The Bible is literally true.

[chaosrage 0]

Why, because it uses the word water? Baptism isn't mentioned. But no, that is the context. The Greek 'and' here (kai) is used in an exegetic sense, thus making it "Born of water, even the Spirit". Water, or Living Water is used metaphorically to speak of the Spirit several times, lending the symbolic baptism it's symbolism. A confusing translation in this instance perhaps, but we can discern this because salvation without baptism is seen in Acts 10:46. Peter says "Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water? They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have." He was speaking of Gentiles, by the way, and he subsequently allowed them to be baptized. But you can see that they have already received the Holy Spirit, and are therefore already saved. In fact, this is Peter's criterion for baptizing them.

If they already received the holy spirit, why did he need to baptize him? Peter said they received the holy spirit, therefore nothing should keep them from being baptised with water. Then he baptised them. I don't see how that is an example of salvation without baptism. If 'and' is used in an exegetic sense, why does every single translation translate it as 'and' instead of 'even'? Also, do you believe in original sin?

 

You keep saying that, it's not getting any truer.

 

Which part? Belief being required or God not needing to sacrifice himself?

 

John 3:18 "He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already"

 

Mark 16:16 "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."

 

Matt. 19:26, "But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God, all things are possible."

 

How do you maintain this with David's reaction to his son Absalom's death? With the baby, he stops grieving when he dies, with Absalom, he starts grieving when he dies. What's the difference?

 

He doesn't stop grieving when he dies. He wasn't fasting to grieve, he was fasting to try to get God to show mercy. But he didn't show mercy, and the baby died, so he stopped. Personally, I think the "I'll go see him but he won't return to me" line is one of the saddest in the bible. If he did stop grieving, it can be explained by Absolom being a grown man and the baby just being a newborn baby. When a baby dies it's sad but it can't really compare to losing a son that you've known for 20 or 30 years.

 

Except the other biblical indications that babies go to heaven. Now, in Revelation it says that books are opened and the damned are judged according to their deeds.

 

Not the damned, the dead. Everyone is judged by their deeds along with their beliefs.

 

James 2:19,20 "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?

 

James 2:24, "You see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only."

 

That's contradicted by all the verses that say just belief is good enough, but the one thing they all seem to agree on is that belief is required.

 

Hey, you wanted some contradictions, right? Clear these up for me O vain man.

 

Now if we look at Jeremiah 19:4, it says "Because they have forsaken me, and have estranged this place, and have burned incense in it unto other gods, whom neither they nor their fathers have known, nor the kings of Judah, and have filled this place with the blood of innocents". God is speaking of infant sacrifice here. He has proclaimed the sacrificed infants innocent, and condemned the spilling of their blood. Since God has proclaimed them innocent, they will be judged as innocent.

 

From where do you get that they're talking about infants with the blood of innocents? Anyway, God judged infants before, for example the Flood where he killed them all. Weren't Adam and Eve considered innocent? He had a real big problem with judging them.

 

In Job 3, Job says "Why did I not die at birth, Come forth from the womb and expire? Why did the knees receive me, And why the breasts, that I should suck?

For now I would have lain down and been quiet; I would have slept then, I would have been at rest," Job here wishes to have been stillborn, because he would have been at rest. What is he refering to? Hell? If there's one thing hell doesn't have, it's rest.

 

Hell's only in the NT. God either didn't talk about it or Jesus decided to invent it. So Job wouldn't have known about hell.

 

In the book of Jonah, God commands Jonah to preach to the Assyrian city of Nineveh. Jonah is unwilling because he despises Gentiles in general and Ninevites specifically. Anyway, after the fish part, God and Jonah are arguing, and God says in 4:11 ""Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?" Who is God refering to here? Nineveh's population was significantly larger than 120,000. He's talking about the children, who aren't accountable for his judgement because they don't even know right and left, and the animals as well confirms this, as animals are under no burden of judgement. God refuses to obliterate them even though that's what Jonah wanted.

 

All the 120,000 people are infants? Perhaps they're just 120,000 stupid people. What makes you think he's talking about children? If he's talking about children, why wouldn't he say it? Like I said, God obliterated animals in the flood. He comanded Saul to smite Amalek and slay "infants and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" and then he punished him for not slaying all the animals.

 

I talked about the historical veracity of the Bible, and that's his book. There you go.

 

There's historical veracity on that piece of paper I wrote on, so now my penis is 4000 miles long and Elisha is pregnant with my kid. Awesome!

 

Oh wait, that doesn't make it any more true and what I said is still on the same level as hobbits, just like God.

[chaosrage 0]

I don't think you did, I think that's just something you theoretically could have seen. Besides, that's not evolution, that's evidence for the flood.

Okay, so I didn't, but it's there for you if you want to see it. Ever did those bacteria experiments in biology class? If you did, you proved evolution. And evolution has to work for the flood to work. Fossils show that creatures tens of thousands of years age were pretty much the same as they are now though.

 

Seriously, read that no excuse passage again, you've abused that more than a blind foster child. This is a ridiculous argument you're using, by the way. God cant exist because he can't be evil, but you're the one who gets to decide what evil is? So you decide whether God exists purely on your own whim?

 

Sure, just like you decide that God is good and he exists on your whim. What makes you think he is good? Because he said he was good? That's not enough. You have to judge him by his actions, the things he did, the things he commanded, the world he created (not that the world is bad, but nature itself is cruel. Someone would have to be cruel to create a world on purpose where creatures have to kill and eat each other to stay alive.), and the severe punishments he gives you for rejecting him.

 

Evil is what God is not, by definition. If God tortures babies (he doesn't) then it's not evil to torture babies because God is the only standard for what's evil. Also, I've been arguing against your perception of cruel because it bucks against God's justice, but it's true, God's wrath is something you don't even want to see. It's not "evil", but God annihilating someone and tormenting them for eternity doesn't prove he doesn't exist. If you don't like that and think it means he doesn't exist, that's ok. That's why he gave you free will. If you think that's evil however, you're wrong. Think of how stupid saying that is. He's GOD. He created everything and has power over eveything and everyone. But you think he's mean, so of course you've learned better in your 20 or whatever years. Nobody deserves eternal torment? Why the hell not?

 

Because no crime could ever fit that harsh of a punishment. Especially if you didn't even DO anything, you just had a THOUGHT that God didn't like. Fine, you don't think David's baby was tortured. But you know he was killed to punish David and you know that God has killed and commanded infants to be killed and you know he advocated killing people who didn't believe in him. If you think God is good, you have to think these things are good and it's good for us to go around killing infants to punish their parents. After all they go to heaven maybe, so it doesn't matter. If you don't agree, then God can't be good, and by definition he would be a contradiction, so it would be impossible for him to exist. I've learned that those things are wrong in my 20 or whatever years, and you have too. Even if you say you didn't, you're only letting God's opinion override your sense of right and wrong.

 

Why stop there? How about you deliver your kids to that child killing molester. Wouldn't that be even nicer? I don't know where you got this sappy idea of God, but he will fuck somebody up if he wants to.  God's wrath is a terrible, cruel and fightening thing. Anything besides that wrath is infinitely more forgiving than you could dream of being.

 

No, I don't think that would be a very nice thing to do to my kids. I got it from the sappy idea of God from the NT where Jesus calls God love. Making billions of people suffer for an eternity isn't love. Just like hot isn't cold. Wet isn't dry. strong isn't weak, etc..

 

Not believing is the same as rejecting. I debate atheists for fun all the time, and not once has anyone presented a sillier argument. Honestly.

 

If not believing is the same as rejecting, how do you explain that if God proved came down from heaven, I would still reject him? Well. I can't absolutely say for sure that I would, maybe I'd be too scared to reject him. But if I did accept him, it would only be out of fear of torture, not because I loved him.

 

So it's not a TRUE gift then. It's only a gift to people who know what words mean.

 

It's a gift but only given to people who do something for him in return.

 

Unless they deserve it.

 

Under our definition for cruel and our own court system, it would still be cruel.

 

No you don't. Say that fellow being tortured so we can save 1000s of lives says "This is wrong, you CAN'T torture me because I have the authority to decide whether I deserve it or not. You are cruel, therefore you don't exist. I'll be going now."

 

He has the authority to decide if he deserves it, just like I do. I'm not going to say he's wrong just because I'm the one torturing him. The difference is I'm not perfect or omnipotent. If I could save those 1000s of people without torturing him, I would. Why wouldn't God? Because he's cruel.

 

I don't follow. It sounds like you think I said the opposite of what I said.

 

It sounded like you were saying if we had the authority to say that rejecting God doesn't deserve punishment, it would be up for us to decide the punishment. In that case we couldn't say whether or not anything's wrong unless we're the ones doing whatever it was we thought was wrong.

 

Let's point out first there's not even hardline reasons to believe this is the case. Now, let me scale my analogy down a bit. If you shoplift and they give you community service, is that cruel? No. Your disagreement with God's standard of punishment is irrelevant. Your point really isn't, because it's only authority is your own opinion. You're basically a 13 year old slitting your wrists because your boyfriend broke up with you. Sure, you believe your life is over, you know with conviction that it's not worth living anymore. What affect does that have on reality? Absolutely none.

 

Is community service pain and suffering? If it is, it isn't very much. Can you say the same about hell? No, you can't. Does God have the power to stop it? Yep, he does. That's the reality. God is cruel. If on the other hand he has to do it because it's in his nature to send people to hell, then it's just in God's nature to be cruel. Not much difference. To think that he does exist, you basically have to twist your mind around to think that good is evil. Otherwise he wouldn't have created it or allow it to exist, and there wouldn't be an evil place called hell for evil people that God made knowing they would be evil. Unless it's good to have evil. And it can't be. That makes no sense.

 

Let me say also, Jesus died and paid the penalty for all sins ever, in the most torturous experience imaginable, and nobody deserved it less. Now, it doesn't matter if you think that's true or understand it, because one doctrine is predicated on another, and you if one is true, they both are. Assume it's true. So Christ, who had done nothing wrong, was tormented and killed for you, who are deserve nothing. You take this and essetially spit in his face and say you're too good for him, even refuse to acknowledge that he did it.

 

Alright, I'll assume it's true. God needed to sacifice himself and had no choice but to pay for our sins with a sacrifice. Wait, my brain just exploded. Ok, let me try again. God had to do this. I would wonder why he just did it for people who believed in him and not everyone. It's good that he did it for some people, but that wouldn't make my atheist sons and daughters being tormented in hell, or the jews Hitler gassed going to hell while Hitler goes to heaven any better.

 

This isn't your slugging your dad cause he took your car keys, this is the God of the universe. You don't even understand the implications of this. I'll quote a verse:"For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know Him who said "Vengeance is mine, I will repay" And again, "The Lord will judge his people" It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

 

This is why I hate Christianity.

 

"I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;" - Proverbs 1:26

 

Yeah, and "God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie" - 2 Th:11-12

 

God is a liar, the bible even says it, why believe anything he says?

[chaosrage 0]

I'm not even sure, I just saw that and felt I had to respond.

 

My answer to "witnessing evolution" (which was subsequently stolen by chaosrage) hasn't been addressed either.

 

My friend owns a labradoodledor

At best that's micro-evolution. Not the huge advances in species change that Darwin theorized about. At the end of the day, it's still a dog. It hasn't grown a fifth leg or gained some new physical ability that other dogs didn't have before.

 

Someone name the passage. Chances are the entire discussion is retarded.

