Right? This is the sort of dumb thing I had to deal with once my aunt got her first email address and started forwarding all sorts of crap like this. I'm not anti-Christian, but I really do not know why stuff like this is stickied on this forum. You'd think it must be a slow news day, except it isn't.
in my opinion, People can come to an awakened understanding of Life without an old book - you don't need to have read the bible to be a good person in the eyes of God.
It's true. God lives in our hearts and our souls. Don't lean too hard on the understanding of man. Shut off the distractions, sit outside at night in the quiet darkness and you'll find a comforting presence waiting for you.
So we are to replace the understanding of Man with the understanding of what? The self? So Man?
All we have is the understanding of Man. And I would much rather put my understanding up against the many, rather than just my fallible self. I am not an authority on Truth. No individual except for God is.
You simply collect the data but always avoid firm conclusions until they're proven accurate. You don't accept fact because man says it or because any construct of man says it. Shut your mind, open your soul, and you find truth.
In the end it doesn't matter what any holy book says. God is God and you have a built in spiritual core capable of processing that without the work of men.
What can be proven accurate? How? Is it really proven? What if it isn't?
Proven accurate by whom? Man? Yourself (i.e. Man)?
And we are not a spirit. We are mind, body, and spirit. To only address one is to miss the fullness and Truth of God's creation.
You can't find truth by shutting your mind and opening your soul, because then you aren't discerning what you are encountering. You're also rejecting the basis of the way God created us. At that point, truth is eluding you from the beginning, so you certainly won't find it later down the line.
In the end, it matters what God says. And if He says it in one holy book, then that book is His True Word. And since we are demonstrably fallible and incapable of attaining perfect truth, the only logical conclusion is that He would put His Word in an objective, external source that we can look to for guidance.
At that point, we only need have faith in Him and his Revelation, and not have faith in ourselves to try and figure out every little aspect of truth.
It isn't the work of men, it's the Gift of God. This is clearly a faith issue for many, and nothing else.
I can take a Bible, a Quran, a Torah and I can mistranslate it. Nothing would stop me from doing so because to do so would violate my free will.
It's a logic issue. When I say shut your mind that does not mean stop being discerning. It means discern with your soul instead of having to have every word translated for you.
I would know God without ever having read a book. He's right there to ask when I have questions and he's never led me wrong even if it felt wrong at the time. I'm saying, instead of not having faith, to instead take the biggest leap of faith there is.
My personal view is that no holy book is perfect. We know there's translation errors. My view is that every religion has a piece of the larger puzzle, split and disseminated through humanity so we could only find the truth when we are able to reconcile our human instincts of violence, greed, love, faith, and shared humanity. I also believe that Christians are the closest thing to the truth.
I trust God to understand why I refuse to follow any given books understanding 100% without viewing it as potentially flawed. I trust God to lead me to the truth. Thou shalt have no other God before me. Yet every major religion from Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, to Jewry all put someone in front of God as a stand in.
I don't know the truth. But I personally feel it's not worth my soul to be wrong and trust God to understand when I direct my praise, adoration, and worship directly to Him. I want my energy flowing to Him. I see the forces of evil and they are stronger then I ever thought possible. That leads me to believe that our energy is being misdirected.
So even when my brain says, this might be stupid. If my soul says it's what I must do, that's what I do. Regardless of the apparent consequences. That way I know my energy is flowing in a positive manner. And instead of God pushing back on me, I get pastors thanking me for the conversation because they found a closer connection through it. I get random strangers talking to me at the gas station about random topics I'd been chewing on without provocation. Things always point the way to further illumination of the truth and furthering my understanding.
It's that simple for me. When I am on the wrong path God will let me know. I simply shut down the part of my brain that says it doesn't make sense. And lean on the part of my soul that whispers "Maybe you just don't understand yet".
Not one of us here would even have an inkling of an idea about God without the "old book".
If the Bible is the perfect Truth, then it is impossible to know the truth and be awakened without reading It. On this topic, there are no opinions. It's far more important than that. Not something one can just approach however they feel like and be fine in the end if they weren't totally right.
The rejection of the Bible appears to me to be a total lack of faith in God. Instead, all that faith is being directed at the self. The self that we all know suffers from sin and from the fallibility of being human.
On your last point, you're not wrong. I've been raised in this new world with vast knowledge at my fingertips that are far better distilled, advanced and tuned to my brain than the Bible. Nothing against it, but It's incredibly boring to me. The Emerald Tablets were much more interesting to me, but I don't worship them.
