food for thought, Diogenes.
I see not many other folk have wandered in here to post.
lynn73 may have given up on you guys.
Me, I just have my opinions;its not much to debate on, I think debates are for people who can prove things; obviously I cannot prove to peoples’ satisfaction that the Bible is God’s word and Jesus purposely died for our sins.
I think that opinion is common knowledge here, anyways.
What is your evidence that the Bible is the word of God? What logical process led you to that conclusion? How can you possibly know that this one book was written by God instead of man? The very staement that the Bible is God’s word constitutes an arbitrary assertion without proof. Do you believe the Bible because someone told you to (in which case you are following the word of man) or because God told you to (in which case you have no way of knowing it wasn’t really a demon).
If you can’t prove the Bible is the word of God then you have no authoritative argument, even for yourself.
Well,to ME, I "had an experience"where I “met” God (no,not in person) and it jibed with the bible.
All I can offer.
Hopefully, lynn will give her opinion too.
I wasn’t trying to offend you. I’m sorry. Believing that Jesus is G-d, okay that still puzzles me, even after what explainations there are. Let me start over. If Jesus is not the messiah, which I don’t believe he was, but particularly if he’s not G-d, which I don’t see how he can be; then you are worshipping not necessarily another god, but a false one. When G-d said not to put any other gods before him, there were no exceptions that I can remember. If you worship Jesus when he was only a man, but you don’t know better, I don’t think you’re off the hook anymore than you think I am for not realizing that Jesus is the messiah. I hope you realize that this is only my opinion, kind of like yours about whether or not I’m doing the right thing.
This was the hardest thing for me to do. To step back and while not exactly saying, what if there was no messiah; at least allowing my self to separate from my emotional response enough to look at things with a little less bias. It hurt. For reasons I won’t go into, I knew, with out any doubt that G-d was leading me to do this. I’m sure you don’t want to and can see no reason to even try. For me the reason was, I didn’t want to have just the blind faith instilled in me when I was younger. I wanted to know the truth. I spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not it was more of a sin to believe Jesus was G-d, if he wasn’t; or that he wasn’t G-d, if he was. It almost seems worse to me to believe in something that is not real. I spent a long time “hedging my bets”, not admitting that I knew he wasn’t “just in case.”
I do disagree with that part of the Bible. I agree with Diogenes in that there is no way to prove the Bible’s infallibility. Listing unverifiable scriptures doesn’t do much for me. I respect your right to believe it’s G-d’s word, even if I don’t agree. I have no expectation of you changing your mind or taking my word for anything. The only thing I’ve tried to do, with no success, is to try and get you to see that your message doesn’t have much or any real success here and it does harm for Christianity and even sadder, it gives people the wrong idea about G-d. Always keep in mind that even if you have no success with me, other people do read this too. And I do hear and consider what you’re saying, before I toss it out for the crap it really is.
I just thought it was in place of a shrug. Love 
Diogenes This was really fascinating. Questions, in your opinion, when you have time. In church, we never got beyond the surface. It’s still hard for me to weed out what I was taught from the Bible and what was added. I’m reading the OT, right now, because we barely studied that and of course the new Dean Koontz book because I am human.
So the concept of “hell” came after his death. I’ve been trying to find in the Bible what I was taught about the literal Hell and it’s not there? The OT doesn’t seem to be very specific about hell, does it or is it called something else?
Nothing Jesus ever mentioned matches Revelation?
Did he believe in an “eternal life” or just turning life into “paradise?” Do you think his concept of G-d was very different than ours is now? He didn’t specifically claim to be G-d, did he? Just some phrases about being one with? There seemed to be more of a separation, with G-d being the final “decision maker”.
IMHO the biggest challenge, but the most rewards. What would the world be like if we could all put ourselves in that other guy’s place. Easier to hate someone you don’t really know. Thanks.