This is sad. You do realize that macro and micro-evolution are the same process, simply taking different amounts of time, right?

[chaosrage 0]

Yes, it doesn't say in that particular passage. So we don't know and I'm satisfied leaving it at that. It doesn't say anything about a coma just like it doesn't say anything about suffering. It could have been, oh... leprosy (old world leprosy, the kind that kills your pain sensing nerves) or any number of other things.

They're both assumptions to make, but one is a bigger assumption than the other. If someone tells you that someone is very sick, you'll probably assume that they're suffering. You probably won't assume that they're in a coma.

 

By this definition, you torture children. Why haven't you sold all your possesions and devoted every moment of your time to feeding starving children? I recognize the flaws in comparing God to you, but the principle remains.

 

It would be if I had put them there knowing they would starve. Yeah, I wouldn't do that, but if all I had to do was snap my fingers and make food fall from the sky I'd do it.

 

Sin is to blame, by the way. I know, why does God allow sin? A question for the ages if ever there was one. It has to do with allowing you to have choice. He could wipe it all out now (he will eventually) but then he'd be condemning everyone who hasn't had time or the chance to be saved by him, which he doesn't want to do.

 

Sin is to blame for us not doing anything, but God is to blame as well for not doing anything. And sin isn't to blame for diseases. Who's responsible for that? God, and no one else.

 

In another way, God doesn't have to rain down manna, he has us. It really should be our responsibility to take care of those starving children, as God has never been a magic problem solver.  If he was it would result in attitudes like this. You'd say, "Well, I don't have to anything, because God is my butler, and even if I actively screw up, he'll bail me out." 

 

He was in the old days. But nevermind. We aren't getting the problem fixed, and they aren't getting fed. If God cared about them, he would come up with a new plan that works or feed them like he did the hebrews. A parent wouldn't say "Hmm.. I think I'll let my kids starve because I don't want them to think they have to depend on me for everything."

 

And from another angle, if you believe God takes children who die to heaven, which as I've shown, is not an absolutely airtight belief, but is by all means within the realm of believability, then dying babies is not quite as harrowing as it first appears.

 

But what if those babies don't die and instead they grow up suffering their whole lives and believe in a different God or no God? Then they go to hell to spend their eternity suffering. God: "Well.. sucks to be them."

[chaosrage 0]

Unless that verse is talking about something else. As I've said, Hell is not a very clear cut idea, all we can discern with absolute certainty is that you don't want to go there and how to avoid it.

If someone gets destroyed someone in a fight, it doesn't mean they're erased from existence. They're just really messed up.

 

That's just another zen riddle. Is God so powerful he's more powerful than himself? It's a ridiculous question. He is forced to, actually, because he can't coexist with sin. We are incapable of getting rid of our sin, so the only way is Jesus' payment for it, the power of which is realized by belief.

 

If he can't coexist with sin, then how is he able to coexist with us right now? We're in his presence, aren't we?

 

That's what Earth is for, to give us a chance. What you described actually is what happened, to Satan, and there is no possibility of redemption for him.

 

God could give us a second chance. Or he could make that ice cream world I was talking about with a little bit of his presence so we don't wail and gnash our teeth in the afterlife. We only eat ice cream a lot.

 

In principle, I agree, because they won't end up in the same place in the end. Remember, it's a parable. People in heaven and hell can't talk with each other, but Jesus is telling a story in which they can because he wants to illustrate something by the dialogue. That's why I don't think we can be so quick to use this story as evidence for the nature of hell.

 

It might not be flames but it's not a good place to go. Alright, we both agree on that. The flame part isn't really important if we accept that it's eternal torment.

 

It's all about who he's talking to. The Jews never questioned torment in fire, it was a given for them, the only question was who was going. They were incredibly self righteous people, in general, and very class discriminatory. The message about the poor is the main point of the story. That the rich man would be tormented and the beggar rewarded was radical stuff to them.

 

How hard would it have been for the rich man to get in heaven and gain understanding and realize what he did was wrong and feel sorry for what he did because it was wrong? And to try get the message across to his brethren that it's wrong because poor people suffer? Or have him in a place away from God, not a horrible place of flames just a place away from God, who he can't see because God disapproves of the life he lived. There's lots of ways he could've got the message across better without being nice for fear of torture.

 

Well, sure God could make you stop sinning. But then you'd be a robot and this time I don't think you'll argue with me. Anyone who sees Hell is going to try to avoid it, that's obvious. It's almost on robotic levels again. If Hell's open before someone and God says "Follow me or go in there." is that even really a choice? That would be more like a threat. God gives you all kinds of warnings. The fact that I've told you this is a warning. The fact that you argue it shows you already knew. You've read the entire Bible. Yeah, you can use your intellect to conclude that God doesn't exist, that's fair, and you can tell him that when you see him. "Sorry, there just wasn't enough evidence." I'm sure he'll understand.

 

Belief in God is just one sin. There's lots of other sins I could do if I believed in God. So no, I don't think I'd be a robot anymore than I'm a robot for you typing that post and proving to me that you exist. It would be a choice and a threat. Just like it is now. Guess what? I'm warning you right now that aliens are coming kill you. Evidence? HA, that would make it a threat, not a choice. Run outside and hide. He should understand because he created us and built us to not be perfect. If he doesn't understand, that's fine. What's not fine is if he doesn't give us a second chance even if we say we're sorry and promise not to sin anymore.

[chaosrage 0]

IDRM's point explains why the burden of proof is on you.  The text itself points to Luke as the author, early church tradition, which was closer to the events and the writings, holds Luke as the author.  Simply because you don't want it to be so doesn't automatically mean everyone else has to build a case for you.  It doesn't work THAT way.  If you're going to go against an accepted claim that's stood for a couple thousand years or so, you'd better have some reasons as to why.

It does work that way. The reason why is because there's no evidence that he did. I thought we went over that. I can't make a case against him doing it because there isn't anything to make a case against. If you think he did, then build your case. How does the text point itself to Luke as the author? It's anonymous.

 

As for my "enraged" paragraphs: My, we like to try and paint pictures, don't we? Point me to actual rage in my words, chaos. Otherwise, try not to be quite so manipulative of your readers next time. I know, that's a resort of someone who doesn't have much to offer but wants to talk alot, but let's at least try, mmkay?

 

Holy shit, SP is the school counselor from south park. I asked you a question and you gave two paragraphs that didn't have anything to do with the question. The question bothered you a little bit. It's okay, you can admit it. Jesus will still love you. Don't try to pretend like you didn't answer because you think it's pointless arguing with me when just a couple posts ago you were looking for a way to jump in on the stupid light debate. Figures that you'd pick the most pointless thing to want to argue about.

 

In short: You give me evidence to disprove the authorship of Luke. You do your homework first since you're making the claim that goes against accepted standing. You do that and I'll throw out why it's fairly accepted.

 

Just because most people believe something does not make it the truth. That said, can you give me evidence that it's the accepted standing? Not among fundies but real scholars?

 

The same majority opinion considers the identity of the author unascertainable. Apart from the title "according to John," which is ambiguous - which John? - and was only later attached to composition, the Gospel itself from chapter 1 to 20 mentions no author. In chapter 21, appended by someone distinct from the evangelist (cf.verse 24), an attempt is made to identify him with the "beloved disciple of Jesus," who is tacitly assumed to be the Galilean fisherman John, the son of Zebedee.

 

Both the third Gospel and the Acts are attributed by the church to Luke, but neither book contains any direct evidence to support the tradition. The earliest attestation that a Gospel and the Acts oof the Apostles were written by a physician called Luke comes from the so-called Muratorian canon, probably the most ancient catalog of the books of the New Testament, of about A.D. 180. Since the only physician called Luke in the New Testament is an otherwise rather obscure companion of Paul (Col. 4:14), he has in the absence of a stronger candidate been recognized as the writer of the third

Gospel and the Acts. There are serious objections to this attribution. The difficulties arise partly from many clashes in the story, relating to Paul, between the Acts and the autobiographical accounts in the Pauline letters, and from the absence of any noticeable impact of the teaching of Paul on the theology of either of the two writings. One would have expected an associate of Paul to do better than that.

 

These Gospels have been attributed in traditional order, to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. However, the titles indicated authorship - the Gospel according to Mark, etc. - do not belong to the original compositions but have been added to them later by the Church. The oldest reference to Matthew and Mark as authors of the first two Gospels comes from the fourth-century Church History by Eusebius of Caesarea (3:39,16), who in fact cites Papias, the second century bishop of Hierapolis.

 

We do not know who wrote the gospels. They presently have headings: 'according to Matthew', 'according to Mark', 'according to Luke' and 'according to John'. The Matthew and John who are mentioned were two of the original disciples of Jesus. Mark was a follower of Paul, and possibly also of Peter; Luke was one of Paul's converts. These men - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - really lived, but we do not know that they wrote gospels. Present evidence indicates that the gospels remained untitled until the second half of the second century... The gospels as we have them were quoted in the first half of the second century, but always anonymously (as far as we can tell from the surviving evidence). Names suddenly appear about the year 180. By then there were a lot of gospels, not just our four, and the Christians had to decide which ones were authoritative. This was a major issue, on which there were very substantial differences of opinion. We know who won: those Christians who thought that four gospels, no more and no fewer, were authoritative records of Jesus.

 

------

 

It is unlikely that Christians knew the names of the authors of the gospels for a period of a hundred years or so, but did not mention them in any surviving literature (which is quite substantial). It is also intrinsically probable that the gospels originally headed only 'the gospel [good news] about Jesus Christ' or something of the sort, and did not give the names of their authors. The authors probably wanted to eliminate interest in who wrote the story and to focus the reader on the subject. More important, the claim of anonymous history was higher than that of a named work. In the ancient world, an anonymous book, rather like an encyclopedia article today, implicitly claimed complete knowledge and reliability. It would have reduced impact of the Gospel of Matthew had the author written 'this is my version' instead of 'this is what Jesus said and did.'

 

The author does not give his name but, from the second century, our gospel has been attributed to Luke who, in Philem 24, is called Paul's 'fellow-worker' and in Col. 4:14 is described as 'the beloved physician.' The author of the gospel also wrote acts and the most obvious reading of his use of the first person plural at various points in the second half of the volume (16:10-17;20:5-15;21:1-18;27:1-28:16) would seem to be that on these occasions he was a companion of Paul. Recent years, however, have seen a widespread questioning of this relationship (Vielhauer 1968) The picture of Paul in Acts differs appreciably from what Paul says about himself. Not only is it hard to fit Acts' biographical details into what Paul maintains, but it suggests a different approach to some issues that were at the heart of Paul's beliefs. The author's obvious enthusiasm for Paul is not felt to be equaled by his understanding of him.

 

Although the gospels of the New Testament-- like those discovered at Nag Hammadi-- are attributed to Jesus' followers, no one knows who actually wrote any of them.

 

Proto-orthodox Christians of the second century, some decades after most ofthe New Testament books had been written, claimed that their favorite Gospels had been penned by two of Jesus' disciples - Matthew, the taxcollector, and John, the beloved disciple - and by two friends of the apostles - Mark, the secretary of Peter, and Luke, the travelling companion of Paul.  Scholars today, however, find it difficult to accept this tradition for several reasons.

 

First of all, none of these Gospels makes any such claim about itself.  All four authors chose to keep their identities anonymous.  Would they have done so if they had been eyewitnesses?  This certainly would have been possible, but one would at least have expected an eyewitness or a friend of an eyewitness to authenticate his account by appealing to personal knowledge, for example, by narrating the stories in the first person singular ("On theday that Jesus and I went up to Jerusalem...").

