Have you leaned what Jesus and your bible teaches?

I’m not sure why some atheists pretend to be theists.

They try to redefine God for us, from the traditional meaning: the supreme being, with supreme attributes (intelligence, power, virtue, etcetera), to their meaning: all that is (and isn’t), the cosmos, existence or the universe.

They say I believe in God (all that is).

What’s the point of saying that?

Who doesn’t believe all that is, is?

It’s tautological.

Why don’t you just get over yourselves and admit you’re atheists?

I mean at least the Hindus were able to explain what their pantheism meant.
They said the universe is God (the supreme being), in that everyone and everything is part of God’s dream (or nightmare), or infinite, immortal God is simultaneously, (sub)consciously roleplaying finite, mortal you, me, that rock over there, everyone and everything in the universe/his dream/nightmare.
But these neopantheists don’t explain in what sense the universe is the, or is like a supreme being, in fact they say there is no supreme being, but yet they insist they believe in God and the universe is it, it’s preposterous.

That we’ll all live happily ever after in wonderland.

I’m not sure which group y ou mean, and they may well be atheists, but pantheists may distinguish themselves from other theists by thinking that God is immanent. Or, in some cases, immanent and transcendent. The Abrahamic religions put a lot of the goodness, or all of it, beyond the material realm. Hence their distaste for bodies and sex and nature, etc. God is transcendent, outside, so is Heaven, this realm doesn’t matter so much, it is a kind of test. There are other versions, but there is a devaluation of matter. Which actually fits nicely with science, certainly up to the latter middle of the 20th century. Might even be causal.

To a pagan pantheist everythingis alive and the whole thing can very well and often does have those attributes you mentioned for a deity. We are then parts of deity, in some sense like the Hindus, though here it is less a mere illusion. There is a both and. Both separate and a part of God.

@Karpel

They’re faxu-theists, I see them on forums such as these from time to time.

I don’t know if they think of themselves as a group, but I’m grouping them.

Right, but in what way is the supreme (or supreme beings) imminent in this rock here, or that tree over there?

either they don’t specify, which’s vague (which’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s okay to be vague, just pointing out that it is, and on a philosophy forum I would prefer clarification), or they deny there is a supreme being, which’s atheism.

I think you’re thinking more about Gnosticism than Judeo-Christianity and Islam.

Matter and flesh aren’t evil in Christianity, we can find Jesus enjoying food and wine in company of friends.
Jesus said the flesh is weak, not evil, the spirit has to reign it in.
When El created the heavens and earth, he said the earth was good, not evil.
According to the bible the origin of evil is Lucifer and man’s hubris, which, like everything, ultimately came from El, El says I created the good and the evil.

Now for Gnostics, a syncretistic philosophical religion, they equate El with Satan (the accuser) and evil (bondage, faith), and Jesus with Lucifer (the serpent) and good (liberation, knowledge).
They said El/Satan and his archons were evil for creating matter to ensnare souls, and then blame them for being tempted, whereas Jesus/Lucifer wants to liberate souls from matter through knowledge or gnosis of our true nature.
Once we no longer identify with matter, and instead identify ourselves with spirit, we are liberated from pain, suffering and mortality, but El/Satan wishes to keep us in the darkness of our ignorance, to feed off our suffering like a vampire.

Gnosticism is more dualistic, matter and flesh are evil, soul is good.
The Abrahamic religions are dualistic in the sense there is a creator and created, but everything save hubris is good, there isn’t this hostility between flesh and spirit, more complimentary, the two go together and are good, so long as spirit reigns over flesh.

And El ultimately wants to create a new earth, not do away with it altogether.

Right, El makes matter something distinct from spirit, he locates all intelligence and spontaneity in the latter, and nothing but blind causality in the former.
So the scientific worldview can be thought of as doing away with spirit but keeping the blind causality of matter, but metaphysical materialism was invented by the Greeks, Hindus and Chinese independently of one another and the Jews in early antiquity.
Democritus was probably the originator of materialism in the west.

Right, that is justifying your pantheism, you’re saying everything is fundamentally interconnected and alive in some sense, conscious (panpsychism), and one or whole (monism), that this totality is the supreme being, the only being, God.

What’s preposterous is that a bunch of dumb junk magically turned itself into people. Hydrogen - A colorless, odorless gas that, given enough time, turns into people.

What’s preposterous is that a magical sky fairy created something from nothing in order to stand outside it and somehow not be a part of it.

Pantheism is the only sensible solution.

Actually I prefer the term panvitalism. The “theism” part makes it seem like an object of worship or a god that is separate from everything else. There is no theism, but only vitalism. No god; just life.

There is nothing that is not god and there is nothing that is not you.

The maximum number of things in any universe can only be 1.

If there are two things, then they must be distinct things and distinct things are mutually exclusive and if they are excluded from each other, then they don’t exist to each other and inhabit individual universes which brings us back to the maximum number of things in any universe is 1.

God cannot create anything unless it be a part of him. Therefore all things are god. Unless you view yourself as a pile of junk, in which case the universe is just dumb junk.

So is consciousness a complicated form of mineral or is mineral a simple form of consciousness? The answer to that depends if you want to insult yourself or not. If mineral is just junk, then so are you.

