No, I'm not saying that at all. That's your idea of karma, not mine.

Also, what sense would it make to speak of a personified godhead passing judgments on people if he wasn't planning on having some sort of punishment or reward in mind? What would be the point of his "judgment" if not to decide on some sort of sentencing or acquittal?

Besides, the mystic view of karma goes far deeper than what you are suggesting here. You have strongly rejected any notion of reincarnation and therefore any notion of spiritual karma that you might have would be meaningless.

You apparently accept a notion that some fully personified godhead created your soul at the time a physical egg acquired a full complement of human DNA, and somehow attached or associated your soul with that egg, its development. and behavior for the span of whatever lifetime you happen to have.

Then your soul will be 'judged' based on its behavior over that short period of time.

For me, that very notion creates extreme problems. In your religion had I died when I was about 15 I would have been 'saved' as a born-again Christian doing my very best to try to "Serve the Lord".

But unfortunately I didn't die at that point in time and now I no longer believe in that religion. So depending on when I die during my life would determine my fate for all of eternity.

That's a "crap shoot" right there.

The system of spiritual karma is fail-safe. You can't lose. It's impossible to lose because all you do is continue to be reincarnated until you finally wake up.

Since you like the parent-child analogy so much let's put it in those terms here.

God is our parents. God sends us to school, which is being incarnated into life as a physical being. If we learn what we need to know, then when we die, we graduate to go back home to be with our parents in the spiritual world.

If we fail to pass, there is no "punishment" per say. The only outcome of that is that we must continue to be reincarnated in physical form until we finally do learn how to properly behave.

It's that simple. No child is ever lost, the worst that could happen is that it takes some children longer to graduate than others, that's all.

It's the ultimate wisdom. Our parents (the creator) has set things up so that no child can be lost, and every one of them will eventually learn what they need to learn. And it's all done on autopilot through karma so the parents don't even need to babysit the kids. They can go off and do other things.

What could be wiser?

As far as I'm concerned it a far sight wiser than some egotistical personified Godhead who casts the vast majority of his children into a lake of fire for not believing in him, or failing in some other trivial way.

So between these two pictures of a divine creator, I choose the wise picture and reject the unwise picture of a loser godhead.

Why would I want to believe in a loser godhead when I can believe in a truly all-wise divine creator who never loses a single soul?

Can you answer me that?

Cowboy wrote:

Because you're getting tired of school and never learning...

This I agree with.

Just don't SHOVE him onto me as "My Father".

That's all I ask.

Talk about "Your Father", all you want. But don't speak of him to me as being "Our Father" in the General Religion forum. If you want to do that go over to the Christian Forum where everyone will agree with you!

When I posted that Jesus taught that his followers are adopted by God, which is why we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, you became outraged. Now you demand that Cowboy adopts that stance. You are old enough to come to a coherent world view. Look at how many years you have been alive and you still don't even know what you believe. You don't know what you don't believe. You just know what you don't want to believe, which is Christianity. It's really getting old. I can't encouraged you enough to pick up a bible and actually read it with an open mind. Pray to God, with no reservations, to show you if the Bible is His word. Your own world view is contradictory, I can't help but think that the cognitive dissonance is causing you a great deal of stress.

Oh please.

Just because you are confused about what I might believe or not believe is no need to push that onto me.

I'm not the slightest bit worried about any "personal salvation" Spider. I know that I'm a good person. I'm sorry that you are feeling so guilty about your own unrighteousness that you feel a need to cower down to a horrible mythology just to imagine being 'saved' from your own evilness.

I have no fear of that whatsoever. Any God that would condemn me could only do so if IT is evil, because I'm certainly NOT evil.

If I can be confident of anything, I can certainly be confident of that.

Cowboy wrote:

Define evil please, define good. Evil is a mere perception, a perspective. Just cause you see something as evil doesn't mean it truly is, it only appears evil to YOU.

Wow, I'm impressed. Have you been studying up on Buddhism?

Yes I agree, once you break away from the Biblical mythology this is indeed true.

Cowboy wrote:

Define evil please, define good. Evil is a mere perception, a perspective. Just cause you see something as evil doesn't mean it truly is, it only appears evil to YOU.

I wouldn't even want to bother taking this discussion into the realm of the Bible because it would quickly become an extremely convoluted can of worms.

The very "fall from grace" in the bible is a can of worms having to do with whether or not Adam and Eve could have had a knowledge of Good and Evil before they ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. That's a huge contradiction right there.


And then you have God giving the commandment "Thou shalt not Kill", yet God killed people all the time, he drowned out the bulk of human population at one point. Your argument there is that God is immune to his own rules of morals.

The only problem with that is then we have no reason to trust "God's Word". After all, if God is under no obligations to obey his own commandments on moral behavior and he can kill people at will, then he can lie to them too with no problem.

So the whole thing breaks down.

None of this is important for me anyway because my theory stands without a hitch.

The hypothesis that Jesus was a Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattva who was simply misunderstood makes far more sense.