 

Moreover, we know something about the backgrounds of the people whoaccompanied Jesus during most of his ministry.  The disciples appear to havebeen uneducated peasants from Galilee.  Both Simon Peter and John the son of Zebedee, for example, are said to have been peasant fishermen (Mark 1:16-20) who were "uneducated", that is, literally, unable to read and write (Acts4:13).  Now it is true that the Gospels do not represent the most elegant literature from antiquity, but their authors were at least relatively well educated; they write, for the most part, correct Greek.  Could two of them have been disciples?

 

Again, it is possible. Jesus and his apostles, however, appear to have spoken Aramaic, the common language of the Jews in Palestine.  Whether they could also have spoken Greek as a second language is something that scholarshave long debated, but at the very least it is clear that Greek was nottheir native tongue.  The authors of the Gospels, on the other hand, are absolutely fluent in Greek.  Did the apostles go back to school after Jesusdied, overcome years of illiteracy by learning how to read and write at a relatively high level, become skilled in foreign composition, and then later pen the Gospels?  Most scholars consider it somewhat unlikely.

 

Perhaps an even more important aspect of the authorship of the Gospels is the evidence that they appear to preserve stories that were in circulationfor a long period.  This observation certainly applies to narratives forwhich no eyewitnesses were evidently present.  For example, if Pilate andJesus were alone at the trial in John 18:28-19:16, and Jesus was immediatelyexecuted, who told the Fourth Evangelist what Jesus actually said?  An early Christian must have come up with words that seemed appropriate to theoccasion.  The same principle applies to the other accounts of the Gospels as well.  All of them appear to have circulated by word of mouth among Christian converts throughout the Mediterranean world.

 

One of our four authors, Luke, explicitly tells us that he used oral and written sources for his narrative (Luke 1:1-4), and he claims that some of these sources were drawn ultimately from eyewitnesses.  This circumstance raises another interesting question.  Is it likely that authors who extensively used earlier sources for their accounts were themselves eyewitnesses?  Suppose, for example, that Matthew actually was a disciplewho accompanied jesus and witnessed the things he said and did.  Why thenwould he take almost all of his stories, sometimes word for word, from someone else (as we will see in Chapter 6)?

 

In short, it appears that the Gospels have inherited traditions from bothwritten and oral sources, as Luke himself acknowledges, and that thesesources drew from traditions that had been circulating for years, decadeseven, among Christian communities throughout the Mediterranean world.

[chaosrage 0]

(passes out)

[Guest SP-1]

The following is not my final word on a rebuttal. I'm knee deep in school work (as I've been for most of this thread), but I came across this as part of my mid-term on Acts 1:8. It will do for now.

 

  Although the author of Acts does not identify himself, the first person "we passages" (16:10-17; 20:5-15; 21:1-8; 27:1-28:16) . . . indicate  that he was a traveling companion of Paul.  That he was the author of the third Gospel may be concluded from the addressee, Theophilus, and from similarities of interest, language and style.  Church tradition consistently testifies from the second century onward that the author is Luke the beloved physician (Col 4:14), a Gentile Christian often associated with Syrian Antioch.  This identification best explains all the New Testament evidence.

-- Dr. William J. Larkin Jr., The IVPNew Testament Commentary Series: Acts (Grant R. Osborne: series editor, D. Stuart Briscoe, Haddon Robinson: Consulting Editors)

 

[On Larkin: William J. Larkin Jr. (Ph.D., University of Durbam, England) is a professor of New Testament and Greek at Columbia Biblical Seminary and Graduate School of Missions in Columbia, South Carolina. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America, he is the author of Cultural and Biblical Hermeneutics (Baker).]

 

Larkin teaches at my school. Hopefully I'll get to pick his brain on the subject and why he believes Luke is the author. Going to the men who wrote the textbooks seems a little more fun than just going to their books.

[Nighthawk 0]

The thread won't die... but neither would Jesus.

 

If, instead, the knowledge is dependent on the choice, then he wouldn't be able to tell you what you'll eat because you haven't decided on it.  How can it be known what you will do if you haven't made up your free will yet? 

 

There's your flaw. If the knowledge is dependent on the choice, it can't be known, except that God is outside time. His knowledge, dependent on choice, is not dependent on when the choice is made.

 

Yes, but it's all we have to work with.  If we assume that things exist beyond what is tangible than we have to assume everything is true and it'd be impossible to say anything is wrong.  We could all be the dream of a 3 year old kangaroo.  But there's no justification for it outside of human imagination.  So it shouldn't even be put into the mix for consideration.  We can't really debate something that we don't know anything about.

 

Eh, maybe. I was refering more to choice not existing outside the physical and mental action of choosing. If choice doesn't exist outside the choice, then free will doesn't exist. There was a decent essay on that subject a few pages back, inserting God into the equation becomes somewhat of a moot point.

 

But the reason it wouldn't be possible is because I wouldn't be physically capable of controlling my emotions and making myself do it.  If omnipotence was just being able to do whatever it is in your nature to do, then technically I would be omnipotent.  Omnipotence means the power to do everything.

 

But we both know you physically could do it. You could have a seizure, or hallucinate or something. It's in your power, yet outside your power. The difference between your omnipotence and God's is that yours is defined by the relatively short list of things you can do, God's by the relatively short list of things he can not.

 

If his power is just limited to doing things that can be done, then you really can't say he has unlimited power, can you?

 

Sure, you can. The issue of what God will do and what he won't is more important as relates to us than the limit or lack thereof of his power. Whatever limits on his power there are, we know that losing control of our salvation is not one of them, and that's the significance. Saying he's omnipotent is just something you say cause he's God. If it's technically true, or practically true, or whatever, it's praise.

 

Things are concepts, concrete, abstract, real and unreal.  The word "thing" just separates one from another.  I agree with you.  Omnipotence is a self contradictory idea and it can't exist. 

 

Correct, the only way omnipotence can exist is if it's limited. The limits can even be self imposed, as it says that Jesus voluntarily gave up some of his power while on Earth. This flushes well enough with the partial omnipotence theory.

 

They didn't have atheism, but they didn't believe in the God of the bible and he proved himself to them.  That overthrew their belief system and their natural line of thought.  Did they become robots?  Of course they didn't.  Evolution doesn't explain the nonexistance of God anyway, just that some things in the bible are wrong.  Unless evolution proves God wrong, we would just try to explain how the Adam and Eve story fits with evolution, like christians do now.  We'd say that the story wasn't meant to be taken literally, or that Adam and Eve were two little amebas and God just didn't want to confuse the Hebrews, or that the people screwed up his message, or he invented fossils to test people's faith.

 

He didn't really prove himself to them. There were some instances where he proved himself better than their gods, but that doesn't mean they must throw down their gods and worship him. They did, a lot of the time, but that was the way people lived. Lots of gods, some people worshipped weaker gods, some people worshipped stronger gods. Israel's God was pretty good, but they still lost battles. In hindsight we can understand this better than they could at the time.

 

If you belief that there is no God, you cannot rationally accept this belief without evolution. This is how it explains the nonexistance of God. It doesn't prove it, but you can't believe it without it.

 

By that logic, it's okay for us to do whatever we want to our kids, including rape, torture, and kill them because we created them.

 

We didn't create them ex nihilo. Our kids are, strictly speaking, equal in value and status to us, unlike God. Also, it's not such a stretch as many people did and do believe that. They overestimate their importance.

 

So in heaven, we'll understand that our atheist kids deserve to be tortured eternally for their beliefs.  Sounds like a cool place.

 

If you really did understand that, that would be some trick, so yes, quite the cool place to be able to pull that off.

 

What's a billion years to God?  I know you could come up with a reason, but your bullshit reasons are just as good as my bullshit reasons.  We don't have any way of knowing whose bullshit is right, so the odds that you're a disappointment to God and you're going to hell are just as good as my odds.

 

You work under the assumption that the Bible exists in a vacuum, which it doesn't. It doesn't just blanketly state claims with no support. Really, you don't come to a belief in God through analysis and study. The spiritual aspect is the significant. You'll gain more faith that God exists from the book of Proverbs than Genesis. Once there, you can look at what else it says from that vantage point. Is the Depeche Mode God in line with what we understand of the relational God? Not at all. The historical God is an extension of the relational God. You're not working from nothing.

 

He might actually want atheists because he wants humanity to learn reason and compassion and use them to decide to reject him.  Considering all the visciousness in the bible, if he does exist, I think that's the only reasonable explanation.

 

But there's no reason to think that, and although you may say there's no reason to believe the Biblical view, as I've stated above, there is.

 

Telling God to make a paradise without him because he's omnipotent, by the way, is akin to telling him to make 2 + 2 5. Now don't start that again.

 

The filament is a part of the lightbulb so there's nothing wrong with saying the lightbulb produces light.  The moon isn't a light.  It just reflects light.  I can't see how you could call it a source of light because it's not where you really get the light from.

 

Heat is not a part of the lightbulb, it's an element unto itself. Light can be an element unto itself, as such. And I'll be honest with you, I just don't care anymore.

 

I agree. You were the one who brought up your pals Jingus Brian and Rudo.

 

Because you said everyone understood omniscience except me.

 

I meant everyone in the world, not everyone in the thread.

 

A heaven that's "considered by Hebrews as solid and supporting 'waters' above" according to the Hebrew Lexicon.  The bible even says there's waters above it.  For the expanse meaning, it has "Flat as base" and "support" right next to it.  I don't know what the hell  that means but it doesn't sound like it's referring to a sky.

 

Supporting something doesn't make it solid, you know. Water supports a boat, water's not solid. The waters being above it was something else, that's how it was supposed to have been at the time. An expanse (air) supporting an atmospheric layer of water. It fell during the flood.

 

Or they thought it just didn't need to be explained because it was a given.  Everyone believed those things.  Or they didn't know for sure, so they decided not to talk about it.

 

Them believing it means nothing. Whether they wrote it down in the Bible is important, and they didn't. If it was important to God, he'd have had them write the truth. He didn't because it doesn't matter.

 

It's a common thread through most of your arguments that if you can't prove something wrong, it's an equally valid viewpoint.

 

No, just the Bible. It's not the same as mud people, or anything else for that matter. It is unto itself.

 

Here's why the gospels aren't trustable.  Back in that time, Jesus wasn't the only savior God in town.  There were dozens and they all had religious writings about them all over the area.  If you accept the gospels as evidence for Jesus, you'd have to accept that all of those other savior Gods existed, and somehow I doubt that's enough for you to believe that they all went around doing miracles, dying for your sins, and rising from the dead. 

 

Of course there were others. Jesus mentioned them. There are still savior gods today. Walk down the street (well, if you live in a big city) and you'll see ten of them. None of them died for your sins. For one, nobody thought that was what the Messiah would do. The very fact that those other Messiahs are nobodies and Jesus is still around today means something.

 

Not only that, but Jesus is nearly identical to Mithra.  Mithra was born of a virgin.  He was followed by twelve companions.  His disciples and he shared a last supper. He was a great teacher and savior who spoke of salvation throught the father.  He was sacrificed to save mankind and rose from the grave after three days and ascended into heaven.  Wow, that all sounds kind of familiar. Centuries before Jesus came along.  Can you give me a logical reason of why to believe in Mithra over Jesus?

