Posts by MarcusScriptus

19

The bible crisis thread

by Joey Jo-Jo in

ill start from the beggining.

i was a non bathtised jw who had spend most of my 30 years in the "truth".

i never was too serious about applying myself to it but my mind was set that this was the "truth".

While I think your posts are very well presented and uniquely interesting, I do think you are carrying over a Watchtower belief that needs to be disposed of because it causes you to come to not very insightful conclusions. Sure there are contrasting differences that don't gel in the Bible, but I think it's something big to you because you're trying to get the Bible to be something the Witnesses claim it should be. Those outside the JW “compound”(like in Christendom) already know these things—they've known them for centuries—and still they accept the Bible. They will look at list like this and ask you if you slept through Sunday school as a kid.

Sometimes we carry over a lot of JW baggage without realizing it. Using Watchtower criteria to judge things in the world will always leave us missing the point everyone else on the planet gets (not to mention the civilization that exists on the M-class planet closest to Betelgeuse). Not that we have to accept these things either, but we won't look very smart to begin with. (I.E.: Other person never a JW reads your points and replies to you in a sarcastic tone: Really? The Bible contradicts itself? Wow! After 2000 years of no one in Christianity ever seeing this, we should all be glad you were born into the world! Thank you, thank you so very much. Now excuse me, because I'm late for my buttock hair removal.)

Unlike the way the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses would like us to believe, Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians did not derive their teachings from the Bible. Because—and this goes for Protestants in a roundabout way—Christianity was already functioning by the time the last of the writings that would be included in the New Testament was written, beliefs it had already developed before the Christian Greek Scriptures’ canonization such as the Trinity could never have come from a collection of holy writings that had yet to be considered the equivalent of God’s Word as found in the Tanakh or Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament).

The KJV was introduced in 1611, the Catholic Douay in 1610, questions regarding the Byzantine/Masoretic-versus today’s critical master texts such as the UBS would not develop until much later of course. The formal Trinity doctrine predates the official canonization of the Christian Scriptures, however. Today’s Evangelical Christians come from American history, after Puritanism’s failure with the Salem Witch Hunts and extended past the Second Awakening into the time of the Adventist’s and the Watchtower’s own Charles Taze Russell. Attempting to put these things together would thus require a rip in the fabric of the space time continuum.

While it’s not that other religions don’t hold the Bible to be God’s inspired, it’s that they don’t believe the Bible is the foundation of religious belief like the Witnesses do. Even for many sola-scriptura Evangelistic Fundamentalists, Christianity is a hodgepodge of beliefs found in and out of the Bible. Teachings such a marrying before a Church elder or a member of the clergy, adding books to the Hebrew Bible and considering them inspired equivalents, even beliefs the Witnesses don’t like such as the Trinity, worship on Sundays as a Christian observance of the Sabbath, the celebration of the Nativity, etc., all these are part of Christianity’s history which the Witnesses reject.

The JWs are restorationism religion, a sect that believes that everything about God and religion before it is impure and unsatisfactory to the Creator until their own religious system came on the scene. The Latter-Day Saints believe this as do the Witnesses. But by rejecting Christianity and its history (not to mention Judaism’s), one has to reject the Church Fathers and those taught by them (as well as what rose from and after the Mishnah), as well as the great strides made in theology that followed. This is usually accompanied in these restorationism groups by a rejection of formal education and thus leaving them with no formal scholars whose knowledge can be put to the test by academia. Reading the Bible outside of the history of the communities and without following or even having learned academic and scholastic principles is dangerous indeed.

Even the New Testament and the Bible makes it clear that there is much regarding God’s self revelation that would not be contained in its pages. Jesus stated that was why he was sending the Holy Spirit. It was that Spirit that moved the Christians to decide which books formally belonged in the Bible. You don’t find explicit details in the Bible regarding what makes up canonicity and what doesn’t, how many if any “gospels” should exist, why reject the well-known Didache but accept the virtually unheard of 2 Peter while putting well-distributed and popular Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter, and accepted the controversial (and back then highly suspicious) Revelation to John. The expressions and words regarding Biblical canonization do not even occur in Scripture. If you are supposed to do things “by the Book” in Christianity, then the Christians goofed since there is no instruction in the Hebrew Bible authorizing them to add their writings to the Jewish ones or how to even do it.

