*Caution* Religious DebateFollow

First off, this thread is for me and Deathfromtheskies to see if we can have a nice argu-- err, debate about christianity, the integrity of the Bible, and so on and so forth =p.



RAR!

Err... ummm... okay... where shall I start...

First off, tell me,

Are you a Christian that accepts the Old Testament as rules applicable to modern life, or are you the kind that believes the OT is "for the jews"?

Do you believe that God is all-knowing?

Do you believe that God has infinite wisdom, including the ability to predict the consequences of his own actions?

Do you believe that God is fair to both christians and non-christians?

Ok, I missed my invite in the mail, but I was lurking around just waiting for something like this anyway....

The Old testament is bunk. The New Testament is bunk. They were written, compiled and edited by men who were trying to make sure that people lived according to rules they thought would help society function well and better itself. Those men were mostly right, despite the Crusades and Jihads.

Of course, I'm all-knowing. I just have a problem remembering things sometimes. But I know that so I'm doing ok.

I think I just answered that for you.

I'm not fair. Anyone who promised you that things would be fair was a liar. They may or may not have been deceiving themselves as well, but they were deceiving you, certainly.


I hope this doesn't dampen your little debate. Feel free to peruse my words and argue over their meaning, if it helps. I can edit for added ambiguity, but I know that won't be necessary.

*calmly peruses the posts, and not seeing one from Deathfromtheskies, notices again how incendiary religious debate can be*...



Since when was I asking you?...



I'm going to have to concur with your sig on this one...



That's great, but I want to see how the Great Deathfromtheskies reacts and answers my questions.

If you want a private debate without anyone else's input, I suggest you use this new invention, it's called email. If you post on a public forum you should expect others to take part. /shrug

That doesn't make it any more or less accurate.

and Rom, maybe death doesn't feel you are important enough to him to respond.

Ok, I'm back, had to go make a parts run.

*pops knuckles*

The OT is no longer applicable to anyone, because the NT replaces it. Jesus gave the commandments "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself". In those 2 commandments all the OT commands can be satisfied. The NT is for everyone, Jew and Gentile alike.

Of course He is.

Of course He does.

Yes.

I already know what your next question will be. You think I walked right into your trap. But it's ok, I have a rebuttal for your rebuttal. Carry on.

Oh BTW, 2 and a half years? 5 here.

Edited, Wed Jul 21 14:26:33 2004 by Deathfromtheskies

pah.


call this a debate?

;)


HOw about this:

If Jesus was God and such... and he is divine and KNOWS full well that there is a heavan.. and that it is paradise... HOw is him committing Suicide By Roman such a big frickin sacrifice??

Jesus was a Buddhist man...come on.

and:

He talked about reincarnation... He said in his OWN words.... "You will be born again, but you won't understand waht I mean"..... So why is every one so convinced that they know waht he meant...

I mean... God KNEW that Man would eat the fruit... We just had to go through the steps.
Jesus KNEW that people would misinsterpret everything and **** **** up for exactly the same reasons.

Word Yo

Edited, Wed Jul 21 15:44:55 2004 by Kelvyquayo

Sure He was.




Please, oh please, give me chapter and verse for that.

I find it hilarious that you are spouting theological nonsense while you have a picture of Marley puffing weed in your avatar. Sweet irony.

Edited, Wed Jul 21 16:09:10 2004 by Deathfromtheskies

Equally, Jesus said, "I come not to abolish the old laws, but to enforce them." Are these words simply ignored? There are plenty of rules in the OT that allow people to kill women who aren't virgins on their wedding day, own slaves, kill gays publicly, kill unbelievers, and kill those who work on the Sabbath.

I disagree as far as those two commandments satisfying all previous commandments on the grounds that one sentence cannot replace hundreds of pages filled with stories and rules.

As far as NT being for the Jews, don't they believe that the real messiah is yet to come, and that Jesus was not the Son of God? I just don't see many jews or gentiles perusing the NT for pleasure reading or religious enlightenment.







Good, I wanted to see if I could get you to establish some basic christian beliefs... you never know, there's a lot of radicals out there o_0.




This is actually a good point that I wanted to talk about...

