How Well Do You Know The Bible?

by dark clouds 60 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  JanH

  UO,
  

  and what about all the prophecies in the Bible that have come true?

  
  Yes, what about them?

  I have asked this before: which prophecies exactly in the Bible have come true?

  - Jan
• 

  ICHING

  ps: back with more later:

  LATER

  clouds -

  i've given this a lot of thought myself - I think - for many years now - and in fact back to my days as a jw -

  the twilight years of my incarceration at least

  the following will attempt to explain a little why -

  PT1

  & to cut a long story short:

  it got to the point for me

  going from house to house

  that I really couldn't give a fuck what the householder believed -

  I'm mean specifically - non christian faiths - islam, buddhism, hindu , judaism - they're the big non christian ones aren't they?

  (for the sake of this post I will call christianity - the western faith )

  (meeting a christian faith at the door - yea I might bother a little with argument etc)

  like I was saying meeting non christian faiths at the door - I couldn't give a fuck about proving them wrong

  for the very reason which I believe you are driving at in your post (correct me otherwise)

  and that is

  from the cross cultural perspective

  their faith is just as valid

  of just as much merit

  as mine is

  to think otherwise

  to my mind

  was to think from within the narrow little confines of an ethnocentric "viewpoint"

  PT2

  I was trying to draw from up out of the narrow confined ethnocentric viewpoint - and in this context i mean ethnocentric as in a persons homelands predominant faith

  it's just like another form of patriotism to me -

  a persons faith -

  the way they feel about their faith

  is almost comparable to the way they feel about their homeland

  ethnocentric

  your homeland and your faith are usually two things you are born into
  with absolutely no say in the matter

  and yet just about everyone thinks their homeland & their faith are the greatest

  as if they had some choice in the matter

  sayings like

  "…………………..(insert town where you grew up)

  was the greatest place in the world to grow up"

  or

  "………………… (insert your homeland)

  is the greatest country to live in in the world"

  spring to mind

  ask someone what they think of where they grew up or what they think of their country as a place to live and see what they say

  now I know most people aren't openly going around talking like this about their faith but my speculation (based on conversations knocking on a zillion doors)

  is that the majority of people die belonging (even if in name only) to the same faith

  they were born into

  kind of a silent vote if nothing else

  most people do not die as a member of a faith they were not born into

  but remember they also did not choose this faith

  why change?

  when people are talking with great sentiment about their homeland or their faith

  all they are telling you about is something that is familiar

  people seem to feel this great sentiment toward the familiar

  there's no logic or rationale behind it

  "it's familiar that’s the reason why I like it "

  most of these people have never made a real comparison between

  their homeland and another

  or their faith and another

  so the muslim kills the jew because his faith/homelands is superior

  jews kill muslims because their faith/homeland is superior

  muslims kill hindus

  hindus kill muslims

  christians kill everyone

  but these things they feel so "strongly" about are things they never consciously chose in the first place

  it was a complete lucky dip

  a lottery

  if you were born in pakistan instead of where you were you might be fighting allah vs krishna with india

  apply the above to all the faiths and homelands in the world

  I don't think there's any rationale going on with this stuff

  it's all another form of indoctrination in a way

  ethnocentric indoctrination

  indoctrination whole populations are under

  national patriotism

  spiritual patrionism

  these things are like the jw's to me

  they make no sense

  because it doesn’t make sense

  and what doesn’t make sense

  is peoples belief in things they didn’t choose themselves

  but acting like they did

  PT3
  
  people love the familiar

  you walk into a crowded room full of strangers

  how do you feel?

  then you see someone you know

  how do you feel?

  why?

  you walk into a supermarket you need some toothpaste

  you go to the toothpaste section

  there's floor to ceiling toothpaste options

  which one do you choose?

  why?

  the list goes on

  and I'm speaking generally

  but most of the choices you make

  you make because it's a familiar choice

  I'm talking "comfort zone"

  the familiar is easy - the unfamailiar is hard
  the familiar is friendly - the unfamilair is unfriendly
  the familiar is comforting - the unfamilar is frightening

  you don't exit ramp the comfort zone without an extraodinarily good reason

  CONCLUSION

  now where was I ?

  oh yea

  faith and ethnocentricity

  all I am talking about here is

  preference for the familiar

  and

  why?

  these days I just think:

  bible - yea that’s the religion of the christian/western world

  gita - yea that’s the religion of the hindu /eastern world

  islam - yea that’s the religion of the muslim world

  and so on

  each being as equally valid as the other

  because that seems to be the reality of the situation

  to me

  I-CHING
  (to lazy to write a better second draft class)
• 

  ICHING

  myths

  legends

  religions

  similarities

  why?

  because essentially everyone is religious

  in one way or another

  christianity is one way to experience the religious

  what's religion

  but

  morals ethics ritual

  sense of the comic?

  I mean cosmic?

