If you ask me, it’s all a pair of bull.
No, unlike you, Orthodox Jews are the final say on what ***they ***are to believe. You can (and do) believe whatever you want.
Why? It’s not like there are any consequences if you don’t follow the scriptures.
The spiritual law was around at least at the time of King David, who again violated the written code, but found blameless in the eyes of God. The path of grace was around at least then. Also before Abraham, ‘Jesus was’. Jesus ‘was’ always and Jesus ‘is’ ‘the way’, so ‘the way’ was always there.
Using the above, it would seem that the ‘spirit of the law’ is against looking at her lustfully, but what about lovingly. Is there any such restriction? And can love lead to a marriage?
IMHO The above commandment about adultery is about spiritual adultery - thought we have to learn it as physical adultery, the physical act is just a result of the spiritual violation (lust being that of other gods one has married themselves to).
It also going into what is marriage, is it the physical paper given by man? It doesn’t appear so ‘what God has joined’, it is God who does the marriage, not man. And He does so in His timing (King Herod married the daughter of Herodias just by lust, she gained ‘up to half his kingdom’).
Ideally marriage is described here:
[IMHO] Marriage is to be Christ (living in man) and the church. As man is refined into the likeness of Jesus, the marriage will be between Jesus living in the man and the wife and be based not in lust, but the love of God.
If a woman married to someone who abuses her to the point that she must get away, but has not gotten a paper divorce cries out in repentance to the Father, He may send a person that has been refined into the likeness of His Son as her new Husband.
As such, physical adultery may be committed, when spiritual adultery is not.
And ending with God looks at the heart, and we can not judge the heart of another. God’s ways are not our ways. God does not want us burdened with guilt, but freed with Love.
[/IMHO]
Thank god, kanicbird versus FlyingDoDo in a cage match
It seems bizarre to me that you’d have to do all these verbal gymnastics and cross-referencing in order to make the Bible say…well, what you want it to say. Granted, kanicbird did say that all that was his opinion. But if the Bible was commandments from on high how can you be sure that your opinion is right? How can you be sure that your interpretation is the right one? I’d want to be crystal clear, not dance around with issues of ‘spiritual’ (which seems dangerously close to thoughtcrime to me) and ‘physical’, i.e. what actually matters.
I’d also dispute this statement here;
If he didn’t want us burdened with guilt, why did he make the central tenet of getting into heaven the biggest guilt trip of all time? If I had been present at Calvary it would have been my moral duty to prevent the slow and painful execution of an innocent man. Yet if I had been successful it would mean that all of mankind was still under the burden of sin, that we had not been absolved of sin through the temporary sacrifice of Jesus.
If the above statement was true, why didn’t he just forgive us without requiring all the sacrificial business, binding us all without any of us having any say in it?
FlyingDoDo strikes me as someone who shows up to proselytize then flees when the Magic Words don’t have quite the intended effect. I’m watching to see if he returns or not.
Seek the Lord, He will teach you His ways. Perhaps the reason this came up is to show that the Lord ways are not how we initially view them. Many people come up with the conclusion that God is cruel, which I can see how, but He has shown me that the cruelty is self caused and God never wanted that for us, and His love for us is overflowing.
The Word states that the law is spiritual. Also IMHO it is only the spiritual that matters, not the physical.
The guilt is the bondage Satan uses to hold us down and to make us serve him. Satan is the one who accuses, the devil is a slanderer. God does not want that for us. look at Jesus, commonly saying ‘your sins are forgiven’ even granting salvation to the thief on the cross for simply acknowledging who Jesus is. That is all that God wants of us, for us to recognize God as Lord.
The struggle that you mention is the struggle between recognizing that God should be God of your life and Satan trying to hold you back. Satan does not want us to know we are all children of the King - Satan wants that power, so if he can make you believe otherwise he gets that (for a time).
Imagine this thread, but introducing non-Abrahamic, pantheistic and polytheistic beliefs into the mix.
In fact, this entire thread illustrates precisely why I “found” atheism.
Or atheism found you.
With all the heat of Randy Mulkey vs Jake Milliman.
This makes no sense whatsoever. Unless you really think that the concept of atheism is floating around out there in the aether, actively trying to infect conscious minds.
In actual fact, I fell into a roving atheism pocket.
