Am I losing my faith or just becoming more realistic?

[Meriweather]

Of course it does. Because then you'd realize that amputees never grow their limbs back no matter how hard they pray.

Once again that is trying to mix two things that do not go together (like using a sewing machine to cook potatoes). And no matter how many years I spent as a child trying to move a mountain and Nevada, the thing just would not budge! This taught me a lot about God and prayer. (Not to mention metaphors.)

 

[JoeB131]

Second: It is very odd how people take the news of Santa Claus. An uncle was so disgusted he swore he would never lie to his children about it. Meanwhile, I loved the idea of grown-ups having so much imagination they could all--as a group--delight children all around the world. Grown-ups could still play, and maybe being a grown-up wouldn't be all that bad after all.

Here's the major difference between the Santa LIE and the God LIE.

After you figure out it's really your parents, you find out you still get presents. Then you mature a bit more and find that you enjoy giving gifts as much as getting them. The purpose of the lie is to get kids to behave a bit better, I guess, but also to instill thoughts of generosity.

The God Lie, though, is about using people's more primal fear (Death) to control them.

 

[Meriweather]

The only thing that offends me is your ignorance.

Actually, what offends is what I now know. Joe, I once was where you are, where the Old Testament simply did not mesh. It was my ignorance then that caused the confusion. The old adage still holds true: The more one knows the more one realizes how much more there is that is not known. I have more to explore--both in the physical world and the spiritual realm--and I look forward those adventures.

 

[Meriweather]

The God Lie, though, is about using people's more primal fear (Death) to control them.

Hmmm. So you have a primal fear of death. I did not know this. Most of us seem to accept death has inevitable and that it will happen one day to us, just as it did to all the previous generations. The death of a loved one--because it means separation--does not hurt any less no matter what one believes or does not believe about an afterlife.

 

[Dale Smith]

No one knows what size of the holes these alleged victims had because no one was allowed to review them, No EMTs were allowed into the shool room and this took all of 15 minutes allegedly and yet not a single fatality was removed from the scene for nearly twenty hours?

Shool room? Um, yeah, you don't remove bodies from a crime scene right away, particularly if you really don't have all that many murders a year and don't have the forensic teams to document it.

Point was, you weren't there. People who were there described it all in vivid detail.

Halbig, Jones, Fenster and the other lying sacks of shit who've been spreading these lies are now having to pay out a shitload of money for doing so.

You are such a blithering idiot and a gullible fool. You would believe that the moon was made up of blue cheese if the state controlled media and "da gubermint" told you that and you would wonder how a thinly sliced piece would taste on a Ritz cracker....you strike me as being just that fucking stupid. The crime scene and what wee were told was solved in less than 15 minutes. Adam Lanza bypassed 6 schools that were actually in use to go to one that had not been in use since 2008. It was a toxic waste dump. You forgot about the CBS interview with a crisis actress that declared that she saw child after child being removed by officers with blood stains as she arrived to pick up her child......at 9:30 AM....but wait a sec....not a single alleged victim was removed until the wee hours of Saturday morning....how can that be? We have the picture of Wayne Carver leaning against a pillar of the school with yellow crime scene tape with no ambulances in sight and the window that Lanza alleged shot through when he fired at a car that randomly showed up where he was allegedly in the class room where he allegedly fired 8 to 10 shots into small children that the other 440 plus students never heard because they were never seen evacuating is still in pristine condition and this is from the Connecticut State police's own website....OOOPS!!!! A bus driver takes 5, no, wait, was it six students? (because Gene Rosen's story constantly changed") where children were randomly dropped off in front of his home....children put on a bus and bypassed the staging area that was the fire station where people are going in and out of the firehouse to make it appear that more people were there than there was and the bus driver never pulled him aside and said "we had a mass shooting, can you keep these kids even though I don't know you"? But wait, there is footage of Gene Rosen at the fire station rehearsing his lines....Hmmmmm?

No video showing that Lanza did a "Rambo like" move and shot through the window and 18 or so cops went through the small opening where a janitor told them that the shooter was "that a way" as he pointed while 9/11 callers whispered into phone that this "killer" was getting off 160 plus kill shots but no shots are heard echoing through the hallway....and you have the unmitigated gall to lamely attempt to "shame me" for questioning this load of bullshit? Who the fuck do you think you are? You are a fucking joke with a lame punchline. You can never address the numerous anomalies that point to this being a drill portrayed as being a Mass Casualty event passed off as a real time event. Every time you lamely attempt to refute, you only end up looking like an even bigger idiot. I will give you one thing....your willingness to look stupid along with a false front of self-righteous indignation is something you are consistent on. Duck, dodge, deflect and get all pissed of, Joe Blowhard, as it is the only arrow in that tiny quiver of yours.

