Certain 'born again' religious fanatics can be very dangerous, because they believe they can lie, cheat, and steal, and it was God that made them do it.
They also believe they are some kind of position to judge other people, and that they themselves are above reproach because they are supposedly born again: they are saintly, and can do no wrong. Even if they are caught doing wrong, that they believe that God made some exception to the normal rules and used them to serve His supposed purpose.
Here is how to prove beyond any doubt whether someone is born again or not.
First, you have to catch them taking a stand on an issue.
It says in the Bible that 'Once a man is born again, he cannot sin, because his every action is guided by God'. This is the basis for this foolishness.
It always amazes me that many Christians state that the most important aspect of Christianity is to be 'saved' or to accept Jesus or even to be born again, when in fact Jesus himself said otherwise. In the two most important rules in Matthew, basically Jesus says to the effect of 'show some respect to God, and be righteous to other people'. He goes on to say that if one obeys these two rules, they obey all other rules, and that nothing else is as important as that information.
It also says in the Bible that God has eyes in every place, and sees everything.
So, if you take 25 quarters (or other coins), and tape them on the wall, no less than 10 inches apart and no closer than 3 inches apart, then the 'born again' should, when a coat is placed over their head so they cannot see, be able to move their finger from quarter to quarter, directly and purposefully moving from one to the next, with no pausing or deciding or changing course, never touching any quarter twice. You can have some of their born again friends in the room to be sure that God can see OK.
Normally, there would be an argument against testing God in this manner, but if the born again has taken a stand on an issue, then according to the born again and his logic, God made him take that stand, since his every action is guided by God. Therefore God had to be using the born again as some sort of puppet to convey His will. According to the logic, God obviously had something to prove, and God used the born again to state or demonstrate his will.
I mean, either their every action is guided by God, or it isn't, so which is it?
When the born again has taken a stand on a truly important issue, say, abortion for example, then according to the born again, God made him take that stand. On such an important issue as this, one would think that God, making an attempt to make His will known through the words and actions of the born again, would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate His will beyond any possible doubt.
Perhaps I should not use abortion as an issue, lest you think I am taking a stand. I believe that before the fetal tissue takes on a set, that type of cell it will always be, that abortion should be legal, and an abortion done after this date should be murder. Besides, in my opinion, if some female is lame and irresponsible enough not to use RU-486 as a day after pill, and she waits that long to get an abortion, then she ought to be made to go through that pain as a punishment, if nothing else.
Experiments were done with salamanders. The tail and an arm of a salamander fetus were removed and transposed, the arm being attached to the tail socket, and vice versa.
If this was done before a certain point in time in the development of the fetus, a perfectly formed arm would grow out of the arm socket, and a perfectly formed tail would grow from the tail socket, after the amputations and transposition had been done.
If the researchers waited too long, past a certain point in time in the development of the fetus, a deformed tail would grow out of the arm socket, and a deformed arm would grow out of the tail socket.
Up to a certain point in time, the fetal tissue is malleable, and will become whatever it is supposed to become in any area it is relocated to.
Obviously, this is the point where life begins. This bizarre discovery led to the Alzheimer's patient treatments to those of you who may have taken my advice and received the brain cells you needed.
From my point of view, I have had religious fanatics of the born again variety rise up against me. I was accused of fraud because I claimed to have a spiritual goal, but was unsaintly from time to time. I pointed out who the real fraud was, real quick-like...
I said, on an important issue such as this, surely God would want us to know that He was personally against me, and was using the born again to communicate His dislike of me. I said that God would surely want to remove any doubt that it was only a religious fanatic, causing trouble, and interfering with progress and development, and change for the better.
That seemed to work pretty good, so I make a reference to it every so often...
Beware of scams, that might involve a number of different approaches, such as the 'hidden Cybervision glasses in the coat' trick, of the Department of Defense's heads up display contact lenses, or their implanted bone transducer near the auditory nerves.
Remember, some of these 'born agains' believe that they can lie, and it was God who made them do it. That logic may be defective, but some people do have defective logic facilities. You wouldn't think it would be possible, but I didn't either, until I witnessed it myself...