 

Nobody cares about Mithra anymore. There's your reason. I can give you three reasons why that doesn't make any difference, one practical, one logical, and one functional. One, remember that book, The Wreck of the Titan (actually I think that was a retitle)? Does that book proove that the Titanic didn't sink, and everyone who says it did is making it up? Two, something which is true is unnaffected by predication. Three, it's probably a lie anyway. Support Mithra. You can't at all. If you tell me to support Jesus, I can give you 17 pages.

 

No one knows who wrote any of the gospels and nobody can trace any back to the time of Jesus.  The earliest copy of a part of any gospel that we can trace is somewhere around 150 AD.  The consensus (look at Wikipedia) is that the earliest gospel was written about 40 years after Jesus's death.  Just for an example, Luke mentions Bernice at the end of Acts, without explaining who she was.  He expected people to know her.  Bernice didn't become famous until 69AD.  Have you ever played the game of telephone when you were little?  Can you imagine what a 40 year game of telephone would be like?

 

 

Of course they wouldn't be from the time of Jesus... he dies in them. I don't even have to point out that the concensus of the writing of the gospel was 40 years after Jesus' death, you've done it for me. This is amazingly supportive of the historical accuracy of the gospels. 40 years is nothing in this field. For this to be a game of telephone, the message would have to be written down, and at each link the person would stand up and ask the originator if he still had it right before passing it on. You know what saying something about the year 1964 is today? A 40 year game of telephone. Acts isn't a gospel, by the way.

 

They contradict each other hundreds of times.  For instance,

Matthew 27:46

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

 

Luke 23:46

And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.

 

John 19:30

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

 

Which was it?  Who's telling the truth here?

 

All of them. He did all three things, and each writer recorded one. This is exactly why we have four gospels. You and I could stand next to each other on the street corner and witness a car crash. When the police took our statements, we could have completely different observations, both of them true.

 

Same for the old testament.  How did Saul die?

He killed himself by falling on a sword. (1 Samuel 31:4)

The Amalekite killed him, at Saul's request. (2 Samuel 1:7-10)

The Philistines killed him.  (2 Samuel 21:12)

God killed him.  (1 Ch 10:14)

 

He fell on his sword because he had been defeated by the Philistines, which God allowed to happen. The Amalekite lied to gain favor. Not too difficult.

 

If it was history, instead of fantasy, this couldn't happen.

 

It makes it more accurate. We could have had just one of these statements and it be true, this allows a fuller understanding.

 

You're not going to like this one but the fact that it has miracles and people turning into zombies is enough, by itself to dismiss it as a myth.

 

And people do quite regularly. It's primary function is not a history book, though there are elements of that. All of history is full of lies, in a way. Martin Luther King was a whoremongering plagiarist, yet history records him as a great American. Was he not a great American? No, he was a great American and a whoremongering plagiarist. But that's not how the books make him look. But wait, I wouldn't know that unless at least some of the books did. And this was only a few years ago. So if all history is a lie, what can be believed? Only something inspired. It's spiritual truths are self sufficient, and you can take the history on top of that. One validates the other.

 

How can we just throw it away as fantasy when their historians thought it really happened?

 

I don't know, how? I never stated that you must believe something because a lot of people did. It is evidence, and there is evidence that Hercules was a real person (and he probably was, in one form or another). Evidence does not prove, it supports.

 

Yet, Josephus was still a historian, and if a historian did record Jesus down around his time, that would be some kind of evidence, evidence can be good or bad.  The thing is... the first record we have of Josephus mentioning Jesus was from the third century when he was quoted by Eusebius, a bishop who ADMITTED it was good to tell lies to further christianity.  As Brian pointed out, Josephus was not a christian, so he also wouldn't have called Jesus "The christ"

 

I don't think he did. I don't think that warrants throwing out the entire passage, but if you must, it wasn't the only mention of Jesus in his writings. Even if Josephus didn't mention Jesus, it wouldn't mean much, as you said, he was just one of many saviors who messed with the wrong Jews and got himself crucified. Nothing to write home about. Christians were much more important, and increasingly so, and I know you won't try to deny early records of Christians. Don't play games with the word either, because we're talking about Jesus Christ. Their existance in itself supports Christ. Not anything about him, or what he said, but that he existed.

 

Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar existed, but the bible says that Belshazzar is Nebuchadnezzar's son.  According to Babylonian records, that's not true.  Plus he wasn't even a king.  Nabudonius was actually the last king.  Just another example of the bible, even though it can verify some things, not being reliable as history.

 

Remember what I said about how father can mean grandfather or ancestor? Yeah. Also, Belshazzar was a monarch, somewhat of a sitting king as Nabonidas was a traveller and was, at the time, residing away from Babylon. This is even indicated in Daniel by Belshazzar offering the third place in the kingdom. Why not the second? Because he was the second.

 

The Medo-Persian take over didn't happen.  The Medes were defeated by Cyrus years before he took over Babylon.  Darius the Mede wasn't a real person.  However Darius the Persian became king after Cyrus.  Cyrus was the one that conquered Babylon, not a mede.  Daniel was a little confused.

 

This is just muddled records, if anything, the same as when everyone knew Belshazzar wasn't real.

 

Those aren't main characters anyway. 

 

Well, Nebuchadnezzar really was. He's one of the most important characters in the Bible, actually.

 

Jesus, the disciples, Abraham, Moses, Noah, those are main characters.  There's no evidence of any of them.

 

There certainly is evidence of Jesus. I mean seriously, out of all the claims made against Christianity, this is just silly. Jesus never existed? What purpose would making him up serve? How could they convert people to a religion based on a person they supposedly knew, famously taught and performed miracles before crowds of thousands, and was crucified on Passover in Jerusalem (when every Jew travelled to Jerusalem) and nobody had ever seen or heard of him? Come on. And now the disciples weren't real? Who made him up then? What evidence would you expect of Abraham, a desert dwelling nomad of importance to nobody except his descendants? Who would write about him save said descendants, which they certainly did, both Jew and Arab. You know, if Moses didn't exist, then the Israelites weren't slaves. If they were slaves, who freed them? If they weren't, who did the Egyptians keep as slaves? And Noah... honestly man. What corroborating record do you want of a man who lived on the Earth by himself.

 

What evidence is there of Babylonian captivity and exile?  If I'm wrong and some major events can be verified, it'd still just be in the same way that the civil war can be verified in Gone with the Wind.  Does that mean there was a Scarlet, a Rhett, etc.?  Does that make Gone with the Wind history instead of fantasy?

 

So the Bible is historical fiction, now? This is just turning surreal.

 

No Egyptian records of a Moses, the plagues and killing of every first born, the drowning of their army, of an exodus.  Those are huge events.  Why wouldn't they write about them?

 

I dunno, they were ashamed? Duh. There actually is a little indication of those things, in a backhanded way.

 

As far as that thing about Tacitus... did you really read all that? Once again, big deal. Jesus wasn't that important. His followers weren't at first either but became so more and more. Also, the archaeopterix was not a transitional fossil.

 

Okay, I don't read hebrew, but what do you think of this? http://www.aiias.edu/ict/vol_26A/26Acc_433-442.pdf

"c. To further substantiate the absence of gaps in the genealogies of Genesis 5:11, the Hebrew grammatical form of the verb "begat" (yalad in the Hifil) used throughout this chapter is the special causative form that always elsewhere in the OT refers to actual direct physical offspring, i.e. biological father-son relationship (Gen 6:10; Judg 11:1; 1Chro 8:9; 14:3;  2Chro 11:21; 24:3). This is in contrast to the use of yalad in the simple Qal in many of the other biblical genealogies in which cases it can refer to other than direct physical fathering of immediately succeeding offspring."

 

It's not such a big deal, but the very examples they use to support the claim can't be said to definitely refer to direct physical offspring.

 

We have things from Indians that go back 30,000 years, cave paintings and such.

 

Well, those aren't really "records" now are they?

 

Except you know whoever wrote Joshua really believed the sun actually moved and it stood still for a day.  Just like you know the writers of Job thought that the Earth was flat because that's what they all thought. And if the sun really did in fact stop for a whole day, don't you think it would've been recorded in every single culture at the time?

 

Again, it doesn't matter what they believed. I could tell you a lot of other things they believed that were wrong. You can't make these general statements because there are indications of accurate science as vague and undogmatic as these.

Well, I bet a lot of things were written by those cultures that we don't have anymore. Writings get old and fall apart if somebody doesn't make a conscious effort to preserve them. By this logic, remember, you support the flood.

 

That's all true, I'm supposed to be a catholic, even when I was little the Mary thing didn't make much sense.  But the bible describes Jesus as omnipotent and you seem to think there are things he can't do.  Hey, maybe you're not believing in the Jesus of the bible.  Every christian I meet has different beliefs, and they can't all be right.  Maybe no one really is a christian.  Wouldn't that be a shock?

 

It does say he laid aside some of his power. There are a few beliefs you can't deviate from, and many you can. The catholics break the important ones.

 

The things he punishes them for are so silly.  He'll have someone killed because they're picking up sticks on the Sabbith, he'll turn Lot's wife into a pillar of salt for glancing back at a burning city, he'll kill 50,000 for looking at the ark, but going around killing thousands of innocent people, no punishment.  Does God have to command Joshua to utterly destroy everything that breathed because it's a conquest?  That's why it's different.  He didn't just command him to kill soldiers in a war.  He comanded him to murder everybody.  Is murder good or bad?

 

There's no way it was 50000 people, by the way, there weren't even 50000 people in that town. That's a translation error, and a real easy one to make. They weren't innocent, either. Well, it is very clear why God said to kill everybody and everything, but it's a somewhat complicated issue and perhaps I'll discuss it later. It gives it's reasons though, it's not a mystery.

 

Maybe God wants to make it more of a challenge for you by making you look harder for the right religion.  So perhaps the one that makes the least sense and is the least known is the one with the true God.  You grew up hating it but nonetheless, you grew up believing it.  Yeah, I don't doubt that you studied all the major religions and you looked at them unbiased, but I think it's still slightly more believable to you than the rest because it had an influence on you.  The single best indicator of someone's religion is what religion the people he grew up around was.  That means religion is indoctrination, not knowledge.  Again, maybe the true test from God is to break the cultural indoctrination barrier and find the religion that looks like it's the biggest pile of shit.  Then he would know that the ones who end up with him REALLY want to be with him.  Pretend you're Indiana Jones looking for the Holy Grail.  You don't want to just stop on biggest and prettiest looking cup.  You want to pick the one that's the most ordinary, nothing special about it, nothing stands out.  Better include those unknown tribal religions in your search.

 

Ok, if I lived in Atlanta until I was 15 and then moved to St. Louis for 5 years, I don't say I grew up in St. Louis. I never hated Christianity, per se, it was the church, and even then it wasn't really "hate" it was just a fun game to play.

Of course religion is indoctrination, but I disagree with most christians (ie catholics), which is the indoctrination and the prettiest cup combined. Real christianity is a very small and unknown phenomenon. Notice I said real and not true, an important distinction. I'd have absolutely no problem denyng the existance of God and saying we came from nothing and evolved to the state we see before if that made sense, but it just doesn't. God is a given. Regardless of what word you use, abiogensis proves a god at some point in time. Which God? I still study it all the time. It's fascinating.

 

God as my witness, I will respond to the rest of this. Eventually.

[Nighthawk 0]

If they already received the holy spirit, why did he need to baptize him?

