The Bible designed to stagnate people and ruin lives

by WTWizard 108 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  mP

  @vanderhoven7

  Before I started reading the Bible, my life was a selfish lie. I gratified myself often at the expense of others. The Bible put a hunger for righteousness in my heart....and that's when God revealed Himself to me. I had quit school at 15, so when God got hold of me, He gave me a desire to serve others. I dropped pre-matital sex and booze and went to night school and graduated from day high school at 21. I later graduated from university, got married, and went into education along with my wife, then special ed. and followed that up with a career (31 years) teaching handicapped children. After 7 years into retirement, some of my former students still call me to keep in touch. My life was advanced and blessed through reading the Bible.

  @MP

  You obviously havent read the bible properly. Explain slavery and the buying of raped virgins. Most of the laws inthe Bible are skewed to the interests of the rich priests or rich property owners who need slaves. The heroes like David are homocial maniacs who seem to not give a s**t about Gods laws as dictated to Moses. Your xianity is completely divorced of the Bible.
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  mP

  TEC

  Just some things to think about.

  MP after all that fraud in ot, gospels and other nt books, how do jnow what is real and what is myth or political propoganda?

  TEC

  Use your reason. See what is corroborated. Ask Christ for understanding and spirit.

  MP

  Thats the problem nothing is corroborated. Who or what or where can i find any corroboration of any aspect of Jesus life. Mt makes stuff up to impress his readers. Mark doesnt know the basic geology of Judea and so on. Mark doesnt even have a resurrection, Jesus just died. The resurrection scriptures at the end of Mark, are an addition, the footnote in the NWT acknowledges this. Given Mt, Lk are enhancements of Mk the synoptics are just edits of the one story. None of them are eyewitnesses. Traidition gives them names to falsely imply they were witnesses, but Mt in his own book always refers to Matthew the apostle in the third person not as himself. John tells us that Jesus died on a different day than the other gospels, which means either he is right or the others (Mt, Mk, Lk) are wrong, they both cant be right.

  I could go on.

  TEC

  Apply His teachings... a liar and a fraud cannot teach truth,

  MP

  You mean his teaching of ignoring someone because they are the wrong race ? There are many "nice teachings", Buddha has a few doesnt mean i believe his supernatural story.

  TEC

  and is unlikely to die for it.

  MP

  Muslims have died for their religion all the way back since the time of Mohammad, does that make them true, of course not, that only means they sincerely believed. The branch Davidians and Jim Jones and those UFO believers all died for their belief, they are not right.

  To state that as proof is stupid.
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  mP

  TEC

  MP

  The only thing you have left are his teaching, the rest the miracles are the very least unverified made up stuff. There are many stories of people in the ancient world doing miracles.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Redivivus_Legend

  Nero Redivivus Legend was a belief popular during the last part of the 1st century that Nero would return after his death in 68 AD. The legend was a common belief as late as the 5th century. [1] The belief was either the result or cause of several pretenders who posed as Nero leading rebellions.

  Several variations of the legend exist, playing on both hope and fear of Nero's return. The earliest written version of this legend is found in the Sibylline Oracles. [2] It claims that Nero did not really die but fled to Parthia, where he would amass a large army and would return to Rome to destroy it. [3] Dio Chrysostom, a Greek philosopher and historian, wrote "seeing that even now everybody wishes [Nero] were still alive. And the great majority do believe that he still is, although in a certain sense he has died not once but often along with those who had been firmly convinced that he was still alive." [4] Augustine wrote that some believed "he now lives in concealment in the vigor of that same age which he had reached when he was believed to have perished, and will live until he is revealed in his own time and restored to his kingdom." [1] In later forms of the legend, among many early Christians, this legend shifted to a belief that Nero was the Antichrist. [1]

