Jesus and Belief

reply to post by iRoyalty


Because said Book does nothing FOR those men that may have changed it.

IF you've read it yourself.

IF you don't just believe what people have "surmised" from it.

reply to post by graphuto


The message in the Bible is fine, it is inherently good. But if someone says "God demands we do this" or "The Devil is trying to stop you from doing this" you will believe them, especially if a priest tells you.

The Devil is known as the Great Deceiver, the way my Muslim friend puts it is that "He speaks only in lies, as if it is his own language", I don't know how similar that is to the Christian take on the Devil but they seem like the same entity. If this is true what is the greatest deception he could ever pull off?

Making you believe you are following God, when it is Satan who pulls the strings.

graphuto
reply to post by iRoyalty

 

Because said Book does nothing FOR those men that may have changed it.

IF you've read it yourself.

IF you don't just believe what people have "surmised" from it.

That is fine, I suggest taking the Good from it.

I just beg you don't believe the Dogma, don't buy into what the church wants and don't believe every verse of the Bible is God's word or definitely the truth just because it is in that book.

That's all I'm trying to get at.

reply to post by graphuto


You are saying that all it takes is 'belief' ??? Jesus says otherwise ... Matthew 7:21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven. - Jesus. Those people believe in Jesus, and so do the evil spirits, and yet they aren't saved.

graphuto
The more vehemently people protest Jesus and the Bible, the more it strengthens my resolve.

The bible and Jesus are two different things.

Much of the Old Testament is debunked. We know for a fact that Noahs Ark did not happen. Neither did the creation myth of Adam and Eve. And the folklore of Exodus didn't happen the way the Old Testament claims it did. It is very much possible (and even SMART) to acknowledge that those debunked things are not to be taken literally. That acknowledgement in no way takes away from the gospels and what Jesus taught. Jesus teachings are able to stand on their own merit.

reply to post by FlyersFan


Spot on.

Jesus was a good and wise man, the people who wrote the bible were most likely not.

graphuto
If you've read the Bible, surely you know that on its own, without the "doctrines" that people have "surmised" from it, and aren't even really based in correctly interpreted scripture,

Everyone has their own interpretation of what scripture says. Your interpretation could easily be wrong, and the people who have interpreted scripture different from you could easily have interpreted correctly. God isn't going to send people to hell because they honestly interpreted scripture one way instead of another. If he does, then he's not a God that anyone should be worshipping.

reply to post by graphuto


Ok, a little more history on your bible, as it has been added to and scripture omitted for centuries since the Council of Nicaea

If we examine the oldest known Bible to date, the "Sinai Bible" housed in the British Museum we find a staggering 14,800 differences from today's Bible and yet it still remains the word of God?

In 1415 the Church of Rome took an extraordinary step to destroy all knowledge of two second century Jewish books that it said contained the true name of Jesus Christ. The Antipope Benedict XIII firstly singled out for condemnation a secret Latin treatise called "Mar Yesu" and then issued instructions to destroy all copies of the book of Elxai. The Rabbinic fraternity once held the destroyed manuscripts with great reverence for they were comprehensive original records reporting the life of Rabbi Jesus.

Later, Pope Alexander VI ordered all copies of the Talmud destroyed, with the Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada (1420-98) responsible for the elimination of 6,000 volumes at Salamanca alone.

Solomon Romano (1554) also burnt many thousands of Hebrew scrolls and, in 1559, every Hebrew book in the city of Prague was confiscated. The mass destruction of Jewish books included hundreds of copies of the Old Testament and caused the irretrievable loss of many original handwritten documents.

In 1607, forty-seven men (some records say fifty four) took two years and nine months to re-write the Bible and make it ready for press. It was, by the order of King James, issued with a set of personal 'rules' the translators were to follow. Upon its completion in 1609, it was handed over to the King James for his final approval. However, "It was self evident that James was not competent to check their work and edit it, so he passed the manuscripts onto the greatest genius of all time... Sir Francis Bacon"

With the aforementioned in mind, surely you must agree that the original word of god has been completely manufactured by man to suit man’s needs?

