From Rapture Ready

[aggle-rithm]

There was a line of demarcation where she joined and then became a totally different person.

I had this sad experience with a friend that I worked with some time ago. Although he had some kooky beliefs, he was a nice guy and I enjoyed working and hanging out with him.

Unfortunately, he joined a splinter group from his church that taught its followers that you could only be saved if you were totally free from sin. So...he became totally free from sin. And much less pleasant to be around.

For some reason, when you are free from sin, you become arrogant, cocky, and judgemental. Other people aren't good enough for you, and you leave a trail of broken relationships behind you.

That's why a little sin on the part of others doesn't bother me too much.

 

[Wally]

I've never understood the fuss about this verse, Luke 18:16, "Permit the children to come to Me" - nothing about life, death, pain or anything like that about it.
Basically stop using 400 year old English.

BLASPHEMER!!!! If the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, It's good enough for me!!!

 

[Personal Grudge]

I am just always completely flabberghasted with the surety that fundamentalists seem to express. Is it really so impossible to express the "This is what I believe, but it's possible I could be wrong" viewpoint? It seems that most Christians can easily say this... and these are the people with whom you can have an intelligent debate.

I am reminded of the family of my Mormon girlfriend (back when we were dating... and back when I was a Mormon... a much more ignorant time of my life). The father worked for NASA. The mother was a high school science teacher. When we first met, I began discussing religion with them. And, I made the mistake of questioning evolution. After all, the Bible clearly lays out how humans were created. So, obviously evolution must be false.

I quickly had a couple of Mormon parents attempting to hold back their laughter at my ridiculous notion. As a couple of scientists, they found the idea of questioning the validity of evolution to be ridiculous. As they quickly explained... the Bible should not really be taken literally. They themselves loved to display the contradictions throughout various passages of this book.

Of course, being Mormon... they certainly held other beliefs that could not be supported by one piece of evidence. The whole "Joseph Smith and the golden plates" story was definitely true in their eyes. But, they were not offended by suggestions that they could be wrong. They readily recognized that their chosen beliefs existed without evidence, and they did not try to pretend that the universe showed any of their beliefs to be self-evident.

For those that express such certainty on subjects for which they cannot provide evidence... how can this be differentiated from sheer delusion?

 

[Foster Zygote]

Of course, it also says "Kids are stupid, so beat the crap out of them every chance you get."

Not in those exact words, of course.

No, no, no... It says that kids should be dressed in tight, itchy formal clothes and made to walk to church. Isn't it obvious? Well it is to me because I've been touched by the Holy Spirit.

 

[Personal Grudge]

No, no, no... It says that kids should be dressed in tight, itchy formal clothes and made to walk to church. Isn't it obvious? Well it is to me because I've been touched by the Holy Spirit.

I was touched by the Holy Spirit once. Unfortunately, it didn't even buy me dinner first... and it was gone when I woke up in the morning.

I felt very used.

 

[Marduk]

Theft - Definition of Theft

A person is guilty of theft if: he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.

so where were the police when Jesus was stealing my sin
I need those, theyre fun

 

[CORed]

I am amazed at the mental gymnastics you have to perform to reconcile the world as you see it with the world as described in the Bible. How in the devil's name do you believe that women are simultaneously equal and subservient?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ETA: just when I think that you have run out of new ways to offend posters on this board, you find a new one.

Hey, once you buy into the trinity, the other logical contradictions are a piece of cake.

 

[six7s]

For those that express such certainty on subjects for which they cannot provide evidence... how can this be differentiated from sheer delusion?

Easy!

Denial

 

[Cayvmann]

Or are they? The Devil tries to confuse believers, and modifying the Bible would be a very good way to do this. If these manuscripts go against something already in the Bible I would be suspicious of it.

So the King James version is the original????

 

[Moochie]

They weren't expected to...

On the contrary, the apple tree was identified simply as a test that they would fail, thereby necessitating the wrath and vengeance of an eternally sadistic, child-molesting arsehole

Oooh, six7s, I love it when you talk dirty!


M.

 

[Moochie]

Even as little kid I remember being sceptical about religion.....I really had a hard time believing all I was hearing about hellfire & damnation.

My mother was catholic-my father was protestant--neither were very religious and for awhile I was spared.

When I got to be 8 or 9 they were talked into giving me some kind of formal religious "training"......and it wound up being catholic.

The parish priest was one of these hellfire & brimstone Irish catholic lunatics who was always raving either about how much jesus suffered for us or about the exact & horrible nature of what hell was like and what was going to happen to us or anybody else that didn't follow catholic doctrine to the letter.

Problem was--my father was one of those protestants that was supposed to be evil & destined for an eternity in a burning hell.

I though my father was a pretty good guy....certainly not deserving of this---and luckily had enough of a conscience to decide the "good father" was full of it.

One day--I think I was about 15---one of my friends came over with a newspaper in his hands. The "good father" was the cover story.

He'd been convicted of raping an adult woman & was heading to the slammer. ( hey--a least it wasn't one of the altar boys).

I think that's the moment I knew I'd been right to trust my feelings.

The criminal old git was probably one of those "hellfire & brimstone Irish catholic alcoholic lunatics."


M.

 

[six7s]

Uh let's see:

"suffer the little children to come unto me"

Any good bible beater could put this on his ideological anvil, heat it with rhetoric and make an iron-clad dogma out of it.