  - more or less

  why the big deal with the differences?

  unless you've got a thing about making everyone conform

  (that’s a philosophy called fascism)

  I think the problem with christianity

  (as I cant speak for any of the others too well - except the I- CHING which is more a philosophy)

  is that christians think they have to be christ

  NOT themselves

  what I call the "lord save me from your followers" syndrome

  rather than experience christ/religion AS themselves

  an individual rather than a collective experience

  and this collective way of religous experience

  rather than individual
  (for all I know )

  may be applicable to all the peoples of the major faiths

  experience of their faiths unique prophet/figurehead/godhead/great spirit

  as well

  I'd be surprised if it wasn't

  clouds I think this whole subject rises from within a very dark murky irrational aspect of human nature

  I-CHING
  (just making this BS up as I go along class)
• 

  dark clouds

  Digderidoo: Perhaps i was being a bit optimistic on the function of religion, because many times i have come to the same conclusion and agreed with the thought, that religion has been used many times over, for power and to control the mass population.

  Opium for the masses.

  I agree that no one has the right to tell anyone what is right or wrong especially when it comes to our relationship with the creative force that started it all. We are all born with an innate conscience which determines to a degree what our actions should be and even though i am gnostic now and an anarchist at heart, SOMETHING has to lay the law. Perhaps what i am realizing is that all these enlightened men, Jesus, Gahndi, Muhammad, Buddha, Lao-tzu, Arjuna, etc. had the same view point it was about their relationship with the divine and not with the church of the time.

  Thank you for bringing that up. . .

  Jelly: Please share that Gahndi quote with us. . . .

  Uncle Onion: My take on the prophecies is this. . . the prophecies that were claimed to have come true, the hebrew ones predicting the messiah they could have been rigged, who is to know for sure, religious leaders will say anything to back up their cause, as far as the modern day ones can we look at the accuracy of the so called interpreters? and not for nothing if these winners are striking out, do you think the nomads were any better or any more accurate?

  Nostradamus, was he not a prophet or do we not count the nonbiblical ones.

  In my quest i want to apply the same rule of fairness to my research

  CHUCK
• 

  digderidoo

  Dark Clouds

  my personal opinion - nostradamus was no prophet, i read somewhere that only 7% of his prophecies came true...and of these, they were prophecies that were re-interpretated after the event. He spoke in riddles... open to interpretation. Wasn't it interpretated that he said the end of the world would come in 1997( or thereabouts)???

  Yours Paul (aka Digderidoo)
• 

  digderidoo

  However, i feel that all of these 'enlightened ones' that u mention, all have something to contribute.

  All have their own interpretation on how to get close to this supreme being. We can learn from all of these.

  Yet also at the smae time i feel that no one has the truth. No one has the truth that we all yearn for. Is it worth our time dwelling on it??? Does it really matter??? .... i know it bothers me or i wouldn't have even mentioned it, but should it bother me???

  I think it is up to us to learn from these people and others and come to a conclusion that each individual feels comfortable with.
• 

  dark clouds

  I Ching:

  My views go back to my teen years when i wore blinders, though at the time they were not as rooted or escavated as they are now, the seed was there. . .

  P1
  I could not be bothered with converting anyone outside of the western idealogy of religion. To me it seemed ludicrous, not to use the old WT cliche but could 100 million [(hindus, buddhists, muslims) take your pick] BE WRONG??! The idea that a cow was sacred fascinated me, the idea of meditation made perfect sense, how could i possibly sell a magazine written in brooklyn to these people and expect them to deny their CULTURE. To accept the ideas that i was barely able to swallow . . . there ideas were just as valid, if not more so if we were going to go by numbers,

  P2
  I would ask my mom if we had been born in india would we be hindus, would we have converted to christianity because of a magazine and her reply would be that (so wrong to see the effects of indoctrination) jehovah wanted us to be saved and that is why we were his followers, of course that set off the question of why were we so much more fortunate than the others, if god was so fair, wouldn't he want us to have equal opportunity throughout the globe . . .

  In answer to the patriotism statement i agree that it is true, we are born into what we are taught, and many times it is never questioned. unless we step away and question what it is that we have been raised to believe, we have a very minimal understanding of our spiritual nature, if we come full circle to where we began then perhaps that faith is the one we belong to, if we find another along the way, then we still have found a faith, but to never question and blindly accept is a lack of spiritual interest. I was always amused at how everyone whose door we went to, could be probed to doubt their stand, but we could never doubt our own. . .

  P3
  Conditioning and the fear of the unknown, we could write books on this . . .

  thanks for sharing

  CHUCK
• 

  dark clouds

  Digderidoo:

  i guess that would make nostradamus a worthy candidate for the GB if he were still alive. . .

  as far as why it bothers you and if it is worth dwelling on, i will risk the assumption that you also spent most of your life in the borg and perhaps just recently abandoned ship. . . it bothered me for a long time for i felt that there had to be A TRUTH and the fact that i spent time dwelling only confirmed to me that i did have a spiritual nature and it drove me to find my answers, i feel I CHING made some valid points as far as to why we cling to our views.

  I have come to see the planet and its religions as one continous experience, not one greater than the next but a chronological order of truth and enlightenment, each of these enlightened men had something for the time and the culture and eventually the world, its a unified theory of sorts in which i feel very comfortable, it allows for equality of all faiths without giving any more spotlight to any one in particular, and focuses on what their function was. . .

  CHUCK
• 

  dark clouds

  double post
• 

  dark clouds

  WTF 3ple post