God is Not a Person

reply to post by wildtimes

How/what are children in your tiny and rare sect taught?

That the truth is in the Bible.
Also that Christianity was co-opted by Constantine who commisioned the creed.

reply to post by jmdewey60


Oh. Bummer. Do you think the Bible needs to be revised and simplified?

And.....no reading list?

reply to post by windword


God Most High is another Name for the One who always has been, always will Be, and always Is, whom we call in the English tongue, Yahweh,

Love

reply to post by wildtimes


The Judge will Judge,

However,

the Judgement will not be unrighteous, as it seems some confused people have made you think.

You won't be condemned for not saying a certain sentence or missing church on Sunday,

You will be condemned for causing an overwhelming amount of evil to come into the world through your words and actions, as opposed to an overwhelming amount of Light,

The scales of THIS world are tipped unfairly,

The scales of the Holy One are always balanced.

reply to post by wildtimes


What if there is an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence to the contrary of your stance?

What if there are people walking this earth, right now, who have had direct, personal experiences and contacts with that Being?

What if they are not mentally ill, as I am sure you will deduce, but are in fact, more logical than most "normal" citizens of Earth?

God bless

reply to post by godlover25

The Judge will Judge,

However,

the Judgement will not be unrighteous, as it seems some confused people have made you think.

Your judgment is unrighteous. You don't know anyone here.

you won't be condemned for not saying a certain sentence or missing church on Sunday,

You will be condemned for causing an overwhelming amount of evil to come into the world through your words and actions, as opposed to an overwhelming amount of Light,

Are you an expert on what's evil?

The scales of THIS world are tipped unfairly,

The scales of the Holy One are always balanced.

Yeah, like you'd know.

reply to post by godlover25

The Judge will Judge,

However,

the Judgement will not be unrighteous, as it seems some confused people have made you think.

You won't be condemned for not saying a certain sentence or missing church on Sunday,

Really?
Okay, then why, in your thread on "The Folly of Atheists" did you say THIS:

I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when your terror comes,
When your terror comes like a storm,
And your destruction comes like a whirlwind,
When distress and anguish come upon you.

sigh.
godlover24,
does this vid strike a chord with you?


I'm not confused, friend. And I'm able to articulate my opinions with more than poetical arrows shot from a narrow-minded bow.

reply to post by wildtimes

Oh. Bummer. Do you think the Bible needs to be revised and simplified?

And.....no reading list?

The "sect" is actually a denomination, the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which I was born into, my family being members for three generations previous to mine.
Sort of the conspiracy theorists of Christian denominations, suspicious of the Roman church, considering it basically the anti-christ. So we are not taught to follow the superstitions added to Christianity by the Romans after being adopted by the state by people who were basically pagans but saw the value in a religion for the masses.
I think people should be critical of what they are reading in the Bible. That means being well educated on studies done on the Bible, and issues concerning it.
A big thing personally for me is understanding that the Christian Bible is the New Testament, and the Old Testament is something the Jews came up with. We study the OT to see where some of the terminology that shows up in the NT comes from, but we don't see it as someplace to get our way of life from.
I'm not sure what you are asking for as a reading list on. What particular topic specifically?

reply to post by godlover25

God Most High is another Name for the One who always has been, always will Be, and always Is, whom we call in the English tongue, Yahweh,

So it's not "REALLY" His name, so that is why it is OK for you to say it?
If that is the case, why not just say, "God"?

reply to post by jmdewey60


I see. The SDAs. You have a much different style from JesuitGarlic (wherever he went)....
When I first joined this forum, you were reading some pretty heady stuff on religion and theology...

I was hoping for some suggestions that backup your statement that the Bible is Medieval fiction. I still maintain that it is. The thing lately stuck in my craw is how willing everyone is to "update" textbooks and scientific knowledge as things become more clear.

There is a new book out called The Halflife of Facts, about scientometrics...the science of science.
Here's a blurb from an article about it www.economist.com...

IN PRIMARY school Babbage learned that there were nine planets in the solar system. None were known to exist outside it. Since then, astronomers have spotted over 800 planets around other stars (and thousands more "candidates") and demoted Pluto to a mere "dwarf planet". Even a cursory glance at other fields reveals similar patterns.


