Another Denier Wakes up and smells the coffee,,

I'm not that impressed with his language work, he is still screwing around with different versions of the English language bauble. You would think an all knowing god would have gotten it right the first time.

 

Is god subject to the same commandments he gives to humans? Just because he tells us not to lie does not mean he cannot lie himself.

For that matter, if god is a liar, a cheat, and an all-around scoundrel, who happened to create the world, then he could very well fill the Bible with lies, including the lie that he does not lie.

Most liars will tell you they never lie. With his god powers, god could lie to you and you'd never know it! So when you say that god "cannot lie" you are speaking of something you cannot know.

The Marcionites were early Christians who believed there were two gods: An evil god who created the material world (since they believed that all matter is evil and only spirit is good) and a good god who tricked the evil god into forgiving humankind by sending Jesus to pretend to be crucified. According to them, since all matter is evil, Jesus could not be matter; he had to be pure spirit, which cannot suffer or be killed. So he just pretended.

Thus, according to the Marcionites, the good god is a liar: he lied to humankind by making Jesus pretend to be flesh, and he lied to the evil god by telling him that Jesus was human.

When you look at their arguments, it's hard to dispute them if you believe the Old and New Testaments: The god of the O.T. is brutal, capricious, jealous, and vengeful; while the god of the N.T. is loving, kind, considerate, and gentle.

You will argue that the Marcionites were just plain wrong. And indeed, the Pauline Christians wiped them out. But their beliefs were far more consistent with scripture than are the beliefs of trinitarian Christians.

 

Ah, I think I am tracking now... your talking about all the translations since the orginal... right?

Anyways, all scripture including the NT is God breathed (inspired). He also promises that His word will never be altered.

 

The issue is so partisan. Even calling people "deniers", it's like calling them witches or nazis, it's so childish.

You're either in the camp of the world is going to hell and we'll all melt and die or it doesn't exist. What about a more real approach that change is happening but the fact is we don't know to what degree or even how much it will help (it's always hurt, isn't it?)? When was the last time Gore spoke at length about some possible benefits of a warmer world (and there are many)?

Climate discussion is like politics in this society. We're so damn ignorant and nasty that we pick sides like it's of no more importance than a football game and we fight tooth and nail like idiots for our views, throwing away as rubbish any oppositional stance.

 

Any and every translation cannot help but be an alteration. English, as an example, has many idioms that are completely meaningless in other languages, even if perfect word for word translation were possible.

Insisting that the Bible was written by an omnipotent, perfect being in a language that didn't exist at the time of its writing is just plain silly.

 

You're right, I don't 'get it', despite the fact that I'm from a faith background. The more questions I asked, both as a child and an adult, the less sense the answers made. I suppose you could say my 'enlightenment' went the other way.

 

Fair enough... just curious, what is your faith background?

 

My Father was a preacher, as was his Father before him. I've read scripture from the pulpit, attended church camps, and even led youth groups. Most of my friends were church-goers, and I was active in the church until my mid-teens. The seeds of doubt may have been sown before then, but that's when I had my intellectual awakening. Reality can be difficult to accept at times, but everything makes so much more sense now.

 

ALL scripture? Including the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, The Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, the books of Baha'i... all of them?

Or only the books included in your favorite version of the Bible? What about the scriptures that the Catholics include in the Bible but the Protestants reject?

As far as unchanging, "Turn the other cheek" is a BIG change from "An eye for an eye." The N.T.'s rejection of the O.T. dietary laws is another BIG change.

The fact is that what you call scripture is a mish-mash of old writings selected according to which ones seemed to favor the theology of the church politicians who compiled them. Some of them turn out to be forgeries (not written by the people claimed in the text to be the author). Several of the letters supposedly written by Paul in the Bible turn out not to have been written by him at all. Were these god-inspired? If so, god lied when he "inspired" them to claim to be written by Paul. And of course, a number of well-known inconsistencies in the Gospels mean that they cannot all be right. If they were just written by men you could say, "They got a few details mixed up -- no biggie." But if they were written by god, and if god is all-knowing, then they contain lies.