That is why there are so many well-informed agnostics and atheists on this board. I’m still believe in God, but I highly respect them because they are usually some of the best examples of starting from scratch (usually, because just like people who claim to be religious there are also a few bad apples among any group that embraces an ideology—blame human nature, not necessarily our convictions). Unlearning is a very difficult process. Many of us don’t do that successfully upon leaving the Witnesses. It’s scary, very difficult. We don’t see where we will land. And because reality comes with very few guarantees (unlike the JWs who offer “an-answer-for-everything” type of religion), it something that will be—not might—demanding great emotional effort as well. Big challenges and steps to take.

So before we begin judging other religious and philosophical systems just like the Watchtower did, we need to ask ourselves: “If you took the name of whatever I’m spouting and replaced with JW terms, am I still the same ‘preach/got-to-prove-others-wrong-because-I-got-it-right’ robot merely exchanging one ‘brand’ of rhetoric for another?”

Sure, we’re all going to find something else after leaving from living over the oppressive and very heavy shadow of that Watchtower. The difference is we’re going to love others not “in spite” of these difference but because of them. We embrace others because they are the totality of everything they are. If they want to know more about what we believe or are doing, they’ll ask. And we can share without feeling like we have to prove anything wrong because—well, we’ve all been down that path.

Now if there is someone to prove wrong it’s from where we left. Where we are going—a world filled with Evangelists, and Mormons, and atheists, and Jews, and Protestants, and Muslims, and Catholics, etc.—it’s best not to go out with guns blazing against the citizens of this world whose acceptance we now need after rejecting them so cruelly for so long. We definitely got being judges of what is and what isn’t “truth” so wrong already, it’s best not to make the same mistake twice. So if somebody has something different about them, even something we can’t accept, we should remember at least one lesson if nothing else after leaving the Witnesses…

Having one foot in our mouth is forgivable. Those who can’t move because they managed to fit both in their trap are just left there to rot. If they aren’t smart enough to keep the second foot from getting stuck in their pie hole they deserve to go without feet and left to die under the hot sun on the side walk where the ants will think twice before rejecting to feast on them.

And what good is there in having a pie hole if you have no room left to stick a slice in (not to mention that even if you did manage to get a slice in it would taste like foot)?

35

Where in the Bible does it say God is omniscient?

by sabastious in

i don't care about scriptures that say god is "all knowing" or "know all my hairs on my head" cause that could all be done without being omniscient.

are there any bible verse's that speak specifically of god's omniscience?.

-sab.

MarcusScriptus

No, the Bible does not state God omniscience in explicit terms. The Bible is not a creed or a catechism. Though it does have some exegesis of its own, it doesn’t deal in technical theology; it deals in revelation.

The Bible mentions nothing about a lot of things Christians take for granted, especially Jehovah’s Witnesses. Where are the Scriptures authorizing religious ministers to officiate contracts of matrimony? Where does it say people have to appear before a religious elder or member of the clergy to be wed before God? Witnesses and well as Christendom all do it without any authorization or even hint in Scripture that such a practice was done in Biblical times.

I could go on and on with things like funerals, burying people in the ground, beginning and ending religious services with hymns or songs, etc. Nothing explicit or even a hint of anything on some of these subjects so “it has to come from the Bible” folks take for granted.

By the way, regarding the Bible being “inerrant” but not having certain things explained in explicit theological terminology doesn’t mean the Bible has erred. It never claims to be “exhaustive,” which is what it would be if it was the begin all and end all. It is “comprehensive,” but since it was meant to be read and understood by the religious communities that developed it, one cannot expect to understand it fully if one ignores what these religious communities believed in totality. Even Jesus said he was the Truth, the Way, and the Life. He never said a book was.

