If you are telling the truth, you would have been studying the Bible for close to or more than 40 years, before you met me. I remember the first day you found the Book of Job. You spent 40+ years studying the Bible before you discovered the Book of Job?

You have never shown even a casual knowledge of the Bible. Everyone else might take your claims at face value, but I won't.

You could have been honest and admitted you didn't even know there was a book of Jonah. If it can't be used to bash Christianity and it's not a well known verse, you've never heard of it.

Thus is the thinking of every suicide bombing terrorist.

People like you give me the willies.

A wise person once said, "Never trust anyone who says they've found the truth. Only trust those who are still looking."

No, you just didn't grasp the meaning of my post. All i was getting at is how you say the laws in the bible and or the bible itself is hearsay. Well so are the laws of our lands today made by the government. For you do not know the people that wrote these laws. You do not know if they are truly the law any ways, you have only been informed they are the laws by some other people. So why should you believe them? Why do you believe someone telling you it's illegal to steal something and not believe someone telling you it's a sin to steal? What's the difference? On both accounts it is just knowledge gained by someone else telling you of such. So why give more credibility to "the laws of the land" in comparison to the laws of our lord?

So?

You have Paul ranting and whining that if someone doesn't agree with his views and beliefs they are fools.

I'm supposed to be impressed by that?

From a totally nonsensical collection of stories that is utterly absurd to begin with?

I keep telling you that as far as I'm concerned the Bible contains nothing more than the opinionated nonsense of mortal men. Yet you keep quoting from it like as if I'm supposed to be impressed or something.

Quoting from the Bible is utterly meaningless. If you want to convince someone that the Bible is the word of God, you're going to have to do more than just quote from it and assume that it's the word of God based on nothing more than your confessed BLIND HOPE that it might be.

You may as well be quoting from Macbeth or any other book for that matter.

In fact if you like quotes about wisdom here are some:

"A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein

In fact, did you need religion to teach you good morals? Or were you attracted to a religion that you believe already has morals that you condone? Or are you just in it for the hope of reward after death?

When I read the moral teachings of Jesus, all I have ever done is shake my head in agreement. Never did these teachings ever teach me something that I didn't already know or agree with. A conversation between Jesus and myself would be extremely boring. All we would do is sit there and agree with each other including when we both say, "I and the Father are One".

Here's some more wisdom for you:

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism." - Albert Einstein

If I have to choose between the wisdom of Albert Einstein a great scientific thinker and achiever, or the so-called wisdom of someone as desperate as Paul supposedly was, I think I'll chose to accept the wisdom of Einstein.

So we pick and chose where we find our wisdom.

You choose yours out of hope and desperation.

I choose mine based simply on what I feel is wiser.

You must be thinking that you are talking to some sort of simpleton.

It's not anything at all like you portray it to be.

First off, I DID trust what I was taught to believe is "God's Word".

I was brought up to believe that the Bible is the Word of God. And I didn't question that in the least. I was THAT naive!

I went to church like a good little boy, and I even accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I repented all my sins, and I gave myself over to God.

After all, who wouldn't? That was my thinking. I'm a decent person, I want to do what's right. Nothing can possibly be a higher honor than to serve my creator.

But then the problems started. You need to understand that a large part of my extended family were involved with the church and several of my Uncles were Ministers. They were all Free Methodists. And I think this is very important to realize. All these ministers were of the precise same faith and denomination. And because several of my uncles were ministers they often brought other ministers over for dinner. So I got a lot of exposure to ministers discussing religion with each other. Now they never argued as such, but even THEY were often in disagreement about how certain things should be interpreted or what they actually meant. And these are all ministers of the very same denomination!

You can imagine what I would have been exposed to at that time if I had ministers from many different denominations around me. They would have been in HUGE debates with each other. Not to mention all the other Abrahamic religions (which I didn't even think about back then).

Ok, so these few ministers of a single Christian denomination were apparently having difficulties agreeing on a lot of issues and interpretations. I became interested in teaching the "Word of God".

After all I was completely naive and innocent! I believed my parents, these preaches, and other Christians I knew, when they said that the Bible contains all the answer. I took that literally! After all, if it's not the literal truth, then what else would it be but a big fat lie?

