Wayne Delia

First of all, you might make a more convincing argument for the Bible's inerrancy if you actually were more familiar with the Bible itself. The problem here is that there were many, many humans who died before Jesus was born, and by your reasoning they are all rotting in hell, because they had no knowledge of Jesus, much less any faith that Jesus was the Messiah. That's unfortunate, because it would include all the Old Testament Jewish heroes. In an attempt to rectify that obvious injustice, James (the brother of Jesus) wrote (in James 2:18-26) that faith without good works was not sufficient to get into heaven, and argued that certain Old Testament characters were "justified" (saved, or sent to heaven) because of their good works, and through no faith in Jesus at all. Possibly from Jesus Himself, who, at the Last Supper, told His disciples that the bread was His body and the wine was His blood, and that they were to eat and drink "in remembrance of me." That was the basis of the sacrament of communion. If Jesus Himself isn't enough of an authority for your religious theology, I can't see how you can rightly call yourself a Christian.Of course not. For a counter-example, a rich young man asked Jesus what must be done in order to get to heaven. Jesus told him it was not only necessary to obey the Commandments (which He incompletely and erroneously tried to list), but also that the man must go, sell all his possessions, and give the money to the poor. There are several references for this story: in Matthew 19:21, in Mark 10:21, and in Luke 18:22. If that's not a "good works" requirement to get into heaven, then nothing is. But again, perhaps Jesus Himself isn't enough of a religious authority for you. That's a laugh. I read the Bible, thought to myself that the supernatural, spiritual, paranormal, metaphysical, unfalsifiable, untestable, superstitious crap in there was all the product of primitive, simplistic, manipulative, anonymous first-century authors, and rejected it in terms of what can reasonably be expected in the real world. Do you think I'd qualify for heaven with that conclusion? One thing they all have in common is that they think they're correct, and that those who disagree with them are incorrect. Then how do you know you're not headed for hell? For example, you apparently don't follow the Catholic rite of Holy Communion in memory of the Last Supper, because you seem to think that God wants you to sit on your ass and do nothing apart from believe in Him. If you're wrong about that, you're screwed. And on what basis could you indicate that anyone else's beliefs are wrong?

WMD

Starboy

Since when do people speak in capital letters? It was the people that followed several hundred years later, well steeped in the myth that capitalized Son of God as they were transcribing the oral tradition that was the basis of the bible. When Jesus’ used SOG, it is clear that he meant that we all children of god including Jesus.

The Jews did not require their messiahs to be gods. Mosses, David, Solomon and so forth were just men. The Jews were expecting another man, not god. Jesus was a Jew and he understood this. It was the Christians that followed well after his death that did not understand this. You are participating in the Christian myth by insisting that Jesus claimed to be god.

As for Jesus being the messiah, the experts in this matter, the Jews rejected him. He didn’t fit the bill as written in the Torah, not the screwed up version that is passed off as the Old Testament. You must know that what is called the Old Testament is a cooked version to make Jesus look like he was the messiah. The Jews to this day are waiting for the messiah that was prophesized because Jesus didn’t fit the bill.

Starboy

Mullibok

Perhaps a quibbling point, but I don't believe the Torah itself says much at all about there being one final messiah to deliver the Jews. That belief came later, with the prophets.

http://www.jewfaq.org/moshiach.htm

(And I think the attempted explanation in this article about the messiah being implied in the Torah is pretty weak)

Starboy

Good point. I think there is no doubt that Jesus is a Christian invention and not something the Jews created. Using the Old Testament as support is a shifty tactic especially when viewed in the light that to this day the Jews do not consider Jesus to have even been a prophet let alone a savior. A comparable situation would be the Mormon religion. They have preempted the Christian bible as their old testament and then glommed on their new testament, which they call the book of Mormon. I am sure that most of the Christian in the world don’t think much of the Mormons just as the Jews don’t think much of the Christians.

Starboy

Wayne Delia

No, of course not. Apples have nothing to do with the current discussion. Returning to the main point, comparisons between human parents and God are doomed to failure, because God is able to perform any ability at all, while human parents are not. So, human parents do the best they can within the constraints they are operating, to raise children the best way they can. In doing so, they often come off as being much more moral, considerate, and compassionate than God is described, particularly in the Old Testament.You didn't actually address the question: despite your amazement, why was it necessary for God to turn part of Himself into human form, send it to earth, have it preach for a few years, require its death by crucifixion, in order to be able to forgive only the fraction of people who believe all that bullshit, which would exclude a good portion of those who were referred to as His "Chosen People?" Your amazement does not answer the question.

The way you started out your response was particularly bad form - you are giving the impression of not knowing much about what you are talking about.

