‘the major discovery of Christian history’?
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NiceCupOfTea
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Amergin
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Of course I have not done any religious writing or archaeology. I am a full time neuroscientist and clinical medical neurologist. I work 14 hours per day.
I just read the works of the various scholars. I admit that it is their work not mine. I am not like narrow-minded so-called Christians who refuse to read the writings of their own scholars, gospel writers, and Paul.
It is patently obvious that Jesus had nothing to do with Christianity except for his name being stolen by Roman Pagans to become the false God of a new religion.
That is why Christian extremists can make up their own theology by ignoring the teachings of Jesus as you do. Then you can make up your own Theology. It gets wackier and wackier each time some nut case like the Popes, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Knox, Smith, Mary Eddy, Jones, Tilton, Ellen White, Swaggart, Robertson, Jim Jones, or Falwell.
The history of Christianity is recorded. We know what the losing rivals of Christianity believed because of the Christian tactic of debating an opponent by first defining the "heretical" beliefs. Perhaps I try in my scientific brain to do the same.
Amergin
Amergin
Well-Known Member
I have a well used Bible that is over 50 years old. It is the KJV. I certainly do not take all of the mythology and magic acts seriously, but I use it in the phrasing of my debates. I discovered how little most American Christians take the teachings of Jesus seriously. That is because they have obsessed with defending his illegitimate deification caused them or gave them an excuse to sin. Sin no longer counted as long as one accepted the man Jesus as a God. Jesus would consider that blasphemy.
I regard Jesus as a mortal man. If we could bring him back to now in a time machine, I am sure he would agree with my essay and perhaps would tan your hide with a whip or have his followers stone you.
NCOT, don't just worship your bible as an idol. Read the bloody book.
Amergin
You know I normally don't take offense to the excessive verbage of those who hate Christianity, but claim to know much about it...but in this case...ah well,I have a well used Bible that is over 50 years old. It is the KJV. I certainly do not take all of the mythology and magic acts seriously, but I use it in the phrasing of my debates. I discovered how little most American Christians take the teachings of Jesus seriously. That is because they have obsessed with defending his illegitimate deification caused them or gave them an excuse to sin. Sin no longer counted as long as one accepted the man Jesus as a God. Jesus would consider that blasphemy.
I regard Jesus as a mortal man. If we could bring him back to now in a time machine, I am sure he would agree with my essay and perhaps would tan your hide with a whip or have his followers stone you.
NCOT, don't just worship your bible as an idol. Read the bloody book.
Amergin
for those who (want to) understand, no explaination is neccessary...for those who don't - no explaination is possible.
NiceCupOfTea
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so what do you use exactly, rhythmic phrasing of content ?
or maybe you just dont get it ?
NCOT, don't just worship your bible as an idol. Read the bloody book.
Amergin
well i certainly dont worship the Bible so no worries about that.
NiceCupOfTea
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well thats the opinion of some people.
if you say so
Spiritual things are to be appraised spiritually, to the natural man they are foolishness.
Amergin
Well-Known Member
Crikey! What does that mean? Imaginary things are to be appraised with delusional thinking, to the sane man they are foolishness.
Amergin
NiceCupOfTea
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1 Corinthians 2:14
The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
Saltmeister
The Dangerous Dinner
As I explained to NCOT on one of the other threads, people need to "make up" theology because the more God needs to say, the more degrading it is to humanity and to say that God's creations do not have the autonomy or independence to make critical judgments and important decisions is to think less of God.
Human fallibility is not our greatest weakness as many may think. Actually, our ability to learn from mistakes, to re-evaluate our past decisions is not only our strength, but a credit to God as well. To say we are stupid is to say God created something stupid. We should acknowledge our weakness, fallibility and vulnerability and recognise our faults, but we should not go so far as to beat ourselves up and say we have no value. That is false humility.
If we are not allowed to make up our own theology, that is like saying that we are not allowed to think for ourselves. It is like saying that we are too stupid to think for ourselves that we need God to tell us everything. The less God needs to say, the better God is. I consider the Jewish and Christian revelations to be minimalist revelations. There are more words attributed to humans than to God and I have no problem with that. Many of these words became part of our Sacred Text.
If in the process of "making up" our own theology, we discover the "divine will," then it isn't really "man-made" but inspired by God. God thought of it before we did.
In the process of making up their own theology and contemplating the divine will, many will stumble on the wrong path, but many will discover the right path. God said all He needed to say but left many unanswered questions. The wise, intelligent and rational people among us will "fill in the gaps" so to speak.
