Zone1 The Greater Sin

[sparky]

You seem to be arguing they cooked the texts so to speak. Where’s the evidence for that?

Allow me to answer that with a question Ding, you're well aware there's an 'old' testament, as well as a 'new' testament in the good book


Are you agreeable there's a stark difference betwixt the two ?

Why do you think that is?

~S~

 

[hobelim]

The traditions Catholics follow date back to the Apostles,

This is simply false.

Catholic practices date back to 325ce and reflect the beliefs and practices of Mithraism, the secret MYSTERY RELIGION of the Roman government and military that originated in Babylon.

* Mithra was born on December 25th. Called "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun", it was incorporated into the church in the 4th century AD as the birthday of Christ. Although Jesus was born in October, christians today celebrate Mithra' birthday, believing it was Jesus' birthday.

* Mithra' birth was witnessed by shepherds and by Magi (wise men) who brought gifts to his sacred birth-cave of the Rock

* He was considered a great travelling teacher and master.

* He had 12 companions or disciples, which in Mithraism were represented by the 12 astrological signs.

* He performed miracles.

* He was buried in a tomb.

* After three days he rose again, but with no witnesses to the event

* His triumph over death and ascension to heaven were celebrated at the Mithran's most important festival, Easter, held at the spring equinox when the sun rises toward its apogee

* Mithra was called "the Good Shepherd."

* He was considered "the Way, the Truth and the Light, the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah."

* In the cult's rituals, Mithra was identified with both the Lion and the Lamb.

* His sacred day was Sunday, and was called "the Lord's Day" hundreds of years before the appearance of Christ.

* Mithraism had a Eucharist or "Lord's Supper" in which bread was eaten as a symbol of Mithra' body, and wine was drunk as a symbol of the blood shed when Mithra overpowered and killed the bull

* Mithra performed many miracles, including raising the dead, healing the sick, making the blind see and the lame walk, casting out devils.

* Mithra was said to carry keys to the kingdom of heaven.

* Mithra was called the god of light and truth, the god of mediation between god and man. He was to his worshippers The creator of life; The Mediator between man and the higher gods; The God of light; The All-seeing one; The Guardian of oaths (covenants); The Protector of the righteous in this world and also in the next.

* A trinity godhead comprised of Mithra (divine god of truth), Rashnu (divine god of justice, judgement and righteousness), Vohu Manah (divine spirit of enlightenment). These three persons were separate yet they were one.

Before returning to heaven, Mithra was said to have celebrated a Last Supper with followers, who represented the twelve signs of the zodiac. In memory of this, his worshippers partook of a sacramental meal of bread marked with the Mithran cross of light. This was one of the seven Mithraic sacraments, believed to be the models for the Christians' seven sacraments, which follow them identically. It was called mizd, latin missa, in other words, in English, mass. Mithra' image was buried in a rock tomb, the same sacred cave that represented his mother's womb. He was withdrawn from it and said to live again.

Mithraism was an ascetic, anti-female religion. Its priesthood consisted of celibate men only

 

[ding]

Allow me to answer that with a question Ding, you're well aware there's an 'old' testament, as well as a 'new' testament in the good book


Are you agreeable there's a stark difference betwixt the two ?

Why do you think that is?

~S~

Allow me to answer that with a question, Sparky. You aren't the first person to have difficulty reconciling the God of the NT with the God of the OT. Gnostic Christians had the same difficulty. They resolved it by saying there must be two Gods; an evil God (i.e. God of the material world, the God of the OT) and a good God (i.e. God of the spiritual world, the God of the NT). This belief arose in the late 1st century BEFORE your supposed conspiracy. How do you reconcile that?

 

[sparky]

How do you reconcile that?

Easy

by pointing out that it's not 'God's word' at all

~S~

 

[ding]

Are you agreeable there's a stark difference betwixt the two ?

No. Read Psalms.

Why do you think that is?

Because people don't understand that the Jews saw God as loving, caring, logical, etc.

Maybe this will help. It's from Huston Smith's Illustrated World Religions

07 Judaism

Part One: Their Passion for Meaning

One-third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry. What lifted the Jews from obscurity to permanent religious greatness was their passion for meaning.

A. Meaning in God.

• From a very early date, possibly from the very beginning of the biblical record, the Jews were monotheists.
• The supreme achievement of Jewish thought was not in its monotheism as such, but in the character it ascribed to the God it intuited as One. God is a God of righteousness, whose loving-kindness is from everlasting to everlasting and whose tender mercies are in all his works.