 

Because all Christians should be baptized. I never indicated otherwise, I just said it doesn't save you.

 

Peter said they received the holy spirit, therefore nothing should keep them from being baptised with water.  Then he baptised them.  I don't see how that is an example of salvation without baptism.

 

Receiving the Holy Spirit is salvation. It's like saying "They have been saved, so what should stop them from demonstrating their salvation publically with baptism?" Nobody receives the holy spirit until they are saved.

 

If 'and' is used in an exegetic sense, why does every single translation translate it as 'and' instead of 'even'?  Also, do you believe in original sin?

 

For one, I highly doubt you're familiar with every translation. That's not a big deal, but your use of "every single" compels me to point it out. There are very, very many. For one, most translators are not working from a doctrinal standpoint, they're working from a literary standpoint. And in this verse, the most intuitive (but not the only, as my explanation is just as viable, if slightly less likely) translation seems to be as commonly rendered. We must use the rest of the scripture to determine with certainty it's meaning. Also, lots of people do believe in a baptismal regeneration, leaving them happy with the translation.

 

Explain what you mean by original sin. I've seen it used different ways.

 

You keep saying that, it's not getting any truer.

 

Which part? Belief being required or God not needing to sacrifice himself?

 

John 3:18 "He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already"

 

Mark 16:16 "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."

 

Matt. 19:26, "But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God, all things are possible."

 

They're both true in one sense and not true in another. I don't remember what I was specifically refering to anymore.

 

He doesn't stop grieving when he dies.  He wasn't fasting to grieve, he was fasting to try to get God to show mercy.  But he didn't show mercy, and the baby died, so he stopped.  Personally, I think the "I'll go see him but he won't return to me" line is one of the saddest in the bible.

 

Hm, that sounds like a personal interpretation to me.

 

  If he did stop grieving, it can be explained by Absolom being a grown man and the baby just being a newborn baby.  When a baby dies it's sad but it can't really compare to losing a son that you've known for 20 or 30 years.

 

Never known anyone with a dead baby, eh? That's good. But this is one of the least true things you've said.

 

Not the damned, the dead.  Everyone is judged by their deeds along with their beliefs.

 

They're judged differently. All the dead aren't condemned to Hell, you know. Actually they are, the different is that the penalty was paid for them by Jesus.

 

James 2:19,20  "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?

 

James 2:24,  "You see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only."

 

That's contradicted by all the verses that say just belief is good enough, but the one thing they all seem to agree on is that belief is required.

 

Hey, you wanted some contradictions, right?  Clear these up for me O vain man.

 

Faith without works being dead has nothing to do with salvation or justification. Even if it's dead faith, it's still faith. As works are the natural result of faith, faith is outwardly manifested by works, but is independent of them.

 

As for James 2:24, John Calvin said:

 

"It appears certain that [James] is speaking of the manifestation, not of the imputation of righteousness, as if he had said, Those who are justified by faith prove their justification by obedience and good works, not by a bare and imaginary semblance of faith. In one word, he is not discussing the mode of justification, but requiring that the justification of all believers shall be operative. And as Paul contends that men are justified without the aid of works, so James will not allow any to be regarded as Justified who are destitute of good works. . . . Let them twist the words of James as they may, they will never extract out of them more than two propositions: That an empty phantom of faith does not justify, and that the believer, not contented with such an imagination, manifests his justification by good works."

 

Keep in mind the audience of the epistle, and of Paul's epistles where a grace only salvation is most prominantly presented. They are addressing different opposition here.

 

From where do you get that they're talking about infants with the blood of innocents?  Anyway, God judged infants before, for example the Flood where he killed them all.  Weren't Adam and Eve considered innocent?  He had a real big problem with judging them.

 

It's not some wild speculation, I just wanted to save you the trouble of reading the book of Jeremiah, but feel free to anyway, it's a fascinating book, probably my second favorite in the old testament.

Killing infants is not the same as judging them, as it says in the Bible "It is appointed to a man once to die and after this the judgement." So you see that they are independent of each other. A declaration of innocence, as we see here, is not a refusal to judge, but a judgement itself, and in this case the infants are already dead.

You can't bring Adam and Eve into a discussion about infants, as they were adults, and the very exception that prove the rule under discussion.

 

Hell's only in the NT.  God either didn't talk about it or Jesus decided to invent it.  So Job wouldn't have known about hell.

 

Hell either exists or it doesn't. If it doesn't, this conversation is unnecesary, and if it does, it doesn't matter whether it was mentioned or not, as it certainly wasn't invented between the old and new testaments.

However, the fact that it isn't in the old testament does raise an interesting point, one that has a lot of bearing on my somewhat unusual interpretation of Hell, and of the idea that Jesus used Gehenna figuratively.

It is difficult to try to use direct quotes from anyone other than God to support doctrine, and as this is just one example of many, I don't feel the need to belabor it. God didn't correct him, in any case.

 

All the 120,000 people are infants?  Perhaps they're just 120,000 stupid people.  What makes you think he's talking about children?  If he's talking about children, why wouldn't he say it?

 

Stupid people are included as well, which is probably why he didn't say children. I didn't bring it up because I'm trying to keep the conversation lean, but retards fall under the infant salvation dynamic as well.

 

Like I said, God obliterated animals in the flood.  He comanded Saul to smite Amalek and slay "infants and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" and then he punished him for not slaying all the animals.

 

Correct, but as I said, killing is not the same as judging. He did end up destroying Nineveh in the end anyway, in one of the most striking prophecies in the Bible. But animals don't go to Hell, for one (they don't go to heaven either, so I'm not going to make that jump), but the fact is that Nineveh was a city of sin, and God wanted them to repent. Jonah would rather he just kill them all, but God brings up the undeserving, as a seperate class from the sinful and worthy of judgement. It doesn't mean he will never kill them, but it does indicate that he won't condemn them.

 

There's historical veracity on that piece of paper I wrote on, so now my penis is 4000 miles long and Elisha is pregnant with my kid.  Awesome!

 

Oh wait, that doesn't make it any more true and what I said is still on the same level as hobbits, just like God.     

 

You're ducking the point which was that you said there was "asolutely no evidence" for the Bible which is blatantly false.

I think you don't fully understand what you want. You tried to present the Bible as historical fiction, now you're back to fantasy. In your Gone With the Wind example, is there any reason to believe those things couldn't have happened, other than what we know about the book and it's writing? No. There are reasons to believe hobbits don't exist. Your reasoning as to verification of the Bible as untrue was that it contains things of a miraculous nature, which are by nature unprovable, as if they were provable, they would be natural and cease to be miraculous. So God appears in a book of fantasy, making him false, and it is confirmed as false by it's containment of things which are not possible, not natural, are in fact, supernatural. So your stance is that the Bible isn't true because God can't exist, and God can't exist because the Bible isn't true. Something's wrong with this picture.

[Nighthawk 0]

Okay, so I didn't, but it's there for you if you want to see it.  Ever did those bacteria experiments in biology class?  If you did, you proved evolution.  And evolution has to work for the flood to work.  Fossils show that creatures tens of thousands of years age were pretty much the same as they are now though.

 

I assume you remember that I don't deny evolution. I deny an atheistic abiogenesis (which shouldn't even be a question) and common ancestry.

 

Sure, just like you decide that God is good and he exists on your whim.  What makes you think he is good?  Because he said he was good?  That's not enough.  You have to judge him by his actions, the things he did, the things he commanded, the world he created (not that the world is bad, but nature itself is cruel.  Someone would have to be cruel to create a world on purpose where creatures have to kill and eat each other to stay alive.), and the severe punishments he gives you for rejecting him.

 

Circular reasoning because without God there is no good or bad. If there is no God, then something like an earthquake is not bad, it just is. If you accept that this can be the case, what does allowing for a God change? You might say it becomes bad based on the standards which are implied by God's existance, however, those standards are that God is the definition of good. So, if God doesn't exist, there is no evil, and if he does, he is not cruel or evil. That's inescapable.

 

Because no crime could ever fit that harsh of a punishment.  Especially if you didn't even DO anything, you just had a THOUGHT that God didn't like.  Fine, you don't think David's baby was tortured.  But you know he was killed to punish David and you know that God has killed and commanded infants to be killed and you know he advocated killing people who didn't believe in him.  If you think God is good, you have to think these things are good and it's good for us to go around killing infants to punish their parents.  After all they go to heaven maybe, so it doesn't matter.  If you don't agree, then God can't be good, and by definition he would be a contradiction, so it would be impossible for him to exist.  I've learned that those things are wrong in my 20 or whatever years, and you have too.  Even if you say you didn't, you're only letting God's opinion override your sense of right and wrong.

 

For one, that's all negated by the fact that things can be good an just for one person to do and wrong for another. Pretending that we are all under the same standard is just playing dumb. And God's standard, of course, is entirely different from our own. Your sense of right and wrong couldn't exist without God, as demonstrated above, it would be, at best, a sense of self-preservation. This is all rooted in an underestimation of God and an overestimation of yourself.

 

No, I don't think that would be a very nice thing to do to my kids.  I got it from the sappy idea of God from the NT where Jesus calls God love.  Making billions of people suffer for an eternity isn't love.  Just like hot isn't cold.  Wet isn't dry. strong isn't weak, etc..

 

Just like if everyone deserves to suffer for an eternity, allowing some of them to escape it isn't justice. But God is that too.

 

If not believing is the same as rejecting, how do you explain that if God proved came down from heaven, I would still reject him?  Well.  I can't absolutely say for sure that I would, maybe I'd be too scared to reject him.  But if I did accept him, it would only be out of fear of torture, not because I loved him.

 

Disbelief is always rejection, rejection is not always disbelief.

 

It's a gift but only given to people who do something for him in return.

 

Even if that were true, you're being offered a chance out of Hell. Are you going to sit there and evaluate it? "If not going to Hell means I have to admit I was wrong, I'd rather go to Hell!" What are you, 15?

 

Under our definition for cruel and our own court system, it would still be cruel.

 

Well I say that the definition of cruel is donating money to charity.

 

He has the authority to decide if he deserves it, just like I do.  I'm not going to say he's wrong just because I'm the one torturing him.  The difference is I'm not perfect or omnipotent.  If I could save those 1000s of people without torturing him, I would.  Why wouldn't God?  Because he's cruel.

 

Or maybe you're just a simpering hippy?

 

It sounded like you were saying if we had the authority to say that rejecting God doesn't deserve punishment, it would be up for us to decide the punishment.  In that case we couldn't say whether or not anything's wrong unless we're the ones doing whatever it was we thought was wrong. 

 

That's not what I meant, but the point has been fleshed by now, so we can drop it. I meant that you were implying both of those things idependently.

 

Is community service pain and suffering?  If it is, it isn't very much.  Can you say the same about hell?  No, you can't.  Does God have the power to stop it?  Yep, he does.  That's the reality.  God is cruel.  If on the other hand he has to do it because it's in his nature to send people to hell, then it's just in God's nature to be cruel.  Not much difference.  To think that he does exist, you basically have to twist your mind around to think that good is evil.  Otherwise he wouldn't have created it or allow it to exist, and there wouldn't be an evil place called hell for evil people that God made knowing they would be evil.  Unless it's good to have evil.  And it can't be.  That makes no sense. 

