Torog

[F L E S H]

Isnâ??t there some way you can just be respectful of other peopleâ??s differences?
Everyone doesnâ??t have to believe the same thing,
God / Jehovah / Gaeya / Buddha / the great nothingâ?¦whatever.
Tolerance, respect and love are what itâ??s all about
â?? regardless of personal beliefs.
For a bunch of stoners you lot donâ??t half get your knickers in a knot.
Maybe you need to change your smoke����

Edit; stop insulting people - you're startin to piss me off

That's what happens in a religion forum... The thing is, when someone feels they're onto something, they tend to want others to 'see the light', so to speak...

[beachguy in thongs]

You're clearly wrong. Have you not read a thing i've said?

Yes, and you've said, in a different thread, that all hypocritical-Christians will... "burn in hell".

[beachguy in thongs]

Oh no, I didn't mean the 1970s, I mean the 1070s, the 1170s... You preach and accept views on the Bible that have gone out of fashion centuries ago.

Funny...off by several hundred years.

[Warlock]

Howdy Warlock,

Lordy ! Don't tell me that you only believe in what you can see..I thought that 'warlocks' believed in the spirit world.

Don't you know..that there are more things in Heaven and Earth..than Man will ever know ?

Have a good one...

I'll believe in anything with evidence that backs it up

[Warlock]

Yes, and you've said, in a different thread, that all hypocritical-Christians will... "burn in hell".

It's a phrase, as in pain.

[Warlock]

Howdy Warlock,

Lordy ! Don't tell me that you only believe in what you can see..I thought that 'warlocks' believed in the spirit world.



Have a good one...

It's a name, that's all.

[ermitonto]

Actually, I have read in some books that it was not Jesus himself who said that the Second Coming would take place in the first or second centruy AD, but rather the new Christians. Remeber, Jesus didn't write the Gospels, and no one was following him taking notes in order to write books. The Gospels were written between 50 and 100 years after Jesus died, so there's obviously going to be mistakes and intentional changes by the authors. The evangelists simply wrote down the Gospels as they thought it should be, and that's what we're left with.

Yes, I do realize that the Gospels were probably based on exaggerated oral history, so we can't really attribute anything said in the Bible directly to Jesus, but when Christians want me to trust in Jesus they want me to base that trust on the material contained in the Bible (since we have virtually no other sources for information about him). Since Biblejesus predicts the Second Coming within the lifetimes of the people alive at the time, I can't trust Biblejesus, and since I have no way of knowing what Realjesus actually said (assuming he existed), I can't trust Realjesus either.

By the way, what was the evidence that Jesus didn't really preach such a quick return? It seems to me like it would be downright impossible to prove what somebody said or didn't say 2000 years ago whose life was never documented until decades after his death.

[slipknotpsycho]

if God spared us everytime something bad was about to happen.

that right there is a contridictory statment to everything you christians and god believers stand behind remember? god is in control of everything if he is, then he COULDN'T spare anyone.... sparing someone is to save someone, you can't save someone if you do it on purpose (can't wait to see how the defendant christians turn this around on me) and as said before, if your book does portray him correctly, then he WOULD know a better way to provide wisdom then killing 100's if not 1000's of HIS innocent creatures. another thing, if he was all wise, and we're basicly nothing (in matter of inteligence) to him, then how is he so predictable? we can tell days ahead of tiem the chance for rain, we can tell days ahead of time alot of things, as long as it's not based on another human being (even then we still can alot of times) and ima leave it at this cuz i want this answered: if he's all wise, and we're 1000000000000000000000000000000's times less... how can we predict him so accurately?

[slipknotpsycho]

Howdy Warlock,

Lordy ! Don't tell me that you only believe in what you can see..I thought that 'warlocks' believed in the spirit world.

Don't you know..that there are more things in Heaven and Earth..than Man will ever know ?

Have a good one...

as to this, i'd a hell of a lot sooner believe in what i can see, then what i can't. i know this is probably taking it out of proportion, but, if i was to tell you there was a pink elephant flying shitting on people would you believe me? or would you not believe it til you saw it for yourself? say the 2nd one and i know you're lying....becasue only an insane person (or one without knowledge of such things) could possibly see that, much less believe that.....

[ermitonto]

that right there is a contridictory statment to everything you christians and god believers stand behind remember? god is in control of everything if he is, then he COULDN'T spare anyone....

Exactly. You can only "spare" somebody from something threatening if that threat is outside your control. Same goes for God, he could only "spare" somebody from something bad if that bad thing was outside his control somehow. Otherwise, he has simply neglected to do bad; he hasn't saved anyone from anything.

This reminds me of a similar glaring contradiction in the Christian conception of a God, which is the fact that the Christian God has very humanlike emotions. Sometimes he's loving and sometimes he's angry, sometime's he's forgiving and sometimes he's wrathful. In the Ten Commandments God admits to being a jealous God. So what's wrong with that? It's simple: emotions are always a response to a stimulus. If you're angry, it's because something in your present or recent past has created a situation you perceive as an injustice. If you're sad, it's because in your present moment something that made you happy or might have made you happy has been taken away from you. But God is supposed to be timeless, experiencing and knowing thoroughly all eternity at once. So he should not show such widely varying emotions. He should not be able to experience anger since he supposedly knows that ultimately all the injustices in the universe will be corrected. The Christian God does not experience stimuli in timed sequences like us, but knows all events in the universe of all times, and should be acting in accordance with the sum total of that knowledge, not just the knowledge of the stimuli that have come up at the time as perceived by humans.

And if individual actions have any influence on God's emotions, this becomes quickly absurd. Say for instance I do something that the Bible looks down upon, like for instance keep my long hair (see here for the Bible verse condemning men wearing long hair), and this supposedly makes God angry. Now that's not fair to the rest of humanity, who must now suffer the consequences of living in a universe with an angry deity simply because of my individual decision about my hairstyle, despite all their devoted chants and idolatry intended to please the deity. So perhaps the deity is indeed amused by the chants and idolatry somehow, and he feels many emotions at once, feeling happiness in some parts because of the chants and idolatry but feeling wrathful anger in other parts because of my long hair.

But this begs the question: why does a "perfect" God not have the self-esteem to be able to live contently without forcing people to worship him all the time and follow his arbitrary rules, or else suffer the punishment of eternal burning?