Ab...wrote:

You make no sense at all. Here you claim that you agree that dogma is irrelavent,...

Ab... wrote:
That pretty much flies in the very face of the whole dogmatic religion.

Precisely the opposite. I refuse to allow other people to decide for me. This is why I demand that the Bible must make sense to me. If it doesn't make sense to me I would be fooling myself to pretend that I actually understand it.

Not only would I be fooling myself, but I would be fooling God!

You would have me LIE to God!

You would have me pretend to accept the Bible and ignore all of its gross contradictions and obvious absurdities in favor of LYING to God in some pretense that it actually makes sense to me.

Perhaps you didn't fully understand my previous explanation about my history with the Bible.

I was taught as a child that the Bible was the word of God and that Jesus was the Son of God. I accepted that because I saw no reason for my parents to LIE to me about something so profound!

However, later I discovered that they had indeed LIED to me! By their own confessions, later in life they confessed that it's a matter of FAITH and that in all honesty they can't say with absolute certainty whether it's a true story or not. In short, they confessed that they honestly don't know whether the Bible has anything to do with God or not. Of if there even is a God!

Moreover, I quickly discovered that preachers have their struggles with their FAITH. I also quickly noticed that the preaches even within a given denomination don't agree on every interpretation and in some cases actually disagree about major issues!

So I finally decided to read the book myself and discover the TRUTH. In other words, if the book truly is God's Word and has answers to all our questions they the book itself should be able to straighten out the whole mess once and for all.

So I went into the book naively believing that is was the word of God and that I would get to the bottom of all these apparent inconsistencies, etc.

However, what I found was just the opposite. Instead of clearing things up I realized that the book was far worse than even the preachers were willing to confess.

Taking my head out of the book, I then looked around at all the different denominations of Protestantism, and then at Catholicism, and finally to Judaism and Islam, and I realized that nobody can make sense of these stories. Not even the most learned theologians! Clearly these stories are extremely ambiguous at best, and totally absurd at worst.

That my friend, is the Gospel Truth or perhaps I should say, "The Truth of the Gospels!", they are totally ambiguous at best, and utterly absurd at worst. Certainly not clear enough for me to believe that YOU could have a handle on them.

I later discovered that the Great Isaac Newton studied the Bible even more than he studied physics and his conclusion was quite simply that Jesus could not possibly have been the Son of Yahweh. That was his conclusion (the same conclusion I came to I might add)

More over, all of the most brilliant minds in science have recognized similar things about these stories. Albert Einstein also rejected them as being utterly absurd and suggested that humanity as a whole would be far better off turning to Buddhism as a spiritual philosophy of life.

So I'm in GREAT company. And I made my conclusion before I even realized that so many other great minds had come to the very same conclusion.

Carl Sagan said in best I think, "The cosmic stage is far too big for the biblical plot". It's so true. Why bother creating infinitely many galaxies if God is obscessed with human behavior on Earth?

Finally, when you read the Bible just ask yourself the following questions.

1. Would an all-wise, all-intelligent, all-compassionate God do and say the things that are written in the biblical stories?

2. Would mortal men who are attempting to strike fear and guilt into the masses write the things that are in the biblical storties.

When I go through the Bible with asking those two questions it quickly becomes quite vivid that the answer to the first question is always a clear and easy no and the answer to the second question is always a clear and resounding YES.

I see no reason at all to believe that the creator of this universe would be as utterly stupid and ignorant as the biblical stories demand.

There's just no reason at all to believe them. And there are a myriad of reasons to reject them. Not the least of which is that the stories themselves constantly conflict with their own interests.

An unchanging God who deals with sin one moment by flooding the sinners off the face of the planet, and then in the next moment he's having his son nailed to a pole to save the sinners?

Right there is enough to have this book classified as a collection of fictional inconsistent fairytales. No need to even look any deeper really.

There is no way that the Bible can be made to make any sense at all. It's clearly as ficticious as the Greek Mythologies of Zeus and company.

I mean if you want to use it as an abstract model for an archetype of God, more power to you. But any attempt to sell it to others as a book of the "Absolute Word of God" is truly absurd. It simply isn't self-consistent enough to be any such thing.

s1owhand wrote ;
Ah yes... but as you say, "some" may not believe in God. That does not make the God of Abraham different from the Father of Jesus.