So I decided to look into the Bible myself and FIND the answers to these difficult question (not the EASY questions). The EASY questions are EASY! If I'm going to be teaching this stuff to other people I had better be able to answer the HARD questions, not the easy ones!

So I started searching for the answers to the HARD questions. Questions that the very ministers of our church had. They should know the answers, but apparently they don't. In fact, it's become crystal clear over the years that no one knows the answers and this is precisely why there are so many diverse denominations of this religion.

Hey, if I'm going to teach God's WORD, I want to make sure I got it RIGHT!

So my investigation into the Bible wasn't an investigation of doubt, it was an investigation that originally started with the sincere and honest BELIEF that I would indeed FIND all these answers and set these confused preachers STRAIGHT.

Well, to make a long life story short, as time went on I discovered two extremely vivid and powerful TRUTHS!

#1. The Bible does NOT contain answer to everything.

#2. The more you search for answers in the Bible the more conflicting contradictions you will discover!

In fact, if you go into the Bible with one troubling question chances are real good that you'll come away with no answers and about a dozen or so even MORE TROUBLING questions!

Of course that obviously depends on what your original question was. If it was an easy question like "Is it ok to steal", you'll probably find a reasonable answer to that question quite easily.

However, if you have a far DEEPER question like "Why is God appeased by blood sacrifices, and why did he ask people to do this?"

Well, if you can answer that question more power to you! As far as I'm concerned there is no answer to that question in the Bible anywhere. You just have to have FAITH that the Biblical God must be related to Zeus somehow, or something like that.

These kinds of question are extremely important to someone who seriously wants to understand and teach the WORD of the deity they are claiming to LOVE.

Sure, a person could just toss their hands up and say, "Hey that's not up to us to ask". A LOT of ministers will take that stance. God just does what he does and it's none of our God damned business!

Well, personally I feel that's utter bull crap. If you're going to claim to LOVE a God you had damn well better know just what it is you are LOVING! Otherwise you might be claiming to love a demon!

Moreover, how can you TRULY claim to love anyone that you neither can know, nor understand? Especially when they are appeased by sadistic acts of blood sacrifices. I'm mean that's RED FLAG right there. Why should blood sacrifices appease a loving creator? Why would God want to see you slaughter an animal of its very own creation for the sole purpose of atoning your bad behavior? What does the poor animals death have to do with your bad behavior?

If this is some sort of "Instruction Book" for humans then this needs to be explained in detail.

I mean, excuse me if this sounds crazy to you, but if I'm going to preach that the Bible is the WORD OF GOD, I would expect people to ask me these sorts of questions. And so what am I going to do? Just say, "I have no clue. God is just weird I guess"

I may as well just confess that I know nothing about God. I don't know anymore about God than the clueless person who has turned to me for answers.

Moreover, you can't dare dismiss this question lightly in light of the central role that the Crucifixion of Christ plays in this religion.

You had damn well better know precisely how this works and why it is necessarily. Otherwise you may as well be asking people to believe in Zeus!

I wouldn't ask someone to believe that Zeus is God. Would you?

Well, if you don't have a better reason for asking them to believe in the biblical God, then you may as well be asking them to believe in Zeus.

I could go on and on and on, but it all falls on blind eyes.

The entire Old Testament makes no sense to me. Sorry but that's just the TRUTH. There are no explanations at all of the truly important question. It's all superficial bull. Just TRUST GOD to be right. (like you say)

Just believe it and don't question it!

Well, like I say, if you're going to do that then why not just believe in Zeus?

Or Wicca, or Buddhism, or anything. May as well believe in atheism if you're just going to blindly believe in anything for no good reason.

I wanted to know why Jesus had to be crucified to 'save' my soul. That is a very valid question in a religion who's major theme is that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb of God given to pay for the sins of men.

If you can't answer this SIMPLE question, then the whole religion is utterly meaningless.

And it all starts with asking why blood sacrifices where required in the first place. This is ZEUS-LIKE mythology! There's no difference between Zeus and the God of Abraham when you get right down to it. They are extremely similar myths.

Why should the real creator of this universe just happen to be the same as Zeus? A totally fictitious man-made myth that almost no one will dispute as such.

As I continued to study I also began to realize that Jesus was not teaching the same moral values that were taught in the Old Testament. On the contrary he was teaching basically the opposite moral values.

