I figure he was writing the sins of the people ready to stone the woman.
The accuser: Satan.
Evolved from lower forms of life, but life itself had no beginning just as you believe God had no beginning.
Serendipper wrote:
and how did these other lower forms of life begin?
What? You are going to have to explain this in more detail.
@Greatest
All modern technologies have primitive roots, but that doesn’t make them equivalent.
I’m an agnostic, not an atheist.
I have personally seen several phenomena I regard as inexplicable in my life time.
Billions of people have, including many of our best and brightest.
Perhaps parts of the bible are loosely based on some supernatural, or preternatural experiences Jews had with the supreme being, if there is one, or with entities.
So if the story of the bible resonates with people, I take no issue with that.
That was his opinion, there’re many Rabbis who’d vehemently disagree with him.
I have also studied the Torah, and there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that on so many levels: ethically, historically, racially, metaphysically, spiritually…
You’re trying to reduce and oversimplify it.
Someone has taught you to do that.
While that particular writer (or writers) may’ven’t had an agenda, nonetheless they can still be used for one.
The more abstract something is, the more we can all believe in it.
If your objective is multiculturalism in white nations only, you could see why the deep state would push for that.
Pretty sure Jesus, insofar as he existed, claimed to be divine, or at least his disciples, insofar as they existed, did on his behalf, tho perhaps it’s open to interpretation.
Jesus was a homophobe and misogynist by modern standards.
While he taught forgiveness of sin, he still regarded gay sex as sin.
And while he valued men and women equally, he believed women were the ‘weaker vessel’.
I don’t think there’s any scholarly proof for that.
So the whole of the Torah is not simply the golden rule after all? 
Now I see where you are coming from.
As long as you are not idol worshiping Yahweh, a genocidal prick, then we have no argument.
I take it that you have rejected supernaturalstupid thinking.
To you, heaven and hell are here and now. Right?
I agree with that view and that heaven and hell are our perception of reality.
Regards
DL
This is a good argument and I tried to show a logic trail for a new O.P.
Please advise if I have fleshed out your idea in a way you would approve in what follows.
Evolution, to a believer, must be seen as real, but not having a beginning, if God has life.
Evolution is an explanation of how life began.
God, if he were real, is said to have eternal life without a beginning. If God is eternal, and has life, then life must also be eternal and without a beginning just as is attributed to God.
Therefore, life and evolution of life must, to a believer; be eternal and without a beginning just like God.
Life then, to a believer; had no beginning just as believers believe God had no beginning. God is life.
This fits well into the law of evolution, which posits that life came to earth from space, which provided the earth with the building blocks of human life.
If an evolving process like evolution is real, which it is, then any original version of God must be in a constant state of evolution and change. That is what makes God unknowable.
Is life, to intelligent believers, eternal and without a beginning?
Regards
DL
See if this makes sense to you.
========
Evolution, to a believer, must be seen as real, but not having a beginning, if God has life.
Evolution is an explanation of how life began.
God, if he were real, is said to have eternal life without a beginning. If God is eternal, and has life, then life must also be eternal and without a beginning just as is attributed to God.
Therefore, life and evolution of life must, to a believer; be eternal and without a beginning just like God.
Life then, to a believer; had no beginning just as believers believe God had no beginning. God is life.
This fits well into the law of evolution, which posits that life came to earth from space, which provided the earth with the building blocks of human life.
If an evolving process like evolution is real, which it is, then any original version of God must be in a constant state of evolution and change. That is what makes God unknowable.
Is life, to intelligent believers, eternal and without a beginning?
Regards
DL
I do as their resonation to a belief that a genocidal son murderer can somehow be good is showing a satanic moral sense. Satan loves the Christians that the bible resonates with.
That was his opinion, there’re many Rabbis who’d vehemently disagree with him.
I have also studied the Torah, and there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that on so many levels: ethically, historically, racially, metaphysically, spiritually…
You’re trying to reduce and oversimplify it.
Someone has taught you to do that.
While that particular writer (or writers) may’ven’t had an agenda, nonetheless they can still be used for one.
The more abstract something is, the more we can all believe in it.
If your objective is multiculturalism in white nations only, you could see why the deep state would push for that.
[/quote]
[/quote]
Yes, I was taught, likely self taught, to KIS.
The Torah and how it’s writings are defined and understood is controlled by the oral tradition that the Karaites Jews control. Karaites lead the religion to where they want it to go.