I've never understood the fuss about this verse, Luke 18:16, "Permit the children to come to Me" - nothing about life, death, pain or anything like that about it.
Basically stop using 400 year old English.

How about you and your friends stop using a compendium of 4,000 and 2,000 year old novels as a handbook on morals and legislation?

 

[Moochie]

I find it worst that people would follow, advocate and believe this psychopath is moral and has the right to do so.

People who do this don't really have a choice, paradoxically. They've been led up the Primrose Path with promises that are entirely fictional, but these poor folk are too broken to understand this.


M.

 

[Mr Clingford]

How about you and your friends stop using a compendium of 4,000 and 2,000 year old novels as a handbook on morals and legislation?

Now you're dissing literature as well? There can be a lot of truth in fiction.

 

[Moochie]

Exactly. A&E were not allowed to have knowledge of good and evil for reasons depicted in Genesis 3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.

They were clueless to the potential destruction from eating the forbidden fruit.

God did not want man to become like him, but....he placed the very thing he did not want right in the middle of the Garden.
Is this a wise God?

As I've mentioned before, I think A&E were the first skeptics in that they didn't believe what God was telling them: they had to see for themselves. The rest, as they say, is his(and her)story.


M.

 

[six7s]

Now you're dissing literature as well?

No

I'm merely suggesting that you 'stop using a compendium of 4,000 and 2,000 year old novels as a handbook on morals and legislation'

There can be a lot of truth in fiction.

Irrelevant in regard to your novels... they are worse than useless

 

[Moochie]

This life has suffering in it, you cannot escape that, and although you can blame God for it, you cannot judge him.

Quite. But you can change your attitude about it. Specifically by having compassion for your own suffering. From that point on, one sees others in an entirely new and compassionate light, or so I've found.

@ hamelekim -- what makes you think anything written in a book as old as the bible has any factual relevance to this world today? Seems to me you have to make some incredible leaps of logic (bordering on insanity) to do so.

I do think there are lessons in the bible, as there are in all religious treatises, but they're related to the inner life of individuals, not prophesy for what happens beyond the times they were written in. Those who assert that it is otherwise have an agenda -- an agenda to impose their views upon others, usually for political purposes. Nothing exceeds like excess.


M.

 

[Moochie]

I don't think any of us knows that answer. God hasn't deemed it necessary to give us the answer either.

If you can't deal with that, then so be it, but don't assume that God is evil because he allows evil. If God created everything that exists, seen and unseen, then can you honestly believe that you have some moral superiority to Go

But that, hamelekin, is where I think you're mistaken. God did give us the answer, but whether intentionally or not, you've missed it, like so many others just like you.


M.

 

[Moochie]

It's "Amazing Grace"

"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see."

http://www.littleleaf.com/amazinggrace.htm

The theological point is that you are saved by faith alone, not works.

Yes, and I'd go further and say that it doesn't even necessarily mean faith in a god. To me, at least, it can mean a faith in the fact that we didn't create ourselves -- we're the spawn of the universe is one way of looking at it -- and that the religious cottoned on to the very real possibility that we have in our grasp the ability to do two things: kill ourselves, and kill all living things, and thus came up with the mythology whereby we a) take notice of this fact, and b) realize that it is within our ability to go in another direction.

In other words, if there's punishment, it is punishment that is self-inflicted, such as us despoiling our habitat, for one example. Clearly, Jesus could have avoided the cross.

Perhaps we all need to experience a personal crucifixion.


M.

 

[Moochie]

My mother joined the Baptist fundy church that nearly destroyed our family when I was about 9. I remember her trying for years to drag my father to church and screaming at him about the horrors of hell and how he was going to go there if he didn't believe in her new found version of God. This caused HUGE fights because he wasn't really interested in God and had been raised a Calvinist, so he thought that if you weren't chosen to begin with you weren't going to heaven anyway so what difference did it make.

I remember my mother as being a fun loving, happy person before she got involved with that church. There was a line of demarcation where she joined and then became a totally different person. All of a sudden everything was RAPTURE, RAPTURE, RAPTURE, trumpet, trumpet, trumpet, new heaven, new earth, sin, sin, sin, etc.

In her defense, she had never graduated high school, didn't know a thing about science (even the basic stuff) and had no critical thinking skills whatsoever. She was very vulnerable to pretty much anything religious that anyone could come up with, it just so happened that the end times rapture stuff was what she latched on to.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. She was a happy person, but unhappy in her marriage, didn't have many friends and wasn't very educated. Here came these people that 'loved her', had all the answers and they were easy answers and not too hard to understand, and also they sent her to Bible classes and made her feel smart about knowing all this 'insider knowledge' about the rapture at a time when she had been upset about not finishing school and having dropped out of secretarial school.

Anyway, I understand what you're saying about how a lot of it never made sense. I used to think the same thing to myself about a lot of the rapture stuff my mom would talk about. It was just flat out insane.

I think the point is, when you die, you're dead. You can paint "dead" in many colors, as the "Rapture" folks are rather fond of doing, but dead is dead.

The problem is, "Armageddon" is a very real possibility, given what scientists tell us about how we're despoiling our environment. There's a very real possibility that eventually we -- us humans -- will make this Earth uninhabitable for any living thing. If that's not Armageddon, I don't know what is.

Whether we do so or not ties in with the whole "original sin" and "punishment" trip. But the punishment will be of our own making.

Just tossing this out there for your consideration.


M.