Posts by humbled

8

Truth Be Told Screening Tomorrow in NYC

by JetSetter in

jw
friends

i bought my ticket to the movie screening for tomorrow at a movie theater in nyc.

it should be interesting, can't wait.. there will be a lot of xjw's there, i actually can't wait..

humbled

where is it being screened? two of my daughters live in the Bronx.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

humbled

Apog,cofty,

There is a crisis on the forum(I think it's a crisis) and in the thread itself that needs to be addressed so that we can learn something in this discussion.

This particular thread is addressing an old problem that religion cannot resolve when humans face suffering and death: How can a just/loving/powerful God(a god we have been told exists) can let violent natural deaths occur.

The OT records God's contract "You do right--I'll do right" That is the axis upon which all the OT stories and prophesy turns.

But the Book of Job showing up in the Tanak (hebrew)canon tells me something that is very important. Whether there was or wasn't that event or that person, whether or not I have a background in Hebrew or ancient mid-eastern history it tells me that even the old timers of faith were seeing that the god program wasn't working. FOR SURE damage control was needed EARLY ON to vent off the pressure from the cognitive dissonance among the Chosen People when they faced suffering and death too.

So apparently old Jewish believers had to walk(spiritually speaking) with a rock in their shoe to worship in their temple or synagoge. God didn't explain how he was loving/fair/powerful and....NOT.

The contract with God has loopholes for god's behavior that nobody could understand while the contract laws multiplied on his people. And the people needed to follow the laws carefully.

Jesus' version of God blew that apart.the laws didn't bind you to God--love did. Good news for some but it pissed off the religious rulers. God-'n-Moses wrote them, right? Love was in there, sure. But all those laws were IMPORTANT.

Of course they were upset with Jesus. Jesus' teachings about reconciliation with God was just so much crap. This wasn't the God they had limped with for so many years. They were used to walking with a rock in their shoe. so there was a New wine/old skin problem. New cloth patch/ old garment problem.

I think that's our problem now. On the forum. In the thread.

A theist on this forum is almost certainly hanging with Jesus. And how to talk about God letting children drown --well, that goes all over a Christian.Not even Job had to walk on arock that big and sharp.

Harder for us because we know that the loving-Jesus stories are tied up with the rest of the dark-god bible.

It's hard to get rid of the old god-rock in our shoe if we are afraid of losing contact with Jesus. So from Christians we can get defensive posts, off-topic, pre-emptive strikes with back stories because the old-rock-god doesn't fit with Jesus the god/man.

Tammy is an UN-orthodox Christian. She said this forum helped her process through some of her questions.(I hope she can return) She has a christian cosmology now that satisfies her. But it doesn't satisfy everyone.

Others of us don't see that she solved Job's rock-in-the-shoe problem. It feels too much like the same old rock to many of us only with a new name.

There were rough reactions to her ideas. Maybe some couldn't believe that she was honest about her motives for saying things. But i think we should understand where her dilemma comes from. She held tight to the love and tried to reconcile the rest. It got convoluted and lied, as many commented, on personal revelation. That said I think having Tammy's solution to the conflict between OT god and Jesus helped fashion the keys to unlock biblical theism's last prison. It was so impossible to reconcile Jesus' love and the all-powerful OT god that I discarded chunk after chunk of the bible. The only thing left was love getting to transcend life's horror. It left me with a carpenter who perhaps was as disturbed as Job at what he saw, felt the rock in his shoes and startd running barefoot. He is still my hero. Old theism has confined not only me but I think it has imprisoned Jesus as well.

It is as hard to talk about the problem of belief in god now as ever. I have been glad to bounce my experiences and observations around folks here......and listen to everyone's else do the same. and this time we are having the most prolonged exploration of god among non-clerics that I imagine I'll ever get to participate in. It is really important to us all to find a way to continue it. I'm afraid if we stop now we may never get it started again.

Maeve

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

humbled

Job is only a dark window into how Hebrews before the exile looked at disasters falling on good people. But it is my best touchstone with reality in the OT.

The OT promoted a "fear of the Lord". It was a contract for him to take care of you. The Mosaic covenant told you how to do right and prosper --he protected your borders, your health, your offspring.Do wrong and the sky became a bronze bowl --dry, drought, and you were invaded.