 

Oh what a tangled web we weave... this is all predicated on the idea that Hell is evil. The only way to come to this conclusion is the belief that inflicting suffering is evil. You are in fact, of this opinion on the surface, and have said as much, although it is untrue. By this definition, a dentist is cruel and evil. So now you are forced to admit that such classification is not regardless of circumstance. This establishes that Hell is not evil as a concept unto itself, it becomes a question of how it is applied. You would probably amend your stance to say that needless pain and suffering is evil, so the question becomes, what is needless? It's now a question of justice. You know that you can't sit in judgement on who deserves Hell and who does't, so you've taken the stance that nobody deserves it. Why is this? What is it about a person that makes them so inherantly good that they are beyond deservance of Hell?

 

Alright, I'll assume it's true.  God needed to sacifice himself and had no choice but to pay for our sins with a sacrifice.  Wait, my brain just exploded.  Ok, let me try again. God had to do this.  I would wonder why he just did it for people who believed in him and not everyone.  It's good that he did it for some people, but that wouldn't make my atheist sons and daughters being tormented in hell, or the jews Hitler gassed going to hell while Hitler goes to heaven any better. 

 

I don't know where you get the idea that Hitler went to Heaven, for one. At most he was loosely described as a Catholic and even that's not true. You didn't really address what I said, but instead reiterated the flawed viewpoint that heaven is something to be earned. You say on the one hand that nobody deserves hell, but on the other hand it's worse than the gassed jews went there and not Hitler. So Hitler deserved Hell more than them? I thought nobody deserved it at all. The extension of what you're saying is that everyone deserves heaven. How could you support this? If God saved everyone, no questions asked, then he's not really saving them from anything, as there was no chance of them going to Hell anyway. And if he did that, everyone would have some innate requirement of salvation.

 

This is why I hate Christianity.

 

Precisely. You hate it because it's intolerant. It tells you what you don't want to hear. You take offense to the fact that someone would tell you that you're going to Hell and need to change your life. You're flabbergasted at the unmitigated gall. If you were a worthless wretch, on the other hand, you should be on your knees giving thanks that someone would deign to show mercy on your pathetic soul. You hate Christianity because if it were true, you'd have to admit that you need it. Closing your eyes and sticking your fingers in your ears won't make it go away, however.

If you think everyone should be positive and love each other and there shouldn't be any mean messages of judgement, you're gay and I want you to go to Hell.

 

Yeah, and "God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie" - 2 Th:11-12

 

God is a liar, the bible even says it, why believe anything he says?

 

Hey, you know what else the Bible says? "God [...] is [...] Satan."

 

OMG WTF?!?

[iggymcfly 0]

This is one of the longest threads ever. One time I actually tried to read all the way through it and catch up with the discussion, but I only got to about page 9 before I finally fell asleep.

 

Anyway, the basic point is that the idea that God is loving, and the idea that God sends people to hell for not believing in him are utterly contradictory.

 

If there is a subsequent point that seems as relevant, it's that no matter what you believe in, it is obvious that hundreds of different religions have been made up that contain the common denominators that they comfort people about their fear of death, and leave responsibilities to a higher power. The idea that hundreds were made up and one was supernaturally inspired is much less likely than the idea that they were all made up.

 

Whether or not you can utterly "prove" that your particular fairy tale is false, does not mean that any rational and impartial observer would not determine that there is no God.

[Nighthawk 0]

Fool.

[iggymcfly 0]

Name-calling's always a good tactic to resort to when you can't refute a rational point. Way to go, Rat's Milk.

[EL BRUJ0 0]

^ghey

[Guest SP-1]

This is one of the longest threads ever. One time I actually tried to read all the way through it and catch up with the discussion, but I only got to about page 9 before I finally fell asleep.

 

Anyway, the basic point is that the idea that God is loving, and the idea that God sends people to hell for not believing in him are utterly contradictory.

False. You apply a human distortion of love to God. It doesn't work that way. God defines love for us to understand. We don't define love and use that to try and understand God.

 

God's sense of Justice is a part of His sense of love, as it should be. And lucky for all of us, God's sense of Love tends to govern His sense of justice. The two are undeniably bonded and this is the way it should be. If not, there would be no discipline. There would be no right or wrong.

 

We are sinful. Sin demands justice. Sin demands complete death, spiritual and physical. And that justice is delivered for those who refuse the way out of it that God, in His LOVE provided in Christ.

 

And that's the problem. IDRM hit it on the head in a reply to chaos. In our own rebellion against God, we don't like to be told that we're rebelling, and we don't like to be told that it's wrong, especially when it's coming from the very One who made the rules since forever. And we especially don't like to be told that it's so wrong we deserve death. The worst part, however, is that we are so rebellious and so determined to fly in the face of God and do it on our own that we will almost always absolutely refuse to choose the loving path to life and freedom that God HIMSELF set up and completed because HE LOVED US ENOUGH TO DO IT FOR US BECAUSE WE ARE UNABLE TO DO IT ON OUR OWN.

 

You want the real definition of love? Look at the Cross. GOD contained Himself in the lowly form of a man somehow, laid aside some of His attributes to walk among us and teach us, to give us THE example for EVERYTHING. And then, because since the Garden of Eden itself and BEFORE, He had a plan to set things right, HE paid the price for sin HIMSELF by allowing himself to be PUT TO DEATH. He did it ALL. because HE. LOVES. US.

 

Yet He's God. And even death could not hold Him.

 

But our own sinful nature finds us out because we want to rebel against God's own love and replace it with our own half-assed definition that allows for all kinds of moral atrocity with none of the justice of moral completeness. That is not love. It is nonsense.

[Nighthawk 0]

Name-calling's always a good tactic to resort to when you can't refute a rational point. Way to go, Rat's Milk.

IDRM hit it on the head in a reply to chaos

 

pay

 

attention

 

u

 

ghey

 

Fool.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

500th post.

 

I didn't read any of this thread, nor will I now.

[chaosrage 0]

Receiving the Holy Spirit is salvation. It's like saying "They have been saved, so what should stop them from demonstrating their salvation publically with baptism?" Nobody receives the holy spirit until they are saved.

Prove it. And can you receive the holy spirit without a belief a God?

 

For one, I highly doubt you're familiar with every translation. That's not a big deal, but your use of "every single" compels me to point it out. There are very, very many. For one, most translators are not working from a doctrinal standpoint, they're working from a literary standpoint. And in this verse, the most intuitive (but not the only, as my explanation is just as viable, if slightly less likely) translation seems to be as commonly rendered. We must use the rest of the scripture to determine with certainty it's meaning. Also, lots of people do believe in a baptismal regeneration, leaving them happy with the translation.

 

Every translation that I looked at. You can compare about 20 translations at blueletterbible, crosswalk, etc.. and they all have 'and' and none have 'even'. Even the crappy liberal translations that Spiderpoet likes has it as 'and'.

 

Explain what you mean by original sin. I've seen it used different ways.

 

Babies are born sinners because of Adam and Eve. So they have to be baptised. If they aren't, and they die, then they go to the lake of fire.

 

Hm, that sounds like a personal interpretation to me.

 

Right, but so is yours. Not very strong evidence that the baby went to heaven when we can't even be sure if David was sad or not.

 

Never known anyone with a dead baby, eh? That's good. But this is one of the least true things you've said.

 

If you say so. It sounded like they didn't even have time to give the baby a name. That can't compare.

 

They're judged differently. All the dead aren't condemned to Hell, you know. Actually they are, the different is that the penalty was paid for them by Jesus.

 

Exactly, you made it sound like when people who don't believe in God die, they get judged by deeds so babies might go to heaven. But really everyone gets judged by their belief and their deeds if you believe one set of verses or just their belief if you believe the other sets of verses. If you weren't saying that, what were you saying? *Tries to hold back on that last sentence*

 

Faith without works being dead has nothing to do with salvation or justification. Even if it's dead faith, it's still faith. As works are the natural result of faith, faith is outwardly manifested by works, but is independent of them.

 

The devils have dead faith. Are they in heaven? Nope. If faith is dead, how can you expect to be saved with it?

 

As for James 2:24, John Calvin said:

 

"It appears certain that [James] is speaking of the manifestation, not of the imputation of righteousness, as if he had said, Those who are justified by faith prove their justification by obedience and good works, not by a bare and imaginary semblance of faith. In one word, he is not discussing the mode of justification, but requiring that the justification of all believers shall be operative. And as Paul contends that men are justified without the aid of works, so James will not allow any to be regarded as Justified who are destitute of good works. . . . Let them twist the words of James as they may, they will never extract out of them more than two propositions: That an empty phantom of faith does not justify, and that the believer, not contented with such an imagination, manifests his justification by good works."

 

Keep in mind the audience of the epistle, and of Paul's epistles where a grace only salvation is most prominantly presented. They are addressing different opposition here.

 

Still a contradiction. Paul says to be justified, you just need belief. And James says you need works along with belief.

 

It's not some wild speculation, I just wanted to save you the trouble of reading the book of Jeremiah, but feel free to anyway, it's a fascinating book, probably my second favorite in the old testament.

Killing infants is not the same as judging them, as it says in the Bible "It is appointed to a man once to die and after this the judgement." So you see that they are independent of each other. A declaration of innocence, as we see here, is not a refusal to judge, but a judgement itself, and in this case the infants are already dead.

You can't bring Adam and Eve into a discussion about infants, as they were adults, and the very exception that prove the rule under discussion.

 

They were adults, but just like infants they didn't know right from wrong. They were innocent and God didn't really give a shit, did he? He judged them. God judged the entire world as wicked, which is why he killed them in the flood. If he would have judged everyone except for infants and animals, he would've let them live. He didn't though. Whether or not they went to hell, who knows. But it's BS to say that God won't judge infants or animals.

 

Hell either exists or it doesn't. If it doesn't, this conversation is unnecesary, and if it does, it doesn't matter whether it was mentioned or not, as it certainly wasn't invented between the old and new testaments.

However, the fact that it isn't in the old testament does raise an interesting point, one that has a lot of bearing on my somewhat unusual interpretation of Hell, and of the idea that Jesus used Gehenna figuratively.

It is difficult to try to use direct quotes from anyone other than God to support doctrine, and as this is just one example of many, I don't feel the need to belabor it. God didn't correct him, in any case.

 

So hell might not exist at all now? In the OT, no one talked about eternal torment, but in the NT, Jesus did. What can I say? This is why Jews don't believe in hell. The flames might be figurative but the part about eternal torment can't be. If the flames are figurative, they would be figurative for the eternal torment. Maybe God just didn't feel talking about hell in the OT. Maybe you should be Jewish instead of a Christian. I just said outloud that there is a hell and God didn't correct me either! What's up with that?

 

Correct, but as I said, killing is not the same as judging. He did end up destroying Nineveh in the end anyway, in one of the most striking prophecies in the Bible. But animals don't go to Hell, for one (they don't go to heaven either, so I'm not going to make that jump), but the fact is that Nineveh was a city of sin, and God wanted them to repent. Jonah would rather he just kill them all, but God brings up the undeserving, as a seperate class from the sinful and worthy of judgement. It doesn't mean he will never kill them, but it does indicate that he won't condemn them.

 

But killing is the same as judging. He judged that every living thing in Amalek needed to be smited because "he remembers what it did to Israel". And listen to what you're saying. Jonah wanted him to kill them all, not condemn them. And God didn't want to do it. But then he changed his mind a century later. There's no indication that he won't condemn them.

 

You're ducking the point which was that you said there was "asolutely no evidence" for the Bible which is blatantly false.

