serotonin_wraith

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Posts by serotonin_wraith

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  96

  Does God love you?

  by nvrgnbk in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  interesting read.. .

  god hates you; but god is hungry and needs you to help him eat your soul.

  he chuckles to himself that he cannot only suck out your life and being, but he can make you believe the lie as well.

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  serotonin_wraith

  Oh yeah, He does love us.

  ...But if you don't love him back, you're screwed.
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  40

  Spirituality vs. Religion - what's the difference?

  by truth_about_the_truth in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  here is an excerpt from a book called "fresh wisdom-breakthrough to enlightenment" that really hits the point:

  the con of religion

  we have never met a christian who has given up everything and followed christ.

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  serotonin_wraith

  Thanks nvrgnbk, that's a better way to describe it- the 'connection with everything' is an out of body connection regardless of whether we think about it. We're all connected to things that can't even think.

  The fact everything is connected in some way is undeniable- so someone who is spiritual is just someone who thinks about that? I don't want to label myself spiritual on that alone, it just seems to be common sense to understand things are connected. I'm probably missing something.
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  96

  Does God love you?

  by nvrgnbk in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  interesting read.. .

  god hates you; but god is hungry and needs you to help him eat your soul.

  he chuckles to himself that he cannot only suck out your life and being, but he can make you believe the lie as well.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
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  serotonin_wraith

  
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  40

  Spirituality vs. Religion - what's the difference?

  by truth_about_the_truth in

  1. watchtower
  2. scandals

  here is an excerpt from a book called "fresh wisdom-breakthrough to enlightenment" that really hits the point:

  the con of religion

  we have never met a christian who has given up everything and followed christ.

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  serotonin_wraith

  Anyone?
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  29

  Question for Christians Re: Cures

  by serotonin_wraith in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  this is actually a sincere question (believe it or not!).

  i've mentioned how christians may not look to find cures for things such as cancer, because they believe jesus will sort it all out when he returns sometime soon.

  there were some who disagreed and said cures can still be sought.. but i thought about that.

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  serotonin_wraith

  I believe we are space dust, and that the matter we're made up of formed when our sun did. The Earth formed after the sun. In Genesis the sun came after the Earth.

  New suns are born from the matter of dead suns that have expelled their matter, and so on back to a time when there was nothing but mostly hydrogen in the universe. What came before the big bang, no one knows.

  According to my information, Genesis was written sometime between 1513 and 1200 BC, not 4-6,000 years ago.

  the people who wrote it were looking further back than that and for want of a better word, 'speculating' the creation in the light of what they knew

  I completely agree. This is why I don't think it was inspired. Your version is excellent, it would still hold up today. Maybe less people would have seen it as an uninspired scientifically inaccurate account if it had been written that way.

  I can't improve on this argument from page 286 (in my copy) of Sam Harris' The End of Faith-

  To be sure, occult, alchemical, and conventionally mystical interpretations of various passages in the Bible and the Koran are as old as the texts themselves, but the problem... is that they are perfectly unrestrained by the contents of the texts themselves. One can interpret every text in such a way as to yield almost any mystical or occult instruction.

  A case in point: I have selected another book at random... The book is A Taste of Hawaii: New Cooking from the Crossroads of the Pacific... While it appears to be a recipe for wok-seared fish and shrimp cakes with ogo-tomato relish, we need only study its list of ingredients to know that we are in the presence of an unrivaled spiritual intelligence.

  snapper filet, cubed

  3 teaspoons, chopped scallions

  salt and freshly ground black pepper...

  The snapper filet, of course, is the individual himself- you and I- awash in the sea of existence. But here we find it cubed, which is to say that our situation must be remedied in all three dimensions of body, mind, and spirit.

  Three teaspoons of chopped scallions further partakes of the cubic symmetry, suggesting that that which we need add to each level of our being by way of antitode comes likewise in equal proportions. The import of the passage is clear: the body, mind, and spirit need to be tended to with the same care.

  Salt and freshly ground pepper: here we have the perennial invocation of opposites- the white and the black aspects of our nature. Both good and evil must be understood if we would fulfill the recipe for spiritual life. Nothing, afterall, can be excluded from the human experience... What is more, salt and pepper come to us in the form of grains, which is to say that our good and bad qualities are born of the tiniest of actions. Thus, we are not good or evil in general, but only by virtue of innumerable moments, which color the stream of our being by force of repetition...

  That such metaphorical acrobatics can be performed on almost any text- and that they are therefore meaningless- should be obvious.

  In the same way too, when you think there must be a deep meaningful message behind the story of God taking a rib from man and making woman, or the way God made everything in the account is some kind of metaphor for evolution, I feel that you're taking it too far. Any meaning whatsoever can be got from the Genesis account if it can be played around with like that.
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  29

  Question for Christians Re: Cures

  by serotonin_wraith in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  this is actually a sincere question (believe it or not!).

  i've mentioned how christians may not look to find cures for things such as cancer, because they believe jesus will sort it all out when he returns sometime soon.

  there were some who disagreed and said cures can still be sought.. but i thought about that.