In my words:

"Jesus is God in the Flesh. Jesus was made as sort of a final sacrafice so that blood sacrafice would no longer be necessary, and human kind could receive a new type of forgiveness. But... there's something a little awkward about this... God created Jesus, who was God in the Flesh, and sacraficed his new God in the Flesh to himself, God, to appease His wrath and anger at the sinful beings of earth. Anything sort of... moot, about that? Aside from setting up a messiah figure, it seems that it would've been easier for God to find some other way than creating himself in the flesh to die and be sacraficed to himself. Furthermore, Jesus' death is labeled as a great sacrafice. One detail is often left out of the reverent homage given to this person. He wanted to die. That was His purpose. To die. He WANTED the romans and the jews to kill him. Besides, Earth sucks compared to heaven, apparently, and I'm sure that Jesus didn't mind going when he did. Tell me, what was his sacrafice? He knew that there was paradise and a seat next to his Father in Heaven. Humans lack that (though some claim to be 100% sure, I doubt they sincerely are)."




True, they knew these horrible outcomes would come about, but I'd like to focus on the above statement for now instead of jumping all over the place.



Shh... Let's not be bursting any balloons... ;)


Edited, Thu Jul 22 00:11:04 2004 by Romulox

HOLY SH*T!!!

Is Jesus saying that all of God's people pre-Jesus went to Hell!?!?

Whew... sucks for them... after all that fellowship, worship, rules, etc...

I never saw that verse... Adds a lot of additional creepiness to the NT...

As for the verses following that one, I simply cannot believe them for I've had the pleasure of knowing too many good people who did not believe in God. They did not love darkness, but they did not believe in God... According to those verses, my friends don't exist >.<

Edited, Thu Jul 22 00:19:42 2004 by Romulox

There is no real OT Jewish concept of an afterlife beyond Sheol. Heaven exists in the OT but as God's home, not as an eternal reward for the holy (aside from Enoch and Elijah who were taken bodily into heaven). Sheol is pretty much nothingness. Eternal rest and greyness and that sort of thing. The idea in the Old Testment being that, largely, righteousness is its own reward. That and most of God's rewards in the Old Testment are earthly. Job passes God's test and receives three times his previous wealth. David has a palace and an army. So on and so forth. The entire Old Testament is largely a lesson that when nations (or people) glorify and honor God they get rich and powerful but when they turn away, they get over run with pagans and infidels and turn poor and miserable. Never in the New Testament does Jesus say that, according to the new order, you stand to benefit in any material sense from being righteous. In fact Jesus warns the opposite: that believing in him is setting yourself up for a life of scorn, poverty and potential death but you'll be rewarded in Heaven.

Keep in mind that, as there is no eternal paradise in the Old Testament, so is there no eternal damnation in Hell. Hell is a concept taken from various neighboring faiths, largely Greek/Roman with its subcatagories of Gehanna, Tartarus, etc and doesn't enter into the Bible (or the Judeo-Christian faith) until the New Testament.

Edited, Thu Jul 22 10:56:02 2004 by Jophiel

Death,

Explain this to me if you can be so kind... sry for the brevity..I'm busy at work

It was said by Maliki, that Elija will return before the Lord will come....thus John the Baptist. I can remember where, but I think I recall Jesus saying that John was Elija..

True that John the Baptist denies that he is Elija.. but technically he wasn't.. He was the reincarnation of.

and wehn the disiple sees the 3.. he see's Jesus talking to Elija.... I dunno It just makes sense to me.

There is definatly room for reincarnation in the bible.

Once again.. I wish i had the time to debate this more thoroughly.


http://www.letusreason.org/NAM2.htm
actually here's a link arguing against my views.. but either way it has the passages if you wish to delve. The view in this link is totally biased
it couldn't be reincarnation because the Bible doesn't teach that LOL wahtever...

anyway.
Peace



Edited, Thu Jul 22 13:37:58 2004 by Kelvyquayo

Anyone read The DaVinci Code? Good book.

1) Yes, I am a Christian, but I do not believe that we are all meant to worship in the same way. Each person can follow their own beliefs and remain in God's grace as long as his heart is true. In fact, Jews, Christians (of all denominations), and Muslims, are all flavors of the same religion. They just chose to believe slightly different things at one point or another. Same ideas, same beginnings. But back to your question... (Warning, this is long, may challenge your beliefs, and is in no way my opinion. It is rather my understanding of facts I have read. It also elaborates on the faults of the church throughout history, from a historian's standpoint, though I do not claim to be a historian.)