  At least three Nero imposters emerged leading rebellions. The first, who sang and played the cithara or lyre and whose face was similar to that of the dead emperor, appeared in 69 during the reign of Vitellius. [5] During the reign of Titus(c 79-81) there was another impostor who appeared in Asia and also sang to the accompaniment of the lyre and looked like Nero but he, too, was exposed [6] . Twenty years after Nero's death, during the reign of Domitian, there was a third pretender. Supported by the Parthians, who hardly could be persuaded to give him up [7] , the matter almost came to war. [8]

  Some bible scholars see the description of the wounding and healing of the Beast in Revelation 13:3 and the mention of the eighth king who is also one of the earlier seven kings in Revelation 17:8-11 as allusions to the Nero redivivus legend. [9] Domitian is also regarded by some as the Nero redivivus, i.e., Nero returned in the person of Domitian.

  For FIVE centuries many believed Nero returned from the dead, just like Jesus, what does that tell you about gulibility and how lies can be spread ?
• 

  mP

  @Vanderhoven

  Still Thinking

  Here is my personal testimony. If there is no revelation, there is no faith....just belief or unbelief.

  MP:

  Your story doesnt is not really evidence of Jesus or the truth of the Bible. Its just your story nothing more nothing less. My own story is the same, the story of Hitler who supposedly believed in God and was a Catholic are also irrelevant and are not scientific proof of the Bible.
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  Shawn10538

  I truly fear and distrust anyone whose morality, sense of morality, is based on the Bible. Who knows what such a person is capable of. But a person who uses their own inner senses, from wherever they come doesn't relly matter, empathy and compassion and not written rules, I can trust with more confidence because at least they are in touch and responding to their own real feelings. for those who aren't in touch with their feelings, we have laws of society that are far more ancient than the Bible. so why do we need the Bible?
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  tec

  You obviously havent read the bible properly.

  LOL... you are the one to talk about having read the bible properly, are you? Too funny. Do carry on.

  Peace,

  tammy
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  Shawn10538

  Consider this:

  Before I started reading HARRY POTTER, my life was a selfish lie. I gratified myself often at the expense of others. HARRY POTTER put a hunger for righteousness in my heart....and that's when God revealed Himself to me. I had quit school at 15, so when God got hold of me, He gave me a desire to serve others. I dropped pre-matital sex and booze and went to night school and graduated from day high school at 21. I later graduated from university, got married, and went into education along with my wife, then special ed. and followed that up with a career (31 years) teaching handicapped children. After 7 years into retirement, some of my former students still call me to keep in touch. My life was advanced and blessed through reading of HARRY POTTER.

  It makes just as much sense read that way doesn't it? I mean, Jonathan Livingston Seagull changed my life. But I don't worship Richard Bach. I might even say that reading Jonathan livingston seagull helped lead me to God and that the book contains the word of God. and it really does. I'm not just making a point. great truths are found in many books, even Harry Potter. So what?
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  jgnat

  I think it is too sweeping to blame the whole bible. It's an noble attempt to codify morality. I think there are a few scriptures, when taken literally, put the bible on a pedestal; the final and invoilate say (2 Timothy 3:16, Revelatons 22:19). That, I think, stopped many from seeking deeper. Those who try and defend the bible as a divine, cohesive, and accurate book put themselves in fantastic mental gymnastics.

  I saw an early sweeping condemnation at the beginning of this thread on the work of missionaries. That brings to mind a rant by Thoreau that I've recently read. As I read Walden, I find myself fighting his sweeping conclusions. His style, though, is to thoroughly set-up the reader, as he later presents devastating evidence to support his case. Food for thought, for sure.

  "The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing? Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, -- for that is the seat of sympathy, -- he forthwith sets about reforming -- the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers, and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it, -- that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia..."
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  EntirelyPossible

  Scripture is god-breathed/inspired.

  True. No everything I write is me-breathed. Sometimes I am out of breath when I talk.

  Explain slavery and the buying of raped virgins

  It's like buying a car. You always get a better priced on slightly used models.

  Can there be such a thing as a raped virgin?