A Christian question, but applies to all thinking Christian too!
by free2beme 100 Replies latest jw friends
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frankiespeakin
Belief in an ancient book full of outragous miracles that don't occur any more. That's what you believe if you beleive the Bible is true.
To maintain this beleif one has to continually ignore, the improbablity of this being true. One is usually lured to beleive the Bible as true through fear of punishment or loss of reward for not beleiving.
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sonnyboy
No longer being a Christian, it has become a mind opening experience to look back and see certian things I once ignored or just brushed off. Yet now I can not help but see these things and wonder why other Christians do not.
Isn't it liberating? There was a time that I swore God existed and would get offended if anyone said otherwise. Then I began to look at the state of the world and this 'being's" lack of action, and I asked myself, "Why did I ever believe in this load of horse crap?"
I'm sure that ancient Romans and Greeks believed in their gods for the same reason that modern Christians believe in theirs....years of conditioning and brainwashing. The human mind is one hell of a machine; it can make you see and feel things that were never there. I felt God's presence just as much as the holy spirit moved me to jump at a rock concert. It's all in the mind.
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Sunspot
So show me where the Garden of Eden is,
Are you sure you meant to say that?
*I* can't even show you the lot we used to play baseball on or the patch of woods at the end of our street that we used to play Hide and Seek in when I was growing up...........and I'm less than 100 years old! These places were there and they were real! I'd be hard pressed to show them to anyone now, because they are non-existent today.
So, what was that about Noah's Ark?
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dorayakii
I don`t believe in religion ... I don`t believe in Dylan .... I just believe ... in me.
Quite right. This may seem egotistical by "Christian" standards, but i wholeheartedly agree with the comment. Instead of putting our confidence in other people's doctrines and dogmas about whether Jesus was Christ or God or whatnot... we should be focusing on improving ourselves and our relationships with people.
Although i don't hold Jesus in special high regard in this matter, (and i don't believe Jesus or anyone was the "Christ") i still acknowledge that the teaching that Jesus taught on the Sermon on the Mount and the message of "love" that pervades his speeches are wonderful concepts to live life by and were unique and refreshing ideas at that time and place.
Jesus also spoke out against the Pharisees who wrote every law down in a book and wanted people to tithe a tenth of the cumin and such. But the very religion (Christianity in its every mutation whether Catholic, JW, Mormon, etc.), which claims to advance Jesus' teaching of "just love, nothing else", ignores his principal teaching, and each fraction has its own story of bloodshed, hatred, mind-control and the need to write down everything in a book and get follwers to listen to it or be burned in Hell (or cut-off in She'ol). This is why i often find it better to refer to the real Jesus and his simple teachings as "the historical Jesus" and to call the embellished immortal Jesus, who was resurrected or who is the archangel Michael or who is the human manifestation of God, "religion's Jesus".
A guy i used to date who labelled himself as just "Christian" told me that when you die you can come out of your body and see your body as if you were standing next to it. I thought about this for a while, because all the other things that he had just told me about Jesus' love and compassion were so attractive and comforting. But then i asked him, have you ever died and seen this? He obviously said well, "no". Then i said, even if you have seen this phenomenon, all i've got is your word. What evidence apart from the lovely comforting concept of grace can you offer me? Obviously he was beyond rational reasoning and could only offer me what i already knew, that humans should be civil to one another. His religion sounded good, but the extra trappings he had developped were founded in unreality.
I would consider myself honest hearted and open minded, so if God came to me in a vision and told me which religion was right and how i should worship Him to get "saved", i would acknowledge His existance and whole-heartedly go down that path, as long as it was proven and didn't involve hurting others or trying to convince them of what they cannot see even though i can see it.
The people who asked Jesus to perform a sign or a miracle in the gospels were not doing so out of lack of appreciation, they were doing so because they just wanted proof that these things were true. I refuse to follow a religion just because a group of people saw something that i haven't seen. Give everyone a chance to see the sign, then make a judgement as to what their "heart condition" is, Not the other way around.
When my parents used to warn me about the demons in certain books, i used to say to myself, if i ever saw a demon, that would even strengthen my faith in Jehovah, because at least then something in the Bible would be proved as correct. My "heart condition" was open minded to accept any thing that i could see demonstrated. A reasonable God would provide all the nessesary proof for his existance. If He destroyed all those who didn't believe in Him because they had no "proof", i don't think such a God is even worth worshipping. I'm not interested in whether the gospels were really written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John... that has absolutely NO relevance for my spirituality. Nor do references to "first hand witness accounts" or "proof that they wanted to control people". Its basically their word against mine. They saw Jesus lifted up into the sky (or they knew people who saw Jesus lifted up into the sky): but I didn't, its as simple as that. On top of that i've never seen anyone else lifted up into the sky. Simple.
The love they preach (and that a small minority actually show) is admirable but i don't need a message that has been slowly embellished and corrupted over 20 centuries to show me that.
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willy_think
Adam translates earth and eve means life; one representation is that a virgin birth is a metaphor for a person whose nature is not that of the earth but of the heavens.
People have to see this and it lowers my respect for the religion all the more, when I realize that it was just another example of the Meditereanian religions sharing legends and passing them into their culture, with their own certian flare.
I think a Christian might look on this as fine. After all if there were a god then sheath know him with out a bible. He taught of him without a bible. The stories of god would be much older then the book the Catholic's canonized. They would have undergone many retellings buy good and bad men before the bible authors were inspired to set them down.
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Sad emo
Sirona, that article, The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ has really freaked me out - why is it so hard to find out about these things? Is there some big cover up going on? How would a JW feel about this article because I would have thought that it would be something they'd love to throw at us 'regular' Christians?
I still believe the man Jesus existed - but reading the article, it looks like he may have had myths superimposed onto him to make him something he wasn't. That said, there are still the moral and ethical truths contained in the gospels and that's what really counts.
I'm quite happy to accept the OT stories, especially in Genesis as myths as those stories are present in other primitive religions - the difference being that the OT teaches about a God who is directly involved in creation etc as opposed to what goes on in the world being a result of various gods fighting, having sexual relations etc. Underlying them all again is the ethical/moral message.
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the_classicist
and here http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/source.html
I wouldn't believe that guy as far as I could throw him. I started to read his stuff, then I looked it up in the sources (such as Josephus). Needless to say, he [website guy, not the historian] attributed actions to Jesus that another Jesus had done. Not many philosophers or historians denies whether Jesus existed. Whether or not he actually performed miracles, etc., that is up to you to believe. A good debate was recorded on book, it was between Umberto Eco and a Cardinal, I would suggest that instead of a website with the scholarly capabilites of the WT.
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georgefoster
Jesus never lived, any more so then Hercules did. The legend lives on though!
If Jesus never lived, then how could he have been gay?