tell us, so it is not necessarily that different people have different interpretations, but that different people get different parts of the whole meaning. But like you said, if someone is doing their interpretation wrong, they will get the wrong meaning of the text.