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Very true, but on the other hand at least in my view the existence of these con- tradictions is an important warning that an approach which treats all parts of the bible as literal truth to be accepted without questioning would carry a lot of se- vere risks.

Thank you very much for a very interesting post. Since I am not a Christian, I can only agree with 99 % of it.

Well, there are also quite a lot of problems in the bible texts themselves. The most obvious example is probably the genealogy of Christ, because the genea- logy according to Luke and the genealogy according to Matthew are not identi- cal - one of the two has obviously got it wrong. There are other, more important contradictions, and of course each church has to decide which of the versions it considers as the true one. Depending on the choices and on the chain reaction of a series of choices even the same texts can lead to very different interpretations of their meaning, and again it is nearly impossible to find out which one is right - or whether there is a right one at all. Using the example of the genealogy, both authors use the genealogy to demon- strate that Christ is a descendant of the House of David. However, both genea- logies lead to Joseph, who is not the biological father of Christ, so it remains un- clear what connection between Christ and the House of David the authors had in mind. Again interpretation is required, and this time there is not even a choice between two distinct options, there are lots of possibilities - including the one that the entire mysterious genealogy thing was added at a later date and is not an original part of the two gospels. And this is just an easy and obvious example of a typical problem ...

The results depend on which bible you read, since they are not at all identical. There are very different translations of the original sources, and often different sources are used, too. For example, the bibles of several Christian churches do not include the Book of Revelation, because their theologians consider it as non- canonical. Other Christian churches do not accept the entire Old Testament, in their case their bible contains the New Testament only, and even there are major differences concerning which texts - especially letters - are accepted as canoni- cal parts of the Acts of the Apostles. So the results you get from plain reading of your bible can be very, very different from the results another Christian gets from his plain reading of his bible. And, frankly, only god could tell with any au- thority which of the churches got it right, and which is reading the wrong texts.

During my discussions about religion with Christians it took me a while to under- stand their reactions when the bible becomes the subject of the discussion. The founder of my religion told his followers never to trust in authorities or holy scrip- tures and to accept only what they themselves have thought through and recog- nized as probably true. As a result our tradition treats holy texts with much cri- tical scepticism and little obvious respect. However, for Christians the bible is the word of god, and criticism of the scripture and its literal content is often seen as very close to criticism of god, which understandably is considered and felt as of- fending.

I am not a Christian and my religion does not care whether deities exist or not, so from my point of view it was written by people who probably did believe that it was the word of their god. Where I live there is a rather strong ecumenical tendency, so most Christians in- deed call themselves Christians, and only after being asked for more information either Catholic Christians or Lutheran Christians or Orthodox Christians, and so on.

This is a problem the Christians have to solve, but they will hardly ever agree, as they failed to do it for the last 2,000 years. I am glad that I am not a Chris- tian and do not have to take part in that argument.

Well, these words are first recorded (and the various records often contradict each other), then translated (often several times through a series of languages), then selected as canonical or not canonical (the Bibles of the different churches often contain different texts), and finally interpreted (in each case with at least as many different interpretations as the texts have words). All this is done by humans, not by angels, so it really should not come as a sur- prise that it is difficult to agree which of the words at the end of that chain are identical to any words at the beginning of the chain, and what the original mea- ning might have been.

You just declared about all European members of Lutheran churches to be non- Christians, because almost all of these Churches have agreed that homosexua- lity is not in contradiction to the spirit of the Bible. Perhaps you should tell them that you know more about theology than they do ? But this just underlines my point that one needs to distinguish, and that there is no such thing as "Christian", there are only many very diverse churches which cannot even agree what the basics of their supposedly common believes really are.

This was written more than 2,000 years ago as the law of a minor seminomadic tribal culture in the Middle East, many centuries before the person we know as Christ was born. For most Christians this is about as important as the fact that those who wrote this considered a bat to be a bird and claimed to have conque- red the town of Jericho at a time when the place was not inhabited.

Hmmm ... Stockholm has an openly lesbian female bishop, openly gay priests are no rarity at least in most countries in western Europe ... the idea that Christians don't agree with gay people sounds rather outdated to me.