As in the days of the Divine Council, Karaites continue put man above God. Not surprising as all the Gods are man made.
Do not make Jews less intelligent than they are. If they were foolish in their views, then so are Christians who usurped their religion and God.
Regards
DL
Yes. I agree with the Jews and intelligentsia who know it is all a myth that tries to explain God.
I believe that Gnostic Christian thinking is older than Christianity from the fact that Christianity usurped what I believe were the holy books of the founders of Gnostic Christian, the Chrestians.
youtube.com/watch?feature=p … At-PAkgqls
Regards
DL
Explain how god began and you will have answered you own questions, just substitute “life” for “god”. Is god alive or not?
As I said, life could not have begun because if it had, then it would have emerged from nonlife, which is impossible.
I tried that, but realized I was worshiping someone who threatened and punished me in order that I’d love him. Yahweh is a petulant child created by a primitive people.
I don’t believe in supernatural or artificial. Anything and everything is natural.
Yeah I guess. I think I need a definition to work with and a celestial north korea with praising dear leader all day is not a good definition of heaven. Any definition of heaven would eventually get old and boring and I’d wind up right back here in the midst of randomness and surprise. I woke up this morning thinking that the reason this place exists is that the other place, whether blissful or not, was unfulfilling. Why else have this world?
The interaction of me and not-me is what I call reality. Me and not-me are two poles of the same thing.
Evolution explains how life changes complexity, but can’t explain the beginning since life cannot have a beginning or else life came from nonlife. If life came from nonlife, it would simply mean that nonlife was actually a process of life. If life came from stars, then it simply means stars are a process necessary to life and must be considered alive in that way. Go all the way back through an infinite regression and we can never come to a point where something could be considered not-alive.
What does it mean to be alive?
In 1964, James Lovelock was among a group of scientists who were requested by NASA to make a theoretical life detection system to look for life on Mars during the upcoming space mission. When thinking about this problem, Lovelock wondered “how can we be sure that Martian life, if any, will reveal itself to tests based on Earth’s lifestyle?”[8] To Lovelock, the basic question was “What is life, and how should it be recognized?” When speaking about this issue with some of his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he was asked what he would do to look for life on Mars. To this, Lovelock replied “I’d look for an entropy reduction, since this must be a general characteristic of life.”[8] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_a … ve_entropy
So if organization is life, there where is non-life? Atoms are not organized? Stars squish hydrogen into helium and carbon and that’s not an entropy reduction? What about gravity? Mars itself is a reduction of entropy from the cloud of star dust accreted into a big ball we now call a planet. The real question here is not how to find life, but how to find nonlife.
Well, we can take the view that life is a complicated form of matter or that matter is a simple form of life. I prefer the latter because it eliminates explaining how life came from lifeless matter. So in my view, there is nothing that is not alive; never was and never will be.
These critters look alive in their own right to me:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjPcT1uUZiE[/youtube]
Start at 27:00 here:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyhZcEY5PCQ[/youtube]
So the believer thinks that god always existed and god is life and god created all that exists and then breathed life into it. That’s not much different than the way I see it except that the creation process is an extension of himself: god has 100% control over everything that exists like I have 100% control over the movement of my arm, so what exists is the dream, thought, idea of god which exists as a construct of the fabric of god and created from nothing like dreams we have that exist only in our heads and made of the stuff of our brains.
My axiom is that god cannot create anything that is not of himself and therefore everything is made of god. The reason for that is distinct things cannot exist in relation to each other. God cannot be disconnected from everything else and also interact with it; if he interacts, then he is part of it.
Distinctiveness is the distinction between myself and believers: I don’t believe in separate things, but they do.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdnZiv24fLc[/youtube]
the message of Billy Graham is
36:25
approximately what I’ve given you and of
36:31
all what I will call fundamentalist
36:34
forms of catholicism and protestantism.
36:39
What would the real gospel be; the real
36:43
good news? It’s not simply that Jesus of
36:47
Nazareth was the son of God, but that he
36:53
was a powerful son of God, who came to
36:59
open everybody’s eyes to the fact that
37:01
you are too. And this is perfectly plain
37:09
if you will go to the tenth chapter of
37:12
St John verse 30, there is the passage
37:20
where Jesus says “I and the father are
37:23
one”. And this is… there are some people
37:26
who are not intimate disciples around,
37:28
and they are horrified, and they
37:30
immediately pick up stones to stone him.