I believe in Deism for all the reasons I have posted in this thread, organised religion spreads hatred and sorrow into society, none of which is from the original scriptures of Jesus and his apostles.

reply to post by iRoyalty


That's an excellent point you've raised, actually. The Great Deceiver. Yes, we do have a similar view of Satan.

HIS mode of deception is the same now as it was in the beginning :

"Did God really say that?"
"Did God really mean that?"

Genesis 3:3 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die

It's actually pretty much his only trick.

John 1:1 says that Jesus IS the Word.

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

If Satan can get the world to doubt the Word of God, as he did in the beginning, and now Jesus, he's got it made!

He could win a ton of souls in the way that you've suggested.
He will win a lot more in the way that I've suggested.


In all honesty, how often do you see "Christianity" preached in the way that I'm preaching it? In Spirit and in Truth, with humility and love, and backed by the Holy Bible to boot?

No one works as hard to discredit ANY OTHER "holy text" as much as they do the Holy Bible, ESPECIALLY when it's being preached in Spirit and in Truth.

graphuto
No one works as hard to discredit ANY OTHER "holy text" as much as they do the Holy Bible.

Well look a little closer to home with that statement, as the Vatican is responsible for discrediting more holy scripture than anyone else.

You don't seem to have an opinion with the facts I have supplied you or have made any comments, is that because I could be right and that the bible you follow today has been changed so much since Christ that it would be unrecognisable from original scripture?

I think from what others have written on this thread that people do believe in Jesus and God but not the bible for all the aforementioned reasons. You keep giving further scripture to prove your point, but I have shown that the scripture you use has been placed there by man and not by god.

graphuto
John 1:1 says that Jesus IS the Word.

Don't you know about the word? Because everybody knows that the bird is the word!

"Peter 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with The Bird, and the Word was The Bird."



Couldn't resist lol

graphuto
In all honesty, how often do you see "Christianity" preached in the way that I'm preaching it? In Spirit and in Truth, with humility and love, and backed by the Holy Bible to boot?

All the time, which is why you are not original and thus are just following other peoples views.

graphuto
No one works as hard to discredit ANY OTHER "holy text" as much as they do the Holy Bible, ESPECIALLY when it's being preached in Spirit and in Truth.

edit on 22-2-2014 by graphuto because: (no reason given)

Of course, because it is so flawed! We have given you irrefutable evidence that the bible is not the word of God, but yet you do not even address any of it.

This is why we try so hard, it is not fun watching my brothers and sisters give their lives to something that is not a holy book, but a book of control, not the good kind either.

What I get from the Op is that Christianity, this life is going to be so difficult, so faith depriving, giving up will be easier than believing.

Thanks for the reminder

reply to post by flammadraco


I am amazed that people today actually think the bible is the word of God. We know the OT was written by at least 5 different people, one whom was thought to be the woman 'J' during Soloman's time.

Christianity has a major problem which most people are too naive to consider and that's the fact that the oldest copies of Mark's Gospel don't include the resurrection. In the original texts from the 4th century there is no resurrection. One of the things Constantine considered with the holy fathers was whether Jesus was to be an ordinary man or a God. He put together a religion that simply didn't exist in the form most people think it arose. People see films with Christian being fed to the Roman lions etc and think that there was a huge united Christian group started up by the disciples that Jesus told to go out from Jerusalem and tell the people. Its not so, Christianity didn't exist like that until about the 4th - 5th century because its dogma only started in the 3rd century and it took time to percolate down to the masses. It was fragmented, full of politics and vying for the most powerful group with factions existing all over the ancient world. Constantine had to pull in a huge amount of 'fathers' to put its dogma cohesively together to help unite both the Eastern and Western sides of the Roman Empire and he did that through religion,m the only tool he had, the velvet glove by telling people they had a soul they could loose if they didn't obey. The different fathers then took the new dogma to the monasteries and the monks were told to destroy documents that didn't match the new dogma, hence the Nag Hammadi and other hidden documents with the shortened gospel without the resurrection.

