Sufficient for what? It hasn’t been sufficient for a single need of mine, if I am supposed to think those needs are remotely important. For those who believe they will find peace everlasting upon their demise, and who find that promise sufficient to keep them accepting their sorry lot in life, I’m glad they can take some comfort in that and I’m a hundred times more sorry that they allow themselves to be suckered by such a raw deal.
Don’t be afraid. I usually tune out when people make reference to “God’s grace.” Could be they’re equally meaningless terms. Or, on the other hand, you could take five minutes to reflect on why Schrodinger’s Cat might make even a straightforward guy like me hesitate to nail down a wholehearted agreement in a single, universal, objective TRVTH.
I seek to accomplish neither.
Your terms need some focusing. But if that’s all you can come up with in twenty minutes, then you’re still wasting other people’s time. You believe in the Christian God. Congratulations! May that belief never disappoint you.
Who said anything about being afraid? Are you afraid?
Well, you can hide behind your tit-for-tat attitude if you wish, I dont care.
You seem to be hung up on quantum theory with your Schrodingers Cat reference. I fail to see the relevance in this context… perhaps you can enlighten us to its significance beyond its boring purpose as a entertaining, but tired, mental experiment, Mr Discovery Channel?
Yea thats exactly why you brought it up. You are fooling no one- stop trying.
Okay, so one of the guys that literally has no evidence of existing. The bible isn’t evidence for it’s own veracity you know. Not any more than Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings are proof of their own verisimilitude.
So, thanks for hoping that an imaginary friend makes my life better somehow. You know if it weren’t Jesus you said was blessing me, you’d just sound crazy instead of intellectually lazy.
Sure I am! That’s why I told you not to be, so you would hold my hand and keep me safe out here where the intellectual buses don’t run.
Should I bother? Everyone else here gets it. If you’re being willfully obtuse (or just characteristically Trollish) then nothing I say will avail me. If you really don’t understand that minor point, I haven’t the patience to explain it. Wasn’t important anyway. You believe there is One Objective Truth, and can’t imagine why that might not be strictly true even in the absence of a supernatural condition. Okey dokey.
No, we’re not. But still wondering:
You’ve built yourself a thread in which to discuss why you believe the stuff you believe. I mean, your original post asks us what we think about it, but the title carried the promise of you talking about Religion and Jesus. In case I wasn’t clear, I gave up believing in Christ when such faith began to increasingly seem akin to belief in Santa Claus, with a similar hope of reward for good behavior and fear of punishment for bad behavior, and a demand for blind faith in the superstructure. Hell, when my mother was six she cautiously expressed some doubts in the existence of Saint Nick, and found her stocking only half-full that Christmas. Wasn’t a coincidence that the grandfather with whom she lived was a Methodist minister. She was lucky it wasn’t filled with coal.
Throw some substance out here and we can talk. But don’t waste our time and energy. The Oscars were boring enough tonight.
That would be so boring! Are you worthy to live such levels or boringness?
I am clergy, and I can say without embarrassment or BS that morality has no place in religion. When used this way it functions as what I call “stupid reasons to do smart things”. When people can exercise critical thinking skills they make better decisions than when they need to be gullible enough to obey this weeks benevolent despot.
So you’ve just stated that people who don’t believe in your one truth aren’t moral. Is this the sort of thing you’re referring to when you claim “perfectly reasonable posts with religious content tend to get deleted for some strange reason”?
Yeah, like @anon67050589, I don’t really think much of this. If nothing else, it’s extremely unflattering to Christians, implying that the reason they’re good people is because they’re scared of divine retribution if they aren’t.
And ‘the Bible is true because the Bible says so’ isn’t going to win a lot of arguments either.
But what was the point of this thread? You’ve trolled better in the past - I thought you were going to try something more substantial here.
Since you don’t accept my offered warning of not feeding the trolls. Let me add fuel to this bible book bonfire.