37:34
He says “many good works I have shown you
37:37
from the father and for which of these
37:39
do you stone me?” And they said “for a good
37:43
work we stone you not, but for blasphemy,
37:45
because you being a man make yourself
37:47
God.” And he replied “isn’t it written in
37:51
your law: I have said you are God’s?” He’s
37:57
quoting the 82nd Psalm. “Is it not
38:02
written in your law ‘I have said you are
38:04
gods’? If God called them those to whom he
38:09
gave his word ‘gods’ and you can’t deny
38:11
the scriptures,
38:13
how can you say I blaspheme because I
38:17
said ‘I am a son of God’?”
38:21
Well that’s the whole thing in a
38:23
nutshell. Because if you read the King
38:27
James Bible that descended with the
38:28
angel,
38:29
you will see in italics in front of
38:32
these words “son of God” the Son of God,
38:35
because I said I am the son of God, and
38:38
most people think that the italics are
38:40
for emphasis;
38:41
they’re not. The italics indicate words
38:44
interpolated by the translators. You will
38:49
not find that in the Greek. In the Greek
38:50
says a son of God. So it seems to me here
38:57
perfectly plain that Jesus is God in the
39:02
back of his mind that this isn’t
39:04
something peculiar to himself, so when he
39:08
says “I am the way, no man comes to the
39:12
Father but by me”,
39:14
this “I am” this “me” is the divine in us.
this
40:23
discovery is the gospel that is the good
40:25
news,
40:31
but this has been perpetually repressed
40:35
throughout the history of Western
40:38
religion because all Western religions
40:43
have taken the form of celestial
40:46
monarchies and therefore have
40:50
discouraged democracy in the kingdom of
40:53
heaven.
KIS, as you do in thinking, is always good buddy.
Regards
DL
Let me be the Devil’s advocate here to pick your brain.
We, apparently, came out of amino acids and lightning. Neither of those are life, yet the seem to be what has produced life from non-life.
Your thoughts?
Regards
DL
Indeed. I like that you KIS, but to religious con men, the more complicated and mysterious the notion they are trying to sell, the sooner they can say to their mark that they just do not understand and have to believe on faith alone, the better it is for the con.
“These critters look alive in their own right to me:”
I have no problem with your view that we are all made from star stuff. It is an old idea and accurate.
If you can’t see God in all, you can’t see God at all. -Anon
“What does it mean to be alive?”
To me, life must have the characteristic of consuming from it’s environment and being able to react to it. IOW, a nervous system that must feed so that it has what it takes to reproduce.
Do you agree with that?
DNA is necessary to make us, but as individuals strands, I would not be able to call it life as it is just information. We are like biological computers that can somehow take that DNA information and actually create the nervous system I described.
That is life from non-life. No?
Regards
DL
I really appreciate all the contributions here so far.
I especially enjoyed Gloominary’s contributions and Serendipper’s recent replies. I’d like to study the Hebrew and Greek texts closer. I do NOT take the Bible literally, and I am currently reconciling scripture with evolution, along with supernatural acts described with what they could mean to life application in a non-supernatural way. I will admit that I take more of the NT literally than the OT, but the OT is so rich and moreso misinterpreted that the ‘can of worms’ of language and interpretaiton is something I am not learned in yet. I live in an enchanted world, full of music and learning, travel and the remembrance of my own past, to help others find theirs.
Greatest still has lots of things to explain, without all the repetition and emotional conjectures, some depth of sources and information. If good works were solely for boasting, then people are being arrogant and will lose touch with the faith and knowledge which forms the basis of good works. Ask yourself honestly, if you have done any good works recently, and in secret, should you establish and grow these things? I don’t care to know, but only want to instill these good habits in you and others, free of charge. I’m almost certain that Jesus talks about the importance of secret charity, dieting, and prayer in Matthew 6. I’m also almost certain most people don’t do any of these things in secret, and those who do these things strive to make them exaggerated for public display, for some deep sick self-esteem issue for which I do not share. If you do these things, I’m sure there will be change in your life.
I agree with Gloominary, ecumenism and new age crap is poisonous. Christianity is the supreme religion for obvious reasons, but human nature makes lots of people feel offended from this supremacy, the truth of it, the ethics of it.