I think you don't fully understand what you want. You tried to present the Bible as historical fiction, now you're back to fantasy. In your Gone With the Wind example, is there any reason to believe those things couldn't have happened, other than what we know about the book and it's writing? No. There are reasons to believe hobbits don't exist.

 

Historical fiction is still fiction. Gone with the Wind is just as true as Lord of the Rings. They're both made up stories. One is just based on real events and the other isn't. The fact that the Civil War was real isn't any more evidence for GWTW being true than finding hobbits would be evidence that LOTR was true. Speaking of, Yahoo! News - Remains of New Species of Hobbit-Sized Human Found

 

Your reasoning as to verification of the Bible as untrue was that it contains things of a miraculous nature, which are by nature unprovable, as if they were provable, they would be natural and cease to be miraculous. So God appears in a book of fantasy, making him false, and it is confirmed as false by it's containment of things which are not possible, not natural, are in fact, supernatural. So your stance is that the Bible isn't true because God can't exist, and God can't exist because the Bible isn't true. Something's wrong with this picture.

 

Yep, I told you that you wouldn't like it. But if you don't agree with it, you have to accept that the story of King Arthur and the Illad are just as likely to be true and just as reliable as real history. If you read a book about the civil war and you have no idea who wrote it, but it has dragons and zombies in it, you can bet that it probably is not true. I never said God can't exist because the bible isn't true. I said there's no evidence of God and the bible isn't it. Just because dragons are in a civil war story doesn't mean there's evidence of dragons. Understand?

[Guest SP-1]

"Liberal translations"

 

This should be interesting.

 

Such as? And when did you get a look at my bookshelf?

 

Plus: I really love how authoritative you like to word things in your replies.

Edited November 2, 2004 by SP-1

[chaosrage 0]

I assume you remember that I don't deny evolution. I deny an atheistic abiogenesis (which shouldn't even be a question) and common ancestry.

 

I remember, but you also said we blindly believe evolution after that. The theory of evolution and the theory of abiogenesis are totally different theories. What do you have against abiogenesis anyway?

 

Circular reasoning because without God there is no good or bad. If there is no God, then something like an earthquake is not bad, it just is. If you accept that this can be the case, what does allowing for a God change? You might say it becomes bad based on the standards which are implied by God's existance, however, those standards are that God is the definition of good. So, if God doesn't exist, there is no evil, and if he does, he is not cruel or evil. That's inescapable.

 

The only way an earthquake isn't bad or good is if things just happened. But if a God was in charge, then the world was made a certain way to have earthquakes. That's bad. And that's the difference. He brutally kills people on purpose, which is cruel. That's an inescapable fact. To some people, cruelty might not be evil though. It's hardly an act of love however. It's an act of supreme indifference to us at best. Evolution is cold and brutal and definitely not a loving act. Any being who would create it on purpose is really a sadistic fuck. Yet by definition, God couldn't be. So again, it's a contradiction, like saying you have a squared triangle. If it was square, it wouldn't be a triangle. A square triangle can't exist. Neither can the Christian God.

 

You didn't answer the question though. WHAT makes you think he's good? How do you know he's not insane or just plain lying? He could just be a demon trying to trick you into joining him. (And if you can't judge him for yourself, how would you know he wasn't?) You might just be walking right into his trap. Since we don't know, it's just as likely that the definition of God is evil. If I told you that a serial killer who killed 200 people was good, and told you that you can't say he isn't good because by definition GOOD IS WHAT HE IS, would you just take my word for it and call him a good person? Or would you think I was a lunatic?

 

For one, that's all negated by the fact that things can be good an just for one person to do and wrong for another. Pretending that we are all under the same standard is just playing dumb. And God's standard, of course, is entirely different from our own. Your sense of right and wrong couldn't exist without God, as demonstrated above, it would be, at best, a sense of self-preservation. This is all rooted in an underestimation of God and an overestimation of yourself.

 

Well it's not negated by it because it just isn't true. Simple logic. If action "A" is evil then if being #1 performs that action he is evil. So why, when being #2 performs action "A' he isn't evil? If action "A" is evil then any being who performs it is evil. Let's say A is killing infants to punish their parents. That doesn't mean some crazy person won't think A is good. What it does mean is if you consider A to be good, it has to be good for everyone to do A. You really think nothing could be considered right or wrong without a God? What the hell?

 

Just like if everyone deserves to suffer for an eternity, allowing some of them to escape it isn't justice. But God is that too.

 

But no one deserves to suffer for an eternity. Why do think everyone would deserve to suffer? Because Adam and Eve ate an apple?

 

Disbelief is always rejection, rejection is not always disbelief.

 

Nah, rejection has nothing to do with disbelief. If he showed up one day, I would choose to either accept or reject him regardless of what I believed before that. In fact, the only way you could accept or reject him is if you believed in him.

 

Even if that were true, you're being offered a chance out of Hell. Are you going to sit there and evaluate it? "If not going to Hell means I have to admit I was wrong, I'd rather go to Hell!" What are you, 15?

 

The point is he ISN'T offering me a chance. He's only offering people that believe in him a chance. And I wouldn't be emotionally capable of believing it even if I wanted to. You want me to believe in something, then you have to make sense and you have to have evidence that it's true.

 

Well I say that the definition of cruel is donating money to charity.

 

What about donating money to charity is pain and suffering?

 

Or maybe you're just a simpering hippy?

 

If I were a hippie, I'd say all death and torture is bad. I would say no one should be tortured at all even if thousands of people could be saved. But I don't say that.

 

Oh what a tangled web we weave... this is all predicated on the idea that Hell is evil. The only way to come to this conclusion is the belief that inflicting suffering is evil.

 

No, it's predicated on the idea that evil exists. Is it a good to create evil, evil people, evil things, Satan, etc..? If it was, evil would have to be good.

 

You are in fact, of this opinion on the surface, and have said as much, although it is untrue. By this definition, a dentist is cruel and evil. So now you are forced to admit that such classification is not regardless of circumstance. This establishes that Hell is not evil as a concept unto itself, it becomes a question of how it is applied. You would probably amend your stance to say that needless pain and suffering is evil, so the question becomes, what is needless?

 

Instead of needless, I'd say pointless. And it's been my stance all along. You're mixing up cruel and evil. I already explained what's pointless about hell. So no need to do it again.

 

It's now a question of justice. You know that you can't sit in judgement on who deserves Hell and who does't, so you've taken the stance that nobody deserves it. Why is this? What is it about a person that makes them so inherantly good that they are beyond deservance of Hell?

 

Already answered this too. No crime could fit that harsh of a punishment. It's not that people are inherently good. It's that there's no way anyone could do something bad enough to deserve an eternity of suffering. This is all pretty irrelevant because hell isn't sentenced to killers or terrible criminals, but to honest people and murderers alike just for making the best decision they can make using the limited intelligence and knowledge that God gave them. That's not justice by any definition of the word.

 

I don't know where you get the idea that Hitler went to Heaven, for one. At most he was loosely described as a Catholic and even that's not true. You didn't really address what I said, but instead reiterated the flawed viewpoint that heaven is something to be earned. You say on the one hand that nobody deserves hell, but on the other hand it's worse than the gassed jews went there and not Hitler. So Hitler deserved Hell more than them? I thought nobody deserved it at all. The extension of what you're saying is that everyone deserves heaven. How could you support this? If God saved everyone, no questions asked, then he's not really saving them from anything, as there was no chance of them going to Hell anyway. And if he did that, everyone would have some innate requirement of salvation.

 

Nobody does deserve it, but if people did, it would still be wrong because of who gets sent there. That's not a contradiction, just two separate arguments. I'm saying it's not true, but even if it was true, it wouldn't matter. Hitler was a Catholic, he grew up as an altar boy, and said he was killing Jews in the name of God. I can give you 10 pages of quotes showing you that he was a Catholic. That doesn't matter either though. Hitler was only an example. If he was a catholic, he would go to heaven, while the jews went to hell and you would have to be okay with it. That's the important part.

 

While we're at it, if Hitler gave the Jews a choice to renounce their faith and become nazis, would you call them 15 year olds for evaluating that choice? What makes what Hitler did different from what God does? There's no difference between the two, except that Hitler only condemned people to their death because of their beliefs, while God condemns people to eternal suffering for their beliefs. That makes God about a million times worse.

 

And I didn't address what you said because it was all based on an invalid point. That we deserve hell and need to have someone killed for us in the first place. I can't bend my mind enough to assume that's true because I know it isn't true. That's like saying "Pretend Hitler spared a million Jews and only killed 5 million instead of 6. Now assume that they all deserved to be killed. That makes him loving for sparing some, doesn't it?"

 

Saying that no one deserves to go to hell isn't the same thing as everyone deserves to go to heaven. I've said a bunch of times that he could create an Earth-like for people who didn't believe in him or don't want to be with him. We're proof that he can do it. I don't believe in him and as far as I know, I'm not in hell right now. Besides that, we know he can do it because he's omnipotent.

 

Precisely. You hate it because it's intolerant. It tells you what you don't want to hear. You take offense to the fact that someone would tell you that you're going to Hell and need to change your life. You're flabbergasted at the unmitigated gall. If you were a worthless wretch, on the other hand, you should be on your knees giving thanks that someone would deign to show mercy on your pathetic soul. You hate Christianity because if it were true, you'd have to admit that you need it. Closing your eyes and sticking your fingers in your ears won't make it go away, however.

If you think everyone should be positive and love each other and there shouldn't be any mean messages of judgement, you're gay and I want you to go to Hell.

 

You were going good until you got to the part about "if it were true". Do you hate Santa because if it were true, you would need to be good or you wouldn't get any presents? Of course not because you don't think it is true, so who cares. I don't hate it because of that. I hate it because it tries to get you to be a christian out of threats of torture instead of God being such a good and wonderful thing that if you believe you'll get to be with him and be happy forever. It speaks volumes about what christians themselves believe. A christian should look at that verse you quoted and think I don't want any fucking thing to do with that prick. But their own fear of what he'll do to them keeps them from doing it. That's just sad.

 

Let's take the Santa analogy and change it around a little bit. We won't say he'll reward kids for being good and punish them for being bad because if God did that, well... it would at least make some kind of sense. So let's say he molests little children. If you don't leave milk and cookies out for Santa, he'll molest you. I leave milk and cookies out for Santa, and you should too. Since Santa shows his love by not molesting me, I worship him. If he molests you, it's your own fault for not giving him any cookies. You can't say that he's wrong for doing it. It's justice. You had the chance to give him milk and cookies and be saved but you didn't. Now you deserve what you get. THIS IS WHAT YOU SOUND LIKE TO ME!

 

Hey, you know what else the Bible says? "God [...] is [...] Satan."

 

OMG WTF?!?

 

Yes, I know. It's really the only thing that makes sense if you think about it, heh.

[chaosrage 0]

"Liberal translations"

 

This should be interesting.

 

Such as? And when did you get a look at my bookshelf?

 

Plus: I really love how authoritative you like to word things in your replies.

And you don't word things as authoritative?

 

The NASB for one.

[chaosrage 0]

This is one of the longest threads ever. One time I actually tried to read all the way through it and catch up with the discussion, but I only got to about page 9 before I finally fell asleep.

 

Anyway, the basic point is that the idea that God is loving, and the idea that God sends people to hell for not believing in him are utterly contradictory.

False. You apply a human distortion of love to God. It doesn't work that way. God defines love for us to understand. We don't define love and use that to try and understand God.