B. Meaning in Creation.

• Judaism affirms the world's goodness, arriving at that conclusion through its assumption that God created it. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" and pronounced it to be good.
• To affirm that existence is God-created is to affirm its unimpeachable worth.
• The Semitically originated religions emerge as exceptional in insisting that human beings are ineradicably body as well as spirit and that this coupling is not a liability.

C. Meaning in Human Existence.

• The striking feature of the Jewish view of human nature is that without blinking at its frailty, it went on to affirm its unspeakable grandeur. We are a blend of dust and divinity.
• Human beings, once created, make or break themselves, forging their own destinies through their decisions.
• People are God's beloved children.
• The ingredients of the most creatively meaningful image of human existence that the mind can conceive - grandeur, sin, freedom, divine parentage; it is difficult to find a flaw in this assessment.

D Meaning in History.

• For the Bible, history is neither Hinduism maya, illusion or a Greek circular process of nature; it is the arena of God's purposive activity.
• Second, if contexts are crucial for life, so is collective action; social action.
• Third, nothing in history happens accidentally; God shapes each sequence as a teaching experience for his people.
• Finally, all events are important but not equally important. Each opportunity is unique, but some are decisive. For India, human destiny lies outside history altogether. Judaism, by contrast laid the groundwork for social protest. It is in the lands influenced by the Jewish historical perspective that the chief thrusts for social betterment have occurred.

E. Meaning in Morality.

• Without moral constraints, human relations would become as snarled as traffic in the Chicago loop if everyone drove at will. The Jewish formulation of "those wise restraints that make men free" is contained in her Law. The Hebrew Bible contains no less than 613 commandments that regulate human behavior. Four of these will suffice for our purposes: the four ethical precepts of the Ten Commandments, for it is through these that Hebraic morality has had its greatest impact.
• Appropriated by Christianity and Islam, four of the Ten Commandments constitute the moral foundation of most of the Western world. There are four danger zones in human life that can cause unlimited trouble if they get out of hand:
• Force - You can bicker and fight, but killing within the in-group will not be permitted, for it instigates blood feuds that shred community. Therefore thou shalt not murder.
• Wealth - As for possessions, you may make your pile as large as you please and be shrewd and cunning in enterprise. One thing, though, you may not do, and that is pilfer directly off someone else's pile, for this outrages the sense of fair play and builds animosities that become ungovernable. Therefore thou shalt not steal.
• Sex - You can be a rounder, flirtatious, even promiscuous, and though we do not comment such behavior, we will not get the law after you. But at one point we draw the line: Sexual indulgence of married persons outside the nuptial bond will not be allowed, for it rouses passions the community cannot tolerate. Therefore thou shalt not commit adultery.
• Speech - You may dissemble and equivocate, but there is one time when we require that you tell the truth, and nothing but the truth. If a dispute reaches such proportions as to be brought before a tribunal, on such occasions the judges must know what happened. If you lie then, while under oath to tell the truth, the penalty will be severe. Thou shalt not bear false witness.

F. Meaning in Justice.

• It is to a remarkable group of men we call the prophets more than to any others that Western civilization owes its convictions (1) that the future of any people depends in large part on the justice of its social order, and (2) that individuals are responsible for the social structures of their society as well as for their direct personal dealings.
• Whereas the Pre-Writing Prophets Such as Elijah and Elisha challenged individuals the Writing Prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah challenged corruptions in the social order and oppressive institutions.
• Thanks to the Prophets, what other nations would have interpreted as simply a power squeeze, the Jews saw as God's warning to clean up their national life: establish justice throughout the land, or be destroyed.
• Stated abstractly, the Prophetic Principle can be put as follows: The prerequisite of political stability is social justice, for it is in the nature of things that injustice will not endure.
• Stated theologically the point reads: God has high standards. God will not put up forever with exploitation, corruption, and mediocrity.
• One thing is common to all the Jewish prophets: the conviction that every human being, simply by virtue of his or her humanity, is a child of God and therefore in possession of rights that even kings must respect. Wealth and splendor count for nothing compared with purity, justice, and mercy.

G. Meaning in Suffering.

• From the eighth to the sixth centuries B. C., during which Israel and Judah tottered before the aggressive power of Syria, Assyria, Egypt, and Babylon, the prophets found meaning in their predicament by seeing it as God's way of underscoring the demand for righteousness.
• God was using Israel's enemies against her. The experience of defeat and exile was teaching the Jews the true worth of freedom.
• Another lesson was that those who remain faithful in adversity will be vindicated.
• Stated abstractly, the deepest meaning the Jews found in their Exile was the meaning of vicarious suffering: meaning that enters lives that are willing to endure pain that others might be spared it. "the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."