This needed to happen in order to set a bad example for people not to follow. When we learn about people you listed above, we can decide not to copy them. One of my biggest problems is people not learning from these examples of bad ideology and educating themselves.
That's unfortunate, but while I disagree with much of mainstream Christianity, I cannot say how often I do the same. The least that I can say is that if you are going to promote an idea, you also have to explain what value it has to the community. If you promote an idea in order to be divisive or to exclude, that is the kind of idea that I criticise. I prefer more inclusive concepts. As long as a person's beliefs are "Abrahamic" they should not be excluded from the community.
This fixation is a result of Christians not understanding that Christianity emerged from the intermingling of the Jewish and Gentile worlds. A group of Gentiles started to believe in the "monotheistic God" of Judaism, but they had the philosophical background of Hellenism. The deification of Jesus came from this "mixing" of Judaism with Hellenism.
At the time, one of the two major factions of Jews that was dominant promoted anti-Gentile attitudes. There were many who hated Gentiles as well as the Hellenism they brought with them. The other faction encouraged acceptance and Jesus was part of that faction.
Despite how abominable Hellenism was, Jesus' followers pushed for acceptance. They tolerated Hellenism to allow Christianity to take off as a new religion. Christianity wasn't taken over by Roman paganism although it may seem it was corrupted by it. If it were, we'd be taking part in their idolatry. Instead the Roman gods were replaced by Jesus. The Romans couldn't help worshipping "gods" so Paul gave them Jesus say they would abandon their other "gods."
Many of today's Christians do not understand this and that is unfortunate, but hopefully with time, they will come to understand the truth.
That is unfortunate, but I can understand how people just can't shake themselves free from this idea. They haven't looked into the history and politics of Jesus' life and teachings. We need to think of Jesus' death and resurrection as a way of countering anti-Gentile attitudes.
another unfortunate idea........... I believe the Gospel of John was really trying to say that Jesus was one of the "divine sparks" of God, like Moses, Abraham, David, etc. God was emanating through Jesus, not becoming Jesus. The Gospel of John said that the Word/Logos became flesh. It did not say God became flesh. His emanations became flesh.
NiceCupOfTea
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lol thats funny.
Saltmeister
The Dangerous Dinner
what's funny?
Amergin
Well-Known Member
In other words, Christian mythology all makes sense, if you just don't think about it too much.
The normal human brain is capable of distinguishing irrational delusion from rational reality.
Amergin
No this is incorrect. You can think on it muchly and often, and it makes sense. You look for the morals, for how that occurs in your life, what you can learn from the situation that others were in. Pick a passage of our mythology that troubles you, any passage, let us investigate it with you.
And didn't I hear somewhere these were deemed to be faked?
Amergin
Well-Known Member
Wil, I respect your satisfaction with your faith. I am simply trying to explain why I do not believe in it. I think the words of Jesus are 90% positive and admirable.
1. Earth was not created before the Sun. The solar disc rotates with the centre of gravity forming the Star (Sun) while planets are gradually accreting from dust, pebbles, and rocks. Therefore, day and night could not occur on Earth before the Sun was created.
2. Earth is not 6000 years old. Science has proved that it is at least 4.5 billion years old or possibly older. Humans have been here as "modern man" for 200,000 years, not 6000 years.
3. The most distant galaxies are 13.7 billion light years away. It took 13.7 billion years for their light to reach our telescopes in the past 60 years. Stars were not created after the Earth but billions of years earlier.
4. There is no scientific evidence that there ever was a truly global Noah's Flood. It did not happen. Regional floods occur almost yearly. The Noah's Story contains contradictions. There was no way that a small wooden boat without sails, oars, steam engine, diesel motor, or nuclear engine able to sail to all 7 continents to select pairs of local isolated animals and after the flood to sail and deliver those animals back to their homelands.
5. Noah's flood was immoral. God is accused of murdering perhaps millions or hundreds of thousands humans, including babies and pregnant women because some humans sinned. It makes no sense at all to murder a million million non-human animals because some humans sinned. This is the most immoral act ever committed in history or fictional history.
6. If two humans offended God by seeking knowledge through eating the fruit of knowledge. God is the offended party so to speak. It makes no sense that God offers his son to be a blood sacrifice performed by the offender’s descendants. If you call me profane names, it would not make sense if I asked your son to harm my son.
7. Christians worship Jesus as a God, yet Jesus never claimed to be a god. Gospels in many verses clearly identified Jesus as a subordinate to God. Secondly, killing the man Jesus then re-animating his body in 36 yours is senseless. His re-animation (resurrection) was unnecessary if God simply roughed up Jesus but let him live and teach.