I could be totally wrong and the Bible is the perfect truth, but to me, if it doesn't compute with me - and other avenues and stories do - but lead to the same truth, which is "truth" then I believe God doesn't care. He just wants us to know the truth, whether you read his manual or figure it out other ways, he just wants you to know the truth.
But you have a good point and you could be right. I'm just a Human and don't know, but have come to know the truth via other methods that have lead me to a much more austere and righteous life without it - However, it wasn't ME that came up with it. Many Lessons that I've gathered and lead me to the truth was distilled through youtube Videos ABOUT the Bible, such as the Bible project. Again, I just don't like reading it, maybe I'm just ADHD.
Does it need to be exciting? Or true? I'll admit that some of it can be just a tad boring, as unpleasant as it is to admit. But it's also extremely exciting to read the Gospels or to read a passage in the Old Testament that is clearly talking about Jesus Christ hundreds of years before he lived.
The Emerald Tablets piqued my interest because they were less well known. More esoteric. Not accepted and hidden away. This doesn't make them true, and is the perfect recipe to be led astray by the "fun" or "exciting" thing rather than lead to truth by the "boring" but true thing.
Truth is not to be based on feeling. Our feelings are not only often wrong or irrational, but they also contradict each other's feelings. This is why we need an objective standard.
I don't only believe things that I find agreeable. I do trust my intuition, to be clear, but when the Bible says something I didn't think was true, I look into it and find that the Bible is right or at least makes a perfectly valid and compelling case. So I change for God, I don't find a "god" that fits me. Because without an objective source of truth, something that I am not, there is no truth at all.
And the way I see it, if I always agree with God, I'm not agreeing with God. I'm just agreeing with myself. The notion that I'd get everything right exactly as God ordained it is highly unlikely in my mind.
To be clear, I always found this quite easy. I went from an agnostic to a hardliner Christian in a couple of months. It really feels more like a day. I realized one day I believed and everything changed. I found it exceptionally easy to just believe the Bible and cede my authority to God, which was quite the opposite of the mindset I'd been fostering spending a lot of time here on GAW, and of my general mindset all my life.
So I don't know what it is like to face the opposite problem of not wanting to cede my authority to God, or not finding it compelling. But I still think that to believe in God is to deny what you know to some degree. Some stuff will align, but we don't know everything and God does, so every truth we learn shouldn't necessarily go down easy, so to speak. There's going to be some big red pills in there. Some big ways of thinking that we aren't correct on.
And respectfully, how can you possibly believe you have found some kind of personal, spiritual truth when there are a dozen other people who claim the same thing, but they claim they were led to an exclusionary truth? Islam isn't compatible with Christianity, which isn't compatible with Judaism, which I'd assume isn't compatible with your spiritual beliefs.
Many of these "truths" contradict each other. They can not all be true. And if Islam is right, I'm going to Hell. Is Christianity is right, that could very well be your path. I don't intend to be one of those fire and brimstone "you're going to hell! Repent!" types, but it's a real possibility if you're wrong.
And what even is truth? If it comes from God, it is objective. Not something one gets to pick between several options on.
I mean, the truth I have found is that the only way to the Father is through the Lord Jesus Christ. This excludes every Muslim, every Jew, every Atheist, and every "spiritual but not religious" person. This certainly isn't the same truth you have found. So who is right? How do we know? Can we know?
I think we can, and I think God gives us exactly what we need in the Bible and His Church.
For one, the Bible makes verifiable, historical claims. The Gospels in particular lay out Jesus' life in a way that we can verify. And history does verify Christ's life as the Bible lays it out.
For another, it's uniquely based on salvation by grace and by Jesus' death on the cross to pay the price for our sins.
If you honestly just can't muster up the attention/focus/interest to read the Bible, I'd suggest going to Church. There was quite some time when the commoners were illiterate and relied on the Church for their teachings. Though, they were still getting the Word of God from the Bible, just in a way they understood. It may be more digestible if you find reading it yourself too boring.
Mark 23: 8 "But none of you should be called a teacher. You have only one teacher, and all of you are like brothers and sisters. 9 Don't call anyone on earth your father. All of you have the same Father in heaven. 10 None of you should be called the leader. The Messiah is your only leader. 11 Whoever is the greatest should be the servant of the others. 12 If you put yourself above others, you will be put down. But if you humble yourself, you will be honored."
What does this mean? Well it means evangelical Christianity will NOT be replacing the Constitution. It means that the mainstream Christianity which is based on Paul's ideas is false. It means that anyone attempting to force Christ into anyone's lives with any kind of authority is a false authority and should be ignored.