The Bible is incomplete, and was written by man, and therefor infallible. It's not a bad book by any means, but rather it's a book of good intentions stained by blood. Charlemagne, when he decided to unify his kingdom under one religion, chose Christianity for whatever reasons he had. Perhaps because it was on the rise, or perhaps he just took a gamble. Who knows. But, he saw that there were several different versions of Christianity across the land. Each church had it's own beliefs and rituals, so he had all the bishops and priests of power meet, where he had them sit down and decide on one unified religion. There, they decided what books would and would not be in the Bible, what beliefs they would have, as well as what practices there should be upheld.

Afterwards, they sought out and tried to destroy all books of Christianity that where not deemed part of the "Bible." Some survived. (Dead Sea Scrolls anyone?) The church has since then sought to destory any and all forms of "pagan" religion and Christianity that where not their own. The church actually held a private war against the Cathars, a group of Christians who held unique beliefs, going so far as to send out armies to kill them all. Most of them commited suicide before letting the Christian crusaders take them captive. Why where they hunted? They believed Mary Magdalene was the "Holy Grail," literally in the bible "San Greal" which means Holy Blood. They believed Jesus and Mary were, in fact, married, and Mary was with child as Jesus died. According to them, Magdelene was a daughter of a different line of kings, and not a prostitute. They belived the Church made Mary Magdelene into a prostitue because they could not erase her name from the Bible. It was used far too much for it not to have been. They also believed that the "Virgin" Mary was not a virgin when she bore Jesus. (The Catholic Church added that bit in at the confrence above. They "decided" that Jesus was the Son of God, and endorsed that fully, changing small aspects to help enforce it, as before not all churches preached that.) They do believe Jesus to be the messiah, though, and viewed sexual intercourse at it's peak to be another method of "seeing" and experiencing God. (Read the DaVinci Code.)

Another fault of the church is the demonization of women. For centuries before Jesus, women where considered sacred by most cultures of the world. The ability to bear children and create life made them so, and there are a good many goddesses, some who were as powerful as their male counterparts in their own ways. There is also even a belief that there is a female counterpart to God, though I forget her name.

But the bible is riddled with parts that cast a bad light on women, especially Eve by taking the bite of the apple then convinving Adam to. The church did this to cast revered godesses in a bad light, and to denounce the Wiccan religon, as well as countless other pagan Mother Nature religions, as evil instead of peaceful. (When I say Wiccan, I mean the "true" version that existed thousands of years ago, not what horror flicks now paint them to be. Same with pagan. Both are more nature loving than devil worsiping, because remember - these religions existed long before the idea of Satan touched their lands.)

It was their excuse to hunt them down to clear out competition. Microsoft could learn a thing or two from the old Catholic Church. (I can see it now...the Windows Inquisition, complete with burning penquins at the stake.) The church is perhaps the single biggest reason that females have not had equality until just recently in history.

They have also assimilated other festivals and traditions into their own religion to further assimilate "heathen" cultures. Halloween was a Celtic holliday, Easter a Norse one. (Yes, Easter is a Norse Icelandic Holliday, down to the giving of colored eggs. They considered the eggs to be the sign of fertility, of whom Frigga, Odin's wife, was the patron god, amoung other things.)

Enough of that. Moving along...

2) I do believe God is all-knowing. However, like the wise father, He lets his children make their own mistakes and learn from them. Seriously, how many times have you done something your father said not to? Sometimes the only way to learn is by first hand experience.

3) See #2

4) That's up for debate. The old testament holds alot of favoritism for the Jews, perhaps to help assimilate other cultures. However, God sent his son down not for the Jews, but for the "other religions" people. That will be up to a person's opinion. Certain "non-christian" regions do seem to have a lower quality of life, but so do some christians, and that could easily be due to the lack of infastructure and development of those cities. Personally, I can see two guys walking down the street - one in a buisness suit, the other in rags, and they both are christian. So I think He's pretty fair overall.

Sorry about it's length. Again, I don't proclaim any of this to be absolute fact - noone alive on earth can truly know what REALLY happened in those times. This is just my understanding of the past, and what might have happened.