There's a very good programme telling people how the Victorians had a massive movement to stem the flow of criticism and disbelief in the bible. They went in search of the most ancient documents they could retrieve from the old monasteries throughout Egypt, Greece and elsewhere in the vain hope of proving the authenticity of the bible. But in actual fact found far more than they had bargained for. They found exactly how Constantine and the church had manufactured their religion and it didn't match then current beliefs. That is still the situation today but the church doesn't for obvious reasons wish to acknowledge it. |As it is wound deeply into politics its likely to stay that way until enough people simply leave religion and look for other areas of spirituality.

What people don't seem to realise is that it was the Church in the UK that stopped people being educated when it took over from the Pagan world which believed in education. The church kept the bible in a language only its priests could understand so the loss of education and lack of copies in a language people could (those who were wealthy and educated) actually read, simply increased the subjective demand that people believe what they were told. Once the bible was printed and people could actually read the language then slowly questions started up. The church was also the most vicious source of persecution for disbelievers that we today cannot imagine or would tolerate.

The question is do we do any good perpetuating something that more and more are finding out is a belief they have been conditioned to accept since childhood and is actually highly political and speculative? Not everyone likes being taken for a ride.
None of the desert religions have any secure foundation because they have all been subject to extrapolation and the original root the Judaism is simply taken from other cultures and the myths from the pagan world. Even Islam with its views on Jesus shows its merely put together to meld with its past roots.

Believe what you will!

I've accomplished what I was called to do here tonight : Preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

reply to post by Shiloh7


Great point, shame I cannot give you a flag

You won't get a response from the OP though as they seem to avoid facts and depend on scripture as evidence.

graphuto
Believe what you will!

I've accomplished what I was called to do here tonight : Preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

edit on 22-2-2014 by graphuto because: (no reason given)

So your leaving because you have no answers to any questions that have been raised? This always happens on these kinds of threads

graphuto
Believe what you will!

The difference for us is that we are not accepting these things based on belief, they are based on facts.

graphuto
I've accomplished what I was called to do here tonight : Preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

You have preached what someone else preached because it served their purpose at the time. If you truely wanted to preach Jesus Christ, you would have simply told us:

Do not Harm,
Do not Steal,
Do not Lie.

That is all Jesus truly wanted.

In fact he never even wanted to be worshipped in the first place. Probably because He knew what would follow if people started worshipping him.

graphuto
I've accomplished what I was called to do here tonight : Preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

1 - Proselytizing is against the rules at ATS.
2 - You didn't acknowledge the quote from Jesus that I gave - 'not all those who say 'Lord Lord' will enter Heaven'. Doesn't that kind of kill the 'all you have to do is believe' thought of yours?

reply to post by flammadraco


The simple fact is that people that want to believe will, and those who don't won't. Hopefully someone can read through this thread and gain something from it.

Here are 3 reasons why someone would not want to believe in God and Jesus :

Reason 1
They don't want the truth.

They received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie, that they all might be damned who believe not the truth, but hath pleasure in unrighteousness.

Why is God sending strong delusion? Is it because he just picks and chooses who to send the delusion to? No. It's because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. It's not God who has made the first move here, but man.

Reason 2
Pride.
A proud person does not want to acknowledge the possibility that God and Jesus exist. A proud person has a hard time accepting the fact that they can't get to heaven on their own. They can't swallow the fact that they're condemned to hell without Jesus Christ.

Reason 3
Negativity
People don't believe the Gospel because they can't accept the negative things in the Bible and the world. There is a ton of it. People have free will. They want to believe in an only positive God, and that Hell isn't real, and that there are no consequences for their actions.

"God is too mean, he can't exist!"

2 Peter 3:3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,

4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.

5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:

6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

In general He is loving, longsuffering, slow to anger.
He is a God of wrath, and judgement, but he is also a God of infinite love if you simply ASK!