I agree with this post, but in the sense that we are respecting everyone as equals and that their interpretations of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are valid like anyone else's. There is no Christian hierarchy. There is no authority but Jesus, and no, none of you Bible thumpers here infesting this site don't speak on His behalf. As I clearly spelled out, authority belongs ONLY to Him. NEVER any of you.
Why do you believe authority on truth belongs to the self? To the individual?
Seems quite useless for God to give us a book that got corrupted immediately (so did He lie when He said He'd preserve His word or was that also made up?) and then give us no other way to know what is true other than simply making it up as we go along in our own minds.
Your lack of faith in God is palpable. You worship the self instead of Him. Paying lip service to authority belonging to Christ doesn't change this because your belief in that is based on the self.
And the irony of you using only the parts of the Bible you agree with, while throwing the rest out because you don't like it. Meanwhile, without the Bible in its fullness you would believe none of the stuff you currently do, as there would be no reason to.
Then you attack other people for believing what they do and sharing that truth with others because they believe if they don't those people's blood will be on their hands when they go to Hell. Doesn't matter if you agree with them, but that is what they are doing, and you attack them for it with an ironically "holier than thou" attitude.
She didn’t cheat. She was just smart and reasoned the problem out.
Besides, she asked her Dad what the United States looks like. Rather that answering her question directly by showing her the map, he gave her a problem to solve. She solved it. Maybe with Jesus’ help. ;)
I don't find you to be sincere and in good faith here. Infact I think you're being obstinate and possibly less than honest in presenting a very manipulative and disingenuous false dichotomy.
BQQM
u/#feelsgood
Awesome!!
So true.
nice
Why my eyes wet?
Mine, too.
Nice story, although the cabal would never print a picture of Jesus in the magazine.
Right? This is the sort of dumb thing I had to deal with once my aunt got her first email address and started forwarding all sorts of crap like this. I'm not anti-Christian, but I really do not know why stuff like this is stickied on this forum. You'd think it must be a slow news day, except it isn't.
in my opinion, People can come to an awakened understanding of Life without an old book - you don't need to have read the bible to be a good person in the eyes of God.
My opinion.
It's true. God lives in our hearts and our souls. Don't lean too hard on the understanding of man. Shut off the distractions, sit outside at night in the quiet darkness and you'll find a comforting presence waiting for you.
So we are to replace the understanding of Man with the understanding of what? The self? So Man?
All we have is the understanding of Man. And I would much rather put my understanding up against the many, rather than just my fallible self. I am not an authority on Truth. No individual except for God is.
You simply collect the data but always avoid firm conclusions until they're proven accurate. You don't accept fact because man says it or because any construct of man says it. Shut your mind, open your soul, and you find truth.
In the end it doesn't matter what any holy book says. God is God and you have a built in spiritual core capable of processing that without the work of men.
What can be proven accurate? How? Is it really proven? What if it isn't?
Proven accurate by whom? Man? Yourself (i.e. Man)?
And we are not a spirit. We are mind, body, and spirit. To only address one is to miss the fullness and Truth of God's creation.
You can't find truth by shutting your mind and opening your soul, because then you aren't discerning what you are encountering. You're also rejecting the basis of the way God created us. At that point, truth is eluding you from the beginning, so you certainly won't find it later down the line.
In the end, it matters what God says. And if He says it in one holy book, then that book is His True Word. And since we are demonstrably fallible and incapable of attaining perfect truth, the only logical conclusion is that He would put His Word in an objective, external source that we can look to for guidance.
At that point, we only need have faith in Him and his Revelation, and not have faith in ourselves to try and figure out every little aspect of truth.
It isn't the work of men, it's the Gift of God. This is clearly a faith issue for many, and nothing else.
I can take a Bible, a Quran, a Torah and I can mistranslate it. Nothing would stop me from doing so because to do so would violate my free will.
It's a logic issue. When I say shut your mind that does not mean stop being discerning. It means discern with your soul instead of having to have every word translated for you.
I would know God without ever having read a book. He's right there to ask when I have questions and he's never led me wrong even if it felt wrong at the time. I'm saying, instead of not having faith, to instead take the biggest leap of faith there is.
My personal view is that no holy book is perfect. We know there's translation errors. My view is that every religion has a piece of the larger puzzle, split and disseminated through humanity so we could only find the truth when we are able to reconcile our human instincts of violence, greed, love, faith, and shared humanity. I also believe that Christians are the closest thing to the truth.
I trust God to understand why I refuse to follow any given books understanding 100% without viewing it as potentially flawed. I trust God to lead me to the truth. Thou shalt have no other God before me. Yet every major religion from Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, to Jewry all put someone in front of God as a stand in.