A space alien living on another planet can’t truly grasp the news articles of the New York Times, no matter how intelligent he is if he believes that all that can be learned about human life is contained within its pages only. And a Jehovah's Witness can't truly grasp the meaning of the Bible if he believes that all that should make up religion is found between its covers because Christianity is not a religion based on a book. It's a religion based on a Person.

35

Where in the Bible does it say God is omniscient?

by sabastious in

i don't care about scriptures that say god is "all knowing" or "know all my hairs on my head" cause that could all be done without being omniscient.

are there any bible verse's that speak specifically of god's omniscience?.

-sab.

MarcusScriptus

Why can’t God be omniscient? There are limits to God? Is everything that can be known about a Being that is supposed to be greater than us spelled out in the Bible?

What if it goes beyond human reasoning? If God is everything God is supposed to be, why do we post the limit of what we believe about God at the extent of our limited reasoning?

Also, we should take notice that the Watchtower view of God, that the Almighty possesses a spiritual “body” is not a belief of Christianity or Judaism. That is an invention of JW theology. The word “body” in Scripture, for those who like everything defined by the Bible, is limited to what is “corporeal.” The Watchtower’s reasoning of the “spiritual body” from the writings of Paul is not the view of Jews or Christians outside of restorative Adventist-based evangelist bodies and Mormonism.

If there is such a Person as God, why is his knowledge limited to what we can understand from what is presented to us in Scripture? Who is to say that even the description of omniscience does God’s knowledge justice? What if that doesn’t even hold a candle to what the Creator knows?

Of course if we belong to a religion that rejoices in triumphalism and waters down religion to a scholastic exercise that is basically nothing more than holding up a mirror to Gnosticism, claiming only those with the enlightenment they provide have it right and can be “saved,” you can’t argue or open the minds of those who claim they can’t be taught anything more about God, they what they have learned and what they believe is the full extent of it all. What a pity for those who have all of God stored up in the brains, for all the accurate knowledge of everything that can be known of God—even if their conclusions are that he doesn’t exist—dies with them.

A God that can be stored in someone’s brain can’t be omniscient, so I guess they’re right after all.

35

Where in the Bible does it say God is omniscient?

by sabastious in

i don't care about scriptures that say god is "all knowing" or "know all my hairs on my head" cause that could all be done without being omniscient.

are there any bible verse's that speak specifically of god's omniscience?.

-sab.

MarcusScriptus

I have to agree with Terry as regards on what it is like discussing these matters with religious folk, especially since we’re talking about viewing things through the very thin and flimsy JW philosophy of “where is that in the Bible?” There's no productivity in discussing thus on this level because most religious people don't understand what it means to have a belief system with holy writings. You find no “omniscience” of God in Scripture not because it isn’t there but because you can’t see the forest through all those ‘trees’ you keep complaining about blocking your vision.

It’s a convenience that the Watchtower leans too heavily on: true religion has to be based on Scripture. Baloney! To do so implies there were no truly religious people before the Bible was written, completed, and canonized. If one has to have everything spelled out in the Bible, then one needs to admit that no doctrine could be verified without it completed as a whole. This would mean all religious understanding was grossly lacking and there was no means of revelation for the Jewish religious system then or now because they never received the Christian Scriptures as canon. This would also mean that the faith of all Christians before the Bible was complete was also lacking because, according to this philosophy, one must wait for the Scriptures before one can verify a teaching as so. Even if one does not believe in Christianity or the Bible or in religion this creates a very problematic scenario, a logical paradox, and in the face of Jewish, Christian, and even secular history is totally wrong.

Sorry to say this to all you JWs and those who still can’t let go of this once you leave the “compound,” but the Bible did not create religious people. It’s the other way around. Religious people created the Bible. The cart does not pull the horse.

The Jewish religion was around first and composed, collected, and edited the volumes which would later be accepted by their community as holy and inspired. The same thing goes for the early Christians. A book didn’t start their religion, a man did. He selected others to carry on his work and they in turn developed the religious community from which religious writings were developed and collected that would later be accepted by the Christian community as holy inspired.