The church always has had a bizarre fascination with capitalizing the letter 'S' for some reason. If gets the Bible on CD-ROM, and does a logical search for ('spirit' AND NOT 'Holy Spirit'), and another, ('Holy Spirit' AND NOT 'spirit'), one sees that the word spirit clearly refers to the dead.
I bet you always wondered why they call it the spiritual world. Now you know. It's because there are spirits there. One dies, becomes a spirit, and goes to the spiritual world.
The Bible says, 'First you must be born of the flesh, then of the Spirit'.
Notice the capitalization of the letter 'S" on the word spirit there. If that meant 'Holy Spirit', it would be the only place in the Bible that used the word 'spirit' by itself to refer to God, to refer to anyone but the dead.
Somewhere along the way, someone decided to capitalize the letter S, for whatever reason.
As near as I can tell, the church did the same thing to the word satan. This was obviously a word that meant man's own evil, his subconscious mind and animal instincts, that which causes man to sin.
The church people in the past made every effort to be saintly, but the occasional evil though would occur to them (like it does to you, me, and everybody else). Perhaps they considered putting something in their pocket that wasn't theirs, or maybe they considered groping on their neighbor's wife, or using their fist on someone they felt deserved it.
Since they were making an effort to be saintly, then obviously to them the thought could not have possibly originated in their own mind. Therefore, it had to come from outside.
Then there is Genesis. You remember the book of Genesis, the one that says that life appeared first on land, then in the ocean (where fact has proven otherwise, beyond any doubt). Any mistakes made in this book were passed on to those who wrote the next book. Any mistakes in the first two books were passed on to the writers of the third book.
Those who wrote the second book believed all that was written in the first.
As if the story makes any sense at all now, when we know better, the order of creation for example, and the fact that creation did not happen in seven days.
The story goes, a God appears in all His great power and wisdom, and creates the very universe in it's entirety. Then this God puts an evil entity here to test His creation, and when His creation proves to be flawed and imperfect, God punishes His creation for the mistake that God had made.
Obviously, it was God's fault, since God should have either created perfection in the first place, or wiped it out and attempted it again.
That story makes the God of Genesis out to be a devil, when examined closely enough...
Of course, certain facts were not known to the people of the time, and it well have been believable enough to them.
The church has strange angles on reality, when one compares different pieces of information. For example, I attended St. John's Prep School for a time, on the campus of St. John's University in Collegeville, MN. Run by Benedictine monks. Theology was a required class. As you might expect, I had too many opinions of my own to get a decent grade in Theology.
But as I recall, back in 1976, decades after it had been proven beyond doubt that man had been on Earth for far longer than 6000 years, they were still teaching that Man first appeared 6000 years ago in Sumer and Mesopotamia.
Unfortunately for the church, decades ago, the Tibetans have produced artifacts accurately dated to 10,000 years ago, and vast numbers of archeologists have produced vast numbers of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal skulls, accurately dated to millions of years ago.
30 years later, the church is still ignoring the facts in favor of their theories. That was 1976. In 1998, I suspect they are still teaching that man has only been here for 6000 years, which makes 50 years of ignoring fact in favor of theory.
Compare this now, with the fact that the church in the past sent out the Conquistadors and the Teutonic Knights to conquer other countries.
Or the Pope in World War Two. At a time when Hitler was well into his program of exterminating the Jews, and had killed more than a million in the concentration camps and elsewhere, the Pope basically said that Hitler was the greatest thing to ever come down the pike, and praised Hitler for his 'Knightly cause against Bolshevism'.
The church used to burn people at the stake who tried to point out that the Earth orbited the sun. This blasphemed against their interpretation of the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis, which according to the church stated that the Earth was the center of all God's creation. Anyone who said elsewise blasphemed, and was summarily burned at the stake.
The church made the mistake of being lenient with Galileo, and instead placed him under house arrest. During his incarceration, Galileo figured out a way to inexpensively manufacture telescopes, making them cheap enough so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry down the block could afford one, and soon there was no way the church could kill all those who wished to state the facts, because too many people knew.
That was then, and this is now, but it still wouldn't surprise me in the least to find that the answer of the 'modern' church to the nasty little problem of life having been proven to appear first in the ocean, then on land, would be to modify the Bible so it says that life appeared first in the ocean.