dont try that. ive read the bible before and i was raised in a christian background…at school.
it says it somewhere and if it doesnt then it certainly is preached about like it is. somehow i think you just made reference to the cartoon to not answer the question. im just guessing. ive debated on many forums before and this seems the same modus operandi. if im wrong im sorry to have offended you.
While I don’t think it’d be appropriate for me to say that I don’t believe you have read the Bible, I will say that attempting to make your point by decontextualizing individual verses and offering semantic refutation thereof was a bit of sophism that didn’t even fly in my high school.
Don’t tell me what I’ll accept and what I won’t.
Bring a reasoned position. Bring pros and cons. Then there’s room for debate.
While there is only one God, there are many definitions of God. Each person is likely to believe something different leaving confusion and contridictions about this subject. While I and others can tell you God doesn’t punish His children it will be hard for you to assimulate the answers into a new belief system.
When I was confronted with these contradictions I chose to research them. Find out all you can about the Bible and religion in general, and in the mean time hold the faith that God loves you very much and will not harm you ever.
hey scrappy. man dont bother. like i said before…ive posted MANY a time in other forums pertaining to religion and they always have the usual handful of people that avoid the references they bring up at all costs.
Watch as this thread either dies or they bring a pile more references to refute your claim after youve refuted THEIR claim. its a never ending cycle. you could get through the entire bible and they’ll just post again from the top because youve forgotten youve already argued it.
See the thing is, they view everyone that differs in opinion akin to being ignorant and dont know anything about the bible. watch the silence creep forth once you stay determined to keep on-topic.
Your comment of the Vatican property holdings was so silly I just mocked it. (It is not true, in case you missed that.)
However, this is a really interesting claim and I would really like to see a citation in which the Catholic Church provided an amicus brief (or in any other way supported) the U.S. Supreme Court on the topic of the humanity of black people.
if you arent willing to use your google button then stop telling me im wrong. catholocism on every front belongs to the vatican. the same way essentially all intelligence and military protocols belong to the President (the american people).
Every catholic church is expected to pay tribute…and in setting up a catholic church you essentially need permission. you pay all the costs but to call it a catholic church requires a fee. the vatican wont officially recognise you unless your registered and once registered they can come at any time and tell you under orders of the pope to change things around to their liking. just because its not on the news doesnt mean it doesnt exist. and no not every deed has to have “vatican” as property owner.
my private school did that. they paid their “tithes” to the church on which it was funded and in turn the church paid tithes to the vatican…its a cycle. the money eventually gets to the vatican in the end.
as for the humanity of black people it’d be so cool if you actually opened a history book or watched some programming during black history month. all during the times of slavery blacks were regarded as sub-human by the ministers and preachers…werent allowed to even pray in the same church for a little while. then it got to be that when blacks started earning small amounts of money the church called them in to repent and be saved. i thought you was all biblical?
but i guess rev. pattersnacker didnt mention it when he called for everyone to give to the Mercedes fund…oops i mean the Lord’s work.
Perhaps you’re right; it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but in any case, as I said, analogies are pretty worthless in a debate unless the person you’re talking to just doesn’t understand the shape of your argument.
I’m trying to remember where I’ve seen this scenario played out before; the atheist who insists that Christians must be strict fundamentalists or nothing; who was it played that tune last time?
Sorry. That is not how a debate in this Forum proceeds.
If you make an assertion, then it is up to you to provide the citations that establish the facts of that assertion. I’m sure I could throw things into Google™ and come back with lots of strange claims made by odd people. That does not establish a fact.
I know very well how theCatholic Church is organized. You, however, made a claim that 30% of all property is owned by the Vatican. I will assert that 30% of all property is not even owned by Catholics, so your claim is false. Where are your facts? (By the way, the political or religious fealty owed by Catholics does not translate to ownership in the way that you have attempted to decribe it. Each diocese in the U.S. is a legal entity that has “ownership” under U.S. laws, organized and incorporated under U.S. laws. That Vatican has no “ownership” under those laws.)