Then what’s the point of talking about “Jesus” at all? How do you find the “real” Jesus? A lot of what you have to say is exactly what I suggested: one interpretation about what Jesus might or might not have meant by the few cryptic pronouncements that he may or may not have made, which are presented in the Gospels in the form of a story that places all those things within a larger and more confusing theological context rather than necessarily standing on their own.
Again, I don’t think Jesus is small potatoes, but I don’t see why he needs to be treated as almost transcendantally great and important unless you have already concluded for other reasons that he MUST be so, because of who you think he is.
Same deal: so you say. You can make a case for many different things, though if you want to credit Jesus with ideas and practices that came out because of later interpretations, it seems a little arbitrary to discard these out of hand. There is the idea of eternal suffering (the eternal part being the innovation), and that having wrong beliefs is what gets it for you.
And… is it? Seems more like a magical superstition than an defensible ethical precept.
Jesus himself creates such an expectation of a radical world changing event, and Paul extends it.
So you say. But it’s far more than Jesus says.
I have met God in person, and so have thousands of others in near death experiences. He is love.
Love
I have had many dreams which I was sure were completely real.
It’s not in the OT. The Hebrew Bible speaks only of Sheol, an underground abode of the dead similar to the Greek underworld of Hades. It was believed that everybody went to Sheol, not just bad people. On Judgement Day, everyone would be resurrected and judged. the good would receive eternal life and the bad would be annihilated. By the first century, some Greek ideas of punishment for the wicked had seeped into Jewish thinking about the underworld and there was some belief that bad people would be punished in Sheol but that the punishment would be temporary.
The Gehenna which Jesus spoke of (and which is translated in some versions as “hell”) was areally valley outside of Jerusalem. It was said to have been a site of human sacrifice by the ancient Canaanites and was believed to be unholy. It was also a garbage dump and a disposal site for the carcasses of animals. The bodies of criminals were sometimes cast into the valley as well. Fires burned ther pretty much continuously as an attempt to destroy the rotting corpses.
Gehenna was literally a fiery, Godforsaken pit where you might get thrown if you were wicked. It wasn’t Christian Hell, though. Do a google image search for “Valley of Hinnom” if you want to see what Gehenna looks like today.
Revelation was an example of “apocalyptic” literature which communicates a message to a target audience using coded symbols. Revelation was written a s a response to the destruxction of Jerusalem and the subsequent persecution of Christians and Jews by the Romans. Everything in revelation is about Rome and the Emperor Domitian (the “Beast”). The message of the book was that God would have the last word on the Romans. Apos made reference to “Armageddon” which is the site of a specific battle mentioned in Revelation. It’s not a synonym for the end of the world altogether and that’s why I corrected him. Jesus made some references to the endof the world and seems to have believed in the standard Jewish expectation of a resurretion and judgement of the dead but he did not speak of anything in revelation, specifically, nor could he have since it was a response to events which occurred after his death.
He seems to have believed in a day of judgement and an afterlife but he also seems to have de-emphasized those concerns in favor of leading a good life now.
When the Sadducees (a sect who did not believe in a resurrection of the dead[sup]1[/sup]) came to him and asked him a tricksy question about who a guy would be married to in the afterlife if he had been married several times on Earth, Jesus responded thusly:
30At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. 31But about the resurrection of the dead–have you not read what God said to you, 32’I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living."
33When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching.
(Matthew 22:30-33)
So, he thought we’d be like “angels” whatever that means, but he also thought that it was our lives we should worry about, not our afterlives.
I think he believed in the basic Jewish concept of a loving, all-powerful and ultimately just God.
Some of the phrases which are commonly believed to be claims of divinity are nothing of the sort in their linguistic context. “Son of Man” (actually ben Adam, “son of Adam.” Adam means “man.”) just meant “human being.” “Son of God” designated righteous men. prohets and sometimes humanity as a whole but it was never a literal biological claim.
Claiming to be the Messiah, as you know, was not a claim to divinity either.
A college prof once told me that in Aramaic the phrase “I and ____ are one” is a figurative way to express strong agreement, similar to saying “we are of one mind.” I can’t find a linkable cite for this, though.