But those religious communities came first. What they wrote down only reflected what they already believed, not what they should come to believe. These weren’t creeds or catechisms or encyclopedias or lengthy pontifications of technical theology. They were books, poems, songs, letters, and prophecies. They didn’t invent religious ideas, they recorded them. Not everything the Beatles sang was pressed onto a vinyl record.

Beliefs about God’s omniscience precede most of the Hebrew writings, and definitely all of the Christian ones. The history is not static. You can look it up. It was a philosophical understanding about YHWH that both the Jews and later the Christians accepted. Sorry that it’s not explicit in Scripture, but neither is there anything explicit in Scripture that gave Christians the authority to add books to the Scriptures.

Jesus didn’t tell people to write anything down. He never said that all truth would be found in these writings and that people would be judged according to how well they followed what would be inscribed and claimed as inspired by his followers. The Scriptures themselves have Jesus telling his followers that there would be a lot more revelation coming that he couldn’t tell them yet. Nowhere in any of the Christian texts is there an explicit statement claiming that all that information was already had by the time they wrote the last book that the Christian community canonized. In fact, nowhere does the Bible explicit list what makes a book worthy of inclusion in the Bible and what does not.

You won’t find a lot of things in the Bible that Christians have traditionally passed down. They didn’t include it because they never thought in a million years that someone would act as if this book just miraculously fell out of the sky and that a group of “students” would stumble upon it, read it and conclude: “Hmm, this sounds good. Let’s build a religion based on it.” The Bible didn’t invent Jews and Christians. Instead Jews and Christians invented the Bible. The horse pulls the cart. Religious groups accepted what books reflected their beliefs and rejected those that didn’t. Christianity defined the Bible, and not the other way around no matter how much the Watchtower wants to wash people’s brains into believing.

You will have to study religious history and theology to find out why Jews and Christians believe this. It did not originate with the Scriptures, but the understanding is reflected within it, kind of like “it’s a given.”

But if everlasting life is based on how many people read and study the Bible and follow it word-for-word then humanity is doomed. Not many have. Most of the apostles didn’t. Many of the first century Christians didn’t. Most of them were martyred before all four gospels were written down.

And if truth is based on how well one creates doctrine out of these religious texts, then the entire Christian religion—especially the Jehovah’s Witnesses—are dead men because it’s foundation of the apostles and first martyrs was not made up of people who had a complete Bible to read and study.

And what building do you know can stand without a foundation?

(And just because some of the Beatles songs weren’t released to the public doesn’t mean they didn’t sing them.)

Oh, and P.S.--For those of you who really want to belong to a religion that bases all its beliefs on a "book they just stumbled upon," they have one of those that you can join. They're called the Mormons.

17

Does the Catholic Church Still Teach...

by Mad Dawg in

that it is a sin to eat meat on friday?

if so, it seems that it is ok to kill man on friday as long as you don't eat him..

MarcusScriptus

The sacrament, known as the “Anointing of the Sick,” is often called ‘last rites’ when it is administered to someone who is dying. In that case, it just means that the Anointing of the Sick is the final rite a Catholic receives before death. It's not actually reserved for the final moments of a person's life. But how does this or any rite help someone either at death or any other time?

Catholics believe in the principle of “sacramentality.” While having faith that God bestows his grace upon us spiritually, they also believe that God’s grace can actually be administered or received through certain physical actions or objects. This goes back to Biblical times, a specific example recorded at Acts 5:14-16 where physical contact with Peter’s shadow was the administrative conduit for God’s grace of healing for many. There’s also the case where Paul performed the rite of exorcism by distributing material cloths he wore on his person at Acts 19:11-12. A sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible grace or helpful gift from God. By means of sacraments God distributes grace by physical contact with the corporeal. In the Roman Catholic Church there are seven of such sacraments.

