whatever he was teaching definitely wasn't pure judaism either. stop trying to sound deep while failing so hard.Quote:
Originally Posted by Black Man
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whatever he was teaching definitely wasn't pure judaism either. stop trying to sound deep while failing so hard.Quote:
Originally Posted by Black Man
Who cares what the original satan was ...Anything Evil is Satan.
Stop trying cause hatred!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Koolish
so you're asking me how a christian can be a "good christian" without following christian doctrines? ya i'm not touching that. but i will point out that the word "salvation" has no meaning outside of christianity. christians tell you there's something wrong with you and the only way to be "saved" is by converting to christianity. it's the basis for all the missionary work that has spread the religion to every region of the globe.
for what he lacked in critical thinking skills, jesus was a marketing genius. still a fuckwad tho.
yes, christianity offers "salvation" and no one else does. apparently being a unique religion is a downfall?Quote:
Originally Posted by Humanface Huggah
so, Jesus lacked critical thinking skills and was nothing more than a fuckwad...
when debating justice, Socrates offered Thrasymacus this proposal:
"Supposing Justice is the benefit of the stronger over the inferior, then they make rules to benefit themselves?"
"correct"
"and are these rulers liable to error?"
"i suppose so"
"so they sometimes, in error, create rules that are not beneficial to themselves?"
after much convincing, thrasymacus agreed.
"so therefore, justice is not the benefit of the stronger over the inferior."
if Jesus were an idiot, and being an idiot he was constantly in error, then this message (love your enemy) would not be beneficial to a Christian. but because it has intellectual merit, a Christian can benefit from it.
huh? no, offering salvation isn't a "downfall" it's a powerful marketing tool. anyone can come up with a set of spiritual beliefs but only an arrogant dickhead would go around telling people that their spiritual beliefs are superior to others. and yes, jesus travelled the near east telling people their spiritual beliefs were wrong and the only way to enter "the kingdom of god" was by following him. if the same guy were doing that today you'd call him a cult leader.Quote:
Originally Posted by Koolish
and as far as your other point, i'd be careful quoting from philosphers who lived over 2000 years ago. plenty of progress has been done in that field and i recommend you read up on more modern thinkers, anything post nietsche.
and if you think "love your enemy" is such a great idea, can you honestly say you'd let someone rob you without doing anything about it? how about if someone was about to murder your family? would you still "love your enemy?"
Actually, it's extremely pertinent, because you're placing faith on the existence of an entity whose concept is quite blatantly man-made.Quote:
Originally Posted by Make~Sensi*
In the early books of the Bible, all actions, good AND evil are caused by God. No second entity is prescribed as causing these. Later, the bible describes certain messengers of God assigned to various tasks. The word "satan" means "adversary" or "obstacle" in Hebrew. When used in the old testament, it is not being used as a proper name, but a description of the task a particular messenger of god is doing. When the angel blocks the path of Balaam, and his donkey begins speaking, it is acting as a satan, but is not supposed to be Satan as we know him. This being causes difficulty for humans, but on God's behest. It is Gods' prosecuting attorney, testing humanity.
Later, in the Book of Job, we begin to see a particular accusing angel as beginning to act independent of God. He suggests to God that Job is only pious because God has given him everything. BUT IT IS STILL GOD'S IDEA TO BRING EVIL UPON JOB to test his faith. He gives the accuser permission to do so. The accuser may have come up with the idea to test Job, but in this story, he is still under God's power.
Further on in Jewish history, religious scholars continued to have problems reconciling the problem of evil with the idea of an all-loving God who controlled everything. It became easier to start blaming all evil deeds on God's prosecuting angels and primordial representations of chaos (Leviathan, Tiamat, Azazel, etc.). By the time several of the great catastrophes of Israelite history had occurred (the last being their enslavement and diaspora by the Babylonians), they could no longer properly explain why the God who made a covenant to protect them would allow such things. When the Persians conquered the Babylonians and allowed the exiled Jews to return home, they had began to borrow ideas from the Persian religion Zoroastrianism (aka Zarathustrianism or Mazdaism). Unlike Judaism, Zoroastrianism is not a monotheism, but a dualism, in which the powers of good and evil exist as equals. Thus, the problem of evil is solved, but there the good side is not the all-powerful like the Hebrew Yaweh (although it is predicted Ahura Mazda will triumph of Ahriman in the end). From Zoroastrianism, the Jews got the idea to separate evil completely from God and place all of it upon a single entity. If the role of the "satan" had not already existed, they would have probably invented it as this point.
Thus, Satan (already an absurd concept) is further falsified by the fact that he is not a consistent entity through the entirety of the Bible. He only comes into existence during a period of Jewish history in which it was necessary to create him in order to rationalize belief.