 

[JoeB131]

Actually, what offends is what I now know. Joe, I once was where you are, where the Old Testament simply did not mesh. It was my ignorance then that caused the confusion. The old adage still holds true: The more one knows the more one realizes how much more there is that is not known. I have more to explore--both in the physical world and the spiritual realm--and I look forward those adventures.

Actually, it's not just the Old Testament that doesn't mesh. The New Testament is just as bad. Jesus didn't come in and say, "Stop Burning Witches" or "Slavery is bad". I guess it was okay to eat pigs now, if you cook them properly.

The Old Testament is "God is every force of nature that we don't understand, so you'd better appease him by doing what we say."

The New Testament is "Well, we realize that there's no correlation between obedience to God and bad stuff happening in your life, but there's this nice afterlife where we promise things are better if you do what we say!"

Hmmm. So you have a primal fear of death. I did not know this. Most of us seem to accept death has inevitable and that it will happen one day to us, just as it did to all the previous generations. The death of a loved one--because it means separation--does not hurt any less no matter what one believes or does not believe about an afterlife.

Yes, most of your Christians are self-deluded, but you are as afraid of dying as I am. Maybe even more, because you live in terror of punishment if you don't obey every stupid little rule here.

 

[JoeB131]

The crime scene and what wee were told was solved in less than 15 minutes.

Um, yeah. What's your point.

Adam Lanza bypassed 6 schools that were actually in use to go to one that had not been in use since 2008.

Is it six schools now? I thought it was three. The whole "Sandy Hook was closed has been debunked many times.

Again. You don't live there. People who do live there have all said it happened.

So once more... Occam's razor

One Crazy person shot up a bunch of kids.

or

Thousands of people were involved in an elaborate hoax to accomplish... um, making you take your meds, I guess. It's never terribly clear what you were trying to accomplish. And even the NRA went along with the hoax, even though they were informed of the hoax.

 

[Meriweather]

The New Testament is just as bad. Jesus didn't come in and say, "Stop Burning Witches" or "Slavery is bad".

Do you need to be told slavery is bad and to stop burning witches?

What I like about Jesus' message is that it teaches each individual a meaningful, productive way of life that introduces love into the lives of others and brings love into one's own life.

I do know this nation has people and groups who still live their lives by enslaving others and by hunting down people in other gangs and killing them. Joe, why don't you go on TV and tell everyone this is bad. How many people do you think would instantly stop?

Jesus chose another method. He spoke to people who are caught up in this type of world, how we can bring peace and joy into our own small surroundings. This works like yeast and spreads into other people's lives and communities.

 

[Meriweather]

The New Testament is "Well, we realize that there's no correlation between obedience to God and bad stuff happening in your life, but there's this nice afterlife where we promise things are better if you do what we say!"

I do not know where you jumped to this conclusion. The New Testament teaches that stay close to God especially through the bad times and you will experience a resurrection into new and better times.

 

[Meriweather]

Yes, most of your Christians are self-deluded, but you are as afraid of dying as I am. Maybe even more, because you live in terror of punishment if you don't obey every stupid little rule here.

Because you fear death, you imagine everyone else must feel the same. It appears Jesus' message, the message he was killed for, never reached you. Jesus said, "Sins are forgiven." He did not say sins will be forgiven or that they may be forgiven. He said "Sins are forgiven. Repentance (turning away from) for forgiveness of sins. Turn to God and obedience to His ways (love God and love one another)--and sins are forgiven. There is no fear when one trusts in God's love.

 

[JoeB131]

Do you need to be told slavery is bad and to stop burning witches?

Well, funny thing. The bible says not only are those things FINE, they demand you do them...

God didn't change his mind, we changed ours.

What I like about Jesus' message is that it teaches each individual a meaningful, productive way of life that introduces love into the lives of others and brings love into one's own life.

Yet never once did he say, "Slavery is bad".

I do know this nation has people and groups who still live their lives by enslaving others and by hunting down people in other gangs and killing them. Joe, why don't you go on TV and tell everyone this is bad. How many people do you think would instantly stop?

There's the difference. I do say those things are bad. I can't zap them with thunderbolts or do other kinds of smiting...