I don't know the truth. But I personally feel it's not worth my soul to be wrong and trust God to understand when I direct my praise, adoration, and worship directly to Him. I want my energy flowing to Him. I see the forces of evil and they are stronger then I ever thought possible. That leads me to believe that our energy is being misdirected.
So even when my brain says, this might be stupid. If my soul says it's what I must do, that's what I do. Regardless of the apparent consequences. That way I know my energy is flowing in a positive manner. And instead of God pushing back on me, I get pastors thanking me for the conversation because they found a closer connection through it. I get random strangers talking to me at the gas station about random topics I'd been chewing on without provocation. Things always point the way to further illumination of the truth and furthering my understanding.
It's that simple for me. When I am on the wrong path God will let me know. I simply shut down the part of my brain that says it doesn't make sense. And lean on the part of my soul that whispers "Maybe you just don't understand yet".
It's all about your relationship with Jesus Christ†, the Savior† of the world.
Jesus said that in the last days he will tell many that He never knew them.
One can not know Jesus Christ without the Bible. We wouldn't even know His name without It.
If someone can't see Him in His revelation to Man, then they don't truly know Him.
Not one of us here would even have an inkling of an idea about God without the "old book".
If the Bible is the perfect Truth, then it is impossible to know the truth and be awakened without reading It. On this topic, there are no opinions. It's far more important than that. Not something one can just approach however they feel like and be fine in the end if they weren't totally right.
The rejection of the Bible appears to me to be a total lack of faith in God. Instead, all that faith is being directed at the self. The self that we all know suffers from sin and from the fallibility of being human.
On your last point, you're not wrong. I've been raised in this new world with vast knowledge at my fingertips that are far better distilled, advanced and tuned to my brain than the Bible. Nothing against it, but It's incredibly boring to me. The Emerald Tablets were much more interesting to me, but I don't worship them.
I could be totally wrong and the Bible is the perfect truth, but to me, if it doesn't compute with me - and other avenues and stories do - but lead to the same truth, which is "truth" then I believe God doesn't care. He just wants us to know the truth, whether you read his manual or figure it out other ways, he just wants you to know the truth.
But you have a good point and you could be right. I'm just a Human and don't know, but have come to know the truth via other methods that have lead me to a much more austere and righteous life without it - However, it wasn't ME that came up with it. Many Lessons that I've gathered and lead me to the truth was distilled through youtube Videos ABOUT the Bible, such as the Bible project. Again, I just don't like reading it, maybe I'm just ADHD.
Does it need to be exciting? Or true? I'll admit that some of it can be just a tad boring, as unpleasant as it is to admit. But it's also extremely exciting to read the Gospels or to read a passage in the Old Testament that is clearly talking about Jesus Christ hundreds of years before he lived.
The Emerald Tablets piqued my interest because they were less well known. More esoteric. Not accepted and hidden away. This doesn't make them true, and is the perfect recipe to be led astray by the "fun" or "exciting" thing rather than lead to truth by the "boring" but true thing.
Truth is not to be based on feeling. Our feelings are not only often wrong or irrational, but they also contradict each other's feelings. This is why we need an objective standard.
I don't only believe things that I find agreeable. I do trust my intuition, to be clear, but when the Bible says something I didn't think was true, I look into it and find that the Bible is right or at least makes a perfectly valid and compelling case. So I change for God, I don't find a "god" that fits me. Because without an objective source of truth, something that I am not, there is no truth at all.
And the way I see it, if I always agree with God, I'm not agreeing with God. I'm just agreeing with myself. The notion that I'd get everything right exactly as God ordained it is highly unlikely in my mind.
To be clear, I always found this quite easy. I went from an agnostic to a hardliner Christian in a couple of months. It really feels more like a day. I realized one day I believed and everything changed. I found it exceptionally easy to just believe the Bible and cede my authority to God, which was quite the opposite of the mindset I'd been fostering spending a lot of time here on GAW, and of my general mindset all my life.
So I don't know what it is like to face the opposite problem of not wanting to cede my authority to God, or not finding it compelling. But I still think that to believe in God is to deny what you know to some degree. Some stuff will align, but we don't know everything and God does, so every truth we learn shouldn't necessarily go down easy, so to speak. There's going to be some big red pills in there. Some big ways of thinking that we aren't correct on.
And respectfully, how can you possibly believe you have found some kind of personal, spiritual truth when there are a dozen other people who claim the same thing, but they claim they were led to an exclusionary truth? Islam isn't compatible with Christianity, which isn't compatible with Judaism, which I'd assume isn't compatible with your spiritual beliefs.