That's how you see it, Good for you lol .
ok here we go. you weren't putting my point together AT ALL. i have never been entirely defending the "love your enemy" concept, fuck, i've been defending that Jesus is an intelligent individual.Quote:
Originally Posted by Humanface Huggah
if you read my example correctly, you would see Socrates disproving a point Thrasymacus offered because he proved that rulers are liable to error. being liable to error would be a temporary lack of intelligence. you said Jesus is an idiot. a stupid person has a constant lack of intelligence. thus any rule they would make would not be beneficial. however, the rule Jesus offered is beneficial to those who follow it, and therefore Jesus was not in error at that moment, and is not an idiot. if you're going to reply to me, attack the holes of logic my statement contains. i can't point them out because i wrote it. this is all i'm defending, i don't give a flying fuck about what anyone thinks about Christianty because on the internet it's the same shit all over "religion's ruining the world, I hate Jesus" blah blah blah blah.
anything written in the Bible is up to subjective speculation. Jesus wasn't saying "sit back and do nothing", he just said don't sink down to their level. i don't know if it's un-christian to harm an enemy because i'm not Christian.
and just because Socrates lived 2000 years ago doesn't mean he's "old news". philosophy is not an art that can be upgraded, it can only offer subjective points of view and debate. to assume that anything from 2000 years ago does not hold up to today's "intellectual standard" is highly ignorant. and plus, the example i was using was not Socrate's opinion, you shouldn't have even considered that example to be "dangerous" to use due to its date since it showcased nothing less than Socrates' great intelligence. that example showed him debunking this random Greek guy's opinion of what justice is. the example was relevant to my defense of Jesus' intelligence.
It has nothing to do with "how I see it". This is scholarly analysis of biblical text, taking historical factors into account. I didn't make this stuff up; it comes from years of research by historians and religious scholars. You need only read the Old Testament to see that the Christian concepts of Hell, Heaven, and the Devil did not yet exist in that time period.Quote:
Originally Posted by Make~Sensi*
The Old testament was before Jesus came into our world, A long time before. You read the Bible Old and New with an already negative opinion and disbelief of nearly all the things said. Your judgment is clouded and your absorbing the parts of the book that can be transcribed in certain ways to create ways of attempting to prove it false. This can be done to all the religious books in the world if somebody really wants to find the negative side of it. You obviously have no love for the true Christian faith or you have been manipulated into thinking it is something else like most so called Christians have done themselves. Saying God is Satan and using the 'facts' you have stated are completely as liable as the Bible, the Quarran, the Torah and any other religious book that has been transcribed and most probaly edited over thousands of years. To say God is the Devil is plainly dumb but if you truly believe this then i pity you. I have a good idea that you don't believe this and you just wish to discredit the bible.
huh, some good shit to read, props
I don't believe god is the devil. I don't believe in god or the devil period. I'm telling you that in the context of Jewish history and Hebrew mythology that the concept of Satan as a single entity evolved over time. God was not supposed to be the devil in the old testament, the devil simply didn't exist in anyone's mind yet. It was sufficient enough to say that all things came from god, and if bad happened to you, it was because he punished you. That notion came to challenge after numerous empires trampled over their civilization.Quote:
Originally Posted by Make~Sensi*
You might as well know that I used to be a fairly strict Catholic. I tried my hardest to wrestle with all those theological problems that tend to defy simple logic. It was only until I actually began to investigate certain parts of the Bible (i.e. not the ones they read in church ad nauseum) that I gained a better perspective about the origins of my religion and the implications a full understanding of its message entails. For as many messages of peace and goodwill Jesus spouts, he gives equally intolerant messages about the horrors that await non-believers. Christian apologists always try to reconcile the Old Testament by saying Jesus changed all that, yet Jesus several times addresses that the laws of the old testament still hold fast, including one reference he makes toward the law about killing disobedient children. Even if this were not so, the the smoothing over of Old Testament brutality only weakens the argument the the Bible is the word of an infallible god and worth abiding by. Are you suggesting that an all-powerful, all-seeing being would actually let little mortals corrupt his message of salvation to the world? He's either incapable of stopping them, or he is malicious for letting such a travesty that has apparently caused thousands of years of misinterpretation occur.
Monotheism is by its very nature intolerant and logically absurd.
So your broke away from christianity? That's good, I went through somthing similar.Quote:
Originally Posted by Cthulhu
But:
Why deny God completley?
Why don't you make your break from christianity complete?
Your still holding on to the christian definition of who and what god is. Your holding on to defined perameters that have no definition.
Why would God need to be all "seeing" to see what your doing. If he's God, he knows you did it before you did it.
Therefore- he knew you were going to leave the catholic church before you did.
He knew you were going to run into me, so I could tell you this. Now you do what you want with it.
I'm not defining God by Christian parameters. I'm criticizing the idea of a god based on those parameters because that's the background most people on this forum would have come from. I have equal disdain for the ideas behind the gods of Eastern religions and pagan religions. I don't deny that there could be some kind of "force" if you want to call it that exists beyond our own understanding thus far. It's just simply futile to try to make a guess at it and then abide by a certain conduct because that's what you imagine it would be like. I know there are mysteries to the sheer idea of existence, and about the universe itself. I'm not going to worship "existence" or the spacetime model because they have something to do with why I'm here on earth. You yourself are trying to pin attributes of which you have no proof upon a being that likely doesn't exist. If there is indeed something in the universe that you might wish to call "god", how can you possibly know that this concept cares about anything on earth? Or that it would know everything about everyone? Honestly, if there were something out there beyond anything fathomable by humanity, what would it have to say to humans anymore than humans have to say to ants or amoebas?Quote:
Originally Posted by Slippy Capalini
You make some interesting points....Quote:
Originally Posted by Cthulhu
You shouldn't make those kinds of assumption about people over an internet connection. And to answer your questions, we're not ants of amoebas.