Oh yeah, then there is this big one: God says to Adam in the O.T. when telling him not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that if he eats that fruit, "On that day you shall surely die." But then god changes his mind and lets Adam live hundreds of years more. Gloss that over however you will (and I've heard all the mental gymnastics trying to evade the obvious) god lied to Adam, because Adam didn't die on that day. He just got kicked out of the garden and god cursed his progeny.

Christians painted themselves into a corner when they insisted on claiming that the Jewish god was their god, and then insisted that that god doesn't change.

 

But if there's only one god, and more than one holy book, how is that possible?

 

Thus the reliance of ignorance amongst the membership.

 

What others? I know of only one.

 

And thus we have found the root of the problem...

 

What problem?

 

Exactly.

 

Do you want to know what He has to say about it? Do you really?
He says to be good stewards of all that He has created.

 

Which version? The Catholic version? The King James version? One of the earlier compilations that pre-date both?

Then of course, you did say "all scripture" and most religions have their own scriptures. It's rather arbitrary to claim that only the Christian scriptures, in the version adopted by your sect, was god-inspired.

So god does change!

You suspect? In the KJV, god says "In that day thou shalt surely die." He doesn't say, "In that day thou shalt become mortal and die a few hundred years later." He says "IN THAT DAY." Then, later, it goes on to say that he changed his mind, forgave Adam up to a point, cursed him with having to work, kicked him out of the garden, but let him live.

The corner the Christians painted themselves into arises from their desire to be accepted in Roman society. It happened like this:

The Romans respected old religions, but not new ones. They accused the Christians of being an upstart religion. They also regarded it as essential for the well-being of the nation that people perform cult to the gods. It didn't matter to the Romans what you believed, it only mattered that you perform the rites, which meant sacrifice, though sacrifice could be as basic as burning a pinch of incense on an altar, and during the persecutions, the government would even provide the incense so you couldn't claim that you couldn't afford it.

The Jews, however, were exempt, because they were an OLD religion, and the Romans respected that.

The Christians wanted to be grandfathered in to the exemption, so they claimed to be the REAL Jews, worshiping the Jewish god (i.e. an OLD, established god). A good deal of Christian anti-Semitism arises from this claim: If the Christians wanted to claim to be the real Jews, they had to disparage the old Jews and claim they had gone astray and were no longer worshiping god correctly.

So the Christians found themselves claiming to be worshiping the god of the Old Testament, when in fact the difference between that god and the god of the New Testament is night and day. By the time Rome adopted Christianity, and they no longer needed to pretend that their god was old, several centuries had passed and the tradition was settled. The anti-Semitism was firmly ensconced in the Gospel of John and elsewhere in the N.T., and the Christians were stuck with a theology that was clearly nonsense. But compared to the utter preposterousness of trinitarianism, and the doctrine that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, uniting the two very different gods was a small matter. Though as I mentioned in an earlier post, some Christians insisted that the two gods were different (one good, one evil) and had to be hunted down, persecuted, and killed off by the dominant Pauline sect.

FWIW, there were also Christians who insisted that Jesus was human and not divine, and others who said he was divine and not human, and there were Christians who rejected the dogma of the trinity. The latter, the Unitarians, were also persecuted and slaughtered by the Pauline Christians, but their theology made a come-back in (I think) 18th century America. Emmerson and Thoreau were Unitarians. And in the 1960's The American Unitarians and Universalists merged to form the Unitarian Universalist Association, a church without a creed, where instead of telling its members what they should believe, they are told they must conduct their own search for meaning and make up their own minds. The UUA does not appeal to people who like to be told from the pulpit what to believe, or people who want easy answers to the difficult questions of life.

Where the early Christians painted themselves into a corner by basing their religious dogma on political expediency, the UUA has cut a back door out of the corner by dispensing with dogma entirely and letting people believe whatever they like. The UUA has Christians of various flavors, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, a few Muslims, atheists, and more than a spattering of Wiccans and neo-pagans. What they have in common is a generally higher-than-average intelligence and a penchant for thinking for themselves.

Smaller UU congregations often have a question period after the sermon, and the discussion can be lively. If you are going to make a presentation to Unitarians you need to be prepared to expound on your ideas and defend your propositions. I've made presentations on the anti-nuclear peace movement to the Unitarian Church and to the Lions Club, and the very liberal Unitarians were a tougher crowd than the very conservative Lions.