The problem is that almost whatever one says about Christians is true for some and wrong for others. Christians have been narrowminded and open, they have developed the idea of human rights and violated human rights, they have protec- ted the environment and destroyed it, they have ... you name it, and Christians did it and did the opposite, too. Therefore this is a subject which requires the ability and willingness to look at the details and to distinguish between persons, groups, movements, time and region. In my experience it is best discussed in a relaxed atmosphere, in the late evening after a good meal and preferably over a nice glass of wine, and those involved do well to be in the mood to show their sense of humour.

Well, mine has developed a nasty habit to eat those invisible singing potatoes which come floating over from the neighbour's garage whenever there is an alien abduction on the nearby highway - I will never understand why people have to abduct those poor aliens and do cruel experiments to them ...

In this regard you might find this interesting, although the website is already a bit old: http://www.christian-gamers-guild.org/xians.html As for the Roman Catholic Church, at least over here it has no problems with roleplaying games, probably mainly because roleplaying (not the tabletop game kind) is a very often used method in its youth movement groups, so the word has a basically positive association.

Careful, Conrad, Giordano Bruno had a very sad end because of such state- ments ... But I think this discussion is likely to lead nowhere and to do a lot more harm than good, this is just neither the right kind of forum for such a debate nor a good start of such a debate.

By the way, did I ever tell you about that invisible dragon in my garage ?

The website linked by Vile makes fun of a certain kind of Finnish Christians, and here in Germany we also have Christian sects which consider almost every acti- vity except reading (and misinterpreting ...) the Bible as more or less satanic. A certain kind of religious narrowmindedness bordering on brainless fanatism is not a privilege of Christians in the USA, although it often seems that the lunatic frin- ge of Christianity is a bit more numerous and vocal there than elsewhere, perhaps at least partially because its most spectacular publicity stunts would be illegal in many other countries.

I just got a PM from a user named Asmodeus, he thinks you are wrong ...

Besides, most of the big predators prefer to avoid any unnecessary fight, becau- se being wounded could severely reduce their chance to hunt and make prey. As a result the big herbivores (buffalo, elephant, hippo ...) usually are far more like- ly to seriously attack, and therefore also far more feared than the big predators, and they indeed kill far more people each year. For example, the hippo, which is rarely ever depicted as a dangerous animal in roleplaying games, is widely consi- dered to be the most dangerous big animal of Africa.

There is no password. I just tried it to make sure, and it can still be accessed without any password.

To give a more serious explanation, I prefer BRP for my settings because it is a very resilient system which endures even major changes and because it was not designed for a specific science fiction setting. There are many very good science fiction roleplaying systems out there, but al- most all of them were designed for a specific setting, and have the assumptions of this setting at their core. While changes are possible, they often lead to an unpleasant chain reaction which easily gets out of control. As a simple example, in Traveller the average travel time between neighbouring planets is about two weeks. I could change this to the average travel time of my Samar setting with its slow reaction drives, twelve months, but then Traveller's entire economy and trade system would implode, because all of its rules (prices of passages and freight transports, prices and potential profits of trade goods, maintenance requirements of starships ...) are based upon those two weeks of average travel time. So, when I begin to make major changes to one of those systems, I tend to end up with at least as much work as I would have if I would design my own system - and my own system fits my own setting a lot better than any tortured and mu- tilated system which was originally written for a completely different setting. BRP has a nice basic percentile game mechanic and does not mind at all if I add subsystems, whether ones I designed (e.g. new skills, rules for learning, for re- search and development, for prospecting ...) or ones I borrowed from other sy- stems (e.g. most of the technology, in the Samar setting it comes from GURPS), or delete subsystems (e.g. hit locations, strike ranks, etc.).

I think this would require two skills, one skill to know or learn about the kind of official document (e.g. Knowledge/Bureaucracy or Research) and another skill to produce the document (e.g. Art/Forgery).

True, but it also does not get in the way.

After CON rounds it would still be able to save (reanimate) the character with First Aid, but the character would have suffered more or less severe brain da- mage, and therefore would no longer be a playable character - only magic could heal that brain damage and keep the character playable. After CON minutes the character would be brain dead, and no medical or magical treatment short of a resurrection could change that.

In my experience, as long as each character has his niche where he can shine and get the spotlight and the characters work as a team instead of against each other, it is unnecessary to balance the characters. I do not remember a single case where the players complained that one of the characters was too powerful, they did always welcome a little additional po- wer for the group.