Hey, this isn't authoritative, right? If you get to be authoritative, then I get to be it too.

 

False. We do define love and if you say otherwise, then you're just a robot believing anyone tells you. What you're saying is that we can't judge God because our standards are half-assed and distorted. If that's true, then you can't call him good or bad. You don't know if he's lying or telling the truth. You have no opinion at all about him. This is like the 10th time I've explained this to you this year.

 

God's sense of Justice is a part of His sense of love, as it should be. And lucky for all of us, God's sense of Love tends to govern His sense of justice. The two are undeniably bonded and this is the way it should be. If not, there would be no discipline. There would be no right or wrong.

 

Jeffrey Dahmer's sense of Justice is a part of His sense of love, as it should be. And lucky for all of us, Dahmer's sense of Love tends to govern His sense of justice. He didn't really want to murder and eat people but he had to out of his sense of love. It's justice at the same time because they deserved to be eaten for being so tasty. The two are undeniably bonded and this is the way it should be. If not, there would be no discipline. There would be no right or wrong. Makes as much sense.

 

We are sinful. Sin demands justice. Sin demands complete death, spiritual and physical. And that justice is delivered for those who refuse the way out of it that God, in His LOVE provided in Christ.

 

We aren't. Our ancestors sinned. Well sort of. Turns out they were innocent and couldn't tell good from evil. Do innocent people deserve complete death, spirtual and physical? Guess they might if you're too scared of what might happen to you after you die to think anything else.

 

And that's the problem. IDRM hit it on the head in a reply to chaos. In our own rebellion against God, we don't like to be told that we're rebelling, and we don't like to be told that it's wrong, especially when it's coming from the very One who made the rules since forever. And we especially don't like to be told that it's so wrong we deserve death.

 

Of course. How would you like it if a bunch of assholes came up to you and told that you deserve death for being a christian and rebelling against atheism?

 

The worst part, however, is that we are so rebellious and so determined to fly in the face of God and do it on our own that we will almost always absolutely refuse to choose the loving path to life and freedom that God HIMSELF set up and completed because HE LOVED US ENOUGH TO DO IT FOR US BECAUSE WE ARE UNABLE TO DO IT ON OUR OWN.

 

You want the real definition of love? Look at the Cross. GOD contained Himself in the lowly form of a man somehow, laid aside some of His attributes to walk among us and teach us, to give us THE example for EVERYTHING. And then, because since the Garden of Eden itself and BEFORE, He had a plan to set things right, HE paid the price for sin HIMSELF by allowing himself to be PUT TO DEATH. He did it ALL. because HE. LOVES. US.

 

Again we have God sacrificing himself in order to save us from.. HIMSELF, because he loves us. Can you please stop saying this shit? Of all the things in this thread, this is the most embarassing to read because I know you honestly believe it and it's the most insulting because you expect us to be dumb enough to believe it too.

 

Yet He's God. And even death could not hold Him.

 

But our own sinful nature finds us out because we want to rebel against God's own love and replace it with our own half-assed definition that allows for all kinds of moral atrocity with none of the justice of moral completeness. That is not love. It is nonsense.

 

Your loving God tortures newborns to punish their parents, killed off the entire world with a flood, tested Abraham's faith by seeing if he was willing to murder his son, killed the firstborn of all the Egyptians, created earthquakes and diseases, and ordered the slaughter of infants and animals. That makes me wonder what the word love means to you.

 

Question. (that I know you won't answer) If God didn't bribe you with the promise of eternal life, would you still worship him and call him love?

 

If Satan offered you a better deal, would you switch sides and call him love instead?

[Guest SP-1]

The NASB is liberal?

 

That kills most of your credibility right there and in any academic discussion on the bible. Any translator worth his degree would laugh in your face and walk away upon hearing you say that. The NASB is the most LITERAL English translation on the market. So much so that some people don't like to read it because it can be hard on the eyes and doesn't always flow so well.

 

That's the most ignorant thing you've said this entire thread, chaos.

 

Just what do you consider a non-liberal translation of the Bible?

 

 

You answer your questions with unfounded authority and a severe, blinding bias. I answer with the authority of academic and hermeneutical study of the Word of God, without bias of denominational influence. I set out to see for myself whether the Bible was trustworthy and therfore authoritative and it has proven itself to be so historically, culturally, and in preservation and internal unity. Were this not the case and were sound theology not built on this authoritative base, two men wouldn't be able to hold their own for 17 pages of this thread. Yet we have.

 

I speak with authority because I have authority. You twist things and, when all else fails, try to bully your way through a discussion. Humanity does not define anything. We have nothing to apply to God. The created does not have the authority or the knowledge to tell the creator how things are, or are going to be.

 

As for your question: Satan has no better deals. I say that with the above authority and with the authority of personal experience. I was involved with his kind before I was involved with Jesus. Satan is nothing but a liar, a thief, and a killer. Life goes beyond the best deal. Life goes back to truth and a correct view of The Way Things Are. Jesus and only Jesus provides that because He defined it. All Satan can and will ever do is try to twist that around to vindicate our rebellious desires and tendencies because we are fallen and sinful creatures.

[Stephen Joseph 0]

Burn. Dood. Burn.

 

Someone not named SP-1 is getting PWNED

[TheBigSwigg 0]

The devils have dead faith.

 

I'm pretty sure their faith isn't dead. They know that God's there.

[chaosrage 0]

The NASB is liberal?

 

That kills most of your credibility right there and in any academic discussion on the bible. Any translator worth his degree would laugh in your face and walk away upon hearing you say that. The NASB is the most LITERAL English translation on the market. So much so that some people don't like to read it because it can be hard on the eyes and doesn't always flow so well.

 

That's the most ignorant thing you've said this entire thread, chaos.

 

A lot of times the NASB takes the translation that makes the religion look the best, not paying any attention to what the Hebrews who wrote it and read it believed. Example: Using the expanse meaning for raquiya instead of firmament. Hebrews didn't think God was talking about an expanse, they thought the sky was solid. Ratsach as murder. Fruit depart from her as prematurely. Translating Ra as calamity instead of evil. Etc.. As for a lot of scholars thinking it's the most literal, you said the same thing about most scholars believing in the authorship of Luke. Then I gave you a bunch of quotes from scholars saying just the opposite. I'm not going to look for quotes or argue about it anymore than that because this is really off topic.

 

You answer your questions with unfounded authority and a severe, blinding bias. I answer with the authority of academic and hermeneutical study of the Word of God, without bias of denominational influence. I set out to see for myself whether the Bible was trustworthy and therfore authoritative and it has proven itself to be so historically, culturally, and in preservation and internal unity. Were this not the case and were sound theology not built on this authoritative base, two men wouldn't be able to hold their own for 17 pages of this thread. Yet we have.

 

No, IDRM has, I've never seen you hold your own in any debate to be honest. You basically go into every religion thread and say "blah blah, you're wrong, and this is true because I believe it's true.", while sidestepping over the hard questions. For instance, you say we can't judge God because our standards are distorted. But then you turn around and judge God to be good and judge him to be truthful. You have no authority to do this, you even admitted it. By your own logic, you can't judge him as good or truthful because we can't judge God. Respond to this.

 

To an extent, I've been holding my own in an argument in this thread about the existence of invisible magic mud men. Does that mean it has an authoritative base?

 

I speak with authority because I have authority. You twist things and, when all else fails, try to bully your way through a discussion. Humanity does not define anything. We have nothing to apply to God. The created does not have the authority or the knowledge to tell the creator how things are, or are going to be.

 

So you speak with authority because you think what you're saying is true. Well I think there isn't a God so now I must have the authority to tell you there isn't. Yes, I know you believe the created doesn't have the authority to tell the creator how things are. I don't agree, and I think that makes you a brainwashed zombie. It's akin to standing around and watching your father kill hundreds of people and doing nothing to stop him because he's your father and must know what's right. As for bullying, you two are the ones giving me threats of hell. I just find it comical you think that would do anything but push people further away from your religion.

 

As for your question: Satan has no better deals. I say that with the above authority and with the authority of personal experience. I was involved with his kind before I was involved with Jesus. Satan is nothing but a liar, a thief, and a killer. Life goes beyond the best deal. Life goes back to truth and a correct view of The Way Things Are. Jesus and only Jesus provides that because He defined it. All Satan can and will ever do is try to twist that around to vindicate our rebellious desires and tendencies because we are fallen and sinful creatures.

 

That wasn't the question I wanted answered for one thing, and you didn't answer this one either. I believe the question was IF Satan did offer you a better deal, if you found out through personal experience that he did offer a better deal, would you switch sides? Answer the question.

[chaosrage 0]

The devils have dead faith.

 

I'm pretty sure their faith isn't dead. They know that God's there.

James said that faith was dead without good works.

[Guest SP-1]

I did answer the question. He can't offer a better deal and thus he won't. I'm not going to entertain illogical flights of fancy.

 

I'll get to the rest when I have time again. Right now I don't have the time to sort through all your circular logic and stupidity. You continually revert back to this existential base of trying to give yourself authority simply because you FEEL like something is right. And that is your flaw, every time. Feelings do not make facts, and definitely don't refute them.

 

I'm still a Christian because I did the homework. Because I investigated and searched, and because I'm still searching academically. God has proven Himself true and proven the authority and reliability of His Word. From that do I believe and from that do I derive my academic and theological authority.

 

All you do is go find like-minded people that support what you feel. I've investigated and walked on both sides. I'm not going to argue with you over that. You can accept it, you can not accept it. Something tells me that you won't and you'll just keep yelling the same things over and over again. That same thing tells me sooner or later we'll just start ignoring you to talk with people who actually want to discuss it intelligently.

[chaosrage 0]

I did answer the question. He can't offer a better deal and thus he won't. I'm not going to entertain illogical flights of fancy.

Jesus, you're dumb. I didn't ask you if he would. I asked you what would you do if he did. And would you worship God if he didn't bribe you with heaven?

 

I'll get to the rest when I have time again.  Right now I don't have the time to sort through all your circular logic and stupidity.  You continually revert back to this existential base of trying to give yourself authority simply because you FEEL like something is right.  And that is your flaw, every time.  Feelings do not make facts, and definitely don't refute them.

 

Yeah, I'm not arguing this. I'm arguing that it's not a fact that he's good. It's just a feeling that you have. The only difference between us is that instead of thinking for yourself, you blindly accept it because he said he was good. Because you decided he would be your authority. I feel that he's bad. Could I be wrong? Well, no because if he existed and he told me he was right and everyone in the world agreed that he was right, I would say that you're all wrong. We either both have authority to say that God is bad or good, or neither one of us have that authority. You keep dancing around this point because you can't stand to look at it. If I can't judge him to be bad, then you can't judge him to be good. We can't tell if he's good, we can't tell if he's telling the truth, we can't even tell if he exists because that would be a judgement and our definitions are distorted. Without making judgements, we wouldn't be able to arrive at ANY conclusion, and we'd have to remain completely neutral about everything concerning God. Why is it you haven't done so?

 

All you do is go find like-minded people that support what you feel.  I've investigated and walked on both sides.  I'm not going to argue with you over that.  You can accept it, you can not accept it.  Something tells me that you won't and you'll just keep yelling the same things over and over again.  That same thing tells me sooner or later we'll just start ignoring you to talk with people who actually want to discuss it intelligently.

 

I've never seen you dicuss anything intelligently yet. If you did it with anyone, I would be impressed.