Samuel Arbesman, a mathematician at Harvard, calls this "The Half-life of Facts", the title of his new book. In it he explains that this churn of knowledge is like radioactive decay: you cannot predict which individual fact is going to succumb to it, but you can know how long it takes for half the facts in a discipline to become obsolete.

Aside from the obvious "science is wrong anyway" stance that many Bible-touters use, the process of religion should be no different from that of science AS A DISCIPLINE and SUBJECT MATTER.

The Bible, and religions in general, need to be updated. Sure, there are "casual dress, hot music" churches now, but the Bible remains as it is, and people cling stubbornly to it.

The Roman and Greek Pantheons were outmoded when Christianity became the "Religion of State" - maybe it will take a similar demolition of the Abrahamic pantheon for us to move forward spiritually. For whatever good people find in it, things are definitely not improving, and it's pretty evident things will NOT improve as long as these dusty tomes are held up as "sacred." They're just BOOKS.

I know this will incite some to flame me, but they really are, just books.

reply to post by wildtimes

GOD is the cycle of the universe and
the everything that it contains. Persons are barely more than innocent
passersby.

you mean that persons were accidental? It was just natural progression leading to humans?

reply to post by wildtimes

GOD is the cycle of the universe and
the everything that it contains. Persons are barely more than innocent
passersby.

you mean that persons were accidental? It was just natural progression leading to humans?

reply to post by logical7


Not so much "accidental", no. But, the design was set up to include them and it can be plausible that we are only partway through with our eventual "end product". Why does each generation think they're the be-all and end-all? Clearly we are not . As long as there are unanswered questions and "miraculous" things to explore and attempt to explain with objective study and research, we aren't "done."

I'm more inclined to think of the universe (GOD) as a work in progress, always changing, always tweaking itself - and all working together in a machine-like way that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND YET.

So yeah, maybe (if we go with the Big Bang as the something-from-nothing that the universe is) when the big soup of chemicals exploded, giving us EVERYTHING that, like a recipe, once put together and cooked long enough (or chilled or left to age or smoked or whatever) we were intended to be what we are - by the original "chef".

The frog in the pot of water doesn't realize he's going to be frog soup...but he is, all the same.

Originally posted by wildtimes
reply to post by logical7

 

Not so much "accidental", no. But, the design was set up to include them and it can be plausible that we are only partway through with our eventual "end product". Why does each generation think they're the be-all and end-all? Clearly we are not . As long as there are unanswered questions and "miraculous" things to explore and attempt to explain with objective study and research, we aren't "done."

I'm more inclined to think of the universe (GOD) as a work in progress, always changing, always tweaking itself - and all working together in a machine-like way that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND YET.

So yeah, maybe (if we go with the Big Bang as the something-from-nothing that the universe is) when the big soup of chemicals exploded, giving us EVERYTHING that, like a recipe, once put together and cooked long enough (or chilled or left to age or smoked or whatever) we were intended to be what we are - by the original "chef".

The frog in the pot of water doesn't realize he's going to be frog soup...but he is, all the same.

thats what i believe broadly, a little different on details.
We are in the plan, but why? I think the Creator created the creation so that the creation can appreciate the creations and the Creator.
So there is a lot of intelligent design and we got a bit of it to be able to be aware of the Higher Intelligence.

Originally posted by godlover25
reply to post by windword

 

God Most High is another Name for the One who always has been, always will Be, and always Is, whom we call in the English tongue, Yahweh,

Love

Nope. According to the scriptures, El Elyon and Yahweh are two distinctly different entities. Yahweh is one of many of the "sons of god."

www.sabbathfellowshipofgrantspass.org...

Gods and Cities

A fourth theory relates the "sons of God" to the 70 sons of El and Athirat in the Canaanite tradition of Ugarit, from whose marriage with a race of titanesses (the daughters of man), the 70 nations of the earth were born. Each city or people thus had its own divinity, with whom they had a special covenant (i.e. Ba'al Be'rith = Lord of the Covenant). This marriage of the divinity with the city would seem to have Biblical parallels too with the stories of the link between Melkart and Tyre; Yahweh and Jerusalem; Chemosh and Moab; Tanit and Baal Hammon with Carthage, and may have been celebrated annually after the new year with a hieros gamos or sacred marriage, in which a Qadeshtu (Holy One) took the role of the God's consort, representing the city.