It’s unlikely in the extreme that Jesus would have ever claimed to be God. It would have been a decidely unJudaic idea (not to mention blasphemous and crazy). Divine incarnations were a pagan tradition not a Jewish one. It also would have been mutually contradictory to claim to be both God and the Messiah. They were two separate entities. On could not be both.
[sup]1[/sup]Which was why they were so sad, you see.
Well, I’m only talking about a locus of sayings and parables which are attributed to a person named Yeshua. The “story’ as such, doesn’t concern me much (and I don’t think it’s possible to know how much, if any, of the narrative parts of the gospels are true). the sayings are outstanding in their own right, somebody said them and we might as well call that someone 'Jesus.”
Bill or Frank or Mildred would be fine with me too, though.
I don’t treat him as transcendentally great or important, just influential and provacative. I don’t think he’s God. I don’t even believe in God.
The fact that some of his words were twisted wasn’t his fault. They weren’t bad when he said them.
It’s just a rhetorical point. Jesus was saying that everyone pretty much has a dirty mind and so we should be careful about judging others. It was a point about judging others, not about being sinful.
Jesus said there would be a battle at Armageddon? Cite?
Not if you read it in context with some of the parables, but be that as it may. It is procacative. It’s a stopper. It makes people think. That’s all it really needs to do.
About Jesus claiming to be God,He did say “Before Adam was, i am.”
Whoever was listening got furious at that.
“I am” is “Yahweh.” YHWH means “I am.”
I thought it meant He was saying He exisited before He was born (in a physicla body)
John 8:57-59
You are not yet fifty years old," the Jews said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!”
“I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.
It should be noted that John is regarded as the least historical and least reliable as to authenticity.
There may be some remembered saying here in which Jesus said “Before Abraham was born was Yahweh,” but John does seem to intend it as a divine claim for Jesus.
John is almost entirely fiction, though.
If you start at John 8:48, Jesus defines himself and G-d very separately. In one of the creation stories, I can’t remember if it’s Genesis or Secrets of Enoch, it talks about G-d creating all the “spirits”, which some people believe means all of our souls have existed since the beginning time.* That would explain the “I am”, but I think it’s more likely that Jesus was just explaining things being pre-destined. He didn’t answer the question directly or really explain it, so we’re left to form our own opinion. If you chose to think it’s because Jesus is G-d, you have to wonder why he’s referring to G-d so separately. Since we don’t know exactly when our souls are created, it’s hard to answer. It’s a mystery vanilla, but a multiple choice one.
*My youngest daughter told me her “pre-birth” stories, when she was a toddler, but she’s always been strange.
These people weren’t dreaming, they were dead.
Love
technically dead?
and you can’t dream when youre dead?
Erm. I think your logic may have failed you slightly at this point. Your logic was fien to prove that Santa is Satan but the point casts doubt on the validity of your arguement. Which in turn raises doubt about Santa’s existence. Also:
I am real… so is my computer table
therefore I am my computer table.
Well vanilla, I have no cites to back me up, but I’m thinking G-d can communicate with you whether you’re dead or alive. In fact, I’m counting on it. Because I had what seemed to be a very real “G-d experience”, I’ve given it a lot of thought. Since I was on my feet, actually on my way to see if the laundry was dry; I’m pretty sure I wasn’t dreaming. But, if there had been a witness to the event, would they have seen the same thing I did or would they just have seen me frozen in place, with a look of shock on my face. I’m figuring it would have been the second answer. It doesn’t seem to me like it would be necessary for G-d to go to all the trouble of violating some natural law and actually show up, when he could just give me the experience mentally, emotionally. It actually doesn’t matter to me, either way. Honestly, it doesn’t even matter to me if I had some sort of “delusional” episode, because all that came from it was good. Since I continue at times to feel his presence, even though not quite like that; I must have a “chronic” delusion going on. BTW, the laundry was quite dry by the time I got to it.
God dried your laundry