BBWWAHAHHH !!
Nice one, no wonder you're going to hell !!!
LOL !!
Well, I have tons of faith in God and Jesus, very little in human writers.
Calling Perry Out (and any others who want to participate)
by OnTheWayOut 150 Replies latest members adult
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THE GLADIATOR
This debate illustrates the problem that occurs when we build on a false premise. The higher we go the harder it gets to build a wall that will stay up.
If the premise that a loving all powerful god designed and created this world, was true, we would not be having this discussion. The fact that we are, requires that we re-examine the foundation that we started from.
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The Finger
THE GLADIATOR
If the premise that a loving all powerful god designed and created this world, was true, we would not be having this discussion. The fact that we are, requires that we re-examine the foundation that we started from.
I don't agree with you.
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mindmelda
I doubt the Hebrews would have lasted a city minute had they tried to adopt what we call more the"civilized behavior" of our times. Probably better for them that they didn't. If that argues that God made allowances for them, then that's fine, but the fate of pacifists in a more barbaric time would have probably been extinction.
And, yes, the Bronze Age was considerably more violent in certain ways than our lives are. Even the times of the early Christians were. There's a reason the disciples routinely carried swords for protection. Do you have to do that, except maybe in some very nasty and gang controlled neighborhoods. Gangs have arguably taken the place of warrior tribal culture because of the lack of more civilized ones being represented in a functional way, representing a regression of culture, in some first world cities. Stone age and Bronze age tribes, such as the one's the Hebrews belonged to, operate a lot like an inter city gang. Think about it.
Now imagine every day you wake up and you're in gangland, and they run everything...sometimes it's okay and the peace is kept, sometimes, when the tribes go to war, usually over territory, it's bad. Very bad. Sometimes, a whole tribe is nearly wiped out or a whole village. Nasty stuff.
We're all still living in the same kind of bodies with the same urges, more or less, discounting some important cultural differences than the Hebrews did. We still want to wreak revenge on our enemies by slaughtering them. We want to hang up pedophiles by their genitals and slice them to bits, throw rocks at murderers in a pit until they die. We'd like to beat people with sticks who steal from us and make them our slave until they work it off. (Not too long ago in America, colonial justice allowed for that!)
But, what keeps us from going postal on our enemies personally, from hurting, killing, stealing, maiming, and all that? Law, and cultural conditioning that cultivates our more compassionate qualities.
The Law did that for the Jews, but the somewhat similar Code of Hammarubi did so for the Chaldeans too.
Anthropologists(people who study ancient people and their cultures) reason number one for the appearance of codifying of law among humans: The progression to larger cities of people who needed stricter laws to control them, combined with the appearance of a class of priests, scholars, tradesmen who could develop writing because of the advantages of living in a large city that offered protection, advances in animal husbandry and agriculture creating food in abundance rather than spending most of your day hunting and gathering chow or making war or weapons to hunt and protect yourself.
Give humans some free time from spending all day catching a rabbit and some roots for dinner and it's amazing what we can come up with.
Humans always had gods, worship, spiritual and creative urges, but the shift in the Bronze Age from a largely hunter gatherer society to an agrarian one, albeit with still a lot of warrior values changed a lot of things about religion and social codes for humans. Writing was developed and previously oral codes got written down. That made them easier to consult and enforce. People had more time to discuss, think, and debate about what was the right and wrong things to do. Sitting around peacefully talking about such things tend to bring out our more civilized side, I think. You're able to put aside temporarily violent emotions and think about something and it's consequences rather than just react to a situation.
Well, of course the OT doesn't line up with anything much Christian. People's social and cultural values change somewhat in 3000 to 1500 years.
The OT is not meant to villainize the Jews or their God, I'm sure. It's just a slightly more honest than some account of their oral and legal and historical tradition. No one but fundamentalist need to interpret it as literal truth and a pattern for modern day living would even try to justify it is as a useful set of traditions in all ways for modern humans.
The reason someone would need this to be literal truth, well, to justify certain behavior that is otherwise incomprehensible, illogical, or even illegal or immoral otherwise by saying that it's ordained of God. Play the God card in a malicious and malignant way gives you license to do some heinous things, everyone knows that.
I don't think that's the fault of God, however. I don't push God on the unwilling, but I also don't believe that God is responsible for anything human that is ordinary for humans. The way people acted in those times was ordinary for humans in those times. Does God need people to be more progressed, more advanced than time and circumstance and natural development allow to be godly? Why would he? One might ask why only one group of humans were deserving of all this supernatural attention and everyone else could go bite a rock?