There are many other contradictions, which would take up too much space to post. I have no objection to Christians desiring to worship Jesus, but be honest enough to admit that the faith is not justified by scripture.
Amergin
bob x
Well-Known Member
Negative review on the authenticity of the "lead codices"
er...duh. Do you another explanation from 4,000 years ago? Has not science continually changed as new discoveries are made...could we use a science book from Galileo's time and call it accurate today? The creation story is a creation story, man got tired of kids pulling at his robe saying why....so creation stories are made...
yet again, you'll find very few Christians and Jews that will hold to this as fact...
of course you know the answer here...do you think we read the bible and go to church to learn scientific notions, the quadratic equation, and such...do we goto music concerts for that? No, we go to concerts to enjoy the sound of the skill of the musicians...we goto temple to nourish our spiritual nature...not to smash the atom, or disect frogs.
surely you jest, you don't think there was two of every beetle out there?? See we are going on and on.... Most of us don't read the bible litterally....why is it that Atheists do???
oh well same statement...see.... and you wonder why we wonder why you harp on the obvious??
metaphor....a little lifes lesson... read it as if you are G!d... what can you learn, what if you are Eve? Adam? the snake? Have you ever done something you were told not to do and had to reap the reprecussions of it? It is a story to learn from... for those willing to learn.
Jesus was questioned about this and responded that the scriptures say we are G!ds, he said that I and the father are one. This is what many Christians read as describing himself as a G!d man, and what I understand him as understanding his oneness with all.
My faith is justified by the scripture...it is the book I use to contemplate all the time....our autobiography is written....and it is in those pages...the turmoil that each went through is turmoil that we go through at various points in our lives...we can use this knowledge to our benefit and make life easier... or we can go on touching wet paint and hot stoves...
Try not justifiying your nonbelief of faith by your literal belief of the bible.
It'll be interesting how it all shakes out, seems folks are desperate for this kind of stuff...
Hi Amergin —
I'm not disputing why you do not believe, but I would dispute what you think we believe ...
I do accept that there are Christians who receive the Genesis creation account without question, but then there are people who receive the scientific account of things without question also.
Most people can't explain what gravity is, but accept it as a given. Same thing.
This myth is an Hebraic account of a common myth, the same being told in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both involve man's relationship to the gods/God, and the quest for eternal life. The outcome of Gilgamesh is pessimistic, of Scripture, optimistic. I also find the metaphysics of Gilgamesh wanting.
I suggest the flood is just a metaphor.
God bless,
Thomas
I'm not disputing why you do not believe, but I would dispute what you think we believe ...
Most Christians don't believe it was. We don't treat Scripture as a scientific document, nor a scientific explanation, of how creation came to be. The current 'creationist' debate is a North American nonsense, it seems to me, the fruit of a particularly American brand of Christian fundamentalism.
I do accept that there are Christians who receive the Genesis creation account without question, but then there are people who receive the scientific account of things without question also.
Most people can't explain what gravity is, but accept it as a given. Same thing.
The Hebrew, Greek and Latin terms for 'in the beginning' all suggest the metaphysical idea of 'in principle' rather than a cosmological temporal unfolding, the Latin 'principio' is used, and the Greek, 'en arche' ... neither of these two terms imply a temporal sense.
Well I don't dispute this, but I have been told absolutely that there is no evidence for this or that before, only for the evidence to turn up later ... so you will excuse us if we don't cave in when faced with your assertion.
This myth is an Hebraic account of a common myth, the same being told in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both involve man's relationship to the gods/God, and the quest for eternal life. The outcome of Gilgamesh is pessimistic, of Scripture, optimistic. I also find the metaphysics of Gilgamesh wanting.
I suggest the flood is just a metaphor.
Again, a metaphor.
Again, metaphor ... and a powerful one in a place and time where human sacrifice was the norm.
Maybe not, but what humans do often does not make sense ... vendetta, for one.
Yes He does, you just don't understand the context ... His audience evidently did, as they tried to stone Him more than once.
Er, no ... the Gospels in many verses clearly identify Jesus as relational to God. It's your failure to comprehend the nature of the relation that leads you to assume one of subordination.
No its not. That's your assumption, but then you reject the whole idea, so of course it would seem that way to you. Difficult to believe, yes. But senseless, no — there is a profound philosophical and metaphysical understanding of the events.
And they've all been answered before. Just cos you don't accept the answers, repeating the contradictions over and over again doesn't make them any more valid.
God bless,
Thomas
This is why there is no real value in promulgating such stuff on the web ... few possess the skills to make such informed decisions.
God bless,
Thomas