Many of these "truths" contradict each other. They can not all be true. And if Islam is right, I'm going to Hell. Is Christianity is right, that could very well be your path. I don't intend to be one of those fire and brimstone "you're going to hell! Repent!" types, but it's a real possibility if you're wrong.
And what even is truth? If it comes from God, it is objective. Not something one gets to pick between several options on.
I mean, the truth I have found is that the only way to the Father is through the Lord Jesus Christ. This excludes every Muslim, every Jew, every Atheist, and every "spiritual but not religious" person. This certainly isn't the same truth you have found. So who is right? How do we know? Can we know?
I think we can, and I think God gives us exactly what we need in the Bible and His Church.
For one, the Bible makes verifiable, historical claims. The Gospels in particular lay out Jesus' life in a way that we can verify. And history does verify Christ's life as the Bible lays it out.
For another, it's uniquely based on salvation by grace and by Jesus' death on the cross to pay the price for our sins.
If you honestly just can't muster up the attention/focus/interest to read the Bible, I'd suggest going to Church. There was quite some time when the commoners were illiterate and relied on the Church for their teachings. Though, they were still getting the Word of God from the Bible, just in a way they understood. It may be more digestible if you find reading it yourself too boring.
Cool.
“The ten commandments and the sermon on the mount contain my religion” -- John Adams
Truth.
AMEN.
And when my people who are called.....
Where We Go One We Go All, together with God.
Poignant to the MAX
Mark 23: 8 "But none of you should be called a teacher. You have only one teacher, and all of you are like brothers and sisters. 9 Don't call anyone on earth your father. All of you have the same Father in heaven. 10 None of you should be called the leader. The Messiah is your only leader. 11 Whoever is the greatest should be the servant of the others. 12 If you put yourself above others, you will be put down. But if you humble yourself, you will be honored."
What does this mean? Well it means evangelical Christianity will NOT be replacing the Constitution. It means that the mainstream Christianity which is based on Paul's ideas is false. It means that anyone attempting to force Christ into anyone's lives with any kind of authority is a false authority and should be ignored.
I agree with this post, but in the sense that we are respecting everyone as equals and that their interpretations of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are valid like anyone else's. There is no Christian hierarchy. There is no authority but Jesus, and no, none of you Bible thumpers here infesting this site don't speak on His behalf. As I clearly spelled out, authority belongs ONLY to Him. NEVER any of you.
Why do you believe authority on truth belongs to the self? To the individual?
Seems quite useless for God to give us a book that got corrupted immediately (so did He lie when He said He'd preserve His word or was that also made up?) and then give us no other way to know what is true other than simply making it up as we go along in our own minds.
Your lack of faith in God is palpable. You worship the self instead of Him. Paying lip service to authority belonging to Christ doesn't change this because your belief in that is based on the self.
And the irony of you using only the parts of the Bible you agree with, while throwing the rest out because you don't like it. Meanwhile, without the Bible in its fullness you would believe none of the stuff you currently do, as there would be no reason to.
Then you attack other people for believing what they do and sharing that truth with others because they believe if they don't those people's blood will be on their hands when they go to Hell. Doesn't matter if you agree with them, but that is what they are doing, and you attack them for it with an ironically "holier than thou" attitude.
So, basically, she cheated. I don't think that kids should be encouraged to cheat.
She didn’t cheat. She was just smart and reasoned the problem out.
Besides, she asked her Dad what the United States looks like. Rather that answering her question directly by showing her the map, he gave her a problem to solve. She solved it. Maybe with Jesus’ help. ;)
There is no girl...
This is obviously a made up story.
Ya think?
LOL
Some people believe stuff like this actually happened
Nah, man, that's called out of the box thinking.
It's literally why anons exist.
Good on her for being a junior anon already!
If a teacher gives you a calculator during a test, is it cheating?
Yes.
Why cheating? Did anyone say how it should be put together? The task was "put it together"! She did that!
Downvoted? So you DO think that kids should be encouraged to cheat. Hmm.
I don't find you to be sincere and in good faith here. Infact I think you're being obstinate and possibly less than honest in presenting a very manipulative and disingenuous false dichotomy.
OK, suppose the reverse had been a photo of "Biden" and she used that to put the map jigsaw together. Cheating?
Gross, dude.
No, people clearly disagree with the first part of your statement, not the second part.
Why do people do this shit online? This is like that meme about how if you say "I like pancakes" everyone will respond "so you hate waffles?"
No, nobody said that.