The Anointing of the Sick is one of the first sacraments for which specific details as to its administration and effects were recorded, so early in Christian history in fact that this sacrament is detailed in the New Testament. At James 5:14-16 we read of where God’s grace of healing, both physical and spiritual, is said to be administered by human prayer, anointing with oil, and by the physical touch of hands. Since the inspired text mentions that sins can be forgiven by means of this sacrament, it has a great benefit for one who is near death and has need for repenting from freely committed sins. If possible, as became the custom later in history, Holy Communion is also administered to the ailing one at this time.

However, it's no longer referred to as "Last Rites" in any formal sense. This sacrament may be requested and administered by any of God’s ministers when serious illness occurs, ebut specially the type that threatens life. While in some cases literal healing occurs, more often the individual is strengthened by God’s grace to see their suffering as a sharing in the passion of Christ.

But why still spoken of as “Last Rites” and usually connected in the public's mind with dark and fearful scenes at candlelit bedsides? We often see it over-dramatized in movies with people on their sick beds at death’s door and their family members hurrying to find a priest before the sick one’s last breath is taken. Is it really like that? As American Catholic.org mentioned in one of its Q & A articles on the subject:

Although the sacrament began as a ritual of healing, over time the emphasis shifted to the forgiveness of sins on the deathbed, when such forgiveness would be the final preparation for heaven. The Second Vatican Council returned the original meaning to the sacrament by emphasizing that it is not only for those who are at the point of death, but for anyone who is seriously ill, including mental or spiritual illness. It also helped move the Anointing away from a private service and back toward a community-based one.

Today we are all aware that tensions, fear and anxiety about the future affect not only our mind but our body as well. These illnesses can be serious. They can move us to ask for the healing touch of Christ in the Sacrament of Anointing. Persons with the disease of alcoholism or persons suffering from other addictions can be anointed. So can those who suffer from various mental disorders. The anxiety before exploratory surgery to determine if cancer is present is a situation in which Christ's power can be invoked in the sacrament.

In these cases the person does not have to wait until the illness is so grave that he or she is in the hospital or institutionalized to celebrate the sacrament. Sacraments, after all, are community celebrations. It is preferable to celebrate them in the context of family and parish even before going to the hospital. The sick person has a better opportunity to appreciate the prayers and symbols of the rite when in her or his customary worshiping community.

17

Does the Catholic Church Still Teach...

by Mad Dawg in

that it is a sin to eat meat on friday?

if so, it seems that it is ok to kill man on friday as long as you don't eat him..

MarcusScriptus

Catholics, like most Protestants, believe that people are saved not by works or by faith but by God’s grace.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification” and “justification [being ‘declared righteous’ in Jehovah’s Witness terms] comes from the grace of God.” They define “grace” or “underserved kindness” as something more specific than the Watchtower does, a literal saving action on God’s behalf, not merely “favor” but “the free and underserved help that God gives.”—CCC 1996, 2010.

Catholic apologist Amy Welborn in her “Prove It” series for young Catholics states: “The Catholic Church teaches that, yes, we are saved by grace alone, but we’re not saved by faith alone.” She states that Catholics don’t believe that they can be unresponsive to God’s grace or help, but need to “cooperate with that grace…to grow in holiness and become more like that Divine Image” found in Christ.—Prove It! Church by Amy Welborn, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, ISBN 0-87973-981-9.

So Catholics don’t believe that one can work to gain God’s grace. They believe one must respond to it in faith, true, just as a starving person must eat if brought food to survive, but they don't believe they can save themselves, even by their actions. Even works of merit, such as the “faith without works is dead” of the book of James is seen only possible by God’s saving help or “grace.” As one of their saints, Augustine of Hippo, wrote: “Man does not work any good things apart from God, since it is from God man receives the power to do the good things he does.”—Two Letters Against the Pelagians.

However, one does sin if they are free to observe a Church law on abstaining or a law on fasting and they refuse to do so because such laws are only active on days when the entire Church is in a formal state of penance (such as on Good Friday). Only health considerations, old age, or the lack of any other type of food or some like emergency excuses a Catholic in such situations.