I am not talking about sinners. I am talking about those who follow Gods ways with true and sincere love. That does not require rejection of the Old Testament.

As Jesus loved God the Father so do the Jews and the Muslims. There may be those who have lost the way but that does not mean that their God is different - just unrevealed.

For those who are living a good and righteous life, their God is the same - Christians, Muslims, Jews and others who believe in one eternal God alike....

The fact that there are sinners who do not love God does not change who God is.

Ab... wrote : Oh but sir, you already have.

You have stated before that my view of the Bible is wrong and distorted and that I can't even see the truth

Well, if that's true, and this is because God has built into the Bible a "sifting" mechanism as you have suggested, then God has indeed deceived me into believing that he is different from what he is actually like

Even you have suggested that I'm not truly rejecting God, I'm merely rejecting the false picture of God that I have because of this deceit that is built into the Bible as a "sifting" mechanism.

In short, you are demanding that God has deceived me!

Moreover, if you believe that God has 'sifted' me out of being able to understand his word, then why should you even remotely interested in attempting to explain his word to me? After all, if God has made a decision that he doesn't want me to understand it, who are you to defy God's wishes?

In fact, that would go for all Christian evangelists and proseyltizers who attempt to explain the Bible to people who don't understand it. They would all be interfering with God's "sifting" mechanism!

Are you suggesting that God is decietful and would hide the truth from those who seek him?

You're just convincing me that the Bible necessarily must be written by some sort of Satan just as Jesus had said in the verse you posted by John.

A loving God would not pull such deceiful trickery on those who seek his love. Thus the Old Testament cannot possibly be the inspiried word of any loving God. Hench Jesus could certainly not have been the Son of the false God depicted in the Bible. In fact, as you have shown, even John shows that Jesus rejected this God.

But I already knew that.

Ab...wrote

The problem is Sparrows, that if you take the entire Bible as a collection of "God's Word", then the entire Bible becomes the context.

In other words, you can't go around finding places in the Bible where God is appeased by blood sacrifices and then other places where God is not appeased by blood sacrifices.

Either it's true, or it's not.

All you're demonstrating to me is what I already know. The Bible is nothing more than a bunch of independent stories that aren't even in agreement with each other.

Besides, if you claim that Jesus denounced the God of the Torah (The Old Testement), then he most certainly could not have been the Son of that God.

So much for the whole religion then. The whole thing falls apart and you end up with nothing.

This is what the Cathers believed.

They believed that the Old Testament was an account of Satan and that Satan and Yahweh were one in the same.

However, this doesn't fit in with the Christian view for several reasons.

1. It was supposedly the prophecy in the Old Testament the predicted the coming of Jesus. If the OT had been written by Satan and Satan was indeed Yahweh, then it makes no sense that Satan would have predicted the coming of Jesus.

2. The whole 'sacrificial lamb' thing actually depends upon the God of the Old Testament being appeased by blood sacrifices.

So if you're going to give the words of John any serious merit, you'd be far better off accepting my conclusions:

Jesus was a Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattva who was indeed rejecting the entire Old Testament and "God of Abraham" as being false doctrine.

So if it's your claim that Jesus renounced Yahweh, then you're actually saying the same things I'm saying.

Yahweh and the entire Old Testament were false doctrine and full of lies.

Ab...wrote

There you have it Slow!

All good and ethical people are in a relationship with God no matter what religion they have accepted or how they view God. Even good and ethical athesits must necessarily be in a relationship with God even if they are totally unware of the relationship on a conscious level.

I certainly won't argue with this.

We're getting closer and closer to a consensus here.

Seriously!

I think we have a break through opportunity here!
If everybody can agree that there is ONE God and it
then must be that your ONE God is the same as
everybody else's ONE God then we are only talking
about different peoples or cultures descriptions of
the same thing.

I demand a role call!

1. Do you believe in ONE God?

2. Do you admit that it must be the same ONE God
that other monotheists believe in?

3. Do you admit that it then does not matter what
religion you are as long as you follow the rules
for good and ethical behavior - amounting to
charity and kindness described in various ways
by different religions?

