Why does it matter what others think? What matters is what YOU think. If you think that the dress looks great, it will look great. If you think it is too flashy and too young for you, you will be uncomfortable.

By the way, "They" forgot to give me the manual on how old women should dress, so I will dress as I like.

There is no such thing as psychic abilities. There is intuition and there are good guesses, but to be able to predict the future means that the future is set in stone, and it isn't.

And if it were, why bother to find out what is going to happen? If you are going to die tomorrow and can do nothing, why would you want to know?

Every "psychic" that I have known have been guessers. Some were better than others.

To say that time has passed anyone by is a ridiculous statement. We exist in spatial time and it is constantly passing by us; however, what WE do with that time is up to us.

Time passes by us; we let time pass us by.

It is amusing that you accuse others of being illogical when you present so many logical fallacies.

First, the "either/or" fallacy of the three options--there are more:

4. He was a practical joker and never realized that things were getting out of hand.
5. Jesus never existed.
6. Jesus existed but the events surrounding his life and death are pure hyperbole; he was a good Jewish boy who would be shocked if he knew how he is presented now.
7. Jesus didn't die.
8. Jesus was a woman in drag.

Your possibility #2: Liar

Why was he lying? Was it for selfish gains or was it because he really wanted to "save" the Jews? In that case, he might have been more than willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good.

And he did try to back down; in the Garden of Gethsemane, he asked that the "cup of poison" be taken away from him.

As for your "lunatic" theory and the Sermon on the Mount: someone can be delusional and logical! There are brilliant people who suffer from mental illnesses.

According to the tenets of Christianity, Jesus' logic fails in this sermon. He says,

7:17 Even so every good tree brings forth good fruit; but a corrupt
tree brings forth evil fruit.

7:18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

But refer back to Yahweh creating the world and how evil came in. God, the "good tree," should only bring forth "good fruit," yet some of his creations are not so "good." Therefore, having brought forth "corrupt fruit," Yahweh must be corrupt.

That's logic.

He also says:

7:13 Enter you in at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leads to destruction, and many there be which go in there:

7:14 Because narrow is the gate, and constricted is the way, which leads unto life, and few there be that find it.

So, few people will get their feet on the narrow path and find heaven, eh? That means that everyone who does not accept Jesus as savior is damned.

Believe or suffer: I will tolerate no one who does not acknowledge me as god. Yup, really logical and a plan for my life!

(And this is where he fed ALL those people with fish and bread. I buy into that, as well.)

Your own logic is faulty and you compare two unlike circumstances. Harriet Tubman's existence is substantiated. Her actions were recorded by people CONCURRENT, living in the same time as she lived, and those people can largely be documented, as well.

The event in the Christians Scripture are substantiated ONLY in the Christian Scriptures. There is no independent evidence that Christ was put to death, that he rose again, or any of the other aspects of his life. In fact, it cannot be proven that Jesus lived.

Considering that the scriptures (if not all) were largely written AFTER the death of Jesus instead of as they took place, their accuracy is highly questionable; in fact, they only need to be compared for inaccuracies to know that. Paul never met Jesus, yet he was the prime mover in getting Christianity off the ground.

In addition, the CS are also suspect merely because they contain so many miraculous happenings that defy rationality. If someone said that Harriet Tubman picked up a train engine with her bare hands and threw it at Confederate troops, we would NOT believe it, would we?

Hmmm . . . You are "commanded" to be smart? How about knowledgeable? They are separate aspects. In addition, by your blanket statement, you exclude people with even average IQs from Christianity--not even to speak of mentally handicapped people.

How do you define "smart"?

Luke 18:16 states: "Then Jesus called for the children and said to the disciples, "Let the children come to me. Don't stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children," indicating that a high level of thinking skills is not only unnecessary, but not desired. Children born smart are smart, of course, but they have not yet developed long range executive thinking skills and other logical ways of thinking.

Of course, 1 Corinthians 13:11 contradicts that by saying: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."

So, which is it: reason like a child and attain heaven, or put childish reason aside and think like a man? (I am not a man, so that doesn't apply to me, anyway.)

Illegal wisdom??? Whoa, that's Nazi talk. Let's burn a few books.

"666" is the number between 665 and 667--nothing more, nothing less.

To answer your questions:

No.

No.

No.

