My comments in the discussion on the guardian discussion lead by Emily Hill, March 2008

Rondebosch is tersely dismissive, a lot of people have their own entrenched position & that's it. Many mythological heros rose from the dead before Jesus & many Roman emperors became gods. It was the thing to do in those days. Shariah law, Christianity, Hindu and Buddhist Beliefs and ideologies such as Communism are often unable to get along because many people believe that they are right. Everyone else is wrong. The fact is that many of these belief systems are at most only a few thousand years old and have been cobbled together from bits and pieces passed on by word of mouth and translated through various languages, called "the word of god" & interpreted to mean almost anything. For the 21st Century & beyond it will become increasingly obvious that dogmas based on belief systems claiming to know the revealed truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth will have to pull their horns in to allow commonsense to prevail. Currently in this modern age we are obliged to worship stuff and celebrities who with all their foibles are paraded in the media as idols. Consumerism and the mountains of junk it creates is on the way out, I hope. I predict a return in respect for mother nature and planet earth. Maybe we'll get back to the truth behind the wedding vow 'with my body I thee worship.' So if you believe sex is the original sin as Christians, Jews & some others do you must be wrong because without sex the earth would be empty and all those holy men in flowing robes & white hairs would have nobody to preach at. If you need something to worship what's wrong with kneeling down in front of rainbows? Not for the pots of gold at the end, that notion is an illusion, but just because rainbows are naturally beautiful, transient, and consist of mist and sunlight. Without water, clouds and ice and the sun there would be no life on earth. The sun shines down on all of us & the rain pours down on us all whatever crazy stuff we choose to do & believe. The ancient Australian Aboriginal rock drawings 40,000 perhaps 50,000 years old celebrated the rainbow serpent as a symbol of hope & new life. They knew that life on earth depends on mother nature. 

mackemsuse wrote 'what a fatuous piece of nonsense,grow up young lady. Crowsfly, the original sin was not sex but disobeying God.'  Now that is fatuous nonsense Mackemsuse! You are saying according to the myth which appears in various forms in ancient literature, not only in the old testament that 'God said, 'don't eat the apple to Eve & Adam & they did,' because a snake told them it was ok & that was so naughty! But it wasn't really about the apple it was that they realised they were naked & felt vulnerable & unclean so they covered up. After that God tossed them out of the garden in Iraq. They were sinners then & that curse has supposedly passed on to successive generations. So according to this line of reasoning if people are bad they need sacrifices to appease God & it must be a blood sacrifice to be effective. The Jews after they got out of Egypt put the blood above the doorway to protect them from bad spirits. Traditional Chinese put a mirror out so the bad spirits will scare themselves away. 2000 years ago the Jews & Romans got rid of Jesus because he was causing them grief. Over time the Christians invented the last supper ritual where they eat Jesus & drink his blood. They eat the Son of God on Sunday instead of eating apples.