I'll start.

1. Yes I believe in ONE God.
2. Yes it is the same one for everybody.
3. Doesn't matter what religion you observe as long as you are good.

I eagerly await everyone's response to these three questions.
Let's hear it.

I'm waiting...

Well, I'm in complete agreement with you on that one. And I certainly don't mean to be trying to talk people out of belieiving in their version of God. Even though it may appear that I try to do this.

And if everyone saw things the way you do Slow, there would be no religious debates, or disagreements.

But clearly most of the believers in the Abrahamic religions are not in agreement with you. Sparrows, for example, simply points out that he can find verses in his book that appear to disagree with your views. And his belief is that this book contains the only true word of the only true God.

So it's more than just believing that there is only one true God. It actually comes down to the idea that only one book contains the true word of that one true God.

And that's where the problems arise.

I feel that I have seen the difference.

The man made version of Christianity demands that Jesus was the son of Yahweh sent to pay for the sins of man.

In terms of "reality" there is no such thing as "real Chrisitanity", IMHO.

In other words, it is my conclusion that there is no such thing as "The Christ" and Jesus most certainly wasn't "The Christ".

I see Yahweh as being nothing more than a man made Godhead no unlike Zeus (in fact quite similar to Zeus actually).

And I see Jesus as a Mahayana Buddhist, who was doing the work of a Bodhisattva trying to teach his brothers the wisdom of the the Far East.

In is my humble opinion, that everything that these authors attributed to Jesus makes sense in that context. Especially if you weed out their false notoin that Jesus was "The Christ".

For example, they have Jesus saying "I and the Father are one". Well, that's Eastern Mysicism. The belief that we are a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.

These biblical authors are the ones who are attempting to claim that by "The Father" Jesus was referring to Yahweh.

They also have Jesus saying, "Before Abraham was, I am".

Once again, they try to take that out to mean that Jesus was claiming to be Yahweh. But if taken in the Eastern Mystical concext Jesus was merely trying to say that his spirit existed even before Abraham made up his God.

Jesus said, "Ye are Gods". That the Eastern Mystical view.

Jesus said, "Whatever you do to your bother you do to me". Again, that's the mystical view.

Jesus said that heaven is at hand. Jesus said that heaven the kingdom of God is within you. And so on.

Plus his moral teachings are in perfect harmony with the moral teachings of Buddhism, and not at all in harmony with the teachings attributed to Yahweh.

Yahweh taught people to judges others to be sinners and to stone the sinners to death.

Jesus taught that we should not judge others, and he clearly did not support stoning sinners to death.

Yahweh taught an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Jesus taught to turn the other cheek and forgive those who trespass against you.

There is nothing in anything that Jesus taught that even agrees with the teachings of the ficticious God of Yahweh.

But everything that Jesus taught is in perfect harmoney with the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism.

So when you speak about "real Christianity", my reply is that there is no such thing. The very idea of "Christianity" is the idea that Jesus was "The Christ" (i.e. the sacrificial lamb of Yahweh).

Since I see no reason to believe that Yahweh was anything more than a Zeus-like myth, and I see Jesus as a Mahayana Buddhist who taught against the teachings that had been attributed to Yahweh, then I have absolutely no reason to believe that Jesus was "The Christ".

Therefore, as far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as "real Christianity". It's all just one big misunderstanding.

You talk about people making assumptions. You have absolutely no clue who you are even talking to.

I have indeed studied the scriptures with an open heart and an open mind. In fact, at one point in my life it was my intent to teach the "Word of God". Thus I set out to learn the stories as best as I possibly could for the express purpose of helping other people understand them.

Part of what drove my quest in this areas was my observation that even preachers disagreed with each other are certain interepretations of things in the Bible.

I was extremely naive! I went at it with an OPEN HEART and as much sincerity as any human can muster. I was taught that the Bible contains all the answers, and I was determined to find them and sort them out so that I can explain them clearly to others.

What did I find in my studies?

I found that, not only does the Bible not contain answers, but it also contains utterly absurdites and extremely vague and confusing things. The more I studied the Bible the more questions I had (not more ANSWERS!)

