Why Christians can’t disregard The Gospel of Thomas

In a recent debate with a Christian, he told me that The Gospel of Thomas is “simply a heretical forgery, much the same as the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip.” After an extensive amount of research, I have found that his statement has some profound ramifications. I went through all 114 sayings in The Gospel of Thomas and found that approx. 84%* of the sayings are contained within the Canonical Gospels, either verbatim or slightly changed in wording. Some of these sayings are the “important” ones. (Examples of this are below¹) Ones that most Christians themselves point to about how compassionate Jesus was, such as “turn the other cheek” and “love thy neighbor as thyself”, are in the Gospel of Thomas. (Sources and characters are at the bottom)

When was the Gospel of Thomas written?

Adam and Eve…and Lilith

A Contradiction in Terms.

Genesis 1:27- "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." You will notice that god creates man and woman AT THE SAME TIME and this woman’s name in never mentioned.

Let us now examine and consider the second verse, which is the contradictory and yet most well known story of the creation of man and woman.

Genesis 2:21-23-“21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’, for she was taken out of man."

This is the story most are familiar with known as “the rib story”. This woman is then named Eve, however she is NOT the FIRST woman and not the first wife of Adam.

Midrash Explained.

The CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for those who don`t know, is doing a series on religion.

[Quote]

In this series on CBC Radio and CBCNews.ca, we explore the question "Where is God today?" - as wide and narrow, and as public and personal as that is.

Commentators, religious thinkers and ordinary Canadians give their thoughts. We invite you to read their experiences and share your stories.

[/Quote]

Link to source article

I encourage any and everybody to add their comments and post their experiences regarding religion. There are a lot of good links there, mostly but not exclusively dealing with Canada. For those of you who complain about the American media, I encourage you to checkout how another country does it. :D

Looks like the CBC wants to talk faith. Let's make sure the atheist voice is heard loud an clear.

This doesn't surprise me in the least, in fact, the only thing that does is that it hasn't been firebombed yet.

Link to source article

Please note, that the christian display was never attacked apparently.

An interesting newspaper column I rang across today.

(Quote)Which is why a new word has suddenly entered this year’s political lexicon: “secular.” As in, “secular Republicans,” or, more generally, “secular voters.” Non-moonbats, in other words. For the GOP, it means voters for whom snakes are not part of their Sunday-morning religious services. For the Democrats, it means voters who don’t believe that 9/11 was a Bush-Cheney-Halliburton plot.(/Quote)

Link to original article.

For the mostly American readers of this site, I thought a few of you might find what other countries are saying about the two frontrunners in your presidential race.

Link to source article

An interesting study was posted today, interesting to me anyway.

(Quote) People recently bereaved gain greater comfort from their pets than they do from their priest or spiritual adviser, a new study suggests.(/Quote)

Link to source article

Another benefit, I have never heard of a cat or a dog sexually molesting a child, unlike some clergy members I could name.

Fyi, I will be taking over publishing the RRS newsletter that Jack Hellfiend used to do, starting this monday.

I just wanted to tell you folks we really appreciate the support. When we started this site we never imagined it would be a meeting ground for so many, build a site for Margaret Downey, adopt Jake's "asktheatheist.com," or become the most popular atheist website in America. We bought a new server today and will soon have a donate module for you to help us cover the costs if you want (the old chip in for that about to become defunct) . If you are a top 666,666 Alexa site and would like to come on our network, send me a message.

 Moves are being made to ensure we have room to grow and bring on websites of friends that we want to help like our friend Troy Conrad, Comedy Jesus. We have an ETA of April 1st at the latest to bring his site(s) on board. Every single one of our sites will be overhauled for the better. RRS will seek to be fully compliant in all of the leading browswers.... including IE!

Some content, extra features, and site functions will only be available to subscribers. For example subscribers get blogs, and several levels of private forums to access depending on subscription level. Consider subscribing to RRS now.

Here are the specs of the new and old server:

OLD:

...represented by a small sample of letters to the editor from around the country. 

 Well, this will be a first with two posts in one day, but I really wanted to briefly discuss the following letters that were submitted to various papers across the US. This is certainly not a statistically significant sample, but I feel that these particular mindsets are far too common for a supposedly enlightened and egalitarian society. We'll start with my favorite one from the Salt Lake City Tribune.