But the book of Job--some say is the oldest book of the OT--I value because whether there was or wasn't this actual man and real story, the book made the cut into the OT/Tanak because,often enough, people opened their eyes and admitted that even when they did not fail God-- he failed them. The book of job let them express the dark feelings of God being absent in their suffering.

Job talks straight--he wants to see God in court.

But the OT has no answer, there is no honest answer for disaster. Some OT writers flogged the Jews saying their sins brought disasters down from heaven in just the same way some Christian leaders do today.

Jesus walked into a void in an occupied land and talked about God being good and loving sinners.

But they already new this from Job: God let it rain on the Just and the Wicked both--no different

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

humbled

Are you referring to your OP?

Or the question of how to deal justly with a poster that is bothersome to certain other posters?

I am not being saucy.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

humbled

Believing in Jesus when the OT God is linked to him is disturbing to folks on this forum inparticular.--It disturbs me, at least.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

humbled

Tammy has a brass neck, cofty. You must give her that. You wield a wicked cleaver. Find a better way to deal with her than this, please.

How will we know how the "trial" goes?

I'll not bring this up on this thread again.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

humbled

I have just found and read the conversation of the past--6-8 hours.

Tec/Tammy is banned? I say shame on you who think this is fair. It is neither fair nor a benefit to us.

I appreciate her strong voice that apparently draws strong reaction on the board. Although there are calls to "not feed" the line of conversation she opens, who of you stop conversing? So one wonders--what's up with that? Because I know personally that it is easy to dry up a poster--do not respond, do not comment. It happens to me plenty of times--even if I think I have raised a good point, even if I have spent time putting the idea together. If no one answers a post-- then there's a pretty quick end to it.

BUT....

Tammy garners almost 100% in the response department.

Why?

One reason is that she is respectful. She doesn't do smack-downs. A+

Tammy is sharp. So that challenges.

She believes in Jesus the Christ. So that challenges us.

She believes in Jesus the Christ.

So that challenges her, too.

If I am not a believer in Christ, I am still a person who reckons that the Jesus teaching of love is consistent with our own desire for love and fairness. Who he was and is in my life is up to me to deal with, to sort out.

In thinking how some of Christian teaching is so dependent on the OT God it has helped me see how tangled the Church apologetics had to become to allow them to develop a god/man of Jesus. TEC/Tammy has come to one answer to this problem. I took a road that is different--but I have spent time on Tammy's road, too.

I repeat:Tammy's voice in the forum is valuable.

This thread is almost unique in all I have been exposed to in readings, live discussions, panel discussions, etc. I've never heard of such a hammering at the tangled threads of belief as this hread has sustained. It has nearly derailed a few times. But tossing Tammy out will derail this topic. I will consider that a tragic miscalculation of how a discussion can develop. And on a personal level I feel it is a sad miscalculation of Tammy herself. She is a fervent believer. Just because that is so obvious, why exclude her amid scurrilous accusations?

Please reconsider.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

humbled

When do we have the Bible God himself explaining why bad things happen to good people?

NEVER.

We only have people spin explanations.In the bible and out of it.Then and now. But God doesn't answer.

The question Job asks God is part of this discussion. It's an important part of this discussion because A BELIEVER, Job, asks God : WHY?

Read the book and see that there isn't an answer given.

Neither old or NT make sense. Bible says the earth was cursed by God (Gen.3:17,5:29) brings a flood to kill evil men but --saves the righteous? All through the bibl the story tries to go with the idea that god reward/protects the righteous--in SPITE of the observations of Job. God saving the righteous is spotty--

If god has love and power at least admit that it isn't evident in the real world. We get sick and die even if we don't die in a tsunami.

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

humbled

cofty, Christian theism has had other moments to wonder why their god has allowed death and destruction in the natural world kill people. The Lisbon earthquake and tsunami in the mid 1700's destroyed most the churches on All Saint's Day and yet let stand most of the red light district.So it is reported.

It looks to me that christian theism always has had to accommodate the mystery of god--it is only that some of us reject the theology that allows"god" to get away with that.

that is why I ran afoul of the JWs on the Sacrifice of Abraham story.

There was no reconciling this with the rest of the scriptures.

The struggle I have, and others is to allow for a higher being that is not the one we've been told exists.

(I'm offline for the next few hours--interested in any comments from anyone:) Maeve

2596

The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday

by cofty in

yesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.

we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.

they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.

humbled

Thistles and figs... by their fruits you will know them.