Posted: May 13, 2008, 9:17 AM CST
I hardly consider it fooling around to suggest that people should take responsiblity for their own evil actions.
As for what I said about Jesus and the devil. Yeshua, commonly known as Jesus, was a great man and an incredible teacher. He had alot of great things to say about how society should treat each other. Maybe he was or wasn't the son of God, the documents that eventually became the bible were picked and chosen from random documents circulated amoung the people of the time. Nothing written by anyone who knew him was included and nothing written by Yeshua himself was ever found in spite of the fact that he came from an excessively wealthy family and would have definately been literate. Anyways, I hold him and his message in high esteem I greatly respect what he had to say.
On the other hand, I don't believe in the Devil. He makes only one appearance in the old testamate in the story of Job. You see zero appearances of demons in the old testamate. During those times people believed that when something bad happened to someone that it was because they sinned and incurred God's wrath. The belief in demons became popular in pagan religeons just before the time of Jesus and thus we see that influence in the writing of the new testement. During that time people believed that all illnesses and inflictions were not punishment from god, but the work of evil spirits so when you see Jesus casting out demons what it really means is that he was curing the sick of their ailments. People of that time didn't understand the concepts of germs and mental illnesses and even if Jesus did, he couldn't have explained such things to the uneducated people of the time, they would have simply discredited him as insane and ignored all his teachings and that would have defeated his purpose.