No--if he existed, he was human

Face it, dude, you're gonna die.

Most of these threads deserve to die--they are about the most inane, asinine topics that I have seen. I do believe that most people on dating sites have never had a clever, witty or original thought.

Before there were monks, people cultivated grapes (not wine) in order to make fermented drinks. Dionysus was the Greek god of wine and he was worshiped for centuries.

If there is something that I desire, I will make it a part of my "make-up."

Why should I?

Damn.

Someone had better wake up the pharaohs and tell them that the religion they practiced up to 5,000 years ago wasn't a religion.

If you are speaking of the religion of the Norse, it is a johnny-come-lately compared to other pagan faiths. The Norns are based on the Greek Moirae and Odin and Thor are like many thunder gods who preceded them.

Really, learn some history, dude!

Go ahead--I am outta here.

Adam and Eve are a myth. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a myth. Unless you are a fundamentalist Christian, there is no way around it. It isn't in my best interest to CLAIM that it is a myth, but I have explained and show why it is a myth.

In this forum, you are not debating in order to convince Christians that either their sacred stories are myths or to establish a "truth": you debate in order to prove your points to yourself and to those who think the same way as you do.

The whole argument about knowledge=evil is an old and rhetorical argument; I went into it in depth in my MA thesis.

It is my fault, though--on a dating site, I should not expect to find a "debate" (and I loosely call this a debate because in reality, it isn't much of a debate) wherein the debaters not only have a firm grasp on the information that they are presenting, but that they are able to see points that do not agree with their own.

Mea culpa.

The Norse made it to what is now known as the "Americas" before the Italians got here.

You REALLY missed the points of my posts. Myth is archetypal--the tales presented in the Hebrew Scriptures are found in many other mythoi. While the Hebrew scriptures are filled with references to other deities, including Astarte and Tammuz, they might not refer directly to Zeus and especially not to Loki. The archetypal associations, though, are clear. Loki and Hermes are the trickster gods; acthetypically speaking, when the serpent gets Eve to eat the fruit, he/she (the serpent is often represented as female in Medieval and Renaissance art), then it falls into the category of the trickster.

Yawheh and Zeus are both "head" gods--and while Yahweh might be singular, Elohim is not. Both Yahweh and Zeus are male mothers; Yahweh creates Adam and Zeus "gives birth" to both Athena and Dionysus. Zeus punishes Prometheus for giving fire to man (and I mean man, not woman). "Fire" is not only a means to cook food and provide warmth, but it also symbolizes enlightenment and knowledge. This is a parallel myth to Eve getting knowledge in an illicit manner.

People who do not have a broader understanding of how a mytho/mythos fits into the wider scopes of mythoi fail to see how the myths are basically the same tales. I bet that if you were writing about the flood, you wouldn't chastise someone for bringing up the Sumerian/Babylonian myth of Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh because they are clearly the same tale with different names; yet, you can't see the obvious connections of the creation myth with other myths.

Not only that, tell me WHERE in the myth of Eve that they ate from a tree that gave them any other knowledge but of good and evil. It isn't there. If you are going to be single faceted and dogmatic about details, then stick to the details.

As I said before, and which you ignored, the Jews didn't discourage knowledge, Adam and Eve didn't have a bible to follow, and keeping people in ignorance (as you categorize) was largely in more modern times when churches sought to keep people ignorant because ignorant people are easier to control.

Before that (and during that time), learning was the province of upperclass men--not women, not slaves, and not the poor. Martin Luther, for all his faults, began the movement, for lack of a better word, to educate the masses so that they could read the Bible for themselves. Sunday School was originally held to teach kids how to read.

And though all of that pertains to the subject at hand--god keeping people in ignorance--none of that happened in the Hebrew Scriptures, so they are moot points to this discussion.

PEOPLE keep people in ignorance, not gods: gods are made in the image of humans. If you want to castigate someone for keeping populaces in states of ignorance, castigate humans.

Why? Are you looking for a reason to believe?

Actually, I did connect the dots; you just weren't able to track the movement.

It's OK, I am used to people not "getting" truly esoteric ideas and theories.

Oh, so sorry for not realizing that you didn't want a more broadly based discussion that included archetypal examples of other religions.

Silly me for being so global; I'll put some blinders on and pretend that neither Judaism nor Christianity are based on prior religions.