H. Meaning in Messianism.

Part Two: The Hallowing of Life. - Jewish ceremonies and observances

• The West, influenced by the Greek partiality for abstract reason, emphasizes theology and creed, the East has approached religion through ritual and narrative.​
• Ritual plays a part in life that nothing else can fill. In Judaism it aims to hallow life - ideally, all life.​
• The name for the right approach to life and the world is piety. The secret of piety consists in seeing the entire world as belonging to God and reflecting God's glory.​
• The Jews preserve this sense of the sanctity of all things through tradition. Judaism the most historically minded of all religions finds holiness and history inseparable.​
• The basic manual for the hallowing of life is the Law, the first five books of the Bible.​

Part Three: Revelation.

• The Jews in their interpretation of the major areas of human experience arrived at a more profound grasp of meaning than any of their Mediterranean neighbors; a grasp that in its essentials has not been surpassed.
• The Jew's say they did not reach these insight on their own. They were revealed to them.
• For the Jews God revealed himself first and foremost in actions - not words but deeds. It was through miracles, divine intervention.
• God took the imitative.
• The God that the Exodus disclosed was powerful and a God of goodness and love. A God who was intensely concerned with human affairs. It followed that God would want people to be good as well.
• Finally, suffering must carry significance because it was unthinkable that a God who had miraculously saved his people would ever abandon them completely. All this took shape for the Jews around the idea of the covenant.
• Yahweh would continue to bless the Israelites if they, for their part, would honor the laws they had been given.

Part Four :The Chosen People.

• The idea that a universal god decided that the divine nature should be uniquely and incomparably disclosed to a single people is among the most difficult notions to take seriously in the entire study of religion.
• The Jews did not see themselves as singled out for privileges. They were chosen to serve, and to suffer the trials that service would often exact.
• Isaiah's doctrine of vicarious suffering meant that the Jews were elected to shoulder a suffering that would otherwise have been distributed more widely.
• It is the doctrine that God's doings can focus like a burning glass on particular times, places, and peoples - in the interest, to be sure, of intentions that embrace human beings universally.

Part Five: Israel.

• Judaism cannot be reduced to its biblical period. In 70 A.D. the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and the focus of Judaism shifted to Rabbinic Judaism - from the sacrificial rite of the Temple to the study of the Torah and its accompanying Oral Tradition in academies and synagogues around the world.
• Today, almost two thousand years later, there are four great sectors of Judaism that still constitute its spiritual anatomy - faith, observance, culture, and nation.
• The reasons for the establishment of the modern of Israel in 1948 present complex problems. Without presuming to answer these problems, we can appreciate the burdens they place on the conscience of this exceptionally conscientious people.

 

[ding]

Easy

by pointing out that it's not 'God's word' at all

~S~

What does that have to do with the timeline? You are pointing to differences between the OT and NT as your proof of a NT conspiracy. Your problem is that that difference was not a product of a conspiracy but because it really did unfold exactly the way it was recorded.

 

[ding]

Easy

by pointing out that it's not 'God's word' at all

~S~

Isn't anything that is true, God's word? Does it have to be written as a religious text for it to be God's word?

 

[ding]

Easy

by pointing out that it's not 'God's word' at all

~S~

You have constructed a conspiracy theory based on a faulty understanding of the testaments. There aren't two different Gods as the Gnostics believed and there was no conspiracy in re-writing the account of the good news. We have 24,000 written manuscripts, the behaviors of the early Christians and the behaviors of the apostles that speak to the veracity of the account of the ministry of Jesus Christ. All of which existed well before your supposed conspiracy.

 

[sparky]

None are so blind as those who refuse to see Ding

~S~

 

[ding]

None are so blind as those who refuse to see Ding

~S~

Sure. That's what the evidence is for, right? In this case I have some and you don't. Which one of us is blind? Me... because I don't see evidence that doesn't exist? Or you... because you don't see evidence that does exist.

 

[Meriweather]

When you say "unify", do you mean unification of spirit, which is what Christ was talking about, or unity of forms and practices? That's a big difference, because those united in the Spirit don't care what name is on the church door as long as we're worshipping and following Jesus Christ. Are you instead talking about the other denominations joining with the Catholic church and they must change their forms and practices to align with yours? IOW, what does unification look like to you?

