biblical interpretation and the atheist


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2 hours ago, cuchulain said:

if god were eternal and constant, why no more burning bushes or big stone tablets? 

An obvious answer is that humans change.  A parent treats a child differently when it becomes an adult. Not because the parent is different, but because the child is. Make sense?

A more commonly cited explanation is that God has been working a long term plan, and we have simply moved into a new phase of it.

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4 hours ago, mererdog said:

An obvious answer is that humans change.  A parent treats a child differently when it becomes an adult. Not because the parent is different, but because the child is. Make sense?

A more commonly cited explanation is that God has been working a long term plan, and we have simply moved into a new phase of it.

I'm not interested in making excuses for God.

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7 hours ago, Brother Kaman said:

Can anything that does not exist be logical?

All story-telling requires the use of an internal logic. While the characters and plot may make no sense in terms of the real world, they must make sense within the context of the story, or it creates those blue bricks that are impossible to see past.

"Long works, in particular, require considerable formal organization, and so Dante relies on Aquinas and Catholic theology to structure his vision of the afterlife, just as Victor Hugo and Tolstoy embed powerful discourses about history inThe Hunchback of Notre Dame and War and Peace. Similarly, Yeats’s late poetry turns on the detailed cosmology he elaborates in A Visionwhile Robert Graves’s best love poems celebrate the somber mythos of The White Goddess: 'There is one story and one story only.' Sometimes the writers truly believe in these various systems, sometimes the systems merely serve as useful architectural blueprints to produce original and coherent works of art. Of course, what matters most is that the resulting novel or poem, through its use of such theoretical struts and joists, can somehow do an even better job than usual of, say, breaking our hearts." - Michael Dirda

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6 hours ago, Pastor Dave said:

 

Good one.

 

Yep. Also a rare example of a joke that is told almost exclusively in a classroom setting. The first time I heard it, my creative writing instructor was explaining why "It really happened" is not the same as "It sounds realistic."  Part of his argument revolved around the whole "reading him his rights" thing. In real life, getting arrested doesn't work like it does in the movies, but the movie version has become so ingrained in our collective unconscious that a more realistic depiction just looks wrong, and keeps most people from following the plot....

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On ‎18‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 11:14 PM, RevRainbow said:

Judging people is not my job description as a Christian. Loving people is. I may judge certain acts as immoral but only among other Christians. I am not to be concerned (in a judgemental way) with the behavior or beliefs of non-Christians but, by my behavior, I am to emulate what a Christian believes. 

 

Interesting. But I cannot agree or work that way.

Let me adlib a quote and then give you another.

1. For evil to grow, all good people need do is nothing.

That would include not judging the evils that non-Christians do.

2. "First they came for the Jews, but I did nothing because I'm not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I'm not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I'm not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no one left to help me." Pastor Father Niemoller (1946)

Would you, if you lived in a Hitler type environment, not judge Hitler as evil and try to help the Jews?

Regards

DL

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On ‎17‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 9:39 PM, cuchulain said:

I cannot speak for all Atheists.  I wouldn't want to try to do so.  I know several Atheists who have read the bible, tried to seek meaning and enlightenment, and just didn't get it.  Or maybe they interpret the book in such a way that makes it seem vile to them.  That's where I fall.  I cannot interpret the book in any way that is good.  I just cannot bring myself to believe that the original authors of the book meant well, but that is bias on my part and I understand that.  It simply explains why the book isn't for me.  

 

FMPOV, you should be proud of your judgement of the bible.

Both Christianity and Islam, basically, have developed into intolerant, homophobic and misogynous religions. Both religions have grown themselves by the sword instead of good deeds.

 

Jesus said we would know his people by their works and deeds. That means Jesus would not recognize Christians and Muslims as his people, and neither do I.

 

Regards

DL

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On ‎19‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 5:33 PM, Pete said:

It is not that Atheists are not wanting to be saved but that they do not recognise anything to be saved from and the means of being so called saved is nonsense to them. Some do not understand this.

That is likely because you have not bought into the false guilt that Christianity creates and uses to build up their coffers.

People who know they do not need saving will not pay the indulgences that the church uses as a con to make people thing they are helping themselves out of hell, another Christian invention.

Regards

DL

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On ‎20‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 7:25 PM, Rev. Calli said:

Greetings to you my brother,

I am reminded of a bit the late, great Bill Hicks used to do.  One night he was performing in a small town way down in the Bible Belt.  Afterwards, in the parking lot, he was approached by a few of the locals who said "Hey buddy, we're Christians, and we don't like what you said up there'"  To which Mr. Hicks (blessed be his memory) remarked, "So, forgive me."

In Solidarity,

Rev. Calli

 

Not to insult Christians, but when they asked for forgiveness of God, his answer was that we had to accept as good justice the punishment of the innocent instead of the guilty and use the death of an innocent Jesus to get into heaven.

Rather a satanic doctrine wouldn't you say?

Regards

DL

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On ‎24‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 1:27 PM, Assassin said:

The problem we have is people pick through the book and only use what is useful to them at that moment just like I am about to do. In the bible it tells us not to judge yet people judge homosexuals, drunks, and people who are just all around different all the time saying they are going to hell.

Just two quick things.

I disagree with you on the bible telling people not to judge. It does, as well as putting an onus on us to correct the evils we see as well as foolish beliefs.

1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test all things; hold fast what is good.

Proverbs 3:12 For whom the Lord loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.

My second question is, why you, as a Christian, would follow a God who is demonstrably evil?

He used genocide and always seems to take the satanic moral low ground and kills, when he could take the moral high ground and cure. He also chose to have Jesus murdered for our sins instead of just forgiving us some other way.

Regards

DL

 

 

 

 

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21 hours ago, Gnostic Bishop said:

FMPOV, you should be proud of your judgement of the bible.

Both Christianity and Islam, basically, have developed into intolerant, homophobic and misogynous religions. Both religions have grown themselves by the sword instead of good deeds.

 

Jesus said we would know his people by their works and deeds. That means Jesus would not recognize Christians and Muslims as his people, and neither do I.

 

Regards

DL

Proud of my interpretation of the bible, certainly.  Not necessarily proud that I foisted that representation onto others.

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One night, I dreamed of angels- giant flaming chariots in the sky. They came with a sudden crushing sadness that shook me deep. I woke up crying, which I have never thought of as a normalIty

It made me  think about a guy who posted on this forum years ago. He asked me what he could do to prove his God to me, and I stayed up all night long waiting for the angels he promised. I didn't wait up because I thought it might happen, or because I wanted to prove him wrong. He asked me to wait, I said I would wait, and I waited. And the angels did not show up.

Or, at least, I saw no angels. The roof would have blocked my view of any giant flaming chariots. 

 

But why so sad? So soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly sad? The last thing my dream-self said before I awoke was "I didn't want that to be true."

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