Yahweh was charged with the people of Jacob, but not of Esau, his twin brother.

Yahweh wasn't everyone's God, he was only some people's God.

reply to post by logical7

I think the Creator created the creation so that the creation can appreciate the creations and the Creator.
So there is a lot of intelligent design and we got a bit of it to be able to be aware of the Higher Intelligence.

I think that's a very supportable premise.

We got a tiny bit of it; we are able to create things OUT OF RAW MATERIALS....
and it's pretty impressive. It's also scary, what humans have created. No other animals are developing things that could destroy themselves and their habitats.

For this reason I feel that while humans have some capacities that other animals either do not have, or do not SHOW to us, we are the aberration. Just can't leave well enough alone; to our own possible demise.

Why can humans not be content with the natural world as it is? Why all the "control" and "dominion" over other species and the natural world???

It seems wrong to me on some level. While technology offers us more luxurious lifestyles, and thusly more free time to ponder things like philosophy, the cosmos, our existence, and the nature of our environment, it also causes us to be SEPARATE from it AS IT IS USED TODAY, and to me, that's the problem.

reply to post by windword


That would explain a lot, but it still doesn't click with the whole "God is the One and Only Truth" deal.

How are we defining the word 'god' here?

reply to post by AfterInfinity


Well, that's the 64 thousand dollar question, isn't it?

Was that God that sat down in Abraham's tent and ate BBQ and cakes? Personally, I think that El Elyon and his 70 mighty men were a corporation that colonized planet earth.

Now, I can't know for certain, but I don't believe in a God that is outside of the universe making stuff out of nothing by shear will. I believe God to be the totality of all that is.

reply to post by windword


Personally, I think it doesn't matter. If knowing the truth changes the life you're living, then you have a problem. Knowing the truth won't change anything for me, because no matter what the truth is, I plan on doing three things during the course of my existence on this Earth...the three things that make existence worthwhile for me:

Laugh.

Love.

Live.

And if ANYONE wants to take that away from me, be it man, god, or my own mother, they can go straight to hell before I give it up. Do not pass 'Go', do not collect $200. There's certain unalienable rights that all men have, and I WILL have mine. All three of them. No amount of truth or pestering from the sycophantic lapdogs of a tyrannical overlord on a narcissistic power trip will change that for me. You can put your hard-earned cash on that number, good sir.

Originally posted by wildtimes
reply to post by logical7

 

I think the Creator created the creation so that the creation can appreciate the creations and the Creator.
So there is a lot of intelligent design and we got a bit of it to be able to be aware of the Higher Intelligence.

I think that's a very supportable premise.

We got a tiny bit of it; we are able to create things OUT OF RAW MATERIALS....
and it's pretty impressive. It's also scary, what humans have created. No other animals are developing things that could destroy themselves and their habitats.

For this reason I feel that while humans have some capacities that other animals either do not have, or do not SHOW to us, we are the aberration. Just can't leave well enough alone; to our own possible demise.

Why can humans not be content with the natural world as it is? Why all the "control" and "dominion" over other species and the natural world???

It seems wrong to me on some level. While technology offers us more luxurious lifestyles, and thusly more free time to ponder things like philosophy, the cosmos, our existence, and the nature of our environment, it also causes us to be SEPARATE from it AS IT IS USED TODAY, and to me, that's the problem.

you do pinpoint the problems very well.
But what if thats the plan?
We humans have been given a brain and some power over the other creations to see who is wise enough to establish harmony like we obeserve in nature and who is dumb enough to self destruct even after having the intelligence to know the outcome and yet choose it.
The downfall is the self serving nature of human, the ego, the greed and the counter force is the good nature, sense of justice, empathy and intelligence to learn and predict conseqùences of actions.
If i kick a hornet nest to feel superior and powerful then i'l be humbled painfully by that little creation.