Why should the "Son of God" be so totally different in character than his supposed "Father"? That's another question that has never been sufficiently addressed. Cowboy keeps claiming that God simply changed his covenant with humans, but that flies in the face of the Bible's stance that God is dependable and unchangeable. You can't have God running around changing his mind all the time without giving sufficient explanations and reasons. And Jesus most certainly did not give anything like that at all. On the contrary the scriptures have Jesus denying that he came to change any laws, they even have him proclaiming that not one jot nor one tittle shall pass from law. Well, jots and tittles refer to writings, and the only writings Jesus could have possibly been referring to would have been the writings of the Old Testament.

So Cowboy's theory doesn't even begin to address my concerns. I'm not the least bit impressed with his interpretations. All he's doing is demanding that God is either schizophrenic or has dementia.

Moroever, after I had finally recognized that the biblical version of God cannot possibly be true, I still didn't abandon the idea of spirituality. Not in the least. Why should I? Just because one fable is false doesn't mean that there can't be a spiritual essence to life.

So I looked into other philosophies, not "Searching" for spirituality, (I already had that without any need for an attached dogma). I was simply looking at other philosophies and religions to see if I might find TRUTH in some of them.

Well, I did find TRUTH in other religions and philosophies. Not the kind of "Absolute Truth" you would expect from a book that is supposedly the "Word of God", but instead I found truth in the wisdom of great religious philosophers and spiritual leaders.

Eastern Mysticism makes so much more SENSE! In fact, it's so sensible that it can almost be called "Logical". It also conveys the innate things that I know to be TRUTH.

Far more interestingly, I discovered something truly grand. I discovered Mahayana Buddhism and the concept of the Bodhisattva. This fits in with precisely what Jesus was like, and with what Jesus was actually teaching. In fact, once you learn the tenets of Mahayana Buddhism the teachings of Jesus makes a LOT more sense. Of course, you need to also take into account that most of the quotes we have of Jesus were actually written by men who had an agenda to turn Jesus into their Abrahamic Messiah. So you can't truly trust the rumors of the authors of the New Testament to truly convey what Jesus might have been trying to say. I mean, even those authors themselves have Jesus telling his own disciples that even THEY aren't truly understanding him.

The more amazing and truly stunning thing is that Mahayana Buddhism was at its peak right around the time when Jesus would have lived. Whether Jesus had traveled to India, or whether he learned these things locally is hard to say. But clearly Jesus was teaching the wisdom of Mahayana Buddhism, and not the very unwise baloney of the Old Testament.

In fact, this is precisely why Christians love Jesus so much. They love the fact that he "changed" everything from the way it was in the Old Testament. Most people truly view the things in the Old Testament as being barbaric and outright "ungodly". If someone were to stone someone for being a 'sinner' today we'd think that was horrible.

So even the Christians truly don't like the God of the Old Testament. They like Jesus! Not the original God.

I don't blame them. Jesus was MUCH WISER and MUCH NICER than the original God of the Old Testament. Let there be no doubt about that!

This is also why he could not have possibly been the "son" of that God.

I mean, hey, if you think you can make sense of the "Holy Bible" more power to you. But as far as I'm concerned no one ever has and this is precisely why there are now so many fragmented religions resulting from this totally nonsensical collection of stories.

You don't need to give up on eternal life.

You don't even need to give up admiring and loving Jesus for having values that YOU also embrace!

But you should truly be reasonable about just how much of this fable you're going to bother supporting as the "Word of God".

There's just no need to support the whole mythology.

Do you honestly believe that if you're a GOOD PERSON, and you actually AGREE with Jesus and admire him for holding the SAME VALUES that YOU CHERISH, some nasty God of Abraham will smite you simply because you didn't "believe" that Jesus was his demigod?

I mean, come on.

That's where the whole thing radically breaks down for me.

Goodness, wholesomeness, and all that truly matters of the heart means nothing to this God if a person fails to believe that Jesus was his son?

What kind of a God would that even be?

Clearly there's a major fly in the soup here.

Why you can't see it is beyond me.

Perhaps you simply can't stand the idea that Jesus might not have actually been a special incarnation of God sent with a 'gift' of eternal life?

Perhaps, you simply can't believe that you are indeed spirit and have always been spirit.