You guys mention lots about dualism and pantheism, some deistic ideas, but forget panentheism. I like panentheism. I’m not sure what I believe, but I try to establish the foundations of what I know and move from simple principles, morally rewarding habits, and a natural philosophy that extends to as much material being as possible. Materialism often discounts the vastness of things, and claiming some things, forgets others. Are you particles or waves?
Also, about the misogyny and homophobic thing, America (and most of the West) has been feminized. A century or two ago, there was significantly less divorce, less anal and oral sex, less babies born out of wedlock, and less abortions. These things let the snake into the garden. Homosexual sexual acts breed disease and a divergence from family/procreation. Implicit and unintended consequences from touchy issues, that intend to free those in the minorities affected, have actually made society’s masses more shallow (along with the mass worship of mammon and baal). These minorities grow until they claim majority, and a moral superiority over others just because they are apart of a minority. I have always hated the sin and not the sinner, but unfortunately the gay community will have to repent for that which they insist defines them completely, and at times, makes them ‘superior’ to others because of inevitable oppression, public judgment, and tough times growing up. The real tough times are poverty, outlier intelligence, lack of family, love loss, deaths of loved/close ones… yet the feminization forgets these in a conquest to free those who are oppressed for more superficial reasons. This opens up the issue of whether some sins are worse than others, for example, gayness versus murder, or cheating on a partner versus telling white lies to children. Some theists level the playing field by insisting sin is sin, all humans are equally perverted and sinful and evil-leaning, some people insist that some sins are worse than others and put themselves in a rabbit hole of defining the hierarchy of moral abhorrence themselves. Personally, I insist, people haven’t read Leviticus in Hebrew and haven’t reconciled Jesus in Greek with the OT law. I haven’t yet either, so I can’t really face these issues honestly, but at least I know these things exist so, eventually, I can look for resolve.
Another big issue here is causality, which seems useless debating. I like the conversation surrounding scripture and morals, but temporal issues are way out in left field. The beginning of all things will forever be foreign to you and I, and when we abandon this obsession with knowing the first and last, we can know the understanding of these things come in faith. Faith for you may not mean to submit to a being existing only in an incorporeal ‘supernatural’ ultimate reality, but in accepting that our limited perception forces us to incorporate some randomness and vastness into our blundering beliefs.
I really enjoyed reading Serendipper’s Sly Man and The Devil story. At first, I was scared, and at last, I felt calm. There was no mention of Jesus, the popularity of the issue and stance, and no mention of a natural philosophy of things/the cosmos. Gurdjieff had some interesting beliefs, and of course, an amazing stache, so I’ll definitely be looking into him more. I don’t see myself in the groups listening to the devil who were sure to get to heaven boasting of their works. I am just some young guy from the north who would prefer a life of privacy and deep connections with few people. St. Peter is always at the gates, but where’s Paul and John? There was a Paul and John in the 1960s who made some good music, but it seems the big guy and the higher tier apostles are often missing in our latter day stories.
We have already mentioned the ten commandments, but there is also a promise before and a lengthy covenant afterwards. You guys read those? In Hebrew? Latin and English too? These things matter to me, even though lots of people have laughed at my drive to learn ‘dead’ languages.
In a thread posing the question of understanding Jesus and the Bible, we’ve spoken about first things and morals, but haven’t honestly addressed the question, not even the OP Greatest…
I have learned some things about Him, and the scripture, but only beginning to understand. The important part is my drive, and your drive, of some understanding and ideal of better-ness. The snakes will eventually be stomped out with bronze feet, with our tongues like swords, and the cleansing of our robes until the evil is separated from good by the sake of knowledge and progression through time so long.
We also had slavery, wife and child beating, no possible way of saying that a husband raped a wife, no recourse for a child being abused sexually by a parent, systematic racism, indentured sevants (which was a form of slavery) child labor in horrible conditions that was legal and more.
Why do periods that have Christian values never have responsibility for what comes after?
IOW in these types of discussions the 60s leads to all sorts of horrible things in later decades, but the more conservative 50s is free from any responsibility for creating the 60s or other problems that came after.
If one comes here as a believer in a traditional God one does get a lot of crap. But some of what you said reminded me of so many things religious people say and it seems to me a kind of selective and self-serving type of memory thing. They are nostalgic for a moral past that did not exist. And blame current problem and what they consider problems only on what they don’t like, when there are aj lot of causes that are left out.
I stopped at your gay bashing. Piece of human garbage and liar.
And you think I should change my ways. F Y homophobe.
Regards
DL