Christianity has its nutbags too

[one...two...tree 2,762]

God did not bring in sickness and suffering and all that other stuff. That was an evil being who did that. Satan brought that all about enticing us with sin thinking we can make it on our own and that we'd all be enlightened by our own understanding.

But your god "knows all, created all, etc" YHVH created Satan. Ergo, YHVH created disease, famine, etc.

God is present in all of creation, but I don't believe that Good and Evil are personified in the physical world. I don't think you could point to a rock and say that rock is evil. It can be used for evil but that doesn't make the rock evil. Through free will, the actions of humankind can result in great suffering, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that Satan is behind diseases. Good and Evil are human concepts and God is way beyond any human concept.

[Alex+R 0]

Good and Evil are human concepts and God is way beyond any human concept.

That's why I don't bother trying to understand/pretending I know anything at all about any god.

[Ban Hammer 14,088]

Good and Evil are human concepts and God is way beyond any human concept.

That's why I don't bother trying to understand/pretending I know anything at all about any god.

that's why you need to join the church of beer!

services held every night.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Good and Evil are human concepts and God is way beyond any human concept.

That's why I don't bother trying to understand/pretending I know anything at all about any god.

We can still have an understanding of Truth, however finite or imperfect that understanding may be. It's when we think in terms of absolutes. Some people criticize that and say it's moral relativism, but it's not about simply choosing what each of us thinks is good or bad - it's using discernment to reach for Truth while recognizing that it's always beyond our full grasp.

Edited July 27, 2006 by Steven_and_Jinky

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Good and Evil are human concepts and God is way beyond any human concept.

That's why I don't bother trying to understand/pretending I know anything at all about any god.

We can still have an understanding of Truth, however finite or imperfect that understanding may be. It's when we think in terms of absolutes. Some people criticize that and say it's moral relativism, but it's not about simply choosing what each of us thinks is good or bad - it's using discernment to reach for Truth while recognizing that it's always beyond our full grasp.

[gimygirl 0]

Good and Evil are human concepts and God is way beyond any human concept.

That's why I don't bother trying to understand/pretending I know anything at all about any god.

that's why you need to join the church of beer!

services held every night.

do they serve wine there??

[ILIKEALLCAPS 0]

Believing that we can fully and completely understand God is like trying to pour the ocean into a bucket.

ok, but what if it was one of them infinite buckets, made by the same company who made the infinite jug stina was talking about? And on a side note, where exactly do you grip the earth in order to pour? Where's the spout?

ok, resume amusing me.

[Identity 0]

Reality as a social construct

[gimygirl 0]

Believing that we can fully and completely understand God is like trying to pour the ocean into a bucket.

ok, but what if it was one of them infinite buckets, made by the same company who made the infinite jug stina was talking about? And on a side note, where exactly do you grip the earth in order to pour? Where's the spout?

ok, resume amusing me.

i you and i your posts!!!!! i miss you here!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*runs and hides from your awesome wife!!!!! *

Reality as a social construct

arthur ... you really need to get a life!!! there is more out there than YouTube!!!!

[Alex+R 0]

Good and Evil are human concepts and God is way beyond any human concept.

That's why I don't bother trying to understand/pretending I know anything at all about any god.

that's why you need to join the church of beer!

services held every night.

Daaamn, I already affiliated myself with the church of low-carb for the next few months

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rev._Fred_Phelps

Delusional nutjob - Yes

Ambassador for Christ - Doubtful

[Identity 0]

God did not bring in sickness and suffering and all that other stuff. That was an evil being who did that. Satan brought that all about enticing us with sin thinking we can make it on our own and that we'd all be enlightened by our own understanding.

But your god "knows all, created all, etc" YHVH created Satan. Ergo, YHVH created disease, famine, etc.

God is present in all of creation, but I don't believe that Good and Evil are personified in the physical world. I don't think you could point to a rock and say that rock is evil. It can be used for evil but that doesn't make the rock evil. Through free will, the actions of humankind can result in great suffering, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that Satan is behind diseases. Good and Evil are human concepts and God is way beyond any human concept.

You're not educated, are you?

The most surprising thing about America, is with all the freedom and access to information you could ever want; many of you choose to be ignorant and believe in religion.

Is this a dichotomy, or a conundrum? That in a world with so much stimulus, people suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

God did not bring in sickness and suffering and all that other stuff. That was an evil being who did that. Satan brought that all about enticing us with sin thinking we can make it on our own and that we'd all be enlightened by our own understanding.

But your god "knows all, created all, etc" YHVH created Satan. Ergo, YHVH created disease, famine, etc.

God is present in all of creation, but I don't believe that Good and Evil are personified in the physical world. I don't think you could point to a rock and say that rock is evil. It can be used for evil but that doesn't make the rock evil. Through free will, the actions of humankind can result in great suffering, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that Satan is behind diseases. Good and Evil are human concepts and God is way beyond any human concept.

You're not educated, are you?

What do you mean?

[*Robert* 2]

What do you mean?

Unfortunately, you just walked right into that!

He meant that people who tend to be lesser educated tend to be the ones that lean more heavily on religion.

I would actually like to see some numbers concerning that hypothesis. How many people with a BA/S or higher consider themselves strongly religious, as opposed to those with a HS/GED and below?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

What do you mean?

Unfortunately, you just walked right into that!

He meant that people who tend to be lesser educated tend to be the ones that lean more heavily on religion.

I would actually like to see some numbers concerning that hypothesis. How many people with a BA/S or higher consider themselves strongly religious, as opposed to those with a HS/GED and below?

Many of the great philosophers were fervent believers in God....Decartes, Witgenstein, Kant, Pascal.

Be careful not to confuse fundamentalism (a way of thought) with religion.

Here's an interesting explanation of religion's purpose:

Its job is to preserve the tragedy of our humanness, our selfhood, while at the same time comforting it and bringing it to wholeness through a direct encounter with the divine. It does this through carefully proscribed rite and ritual which was all over the world in earliest times the same: the ritual of the sacrifice, which is the hieratic return to the world of intimacy, beyond time and self and other. To sacrifice is to take something that exists in the world of thingness and duration and bring it back to intimacy, to erase it from the plane of thingness and return it to the plane of immediacy. Sacrifice is conceived of as gift, gratuity, a paying back to God or the gods of what had been primordially given so that the world of thingness, of which all individuals are a part, could come to be and will only continue to be as long as the rite of sacrifice is reciprocally maintained. In other words, sacrifice involves evoking the intimacy of death- which only appears as such from the standpoint of the world of thingness. From the standpoint of the world of intimacy and immediacy there is no such thing as death, there is only the eternal presence, which includes all absence. Only when there are things can there be their absence, and in their absence they return eternally to the world from which they came.

http://www.everydayzen.org/teachings/essay...ceofoneness.asp

Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice - the Lamb of God.