No one knows jack shit about what happens to us when we die. You cannot not “know” that there is only one god, multiple gods, or none. Everyone is allowed to believe what they want, but I know for a fact (since my Dianetics coach told me) that I am the chosen one, the embodiment of Ron L. Hubbard. I only found this out after I crossed the $1,000,000 mark. Tom Cruise was pissed.
But in all seriousness, Any person claiming to know the word of any particular god or to know what a god wants is foolishness. To error is human. The only piece of advice anyone needs is this:
First, there is no aggreement on what Christianity is. Even the meanings of Iesus’s teachings and the significance of his actions are sometimes in dispute.
I for one don’t think any good could come of some people torturing another person to death. So the resurrection is my hope, never the crucifixion.
Second, there is no universal Christianity. Since the Atta Unsar compares God to a parent, it’s not going to have the same meaning for someone with abusive parents that it can have for someone with loving parents.
Third, there is no way to reproduce religious experiences, certainly not to reproduce them and get the same results. So religion can’t really be shared. Only stories about religion, which can be good, but which won’t have the same significance to each person, or institutions which are supposed to have something to do with religion.
Literature aspires to, if any, literary rather than historical verisimilitude. While religious texts strive for symbolic verisimilitude. They are both primarily subjective. I find that religious symbology tends to work better when it’s mythos cannot be easily mistaken for anything else. Shamanic traditions such as those of the Americas understand this. Abrahamic religions are modelled upon the (IMO not terribly useful) forms of Mesopotamian god-kings. The mystical traditions such as the Gnostics, Kabbalists, and Sufis have had much more robust concepts and symbols to work with than the popular lineages.
That’s not at all far off from how much hardcore mysticism works. It’s easy to dismiss the reality of a passed-down story. But where most people have trouble is believing in their own self. And by this I mean the identity created by the psyche rather than who one ultimately is. So, when religious frameworks are effective, rather than being used as a poor conditioning instrument, the “imaginary friend” is ones own limited persona. For better or worse, understanding how one has constructed this apparent self usually involves using symbols to bypass language and access the deeper mind.
As for Christianity specifically, I find it somewhat interesting, but not terribly useful. It is so broadly syncretic and piecemeal that people can easily cherry-pick their favorite bits out of the contradictory jumble. The New Testament is the books which were left after the Council of Nicea picked over the existing texts in 325. It was made by committee! They kept most of the “safe” moralistic stuff, with everything else being categorized as Apocrypha. If you look back at other biblical texts, teaching of Jesus etc for the 300 years before this time, there was quite a variety of eclectic thought. It would make most fundies heads asplode. For instance, the Gnostic Christians thought that the real God was unknowable, and that the paternal blowhard of the Old Testament was really the Demiurge, a sort of egotistical pseudo-god created by the real one. And that Jesus is the devil, who is helping to undermine the demiurge so we can escape this prison and behold real, hidden god.
The history of the Old Testament is at least as wild. The Jewish stories are a crazy combination of their travels, mixed with some Egyptian and lots of Mesopotamian ideas. What most people have read today was translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin - and then to various western-European languages. Many of these translations are controversial in their assumptions. Also, what we get is a comparatively late, revisionist version of Jewish culture. Early Jewish culture was actually polytheistic, largely adopted from bits of the Canaanite religion. Whatever happened to Yahweh’s wife, Asherah? Why is Baal sometimes depicted as Yahweh’s brother, son, or even the same being as Yahweh? And then later classified as a demon! Yahweh and Ashera used to have seventy sons who were also gods, who were eventually downgraded to Nephelim, fallen angels. Why is it that the Hebrew bible discusses Elohim (literally, godS, plural), which was later translated as God, angels, or Holy Spirit instead? Do the names El, Yahweh, and Jehovah even refer to the same deity?
The contemporary Christian bible is the sort of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” version which sort of ignores or explains away lots of the ambiguities and contradictions. It’s also very telling of the ignorance of many so-called “fundamentalists” that they frown upon the actual history of their religion being taught, because it loses that monolithic, inscrutable character which their narrow dogma depends upon.