Well the cosmos is one in that everything we experience affects everything else, directly or indirectly, and everything is alive, aware and intelligent in that everything is in part spontaneous (at least on the subatomic level), responsive and organizes itself in very sophisticated ways.

Still some things within the cosmos are more alive, aware, intelligent and unified than others.

Right, consciousness doesn’t come from nothing upon assembling the right amount of complexity, but there is a continuous spectrum of degrees of consciousness with no zero being found.

All religions have pagan roots.

Moses was a myth and literalists are never right as they believe on faith and not on facts. Literalism is for those who do not want to know the truth.

I hope you can see how intelligent the ancients were as compared to the mental trash that modern preachers and theists are using with the literal reading of myths.

bigthink.com/videos/what-is-god-2-2

Further.
pbs.org/moyers/journal/03132009/watch.html

Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said that when asked to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching, while he stood on one leg, said, “The Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. And everything else is only commentary. Now, go and study it.”

Please listen as to what is said about the literal reading of myths.

"Origen, the great second or third century Greek commentator on the Bible said that it is absolutely impossible to take these texts literally. You simply cannot do so. And he said, “God has put these sort of conundrums and paradoxes in so that we are forced to seek a deeper meaning.”

Matt 7;12 So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

This is how early Gnostic Christians view the transition from reading myths properly to destructive literal reading and idol worship.

youtube.com/watch?v=oR02cia … =PLCBF574D

Do you wish to talk truth or the lies you get when reading a myth literally?

Regards
DL

I agree that the bible is depicting the supernatural and is therefore irrational.

Regards
DL

So you see both Jesus and Satan doing God’s work. Interesting.

That is more of a Jewish take than a Christian one. Are you agreeing that Eden was where man was elevated and not where he fell?

Are you agreeing with this link?

dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/ … -theodicy/

Regards
DL

Then there is a problem with using quotes from that Bible to demonstate what Jesus really thought.

Indeed, but I am using the quotes that are basically inter faith as the meditation it promotes is found in most religions.

Anything can be used as a mantra and Gnostic Christians traditionally use the Jesus Chrestian good man archetype.

Regards
DL

That’s fine in terms of your use of the Bible. IOW you believe parts are true and others are not and you know which parts to listen to and which not, given your belief system. But you are turning to Christians who are not Gnostics, with the title of your thread ‘Have you learned what Jesus and your Bible teaches?’ and using as evidence certain quotes that you interpret out of your belief system. See, Christian, this is what your Bible says, there is no supernatural stuff. But the Bible very clearly intends people to believe in supernatural stuff, including about Jesus and that Jesus believed in supernatural stuff himself.

Now those who wrote the Bible may have presented a distorted image of Jesus and what he really believed, but the Bible as evidence is utterly undermined and it does not make sense as a demonstration to Christians. You can’t use the Bible to show that Jesus did not believe in the supernatural. That’s cherry picking. Further the cherry picked quotes themselves are rather open to a variety of interpretations.

It is just not the case, as you admitted above, that the Bible teaches there is nothing supernatural. Nor does the Jesus as presented in the Bible.

The quotes you quoted earlier can certain be used as discussion points on an interfaith level, but there’s no demonstation of ‘what the Bible is teaching.’

I don’t really think the various meditations promoted in the various religions is the same. It certainly was not what I experienced and the language and specific practices are different, but that’s another can of worms.

The whole bible is a cherry picking from most of the religions of those days.

As esoteric ecumenists, we just follow that old tradition and given that Christians burned a hell of a lot of the older holy books, it has become a guide to what the ancient thinkers thought.

The bible is basically the only book, other than Gnostic writings, that speaks of Jesus.

No bible = no Jesus.

Do you want to chat about Jesus or not?

Regards
DL

Christianity is unique, and real Christians ought to purge their churches of ecumenical and new age thinking.

If you know of the standard Jesus set for Christians to be his followers, with faith or belief, then there are no real Christians as Jesus said they could do all he did and more.

Jesus would look at Christianity today and reject it out of hand due to their homophobic and misogynous teachings.

BTW. the new age thinking that you might be attributing to Gnostic Christianity, is alder thinking than Christian thinking.

They usurped our God. We did not usurp their vile genocidal son murdering prick of a God.

Regards
DL

He certainly, according to the Gospels, stood up for a particular woman in a particular situation. But then there are no statements made by him challenging women’s place in society or the religion. And there is nothing about homosexuality. So what you are doing here is making a psychic claim, a supernatural claim. He certainly would have had opportunities to challenge the OT on its sexist, homophobic passages and stories. Perhaps he did do this and it was not recorded. But we have no way of knowing he thought those things. Unless we know via some kind of supernatural ability.

Are you making a psychic claim?

How could they usurp your God? They had a different religion from yours, except those who made Gnostic interpretations that you agree with.

I make no psychic claims.

I make a logical inference that a Jesus who pushed the Golden Rule, would treat women as gays as he would if he were a woman or a gay.

As to usurping our original Chrestian God ideas the same way Christianity usurped Yahweh from the Jews, I get that from this link.

youtube.com/watch?feature=p … At-PAkgqls

There is nothing unique to Christianity as it is a religion that came from a consolidation of many of the older and wiser thinking systems.

Regards
DL

Greatest u r and Gloominary

Am I to understand that both of you believe in Evolution?

If so tell me, how does Evolution explain the origin of life.