I don't know why you cling to an entire dogmatic religion when all you truly need is to know that your true nature is spiritual. That's all you need to know.

I guess I TRUST our creator more than you do.

I TRUST that God is at least as wise and as caring as myself.

That's all I need to know.

Anything less and it isn't much of a God.

The idea that you need to believe that some specific dogma is the "Word of God" is just downright absurd, IMHO.

Free yourself from dogma, and know that you are one with God and always have been and always will be.

Just have a little FAITH and TRUST GOD directly. Why support religious bigotry in the name of a jealous dogma?

How can I reasonably trust an alleged Creator who gave me a potentially fatal lesion inside my brain before I was born?

Actually, the last episode did technically kill me briefly, but I knew what was happening before it got totally past the point of no return and I was in the back of an Advanced Life Support Unit ready to be airlifted to Johns Hopkins if necessary when it happened.

And I can hear it now-- God was responsible for the events that brought me back and that I'm not somehow converted by that experience must mean that Satan has it hooks in me somehow.

Don't you just love it? The way that people who have NO experience about your particular experiences with Hell on Earth offering their OPINIONS on What Really Happened?

-Kerry O., "Touche!"

You cannot understand God's Word if you don't trust Him.

It is though you can't get past the 1st line...of His Word.

"In the beginning God..." Genesis 1:1a

For a Christian you sure don't mind bearing false witness against your neighbor. You know very well that I have studied the Bible for the better part of 50 years.

And yes, the MORE I study that more UTTERLY ABSURD I realize it is.

This God depicted in the biblical stories truly would need to have the mentality and LACK OF WISDOM of a very young child to be sure.

The absurdities are abound.

Just look at how God handled the Canaanites and you'll see the utter stupidity of this supposedly all-wise supreme being.

These stories were clearly written by people who were simply attempting to justify their wars and atrocities in the name of a God.

No genuinely intelligent being would have ever condoned the crap those people did.

The Bible sounds like it was written by morons because it was written by morons. Egotistical, self-centered, and male-chauvinistic morons too boot.

How you can defend such moronic behavior in the name of any "God" is beyond me. It's an insult to any supreme being to even suggest that they might be the God of the Bible.

This mythology itself constantly shows its own fallacy.

If grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, then there would have been no need for any "Great Flood" in the days of Noah.

Christianity is truly incompatible with the religious mythology upon which it claims to rest.

Moreover, there are so many contradictions in these tales that if there is any "miracle" associated with the Bible it can only be the miraculous amount of people who actually believe in it. Of course, given that as being a "miracle" then the same miracles would apply to the Torah and Quran as well.

A lot of people are lost without a leader or King to follow. The Abrahamic religions are fables about a "God King". Everything about this tale resembles and reflects the concepts of an Earthly King, right down to the idea of Satan.

Satan was supposedly a fallen angel who thought he could "overthrow" God's kingdom and become "King" himself. Of course, if there is a creator of all that exists it would not be possible to simply "overthrow" it because it doesn't gain its power from "authority", but rather from the very nature of what it is.

So the whole idea of a fallen angel thinking that it could "overthrow" the creator of the universe and thus gain the ultimate "authority" is an utterly asinine idea to begin with.

The whole fable is precisely written from a human perspective of Earthy Kings. Even Jesus is portrayed as becoming the "King of Kings" (i,e, the ultimate authority). However, before he can lay claim to his kingdom he must first defeat the fallen angel who has given him such grief, including placing him in the most desperate of positions of having to be crucified on a pole to 'win' his supposed war. That very notion right there suggests that God himself views Satan as a VERY SERIOUS THREAT that requires major sacrifices in order to beat.

At the end of the fable God finally defeats the fallen angel once and for all. He squishes the head of the fallen angel and then casts it's carcass along with all the souls that the fallen angel has won into the lake of fire where there will be eternal wailing and gnashing of teeth. (nobody wants to be in that crowd)

Then the city of Jerusalem is prepared as a bride and the King Jesus returns to re-marry his divorced wife of Israel.

In the meantime, all other human cultures were just an "aside" in this creation fable. Just supporting actors and actresses in the central drama of the dance and marital quarrel between God and the Jews.

Like most good fairy tales it ends with, "And they lived happily ever after".