Again, you've made an assertion of Biblical inerrancy, but you continue to indicate you're not very familiar with the Bible. The punishment is *death* by stoning. Now, hook that up with the actual offense: my teenage son Joe was being rebellious, lazy, and had a few beers. Does he deserve to be killed by having his skull crushed by large rocks, for behavior which is actually quite common with teenagers? Yes or no? If not, what happened to the legitimacy of that particular Bible teaching? And if so, why am I expected to embrace this barbaric religion?
The Christian concept of "Original Sin" is that a person needs to believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior in order to avoid hell. But nothing that any human has done, not even Hitler, in a finite lifetime deserves infinite punishment. The rationalization for hell (in the Christian paradigm) is that either the guilt for Adam and Eve's transgression, or else the sin nature acquired when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is somehow transmitted to all their descendents, making them "de facto" guilty of some sort of sin that deserved an eternity of punishment in hell.

Returning to the example of my currently-ten-year-old son Joe, he holds no particular religious belief in anything, least of all Jesus, but when the time comes I will encourage him to examine carefully and critically all manner of religious claims from competing religions and to draw his own conclusions. So far, he and his sister Lisa have been bright, beautiful, inquisitive, caring, sensitive children. If they were to die in this state, would they go to heaven? If they do, then Christianity is irrelevant, because they're not Christian. If they don't, then clearly they haven't done anything worthy of eternal punishment, so if that's their sentence, then as a parent I will do everything I can to keep them as far away from the barbaric, bloodthirsty Christian religion as I can.

As an aside, Genesis 3:22-23 indicates that God banished Adam and Eve not because they disobeyed Him, but rather because by disobeying Him, they acquired the ability to discern good from evil, and God was - literally - jealous of them acquiring that ability. So, speaking either with the royal "we" pronoun, or else speaking to other gods (???), God banished them out of fear that they would acquire immortality by eating from the Tree of Life, which would make them equal to Him. What's wrong with examples according to Biblical beliefs? I'll give you two: Genesis 6:9 (Noah), and Job 1:1 (Job). Those characters are described as being upright and perfect, blameless and righteous (depending on which translation one uses). But the question is, what's the benefit of following a religion which attempts to extort a single, unreasonable, unsupported belief in an arbitrary religious assertion through threats of eternal punishment for failing to be perfect? I've got much more constructive, more optimistic, more humanitarian things to do with my time.
That's priceless! An honest answer either way would put your theology and your God in a state of irrelevancy or atrocity, so your solution is to plug your ears and run away from the question. My conclusion is that you're wasting a lot of your time with your beliefs, and that there's nothing at all wrong with what my children and I observe about the world and how we lead our lives.

WMD

Wayne Delia

I'm not applicable to the current discussion, since I'm not a theist at all. The problem remains, though, that you've rejected certain teachings of other Christian groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses because they're not "True Christians," but you don't actually have an objective standard for who legitimately qualifies as a "True Christian." First of all, fully a third of the world's population is affiliated with some sect or denomination of Christianity, so there's something seriously wrong with your idea that "world" implies "not Christian." This may have been applicable in the early days when there were actually very few Christians, particularly when Jesus was alive. Second, while I am familiar with the reference you're alluding to, it makes Jesus and His followers out to be some sort of Space Cadet troop which one might find at a Star Trek convention. Finally, you've just restated the premise, instead of supporting it and demonstrating why a "worldly" view or action is necessarily bad, particularly when "worldly" implies a view consistent with observed reality.Again, you return to your original problem: how can you identify yourself positively as a "True Christian," and exclude people from other groups, even when they're doing the same thing to you? Not really. Your definition of "True Christian" was changed after the fact, in order to exclude Jehovah's Witnesses. That's a common logical fallacy called "No True Scotsman" (more precisely, argumentum ad hoc). If you're not familiar with it, I can give you an example using the Scotsman himself. Calm down, kid. All it means is that no particular interpretation of Christianity is necessarily correct, and that includes your interpretation. Devoting one's lifetime to learning about God and worshipping Him strictly based on one or a few interpretations which are not necessarily valid seems to me to be a huge mistake, at the very least. It's quite different in politics, especially in a system of government such as ours, because any one particular political party does not necessarily reflect the opinions of all people who would be governed by that party. And it's always a bad idea to compare science to theology, since the scientific method encourages searching out, locating, and verifying or falsifying currently existing scientific theories; religious dogma is not subject to any questioning or critical examination at all.

WMD

Wayne Delia

That also does nothing to explain why "worldly" stuff is necessarily bad. Jesus is just making an unfalsifiable assertion to explain why nobody was sticking up for Him. Additionally, He also later said that if He wanted, He could summon all sorts of angels from heaven to protect Him and bring Him down from the cross, but for some reason chose not to. But that's functionally equivalent to a regular guy getting crucified, so it holds no weight with skeptics. All it sounds like is that Jesus, in a fit of paranoid schizophrenia, imagined He was a king of some sort of outer-space army that consistently failed to show up.

WMD