Did you slip out of the space-time continuum? Or was the pocket of atheism sort of like an amoeba-like mass that slurped you inside?
In my youth I did, and found…nothing. No answers, no divine revelation, no Paul on the road to Damascus. Why would he purposefully obfuscate himself?
I came up with the conclusions that this deity was either a capricious trickster, or non-existent. All the things we could attribute to a malevolent God - earthquakes, tsunamis, diseases and so on - we can also attribute to naturally understood causes. So, I dispensed with the extraneous, as Occam’s Razor says we should. Thus I found myself supporting the latter of my two conclusions.
There are two problems with this - first, you have to establish that The Word really is…well, The Word. How do you know the Bible is true? Because it says it is? The Koran also says that it is the last word of God. The Book of Mormon claims to be heaven-sent. I need more to go on than just the say-so of the source itself. Secondly, we need to establish that this ‘spiritual realm’ actually exists in order to claim that it matters. Solving the first problem likely solves the second, granted.
If I understand you correctly, Satan is attempting to trick us somehow, against the wishes of God. Yet he punishes us for falling for this trickery? This seems an unjust system - if somebody falls for a scam you throw the scammer in jail, not the person being scammed. You also have the problem of why, if God does not want this, does he even allow it? Why not just get rid of Satan, will him out of existence, obliterate him entirely? It should not be beyond the capabilities of God.
Going back to the crux of the matter - Jesus. Everything hangs on him, as Corinthians says “…And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” (15:17). But here’s the problem - why was the temporary sacrifice of Jesus necessary in the first place? Why could not God, who is love (according to Christians), spare himself the pain and just forgive our sins anyway?
Here’s my final question, as I’ve probably asked too many anyway. If I was present at Calvary, a witness at the cruxifiction of Christ, I would consider it my moral duty to save an innocent man (who had perhaps some ideas I didn’t agree with - take no thought for the moro, love your enemies - dangerous and immoral preachings, in practicality) from a slow and painful death at the hands of the Romans. However, if I were successful, I would be condemning myself, and all humans who had ever lived, for their sins would not be redeemed. Is this not correct?
Oh, and thank you for engaging me, few Christians are actually willing to fulfil their obligation under 1 Peter 3:15.
Flying DoDo are you a Seventh-Day Adventist or an Armstrongite? Since I think the vast majority of Christians celebrate the Sabbath on Sundays.
This is really not the place to bring unfounded and unsubstantiated rumors, particularly if you are going to claim that we have to follow scripture, but that you think there is extraneous stuff in scripture.
You might want to go find out what you’re talking about, then come back only with evidence, not rumors.
It is kanicbird you’re talking to, so I wouldn’t rule that out.
God works in His timing, not ours. What you did back then may have set in motion what will bring you to God, He may have selected a path of atheism for you for a while. You were either not ready or had things to learn first.
God proved that His Word is true to me personally - He is willing to do that for anyone who seeks
God has shown that the Koran is a book of deception to me personally, specifically He has pointed out the deception/distortion in the book describing creation. Again He has proven it to me, and it is His job to prove it to the seeker, not mine.
He has not given me anything on the BoM, but there are spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavens, so ‘heaven sent’ doesn’t really help.
For a while I was dead set against the spiritual for a while and just accepted the physical, then God opened my eyes, and I saw what a illusion our physical world is. I like Plato’s cave allegory to describe what I believe has been revealed to me.
Satan is a lesser god, as such God respects his godhood. He lets things run it’s coarse knowing that Love will win out in the end. We, in our stubbornness, basically tell God that we can take care of ourselves following the ways of Satan (not really knowing we are following Satan), our Father allows this, just like sometimes a parent must let a child make a choice that they know will hurt the child, but it may be the only way a child will learn.
It is the marriage of Christ and the church. The 2 become one. So Jesus is now us, and Jesus paid the price of sin, so we paid the price of sin if we are one with Jesus (and also one with the Father - as God is one).
In short you would not be able to do this.
You don’t understand how authority works. You would have to have greater authority then Satan/Lucifer, a arch angel, to accomplish this, though I believe only God has higher authority - and since God is one, this would be impossible for you.
Think of atheism as another religion with real gods that control the people in it and it may make more sense, as that is exactly what it is IMHO.
This gods purpose, to blind the person from turning to the one true God and to blind them to the spiritual.