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  serotonin_wraith

  I'm not sure how anyone could get anything of the kind out of Genesis. It's not that it was simpler to understand, it's a completely different story. 'And ape changed to man and God blessed man' would have been simpler. Humans as we know them today were still around over 6,000 years ago. We'd invented glue by that time. God then made Adam from dust, and Eve from Adam's rib, even though the Earth already had many many humans- I just don't see how the two fit together. Their sin passed on to the humans that were already on Earth? Sorry, I just don't get that at all. They seem like opposing accounts to me.
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  29

  Question for Christians Re: Cures

  by serotonin_wraith in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  this is actually a sincere question (believe it or not!).

  i've mentioned how christians may not look to find cures for things such as cancer, because they believe jesus will sort it all out when he returns sometime soon.

  there were some who disagreed and said cures can still be sought.. but i thought about that.

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  serotonin_wraith

  That's cool. A lot of Christians do believe that, and I don't know everyones specific beliefs here so I wanted to cover all the bases. Thanks for clearing that part up though.
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  29

  Question for Christians Re: Cures

  by serotonin_wraith in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  this is actually a sincere question (believe it or not!).

  i've mentioned how christians may not look to find cures for things such as cancer, because they believe jesus will sort it all out when he returns sometime soon.

  there were some who disagreed and said cures can still be sought.. but i thought about that.

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  serotonin_wraith

  jgnat-

  1. That does seem unusual though. That Jesus would come and cure people when God had set things up so that we'd have diseases. If he wanted to help us then, why not help us right back at the start and stop these things even happening?

  2. Those things are what we control as a species. We set them up to help us. Banks, etc. With diseases it's part of us that was 'designed by God' and we fight against that. If he set us up to get sick, what does he want? To make us sick or for us to not get sick? I may answer my own question here in a way, but I'm considering hunger/starvation too. We're set up to need food to survive, but that need also kills us when there is none available. So is hunger a bad thing to set up, or is it because of us that it goes against us? Hmmm...

  3. I've always seen original sin as being about the sins being passed on to us all, because Adam and Eve fell. And it didn't 'just happen' to them, they deserved it. Therefore, we do too? A universe could have been set up so that we'd all grow wings if they fell, anything could have happened, so it's not that it 'just happened'. It still needed to be planned by God, because he would control everything.

  4. "A. Perhaps because God doesn't want us to suffer?" That's the system he set up though.

  Deputy Dog-

  I do feel lucky to have life. From the atheist viewpoint it is still amazing that out of all the countless billion sperms and eggs and babies that die, I made it. I don't feel I deserve it. But if there is a God, do I deserve to get sick and suffer? If I have a baby, is it okay to inject it with a virus just because I created it? Yet if we are 'God's children' that is okay? If the Earth is supposed to end up a place where we don't get sick, and it's to restore the Earth to the way things were, then how things are seem to be related to our fall and it's what God wants. Why question that? Or it may be like Sad Emo said- God made us to possibly get ill straight off the bat.

  Could we ever reach the point where we cure all sickness ourselves? If we do that, what need is there for God to do it for us? We're a long way from that though. Sorry for the rambling, I don't believe in a god but this kinda thing is still interesting to think about.
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  29

  Question for Christians Re: Cures

  by serotonin_wraith in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  this is actually a sincere question (believe it or not!).

  i've mentioned how christians may not look to find cures for things such as cancer, because they believe jesus will sort it all out when he returns sometime soon.

  there were some who disagreed and said cures can still be sought.. but i thought about that.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  serotonin_wraith

  Do you believe in evolution then? I believe the appendix was useful in the past, but evolution has changed our bodies in such a way as to make it dangerous now. You agree it's changed too- so if you believe in evolution (which is small changes as you described), where do Adam and Eve come into it?
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  29

  Question for Christians Re: Cures

  by serotonin_wraith in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  this is actually a sincere question (believe it or not!).

  i've mentioned how christians may not look to find cures for things such as cancer, because they believe jesus will sort it all out when he returns sometime soon.

  there were some who disagreed and said cures can still be sought.. but i thought about that.

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  serotonin_wraith

  Cures are a form of God's Grace and Christians look for ways to share God's with everyone. I can't think of a better reason to look.

  It does seem less than loving to do that though, in my eyes. Why let someone suffer with an illness at all, if you could have made them without it in the first place? "I'll make it so that humans suffer for hundreds of years with a disease, and then I'll be kind and help one generation over the last." I can't see it as loving. Many people will refuse to have children of their own if they are afraid of passing on a genetic illness, so humans wouldn't purposefully do it out of love. Why is human love and God's love so very different? God's love looks to me like my version of spite sometimes.

  Mouthy, I'll agree that we may bring these things upon ourselves by not being careful. But there are so many other diseases and ailments that we get that aren't our fault. Sometimes we are just born with them. In the grand scheme of things, the ones we bring on ourselves are a small minority. With God seeing ahead and perhaps wanting to protect your daughter from pain, that may be understandable. But at the same time he's allowing people to deteriorate with Parkinson's Disease over a period of many years?

  I suppose this is why I put it down to random genetic defects or things we bring on ourselves, rather than a higher power intervening.

  Sad Emo, with consequences for our actions, I can see what you mean with some of the things we get. But I don't think it covers most of them. We have an appendix which could burst and kill us- how is that possibly our fault? We are born with it, and we don't even need it. That's why it's removed if it's a threat to us. It's going in a different direction so I won't go too much into it, but that doesn't seem to be a good design to me.