Leaving that aside, where is your reference regarding the Catholic church, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the humanity of blacks?
BadChad was our most recent unreasonable proponent. Before him, Sweet Willie made a pass at it, but he was more interested in baiting Jews than Christians.
Transliteration and translation are not the same. Paraphrase is a quite necessary component of translation — especially with metaphorical languages like Greek. Take Aristotle’s famous “to ti ên einai”. Transliterated, it is “the what it was to be”. Now, do you know what he’s talking about? Befuddled Roman philosophers, translating the text, invented a whole new word for it out of whole cloth: “essentia”. We know it as “essence”.
It doesn’t take a genius. Merely a rational examination of the facts. Let’s forget for a moment the detail that these words may never have been uttered by Jesus at all, or the issue of translation. In this chapter Jesus is speaking in parables. Let’s talk interpertation. What does it mean to Jerry Fawell, Billy Grahm, or the Pope? What if they don’t agree? Is it literal? Is it allegory? People who have studied the bible much more than you or I don’t agree. So for you to declare what Christians "have to believe " to be Christians is…welll, I already called it what it is.
I think the authority of Christianity can be understood by looking at other words attributed to Jesus.
Matthew 16:17Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. 18And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
John 16:13But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.
From the very begining of the Christian movement there was little agreement on exactly what Jesus was teaching and what it all meant. That has remained true down through the ages. Christians don’t agree on whether the Bible is the literal word of God and they certainly don’t agree on what certain passages mean. So regrdless of what any one wishes it might be, the Bible, is in fact subjective.
In case you haven’t noticed. Thats exactly what is happening.
Hey, even if my parable sucked, I still wanna take CREDIT for it! 
**Ex machina ** had nothing to do with that. 
I don’t know. I’ve spent more time studying how to live the life I’m in. The point is that people don’t agree on what it means. If it’s important to you then you can do your own studying and reach your own conclusion.
There are things I cannot figure out. I am told that God’s judgment, which apparently still works today, is meant to draw people to repentence. So if He sends someone or many people disasters ,or earthquakes, etc. HOW do these bad things make them turn to God? It doesn’t make sense. Then again, I am only a puny human. Also, if hell IS only ceasing to exist, and your loved one ceases to exist, how can you be happy in Heaven? Any opinions helpful. 
I hate to be a pedant, but “transliteration” simply means changing the letters from one alphabet to another with translating the words. En arche en o logos is a transliteration of Greek letters into English . The translation would be “In the beginning was the word.”
Your larger point about literal translations is essentially valid and some degree of paraphrasing is almost always necessary because there are usually aspects of grammar and syntax which don’t make sense in strict, word for word renderings (sometimes called “slave translations” by translators). This is definitely true of Greek in which syntax is determined by morphology rather than word order, where virtually every noun and adjective requires a definite article (you can’t say “the red ball,” you have to say “the red the ball”), in which untranslatable particles abound, etc. A slave translation of the New Testament would read like gibberish. You’re right on that account.
This was from Aesop.
I’m an agnostic and I’m certainly not an apologist, but this verse does not refer to the popular Christian conception of eternal Hell (which is not in the Bible), but refers to an ancient Jewish eschatological belief that the unrighteous would be destroyed in Gehenna at the time of judgement. The punishment was annihilation, not eternal burning.
All of the “hell” sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels (except for one parable which mentions Hades) actually say Gehenna in the Greek. The word is often mistranslated as “Hell” but Gehenna was not Christian hell.
I don’t understand why some atheists get so hostile when many Christians do not hold fundamentalist beliefs.
In my opinion, we have a least one atheist in this thread whose posts are as hostile and controlling as Christian fundamentalists are reputed to be and some Christians who take the more “hands off” approach I’ve often credited to atheists and especially agnostics.