I finally realized that I could not teach this to anyone, because it is utterly nonsensical and absurd. I could not justify anything in the book. In fact, I could clearly see where the authors of the various books were in total conflict with each other. Even among the gospels in the New Testament.

No only did I realize that these stories were unsupportable, but I came to the very real conclusion that there is no reason for me to even believe them!

I didn't even STOP there! Once I got my head out of that absurd book and took the blinders off I looked around at life around me. What did I see?

Well, first I realized that all of the people who worship these Abrhamic religions are at odds with each other over what they supposedly mean, from the Jews, to the Muslims, to the Catholics, and to the myriad of confused and protesting Protestants.

None of them could get a handle on this book. Nary a one! So I was not alone!

Moreover, it then came to my attention that that greatest minds of all humanity looked over this book and rejected it. Isaac Newton studied the Bible even more than he studied physics and mathematics, and his conclusion was the same as mine, Jesus could not have possibly been the son of Yahweh.

Albert Einstein also recognized the asburdity of the Biblical God and make that quite clear. In fact, Einstien pointed to Buddhism as being the most sane of the spiritual philosophies.

I also studied the Eastern traditions of Mysticism. I found something quite interesting in those studies. There exists a form of Buddhism called Mahayana Buddhism that teaches precisely the same things the biblical gospels attribute to Jesus. Moreover that form of Buddhism was at its peak precisely at the time when Jesus was supposed to have lived and been crucified for blaspheme.

I've come to realize that Jesus most likely was indeed a Mahayana Buddhist who tried to teach those male-chauvinistic Hebrews some genuinely morals. He was then crucified by those people and ultimately held up in the New Testament like a dead marionette doll whilst they shoved words in his mouth and proclaimed that he was the sacrificial lamb of Yahweh, the very teachings that Jesus himself rejected!

So your assumptions about my understanding of religions is a totally wrong assumption on your part. I've studied the Bible to the point there I am throughly convinced that it can never be made to be a consitence story in any case.

And this is precisely why all the Abrahamic-based religions are in such constant conflict and turmoil with each other. They are all based on a completey insane and absurd story that cannot even be made to make any sense at all.

And that's just the TRUTH.

Well, there you go. Contradiction# 9873635277462573

Everyone knows that the Virgin Mother Mary was also without sin. You can't have Jesus being born from a vessle of Satan. So there's your contradiction.

The Bible constantly conflicts with its own stories and therefore no single verse like this can be trusted to have any merit on its own.

Besides, those people who are determined to make God and Jesus out to be monsters should truly be sorely asshamed of themselves.

Like Slowhand has clearly pointed out, for your belief to be true, you would necessarily be worshiping a God who condemns millions and even billions of perfectly righteous souls to either eternal damanation or perishing simply because they don't believe a book written by a bunch of Hebrew male-chuavinist pigs.

Moreover, if mankind is as lame as you claim who's fault would that be? It could only be the fault of the God who created them in the first place. So this doesn't say much for your God.

A good who creates inept beings just so he can judge them to be inept?

That doesn't even make any sense.

Moreover, if mankind does not have the ability to be good on his own, then what sense does it even make to claim that mankind would be responsible or guilty for being bad?

All you'd be saying is that no man is responsible for being bad because God created him to be bad.

I'll tell you what's really going on.

The men who wrote Romans (and I doubt very much that it was Paul), were simply trying to convince the readers that no one is exempt from being a sinner and all must be 'saved', which at that time could only happen through the approval of the church.

So this was just a political ploy to use religion to make all men feel guilty and in need of salvation through the church.

Once again, this very scenario doesn't even make any sense at all in the context of an actual all-wise creator. Therefore it can only be the dubious plots of men who are trying to use religion to place the masses under their authority.

Anytime you read the Bible just ask yourself two simple questions:

1. Is this what an all-wise super-intelligent supreme being would do or say?

2. Is this what deceitful men would write who are trying to convince the masses that they need to come to their churches and worship their priests?

When I read the Bible in every passage the answers are crystal clear.

No, to #1, and a resounding YES, to #2.

Every time!

Excuse me, but that is the problem according to the Bible.

You've just described the "problem" and act as if it doesn't exist. What sense does that make? Abslutely no sense at all.