A bishop may make an exception during Lent for Catholics to observe a feast day of a saint, which is supposed to be a day of celebrating Christ’s victory over evil in the example of his faithful servants. St. Patrick’s Day is such a popular feast day that always lands during Lent (the 40 days of Church-wide penance, minus Sundays, prior to Easter). Such an exemption is based on local popularity of the saint and thus at the discretion of the bishop over an area.

Certain days of the Catholic liturgical calendar should never be days of fasting or abstinence, even if they occur during formal penance times such as Lent. Solemnities such as Sabbaths (Sundays, the days of Easter and the first eight of the “twelve days” of Christmas, All Saints Day, etc.) and certain other feasts fall under such days where penance is contrary to the law to celebrate.—See Nehemiah 8:9-12.

59

Why did God create humanity?

by XPeterX in

what was the reason?.

MarcusScriptus

Rather: Wearing the name “atheist” does NOT change the fact that there’s still a wolf that likes to prey on the life blood of others underneath.

59

Why did God create humanity?

by XPeterX in

what was the reason?.

MarcusScriptus

There’s a big difference from being an atheist and an opportunist.

An atheist is a person who, because of a combination of the free exercise of conscience and intellect, comes to a conclusion that they don’t believe in God—either as that popularly represented or in the existence of deities exhaustively speaking.

An opportunist is someone who takes advantage of something like claim to a philosophy or even hijacks it, like many did at the rise of Communism and claimed they were “enlightened by atheism” merely to prove that they were as nonsensical as those who claimed to be enlightened by religion but belied it by their actions. Many took an enlightened concept of the mind and human spirit and turned into a name often too concurrent with the blood baths and the rape of humanity they inflicted in country after country in Europe and Asia. What these men were was nothing less than an opportunist who, instead of clinging to the title of religion like the Nazis did before them to masquerade their havoc dance of hatred on people.

Now they had “atheism” to wear as their new clothing, but their business was the same: hate others, make sport of the exercise of free conscience, use anything a person can to keep being that bully from way back on the schoolyard of so many years ago…that boy who beat up easy targets because on the inside nobody liked him. He felt unlovable by parents who probably wanted him less than a possible STD they could have picked up from a night of drunken sex. Or maybe because someone else was chosen from among siblings and he or she was made to feel like they didn’t exist unless they did something violent—yes, imagine that, being able to be an opportunist with violence itself, the tool that seems to cause the most relief because nothing else seems to shut up the hatred we feel inside ourselves except when we know we are hurting others, either emotionally or physically…but we hope for both!

That’s not a real atheist. Might as well just well enough remained a JW or member of some other religion we could easily hijack until atheists got even more power and control again, and then, wham, push them aside like we did before when we had the Soviet Union and take advantage of anything available as long as we have our targets to make us forget that poor little boy, unloved on the playground, who nobody cared about unless he raised hell.

Do we really have to be so callous to one another over the Internet? Do we apples really never fall far away from the hatred-inducing tree of Jehovah’s Witnesses that now since we no longer have a congregation of people to bully and make fun of for using their own minds and exercise their conscience that we have to advertise how much we miss people one of them by acting like this to a very good question?

And when is asking any question mean the person is doing anything more than asking a question? Just because some of us might have a hidden agenda when we ask things (like just wanting to stir things up for our own enjoyment of seeing others get hurt) doesn’t mean others lack a heart because we now have an empty cavity of seared conscience.

Just reading the comments of some people or the way the “joke” makes me feel like I’m back on a body of elders again, lovingly care for the sheep. Ah, it “feel good to be a Jehovah’s Witness” again!

I’m sorry but this isn’t what I’m looking for. If you people can’t move on and just wallow about being “tossed out in the darkness” from a group that didn’t have any light in the first place, then you deserve to keep acting like Jehovah’s Witnesses do to each other.

Wearing the name “atheist” does change the fact that there’s still a wolf that likes to prey on the life blood of others underneath.

I haven't seen people act this rude since the Integrity Keepers Convention of Jehovah's Witness in 1984--the last one I cared to even stay awake for.

59

Why did God create humanity?

by XPeterX in

what was the reason?.

