Actually, this is one of the few things **kanicbird **ever said that makes any sort of sense to me.
Because if I (theoretically speaking - atheist here) simply believed on blind faith or rote indoctrination, then that would be that. OK, I believe there’s a God, I gotta be good to be saved, whatever. I’ll be kind to strangers and say my prayers before I eat kosher, all right ?
But if I believe, and I see an actual miracle, or any kind of incontrovertible proof that my belief is factual, and all powerful ? I’ve gotta tell *everyone *about this !
OTOH, since I don’t believe, if there was such a thing as miracles and I ever saw one, I’d assume it was a trick. Lazarus wasn’t really dead, someone just misdiagnosed him. I was just too sloshed to realize I was drinking water rather than wine. The loaves and fishes were in his sleeves all along.
Yeah, I know.
There’s something quietly soul crushing about finding a diamond in the muck, only to find out 5 minutes later that it’s just the usual muck catching the light in a weird way :(.
Or perhaps reading **kanicbird **is like analysing a song by Freddie Mercury: if you see it, darling, then it’s there
That miracles happen. What else could you conclude?
No, one Father, one company, one single source forever - this will never change. Those employed by the Father will get the resources they need even if they are deluded for a time and work for Pharaoh, even if Pharaoh control them so much that the miracles through that person is at Pharaoh demand and even without his/her knowledge that they are doing so.
That person is basically a captured POW (or born as a POW) in the war of good vs. evil, but still supported as a captive of Pharaoh by the Father and His resources.
Given that I happen to be a Jew, I’m not sure “captive of Pharaoh” is the best metaphor here; I’m one of the guys who reads about Jesus and thinks, Huh, sounds like one of those guys Pharaoh knew – right down to also never working with sand and lice.
Perhaps it would help if you explain it from your side and how it doesn’t work for you. If you did I apologize, it’s a long thread but if you would restate it.
Possibly, but God does allow such things for a time, you may or may not be the one to do anything about it. This is where prayer comes in to get answers about what to do.
Part of it is learning what your true job is. In my own career path I have found that I am sent to places that have people who live generally isolated lives. At first I though my work was technical, but found that my work was simply talk to those in such isolated areas.
When I learned that, yes I still did the technical stuff and got the job done, but I found that it got much easier, problems that caused delays in the past simply no longer happened and more then once since that time I was actually handed my completed job minutes after walking in the door, just leaving some spot checking.
I would say that every job has a social aspect to it as God sees it, OR if not it is because there is something to learn about social contact.
How did scriptures help with that, well one is to discover that we have a spiritual life, which includes a spiritual job, and that is the real work you must do.
Another aspect is noticing a overlying pattern to everything, that we are indeed guided.
I was using the generic ‘you’, and on edit change it to exclude the possibility of taking it personally, but OK captive of Satan if you prefer, though it’s somewhat easier to understand in terms of a flesh and blood person.
You have brought up sand and lice multiple times, in Exodus and Psalms it is clearly through Arron, not the magicians of Pharaoh - they were unable to duplicate it.
Not sure what is your point in bring up the ‘sand and lice’ and how you are relating this to Jesus. I think you may be relating Jesus to perhaps being a magician in the service of whatever ‘Pharaoh’ was operating in Jesus’ time.
I am, in fact. I note in passing that, apparently, the only way to tell the difference between God’s representatives and “a magician in the service of whatever” is that the former could work miracles involving sand and lice while the latter could only work other miracles, such as changing water into a different liquid.
This sounds scarily like the Salem witch trials. After miraculously raising the dead being demanded to either turn sand into lice (or dust into fleas depending on the translation), or we will accuse you of working for Satan and stone you.
Sadly this has been the logic behind verifying the prophets of God, has nothing to do with verification, and the reason most prophets were murdered by the people they were sent to.
Quite honestly it seems like a convenient excuse to murder God’s Prophets.
It is instructions (legal code) by God to the Jewish people to automatically destroy Prophets and all others who are determined to be pushing other gods that are not the one God.
It is OT law, that doesn’t apply to those operating under grace.
Let me interpret in in light of the NT as I see it
About (any) stoning:
Jesus shows us in John 8 who is the one worthy to condemn anyone to death by stoning - in this case a woman caught in the act of adultery:
John 8:7x “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
That is the command you don’t wish to violate IMHO, you have to be sure you are without sin before engaging in such things. If you are sinful you already are involved with other gods and just as guilty.
The only one not guilty of sin in this crowd is Jesus, which he states:
“Then neither do I condemn you,” (John 8:11x)
So even though the woman violate the ‘law’ she was not condemned by God. This is what one has to be very careful about in any OT law action. Does God condemn the act? If not and you do stone her you are guilty.
About false prophets:
God shows He is capable of dealing with false prophets, we have seen Elijah and Jeru vs. Jezebel in the OT, in the NT we see Jezebel again:
Rev 3:20:
You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. 21 I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. 22 So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. 23 I will strike her children dead.
Now if you are the one called by God (as Jehu was), you will know and act as God’s hand in striking Jezebel. In Revelation we see it is God who must strike down Jezebel (the false prophetess).
First, it is simply false that there is no evidence that the earliest Christians didn’t believe in the resurrection. You should be aware that a wide range of scholars believe that while the gospels and early Christian writings themselves in their current form can be dated in the range of around 60-80AD, many of them contain sources that are much earlier than the full work. The resurrection is mentioned in these, and so it appears likely that a belief in the resurrection was part of the belief of the earliest Christians. One example (amoung others) of this kind of thing is in Paul’s formula of what was passed on to him in 1 Corinthians 15. Because this is writted in very non-Pauline phaseology many scholars believe that Paul is quoting earlier teaching that he had heard, possibly on his first trip to Jerusalem. If this was the case then the saying would be dated to within a few years after the resurrection of Jesus.