To judge a thing as "un-wise' you must have all the facts past present and future about the thing.Obviously you do not posses such knowledge, therefore you cannot judge the "un-wiseness" of things that pertain to eternity.

Totally untrue. I am judging stories in a book in human terms based on the stories in the book. Period!

That is all that I'm doing. And it is my firm conclusion that these stories are totally unwise in that context.

What you are doing on the other hands, is merely assuming that there exists other information outside of the book that somehow justifies this God.

In other words, even you recognize that my conclusions are indeed correct given the actual information at hand.

"Violent ways" in this you refer to the flood drowning most all humankind.If you read you will see that God had Noah warn the people for 40 years there was a flood coming, but they refused to believe and drowned instead...And now you blame God? He gave them the freedom to choose as he does you. They chose drowning.If I give you freedom to do what you want, but warn you not to play in the street and a car runs you over...how is that my fault?

If you are a father of a child who is incapable of understanding the danger of playing in the street, and you allow that child to play in the street, then you are an incompetent and irresponsible parent. In fact, by our current laws you could be charged with abuse via neglect.

These lame excuses that you attempt to make up for this God simply don't wash. That are every bit as lame as the stories in the Bible, IMHO.

Even now you have a choice to make.

I already made my choice. I choose to reject the writings of the ancient Hebrews as being utterly ignorant, stupid, and foolish and therefore cannot possibly be the thoughts, words, or actions of any supreme all-wise deity. That story is every bit as stupid as the stories of Zeus and everyone accepts that those stories are stupid.

That is my choice sir.

You are welcome to chose whatever you like, but don't try to sell it to me because your sales pitches are utterly devoid of any value to me. They are just as short-sighted and lame as the Biblical stories IMHO.

Nonsense! Show me this claim!

Why should I give a hoot what the Bible says?

Apparently you fell for the idea that the Bible represents "God's Word".

I personally don't believe the book is anyone nearly intelligent enough to be the word of any divine supreme being.



I personally don't believe that story any more than I believe the stories of ancient Greek Mythology.

Here is something for you to ponder:

If God is all-wise then why does the Bible have this God always solving problems using utterly unwise and often quite violent ways? Also why do the stories within the Bible stand in such blatant contradiction with each other?

For example, the Bible has humankind becoming more and more disobedient to God until it apparently gets so out-of-control that God has to flood the entire planet save for a handful of questionable humans in an ark?

First off, this very story implies that God wasn't wise enough to see this coming and nip it in the bud before it got so far out of hand.

Secondly this is clearly a very violent solution. Not only does he kill all the people on Earth, including innocent babies and children, but he also wipes out all the poor innocent animals in the process. That was real smart.

Also if this is the same God who you can pray to and ask him to magically cure your cancer then why couldn't he have just given all the sinners heart attacks? Or better yet just make them all sterile so they couldn't have any more children. Then the generations of sinners would have finally died off without having to drown innocent babies and children.

Clearly this Biblical God is not the least bit wise.

Then he promises some people some land, and after leading them through a desert for 40 years he finally shows them the real estate but it's already inhabited by a bunch of heathen. So God just tells his choosen people to murder all the heathens and once again kill all their women, children and babies too.

Again, if he knew this was coming whe didn't he just make the heathen sterile so they couldn't reproduce? Then by the time he finally found the piece of real estate there woudln't be any heathens on it.

The Bible says that God is unchanging and is the same yestersay, today and tomorrow. But not so according to the New Testament!

In the New Testament God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son as a sacrifical lamb to save the souls of men.

Well, hey. Is this the SAME God who once hated the world so much that he downed everyone out?

Why should I believe anything that's written in the Bible. It's clearly a bunch of conflicting stories that make no sense at all.

Even if I accept the "Crucifixion" of Jesus as the Son of God what does that say? It just means that I accept yet one more violent solution to God's problems.

I thought this God was supposed to be WISE? Solving everything with acts of violence doesn't seem very wise to me.

So I'll pass on believing that the Bible is the word of any "all-wise" God. It appears to me to be the writtings of bumbling idiots, not an all-wise supreme being.

Let's all HOPE that if we have a creator, that creator is far wiser than the idiots who wrote the Bible.