What practice do you not wish to follow?

 

[Meriweather]

You don't regard Martin Luther and the other priests such as Menno Simons and those who follow them as heretics and thus to be condemned? At least one of your compatriots on here does. What do your priests say about your fellow believers who are not Catholic? Are they equally part of the Body of Christ or are they somehow "less than" to you?

Catholics don't consider anyone--not even atheists--as "less". Nor does the Church condemn people. There are simply degrees of separation from the Catholic faith.

Let's take a look in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2089) at what that can separate one from the Faith:

Incredulity: The neglect of revealed truth or the willful refusal to assent to it.

Heresy: The obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same.

Apostasy: The total repudiation of the Christian faith.

Schism: The refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.

 

[Meriweather]

Are you agreeable there's a stark difference betwixt the two ?

I am not answering for ding, as this was addressed to him.

My own study, research, and belief: There is not a stark difference between the two. What do you see as the stark difference?

 

[BreezeWood]

You have constructed a conspiracy theory based on a faulty understanding of the testaments.

correct ...

that is christianity that diverted the events of the 1st century repudiation of judaism, their testament of false commandments, hereditary idolatry et al to a new testament unwittingly commiserate w/ judaism -

than the reason those true heavenly followers w/ jesus gave their lives for liberation theology, self determination no where found in the christian bible.

- the affirmation by christianity for a religion of servitude and denial the exact opposite for bringing to conclusion the closing scene of the 1st century.

 

[BreezeWood]

There is not a stark difference between the two.

correct again

their betrayal of those heavenly followers that gave their lives for liberation theology that is nowhere found in any of the desert bibles, the religions of servitude and denial the exact opposite as believed in the 1st century events. - meriweather.

the heavenly beliefs of jesus the crucifiers for centuries continue in their rampage to mischaracterize and in return use for themselves.

 

[kjw47]

Apparently all Christians believe that the god was in on the plan to have his boy strung up.

The ransom sacrifice. Satan entered Judas to do what he did.

 

[kjw47]

Why do you believe only 144,000 are going to be saved and you can only hope you're one of them? Rev 7:9 says you're wrong. I'll even post it from your own translation:

KJV:

9 After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;
10 And cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.

Your version:

9  After this I saw, and look! a great crowd, which no man was able to number, out of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues,*f standing before the throne and before the Lamb, dressed in white robes;g and there were palm branches in their hands.h 10  And they keep shouting with a loud voice, saying: “Salvation we owe to our God, who is seated on the throne,i and to the Lamb.”j

144,000 = the little flock( Luke 12:32) the anointed bride= bought from the earth( Rev 14:3) to heaven to sit on thrones.( Rev 1:6, Rev 20:4-6)
The great crowd( Rev 7:9) no man can number= the other sheep( John 10:16) who are not of that fold= promised to live on earth forever. These will be saved as well.

 

[hadit]

Catholics don't consider anyone--not even atheists--as "less". Nor does the Church condemn people. There are simply degrees of separation from the Catholic faith.

Let's take a look in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2089) at what that can separate one from the Faith:

Incredulity: The neglect of revealed truth or the willful refusal to assent to it.

Heresy: The obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same.

Apostasy: The total repudiation of the Christian faith.

Schism: The refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.

You didn't address whether you view Protestants as heretics or not. This goes back to the ongoing assertion by some that one is not a Christian at all if one is not a Catholic. That is a false teaching.

 

[hadit]

144,000 = the little flock( Luke 12:32) the anointed bride= bought from the earth( Rev 14:3) to heaven to sit on thrones.( Rev 1:6, Rev 20:4-6)
The great crowd( Rev 7:9) no man can number= the other sheep( John 10:16) who are not of that fold= promised to live on earth forever. These will be saved as well.

That flies in the face of what a JW was telling me when I discussed these things with them. They literally said that only 144,000 were to be saved and everyone else is to be eliminated.

You do realize, don't you, that the 144,000 are all Jews and you have no hope of being one of them?

 

[Meriweather]

You didn't address whether you view Protestants as heretics or not. This goes back to the ongoing assertion by some that one is not a Christian at all if one is not a Catholic. That is a false teaching.

1. I don't broad brush. If an individual Protestant wants to convict him/herself as a heretic, that's up to them, not anyone else.

2. "Some" making any assertion does not make that assertion fact. Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church if facts interest you, and my brief explanation is not sufficient.