You may not agree with that analysis (I am sure you don’t), but that is not the point. The point is that there are reasons to believe that the earliest Christians believed in the resurrection. You might be able to make the claim that there is no evidence that you find personally compelling, but that is a very different claim than that there is just no evidence.
Secondly, apart from speculation run amok, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the earliest Christians didn’t believe in the resurrection, otherwise you would present it.
Thirdly, saying that the earliest Christians were not persecuted for the resurrection is simply a distinction without meaning. The resurrection was central to the belief of the early Christians, and informed their attitude on a range of issues. While the Romans may not have specifically cared about the resurrection itself, it is silly to say that the Christians were not motivated by the resurrection in resisting Roman persecution. Obviously the Christians could have just abandoned their beliefs and became Roman, but doing so is not consistent with a belief in the resurrection.
Aesop’s fables are presented as fables and always have been. The gospels are presented as historical accounts and always have been. I simply don’t see any comparison there. As for the hypothetical scenarios about Vespasian or Joseph Smith, it’s hypothetical. One can make up hypothetical scenarios in which the history of humankind or anything else is vastly different in any number of ways. However, the challenge that all human beings are presented with is what to make of this cosmos that we live in. I evaluate the evidence available in this cosmos and make my judgments based on that.
(On a side note, Joseph Smith actually claimed that he was visited by the angel Nephi. The LDS Church revised it to Moroni later.)
Perhaps I wasn’t getting my point across adequately. According to the gospels, Jesus said these things. (That His Church would endure permanently, that He’d have followers in every nation, etc…) Such predictions have come true, or at least true to the extent that Christ’s Church and his message are still here twenty centuries later. This is a quite remarkable fact, given that very few carpenters and itinerant teachers have started a worldwide movement that lasted for two millenia. Hence the gospels make a number of very remarkable predictions and those came true. The remarkability of such statements would not be much diminished even if they were written forty years after Jesus’ time. I find a source that makes remarkable predictions which come true to be worthy of careful consideration. Vespasian made no such predictions; neither did Joseph Smith; nor anyone else that I know of.
Again, I may not have gotten my point across. You wrote this in response to my point that Jesus had promised the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the continual presence of God to encourage and guide Christians on earth. I did not mean to imply that I accept the truth of these things on the Bible’s say-so, but rather that they are a definite fact in my life and in the life of many millions of other people. So, once again, as the gospels contain a prediction of something highly remarkable which I find to have come true, I find that a piece of evidence pointing towards trustworthiness.
Jesus was a Jew. The Jews believed that their moral rules and guidelines came from God; Jesus believed that He was God. It is thus not at all surprising that what Jesus taught would have common threads with Jewish teachings. However, at the same time, there are radical departures in what Jesus taught and what was taught in his social milieu. To name just a few: He taught that the poor and social outcasts are nearest to God while the rich and pwerful are farthest away; the society He was raised in taught the opposite. He taught that God was abandoning the centuries-old traditions of atonement lead by the priesthood. He ignored the His society’s traditional barriers between men and women, Jews and gentiles, and so forth.
(I’ve got a funny feeling Dio will respond by complaining that Jesus referred to gentiles as “dogs” again.)
Sorry, but wrong. There is zero evidence. If you disagree, then show me what it is.
Not really, no. The mainstream consensus, by far (and with good reasons) place the dating between 70-100 CE.
The Gospels are not evidence. None of represent any firsthand, or even secondhand testimony. They were written decades after the fact, outside of Palestine by non-witnesses to Gentile audience in a Gentile language, and can be patently shown tp have been largely fabricated from the Septuagint and wrapped around a sayings source.
Paul himself denies that his formula was given to him by other people but is adamant that he learned it entirely from the voices in his head. he also doesn’t say anything about a physical resurrection, but says only that Jesus “appeared” to people.
There is no evidence, period. Neither the Gospels nor the letters of Paul give us any testimony from the original apostles or represent, in themselves any evdience that they saw a dead guy walk out of a cave. That claim can’t be traced before 70 CE, and is not found in the earliest layers of Christian literature.
This is fatuous. There’s no evidence they weren’t Scientologists either. It;s also off point since I never made a positive claim they didn’t believe in a resurrection, only that there’s no evidence that they did. In point of fact, we simply don’t have any idea at all what they thought about Jesus. We can tell that the appearance narratives in the Gospels are fabricated, though.
There’s no contemporary evdience or real corroboration that the earliest Christians were persecuted at all.
Cite?
This is another canard. There’s no evidence at all that under the first few sporadic Roman persecutions that recanting their beliefs would have saved them at all. Nero’s reasons, for instance, had nothing to do with their beliefs. He went after them solely as a scapegoat after the fire.
Moreover, those who were Christians by the times of Roman persecution were not themselves witnesses of anything, so their beliefs had no basis in evidence and reveal nothing about the beliefs of the original apostles.
So does the Book of Mormon*.
And Parson Weems, writing very shortly after Washington died (years, not decades) wrote about him throwing a dollar across the Potomac, a miracle if it ever happened. When I was a kid this was still very much believed - by kids at least.
ETA: the book not the musical, to head off the smart-alecks.