MarcusScriptus

You are correct in your concept of reference for time. You need add only one extra ingredient to understand this equation. First ask yourself, “Before the universe was there time?” And also add in as a factor that God lives outside this physical universe.

Time is relative, according to both theology and science. Time is nothing more than the measurement of change. It exists in our realm where we have an existence in three dimensions. We are bound to the space-time continuum in which we exist, even if parts of that continuum get interrupted, twisted about, etc. There’s even talk in physics of the possibility of creating wormholes or even folding this continuum to enable intergalactic space travel. This would be necessary to travel in this universe because we cannot live outside of the influence it has on us.

Just Draw a Line ...

Now draw a line on a sheet of paper. Once finished, look back on the line. You can see the line’s beginning, it’s middle, and it’s end, practically all at once if you stand back far enough, right? You don’t live on the line. You transcend it. If a tiny spec of life lived at one point on this line it could not see either end. It could not know the beginning from the end. But you still can, despite the spec’s limitations.

It’s similar with God. God created the universe with its physical laws that govern the continuum. He isn’t bound by the laws because there was a time they were not. God was before them and, if science is correct, God will exist after this space-time continuum folds up. Once it is gone, will time as you or I know it exist? Will God stop existing because time as understood in this continuum ends? Of course not.

As one theologian stated, “Eternity can take place in an instant of time.” “Eternity,” meaning the realm above our continuum (or the “temporal” plane) was not dependent on what a minute or a second is in this universe before it began or even after it ends, if that type of end does takes place. It is the other way around. This universe has time because history was set in motion by One that can definte it, manipulate it.

There is no “start” for God, for God has always been “Is.” From our standpoint there are beginnings and endings, but God is not defined by our standpoint. There was never a time when God has been anything else than Always. Since God does not change there is no need to measure what doesn’t occur with God. There just is no such thing as time as far as God is concerned.

Other Dimensions to This Other Dimension

There is also no space in Eternity. Heaven is not a place like you and I live in. God requires no space to live in because God exceeds the ability for any space to hold him. You can’t travel to Heaven in a spaceship because it is not a “location” or “place” as you or I understand those concepts.

There is no distance to travel, there is no close or far, there is no yesterday or today, there is no past, present, or future. There is, however, always. But that is as far as this theology has uncovered.

Remember God is not relative to man in any sense of the word. Man is relative to God always, but never the other way around. Humankind is not necessary for God to exist. The universe and its boundaries of time do not need to exist.

You did not need that line you drew in order to exist. You can now tear it up and toss it away and you will still be. Whatever was bound by that line has never, will never, and can never have any control over you. It is similar to God.

Footnote: The concept of Holy Communion as practiced by many Christians where they believe Christ is present as “sacrifice” is based on this concept. They believe that since God is not bound by time, the blood of Christ is freshly poured before God always. It is always there on the cross and on the ground. One can always exercise faith in that sacrifice and no other one is needed because it doesn’t disappear like all those that did at the Temple. Like Abel’s blood that still bears witness, like the fact that God is still the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob despite their being dead from our standpoint, considering that the letter to the Hebrews tells us that Christ is always begging for us through this sacrifice on our behalf is based on this very theology that to God this Precious Blood always IS. That’s how Orthodox, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and some Protestants “offer” the Sacrifice of Mass without it being a new sacrifice, for the value of the sacrifice on the Cross is as fresh today as yesterday in the eyes of God who is not bound by time and can always see it on the line of that continuum in which we exist.

59

Why did God create humanity?

by XPeterX in

what was the reason?.

MarcusScriptus

By the way, I’m not saying I prescribe to things like purgatory or heaven or hell. I’m just saying that the reason why millions aren’t leaving the churches to switch out their beliefs for the Witnesses is that the JW misapplication of time to God’s existence makes their arguments in eschatology weak. Neither heaven, hell, or purgatory are considered literal places and neither can someone be “delayed” from heaven by undergoing the process of purgation since there is no time in the realm of “eternity” wherein God exists according to mainstream theology.