Văn hào Mỹ Mark Twain (1835 –1910) nhận định sau khi đọc Kinh Thánh của Do Thái Giáo và Thiên Chúa Giáo: Quyển Kinh Thánh đầy thú vị. Nó có thơ văn cao cả trong đó; vài chuyện ngụ ngôn khéo léo; một số lịch sử đẫm máu; một vài điều đạo đức tốt; đầy dẫy những băng hoại; và hướng đến cả ngàn chuyện dối trá...
Để rồi sau này vỡ nhẽ ra làm gì có các bà phù thủy trên đời này, và chẳng bao giờ có. Người ta không biết nên cười hay khóc đây!... Không có các mụ phù thủy. Nhưng đoạn văn về các bà phù thủy trong Kinh Thánh vẫn còn đó; chỉ có cách hành quyết họ thay đổi (thí dụ hiện nay chính đáng hóa việc "trừ quỉ"-Exorcism in the Catholic Church. )Hỏa ngục cũng bị chứng minh không có, nhưng đoạn kinh thánh hỏa ngục vẫn còn đó. Phạt tội (tổ tông ) trẻ thơ chưa rửa tội vào hỏa ngục, cũng đã sai, nhưng đoạn văn này trong kinh thánh vẫn không xóa. Hơn 200 tội danh tử hình trong sách Luật cũng đã bị loại bỏ, nhưng các đoạn văn kinh thánh dẫn đến những tội danh này vẫn còn nằm trong đó.
Khi một người đọc các quyển sách trong Kinh Thánh, sẽ ngạc nhiên về những điều Chúa biết ít hơn là những điều mà Chúa không biết!
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Mark Twain on the- Bible
It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.- Letters from the Earth
The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes...The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession- and take the credit of the correction. During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.
Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.....There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.
- "Bible Teaching and Religious Practice," Europe and Elsewhere
When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
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Why the Pope Shuns Creationism But Supports Exorcism
Nov 5, 2014 06:33 PM ET //
Last week Pope Francis made several newsworthy remarks including expressing the Catholic church’s very different positions on the subjects of creationism and exorcism.
Francis voiced his support for the practice of driving demons out of possessed individuals.
Do You Need an Exorcism? Take the Quiz!
According to the Catholic Sun:
“Exorcists, assigned to that ministry by their bishops, demonstrate the love and care of the Church for ‘those who suffer because of the work of the devil,’ Pope Francis said in a message to the International Association of Exorcists. The organization, which was recognized by the Congregation for Clergy in June, brought some 300 exorcists to Rome for a convention focused particularly on the impact of the occult and Satanism on modern men and women. In an Oct. 27 interview with Vatican Radio, Dr. Valter Cascioli, a psychiatrist and spokesman for the group, said the number of people who turn to the occult or are fascinated by Satanic cults and rituals ‘is constantly increasing and this worries us’ because it appears to coincide with ‘an extraordinary increase in demonic activity.’”“Exorcist Father Aldo Buonaiuto says his exorcists are receiving up to 40 calls for help a day in the lead-up to the pagan carnival. ‘Many say Halloween is a simple carnival, but in fact there is nothing innocent or fun about it — it is the antechamber to something much more dangerous,’ he said. ‘There are always more evil rituals, animal sacrifices, desecrations of cemeteries and thefts of sacred bones at the time of the 31 October.’”
The Devil: Alive and Well?
Many people wrongly associate Halloween with Satanism, and it should be noted that the predicted surge in evil rituals, animal sacrifices, cemetery desecration and other malicious deeds by Satanists doesn’t seem to have materialized.Evolution and Exorcism
The pope’s statement supporting the importance of exorcists came on the same day that he reaffirmed that Catholic teachings do not stand in opposition to evolution and the Big Bang. In statements made at an assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he said: “‘When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,’ Francis told the gathering. God, Francis said, ‘created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment.’”
The Catholic Church has long accepted that evolution by natural selection is a proven scientific fact and doesn’t contradict Catholic doctrine. Pope Pius XII stated this in 1950, and Pope John Paul II reiterated the point in 1996. The wrinkle is, of course, that God created the universe and everything in it before evolution took over.
For many it may seem odd that the pope took a socially progressive stand endorsing evolution while on the same day seeming to take a step back into the Middle Ages by endorsing belief in demonic possession and exorcism.
BLOG: Trying To Sell Your Haunted House? Try Exorcism
Pope Francis can afford to distance himself and the church from creationists — especially young-Earth creationists who believe that the planet is only about 6,000 years old — but dismissing Satan is a whole other matter. To deny the existence of demonic possession would question the existence of the Devil, an important character in Catholic theology.Belief in a literal Satan is widespread: According to a 2007 Baylor Religion Survey, over half of Americans “absolutely believe in Satan.” In an interview last year in New York magazine, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia expressed his firm belief in a literal Satan: “I even believe in the Devil. ... Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. ... Every Catholic believes that. ... In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot.”
Tom Flynn, editor of the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry, told Discovery News: “Like every Christian religion, Catholicism needs a solution to the problem of evil: If God is all-good and all-loving, how can there be evil in the world? Satan solves that problem (more or less) by serving as God’s adversary, the author of all the moral and physical evils that the faithful would prefer not to attribute to God. The whole drama of salvation is depicted as an epic battle between God and Satan. So Catholicism can’t part with Satan in the way it can jettison something more genuinely incidental, like creationism. Satanism is baked into the Catholic worldview at too deep a level for that.”
Catholicism, like all religions, is caught in a tug of war between tradition and progressiveness. One day creationism may be dead and buried, but the idea of evil and Satan are here to stay.
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