The entire Old Testament can be dismissed as just another Zeus-like man-made fable. Not really all that much different. The idea of a male Godhead who's chomping at the bit to cast people into a lake of fire for refusing to believe in him just absurd.

Why bother with anything else when this explains history without the need to believe in any absurdities?

And then you have God giving the commandment "Thou shalt not Kill", yet God killed people all the time, he drowned out the bulk of human population at one point. Your argument there is that God is immune to his own rules of morals.

Cowboy wrote:

It's called judgement my dear watson, not "killing".

You forget God works through people. That may be why I have such a drive to come in here and defend our father...

There it is again, the intervening God. God works through poeple - but which people?

Some may think that Gods' work comes through people who tell others what is necessary to please God and find salvation? And which set of ideas pertaining to those objectives would any other believer or a non-believer have to embrace?

Of course if God works through 'people' than God works through all people. So how can you know that God is not working through Abra? How can you know that God is not working through Richard Dawkins, or even Hitler?

Could it possibly be that God does not work through people so much as God intends his message to be ONLY for each individual?

If the message you receive is contrary to that of another Christian individual does that make one you wrong? And how can anyone know if thier message is right or wrong for anyone, including self?

Is it not possible for an individual to read the Bible and develop a stronger faith in God without coming to the same moral conclusions that another might accept as fundamental for belief and salvation?

Could it be that the biblical message pertaining to judging others, is a warning implying that comparing individual beliefs can lead to MIS-judging the beliefs and behaviors of others based on a message that was meant for the individual alone?

After all, if God works through people and people have no idea what God's intensions are, then wouldn't it be wrong to try to change what a person believes since that belief is guided by the will of God?

There it is again, the intervening God. God works through poeple - but which people?

Some may think that Gods' work comes through people who tell others what is necessary to please God and find salvation? And which set of ideas pertaining to those objectives would any other believer or a non-believer have to embrace?

There it is again, the intervening God. God works through poeple - but which people?

Some may think that Gods' work comes through people who tell others what is necessary to please God and find salvation? And which set of ideas pertaining to those objectives would any other believer or a non-believer have to embrace?

Of course if God works through 'people' than God works through all people. So how can you know that God is not working through Abra? How can you know that God is not working through Richard Dawkins, or even Hitler?

Could it possibly be that God does not work through people so much as God intends his message to be ONLY for each individual?

If the message you receive is contrary to that of another Christian individual does that make one you wrong? And how can anyone know if thier message is right or wrong for anyone, including self?

Is it not possible for an individual to read the Bible and develop a stronger faith in God without coming to the same moral conclusions that another might accept as fundamental for belief and salvation?

Could it be that the biblical message pertaining to judging others, is a warning implying that comparing individual beliefs can lead to MIS-judging the beliefs and behaviors of others based on a message that was meant for the individual alone?

After all, if God works through people and people have no idea what God's intensions are, then wouldn't it be wrong to try to change what a person believes since that belief is guided by the will of God?

Of course Jesus' teachings weren't the same as the old testament laws. They are TWO different forms of laws and Jesus fulfilled what we now call the OLD testament. So no he wasn't agreeing that they were unwise, just they were fulfilled, completed, finished.

Some simple questions.

Were the 10 commandments part of the old covenant? Simple answer yes or no.


Did the old covenant make distinctions between the ten commandments and the rest of the law as prescribed by God? If yes, please explain the distinction - or you can simply answer no?


EXACTLY when were ALL the laws of the old covenant fulfilled (in your words - "completed, finished"?

Some simple questions.

Were the 10 commandments part of the old covenant? Simple answer yes or no.


Did the old covenant make distinctions between the ten commandments and the rest of the law as prescribed by God? If yes, please explain the distinction - or you can simply answer no?


EXACTLY when were ALL the laws of the old covenant fulfilled (in your words - "completed, finished"?

No, nothing with intervening. Intervening would be God literally taking over someone's body and forcing them to do something or not do something. Yes God helps us through our lives, you can call that intervening if you wish. But God in no way do my first example, he doesn't take anyone's free will away, he doesn't "force" anyone to do anything. We ALWAYS have a choice.

And with your comment on doing God's will. If you have on your heart to do something in particular, if it coincides with what is said in the bible then you can trust it is from our father. If it doesn't agree with his teachings and or laws then you can guarantee it is Satan tempting you to do something you ought not do.

...if it coincides with what is said int he bible...

My goodness gracious, Redyk, I never knew this power and consistency of deductive logic was in you.

Very nicely done, I am in awe. My, my.

Right on. God talks to people, but we don't know if He does or does not talk to everyone through someone else. Why make that claim?

Because if He talks to everyone through someone else, then actually nobody gets his word directly -- everyone gets a word via a medium of a human person, so there is actually nobody that is a direct recipient of god's word, which means god is not talking to any of us, therefore whatever we imagine is god's word, is actually just some other's bloke opinion.