Now good night children and have sweet dreams. All will be well in the morning, just trust in the Lord of the Israelites. For all other religions and creation stories are false myths created by that nasty fallen angel, Satan.

It's not that kind of a "gift" Arcamedees.

It's the kind of "gift" that retail stores offer. In order to qualify for their "gift", you first have to buy their product at an expensive price.

It's the same with the Biblical God's "gift". It's just a gimmick to get you sucked into the product. In order to "qualify" for this so-called "gift", you must first agree to give up your own free will and only do the will of the gift-giver, for the rest of eternity.

I've always pointed out that this so-called 'gift' is certainly not FREE. It's the most expensive 'gift' you can possible purchase, and you purchase it by devoting your soul to the WILL of another being for all of eternity.

God is offering to BUY your soul essentially.

Just like the devil supposedly offers to BUY your soul.

This mythology was written by extremely uncouth salesman obviously.

Apparently you totally missed my point. I'm not an atheist. I'm not saying that I don't believe in the spiritual nature of our existence.

What I'm saying is that just because I do believe in spirit doesn't mean that I'm going to run off and worship Zeus, or any other blood-thirsty mythological God who is appeased by blood sacrifices and professes to be a jealous egotistical God.



Let me clear this up for you. Just because you have accepted one particular version of one particular mythological fairy tale doesn't make it the "Word of God".

Also, if I were to say that I speak for God, and you refused to believe me would you then be rejecting God? Or would you simply be refusing to accept the idea that I speak for God?

Think about that for a while.

It's absolutely impossible to reject a God by refusing to believe in the hearsay rumors of some mortal men. Therefore it's impossible for it to be a grave "sin" to reject the Bible as the "Word of God", yet this is precisely what the authors of the Bible hold to be true. They claim that's it an unforgivable sin to reject their words as being the "Word of God".

Therefore, those authors cannot possibly be telling the truth. They are caught red-handed in an outright lie that can't possibly be true.

Also, are you aware that the Bible does not contain a single solitary word from Jesus himself. Nary a one. The entire set of fables is all nothing but hearsay rumors, many of which actually conflict with each other.

So to reject these words of men as being the "Word of God" cannot possibly be the same as rejecting a God itself. Thus the Bible is necessarily ungodly, and has absolutely nothing at all to do with any "real" God.

The proof is in the pudding.

It's absolutely impossible to reject a "God" that hasn't come to you in person in no uncertain terms and revealed itself as the creator of this universe. Anything short of that is necessarily a man-made sham.

Having heard the biblical hearsay rumors and dismissing them as being utterly absurd and foolish, would hardly be the same as denying the man they are supposedly about.

If you fall for this kind of rhetoric it's no wonder you're a Christian. You'll believe anything.

In fact, it's precisely these kinds of clearly man-made devious tricks that reveals to me that these writings aren't even close to being divine.

I personally don't believe that any genuinely all-wise God would ever do anything that stupid. Judging people on whether or not they believe some utterly absurd hearsay rumors would not be a fair judgment at all. Where do you get off thinking such a thing?

Just because these morons who wrote the New Testament say so?

Why should you believe those guys? Have you ever actually met them?

You have absolutely no sane reason to believe in these stories. And therefore it would be utterly foolish for a God to condemn you for not believing in them.

Do you believe that our creator is this foolish or what?

These kinds of claims made by these authors are actually a RED FLAG that should tell you instantly that their writings didn't come from any all-wise divine being.

The atheists make more sense than you do, that's for sure!

It will be a fair judgement including weather someone had the chance to accept Jesus or not. If they've never heard of Jesus yes they may not have accepted Jesus as lord and saviour but they did not REJECT him. And the lord says "But whoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven." Matthew 10:33

No, because there is an age of accountability. Yes that particular term isn't in the bible. But it breifs up alot of the teachings. We are not responsible for our actions till we know right from wrong. And once you pass the age of say 13ish you know right from wrong. Weather you avoid doing wrong is another story, but you still know it's wrong. This age isn't an exact age, for we all develop differently and learn at different paces. And that is why it's called a JUDGEMENT, it's not a SENTENCING. It will be a fair judgement including weather someone had the chance to accept Jesus or not. If they've never heard of Jesus yes they may not have accepted Jesus as lord and saviour but they did not REJECT him. And the lord says "But whoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven." Matthew 10:33