Jesus couldn't even be bothered to IMPLY a threat of smiting for slaveholders. In fact, the thing slaveholders were able to do during the civil war was quote the bible as justification.

Jesus chose another method. He spoke to people who are caught up in this type of world, how we can bring peace and joy into our own small surroundings. This works like yeast and spreads into other people's lives and communities.

Uh, yeah, but he couldn't say that people owning other people was wrong. That's because he (or the people who made him up*) couldn't imagine a world were that wasn't the case.


(*- Incidently, I don't think Jesus ever existed. He was made up by other writers as a literary device.)

 

[Meriweather]

Well, funny thing. The bible says not only are those things FINE, they demand you do them...

God didn't change his mind, we changed ours.

Read back through human history. There was slavery before the Ten Commandments. The Israelites inherited that fact of life. By the time Jesus was born, very few Jews owned slaves, because over the centuries all the laws God had given them clearly spoke against it. Further, keep in mind 'slavery' in those days was not the same as 1800s slavery.

 

[Meriweather]

Yet never once did he say, "Slavery is bad".

So? What makes it bad? \

If instead of Samaritan on the road, imagine a slave. Do you believe Jesus' instructions would have been any different?

 

[Meriweather]

(*- Incidently, I don't think Jesus ever existed. He was made up by other writers as a literary device.)

Ah.

 

[JoeB131]

Read back through human history. There was slavery before the Ten Commandments. The Israelites inherited that fact of life. By the time Jesus was born, very few Jews owned slaves, because over the centuries all the laws God had given them clearly spoke against it. Further, keep in mind 'slavery' in those days was not the same as 1800s slavery.

Naw, it was probably worse.

Funny thing, I bet the Hebrews were doing a whole lot of shit before Moses made them stop. So God had to get them to stop eating shellfish and pork, but meh, one human being owning another... no biggie for a Cosmic Sky Pixie dedicated to "Good".

So? What makes it bad? \

If instead of Samaritan on the road, imagine a slave. Do you believe Jesus' instructions would have been any different?

Let's see now, what makes one human being owning another bad? DO we really need to answer this?

Ah.

Come on, you just have to look at the writings and the order they appeared to see that he was.

If Jesus were a real person, like let's say Julius Caesar, we'd know what date he was born and what date he died.

 

[Bo Didleysquat]

One of my main problems with God is that he did not answer my prayers and many things have gone wrong for me.

Seeking answers, I read a book called "Where the hell is God?" written by a Jesuit priest.

He explained that he and his family had a faith crisis when his sister had an auto accident and became quadriplegic.

His answer to the question "Where the hell is God?" is that God, in his view, doesn't CAUSE these bad things to happen, so there appears to be no point in praying to God to fix the bad things that happen.

His example is the long drought in Australia, which people have been praying to end, but the drought just goes on and on.

I guess the problem with this priest's resolution is that it has weakened my faith to believe that God isn't the CAUSE of bad things that happen, because if he ISN'T, then there is something more powerful than God in the universe, another God, or an impersonal force that controls random chance.

And now I find myself thinking: What's the point of a God who is a passive bystander to the events in the universe? Why pray to him for anything?

Christ teaches we SHOULD PRAY and if we knock on the door, the door will open to us.

So really, this Jesuit priest is saying something that is inconsistent with the teachings of Christ.

But my experience with prayer is that some of my prayers have NOT been answered, and I've been praying for many years.

Atheists, please keep your stupid comments out of this thread, I'm seeking answers from fellow believers.

Faith is the purposeful suspension of critical thought.

 

[Bo Didleysquat]

Place your faith in God at the top....no matter how bad things get remember God will see you through...keep the faith....

The message the Antebellum plantar aristocracy fed the enslaved.

 

[Rambunctious]

Place your faith in God at the top....no matter how bad things get remember God will see you through...keep the faith....

The message the Antebellum plantar aristocracy fed the enslaved.

 

[Meriweather]

Let's see now, what makes one human being owning another bad? DO we really need to answer this?

Yes. Also answer what might make it good back in prehistoric times. Have you ever considered that corporations paying workers minimum wage today might be our form of "slavery"? Stop thinking solely in terms of southern plantations...which did not exist in prehistoric times.

 

[Meriweather]

If Jesus were a real person, like let's say Julius Caesar, we'd know what date he was born and what date he died.

How many birth and death days from that time period are known to us today? If you correctly respond, "Very few" then does that mean very few people actually lived in that era?