Originally posted by heart
Matthew 22:39
....Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
VS
Luke 14:26
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
This is what happens if you read the Bible with tunnel-vision. You cannot read a single teaching out of the context of a general teaching. Apart from that - in order to validate this contradiction,
you must be the literal fundamentalist in this case, not the Christian. Just keep that in mind.
Matthew 10
37"Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
Jesus is saying commitment to him is primary and always comes first. Thus, if you are willing to put others before Christ and unwilling to follow through with your commitment, you may as well never commit in the first place.
Or do you take this passage literally as well?
Luke 16:13:
No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.
What about this one?:
Genesis 29
30 Jacob lay with Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah. And he worked for Laban another seven years.
31 When the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.
Here's a secular Greek example:
Poimandes 4:6
If you do not hate your body first, O child, you will not be able to love yourself.
and from the Greek war song in
Poetae Lyrici Graeci: it is said that in battle, men "must count his own life his enemy for the honor of Sparta".
Why do people suddenly plead the case for stupidity when they read the Bible. Everybody else was using hyperbolical language, why not Luke, Paul and Matthew? After all, they
believed in the Ten Commandments much more than you do. They wouldn't exactly strengthen their case by contradicting it.
Scrollmaker, you are evidently going out from an anti-biblical bias. That's all fine, as long as you are not lying to yourself about being objective. Otherwise, do some research befor you just quote a sceptic website verbatim.