People will point to the fact that the Hebrew law included some accurate and advanced ideas such as quarantine and not eating of animals at risk for giving one parasites or illnesses as proof of divine inspiration, but I assure, humans are not so dumb and unobservant that they wouldn't figure out such things from observance. Not that hard, really. "Gee, those people who keep eating pig meat sometimes get that awful worm disease, lets not do that." See, not that hard, if you're observant, and apparently, the Hebrews like any good Bronze age agrarian/warrior people were pretty observant of nature, so they could grow food and stay somewhat healthy.
Also, how does that account for a taboo right after those that says that wearing clothing of mixed linen and wool was bad that makes no literal sense at all? The colonials wore that combination of "linesy-woolsy" for years with no ill effects. That was because those taboos were symbolic, like many taboos, not literally harmful, and the Jews were smart enough to figure out the difference, eventually.
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THE GLADIATOR
I see you have the same first name as me.
For you to agree with me your wall would have to fall down. So I guess it's The Finger for me!
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mindmelda
I hope the name finger refers to "the finger of God". I always used that to mean, "the finger" as in you know, the finger. Yes, the middle one.
Anyway, why do people try to defend the metaphysical, like the existence of God and the supernatural realm with logic and fact? Not possible. Just stop it. Be happy in your metaphysical experiences.
I have them all the time. That's enough for me. I truly think some people either do not have those experiences or they don't catagorize them as from God, whatever.
If God needed everyone to feel the same about it, he'd have given them the same brain, the same body, the same experiences.
I can't even prove I exist by means of some sorts of criteria. If I can't do that, how can I prove that God exists? Big waste of time. Metaphysics is non-empirical. Means...Not able to be proven by physical examination or scientific method. You're using a toothpick to paddle a canoe, in other words. Stop that, it's a waste of time!
From Wiki, for what it's worth.
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. [ 1 ] Someone who studies metaphysics would be called either a "metaphysician" [ 2 ] or a "metaphysicist." [ 3 ]
The word derives from the Greek words μετ? (metá) (meaning "beyond" or "after") and φυσικ? (physiká) (meaning "physical"), "physical" referring to those works on matter by Aristotle in antiquity. The prefix meta- ("beyond") was attached to the chapters in Aristotle's work that physically followed after the chapters on "physics," in posthumously edited collections. Aristotle himself did not call these works Metaphysics. Aristotle called some of the subjects treated there "first philosophy."
A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into what types of things there are in the world and what relations these things bear to one another. The metaphysician also attempts to clarify the notions by which people understand the world, including existence, objecthood, property, space, time, causality, and possibility.
Before the development of modern science, scientific questions were addressed as a part of metaphysics known as "natural philosophy"; the term "science" itself meant "knowledge" of epistemological origin. The scientific method, however, made natural philosophy an empirical and experimental activity unlike the rest of philosophy, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had begun to be called "science" in order to distinguish it from philosophy. Thereafter, metaphysics became the philosophical enquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.
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undercover
I hope the name finger refers to "the finger of God".
You mean it's not this one?
Then again...maybe God is giving us the finger what with all his raping and pillaging...
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A.Fenderson
However, I personally believe that God did order the Israelites to wipe out the nations of Canaan, and that He was justified in doing so.
There have been human leaders who have ordered far worse atrocities, so I don't get it why some make such a big deal of it.
(I know this was way back on the thread, but it doesn't seem to have specifically been addressed, so....)
I'm guessing they do because believers generally paint a picture of God as loving and flawless in action, whereas above you're comparing God to the likes of Hitler and saying that God's not that bad by contrast. All you can accomplish by that is perhaps showing that God, on a sliding scale of morality, is more evil than me, but less than Hitler. Why would I ever worship someone who's more evil than myself?
....................me (no genocides)...........God (some genocide).......Hitler (lots of genocide)
less evil <-----X-------------------------------X-------------------------------X--------------------------> more evil
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undercover
....................me (no genocides)...........God (some genocide).......Hitler (lots of genocide)
less evil <-----X-------------------------------X-------------------------------X--------------------------> more evil
Considering that JWs believe that God is going to destroy 99.9% of all humanity shouldn't it read:
...........you or me (no genocides)...........Hitler (some genocide - unfulfilled)................God (lots of genocide - up to 99%)
less evil <-----X--------------------------------X-------------------------------------------------------X--------------------> most evil
