bleep
"The bible is not some dumb fairy tale sprinkled with unicorn glitter. It contains difficult teachings that only yield their beauty to those with ears to hear, and eyes to see. It is a historically substantiated fount of literary treasure and spiritual wisdom."
No.... Its a bastardised masogynist bunch of dissociated prose, manipulated and written to A: push Patriarchy ..and B: to further the coffers of the "ordained".
And just to rub salt in the wound ...... the nazarene decreed that because god gave man a choice .... all the bad shit that happens ..is a direct result of that "choice". What a fucking glaring and hypocritical cop out.
One little point I wish to make, mostly related but only on a perepheral area.
More recent studies of the times then show that it is unlikely that more then 200 christians were killed by the romans during the persecution, considering that the church of christ was by this point several thousand strong you can hardly call this a slaughter.
Also the romans didn't kill the christians for their beliefs, they killed them because legally they were criminals. Christians didn't sacrifice to the roman gods, which was legally required at that time, the punishment for failure to sacrifice was death.
So the christians were actually treated no different from any common criminal for the most part. And for most of the period we know where christians were being persecuted the romans were ignoring them. They just didn't matter that much.
And of course, as is the way with history, anyone who was caught and killed by the romans was posthumusly made a glorious martyr, regardless of how they'ed actually behaved.
All Muslims adhere to a belief in the resurrection of the dead on judgement day, but neither the Shi'ite nor the Sunnis accept that Jesus was crucified. They contend, rather, that "only an appearance" of this was given- and that Jesus himself lived out the remainder of his days quietly, in the countryside. They do, however, believe that he will return again- immediately following the one who will come to prepare the way for him, whom the Shi'ites call the "hidden Imam" (Imam Madhi). Interestingly, in Christian eschatology, the "Antichrist" is supposed to come prior to the return of Jesus. Some might correlate this figure with the hidden Imam.