Did god really condemn mankind? Is god a just god?

The Devil wrote the Bible".–MH
I never said I agreed with him. For me the Bible is a fat udder for spiritual infants. It can nourish if read carefully.

lol I have never heard that before, Ierrellus. It was funny and yet a bit creepy in its bestiality-like image. 8-[
They need not be spiritual infants who are nourished by the bible.

Have you forgotten that a prepositional phrase ought not to begin a sentence, Ierrellus, at least not without a comma? :stuck_out_tongue:

After listening to the Bible videos by Jordan Peterson, I believe that psychologically there is a lot in the Bible, but we have forgotten how to read it. Prior to the renaissance, people used stories to explain things for which they had no vocabulary.

Greatest I Am,

Do you see the individual? Do you see the part or always just what you consider to be the whole?
I have no idea what the statistics would be insofar as the percentage of christians/catholics who would believe homophobia and misogyny to be acceptable and good BUT not all of them would believe in that way. Sometimes it is a question of upbringing and not LEARNING TO THINK FOR ONE’S SELF. The main thing that these biased people are guilty of is not questioning what the bible says. It is called Ignorance.

Look above. Perhaps you are correct insofar as some go but my main point is that they have no idea what they are even saying when they go along with these beliefs. As I said in the post above…

They are about growing up in ignorance, taking everything in the bible as literal instead of learning to think for one’s self. They are about fear and mis-understanding.

So what you seem to be saying, as I read it, is that Gnostic Christians are kind of infallible and can have no biases, no wrongful thinking. How deep do you think the psyche or core of a human being goes anyway?

Okay, I can understand that albeit I still do not agree with his approach. I also agree with and share his thoughts given in the below hyperlink. They shed a didn’t kind of light on him. I will admit that I do not know a lot about him.

livescience.com/59455-richa … ation.html

Ciao
:evilfun:

My last post was based on Greatest Iam’s admission of having a Bible in his home. I wrote sentences that might evoke his response. I did not say that the Bible is never spiritually nourishing. Bob is right. One’s attitude about the book depends on how it is read. It can offer ideas of brotherly (and sisterly) love or excuses for violence and hatred. I just wanted to see if GIA throws out the baby with the bath water.

We shall see what we shall see.

:evilfun:

From reading Elaine Pagels and Hans Jonas on Christian Gnosticism I came to the understanding that it is just another mythology. I’m not saying the myths are bad or even in error. Choosing to believe in one or the other is a personal choice. Fundamentalist Christianity is now being challenged by many thoughtful progressives. Dawkins’, et.al, criticisms of it are like the beating of a dead horse.

I think you’re preaching to a crowd that is dwindling. I’ve been following atheist arguments for over 20 years and as is also true of theist arguments, the atheist ones have certain recurring themes…like appealing in their arguments to the lowest common denominator in (most of the time) Christianity, the literalists. There are still a reasonable number of them around but they’re thinning out; your target audience is shrinking. There is an underlying semantical system system in the Bible which is both rational (dictionary type, not philosophical) and allegorical by which it can be demonstrated that the hell passages are metaphors for internal [spiritual] cleansing, most likely accomplished in time. The promotion of any allegorical system of interpretation has traditionally been considered a treading ground of religious liberalism, but this allegorical system–while it certainly rocks the literalist boat (universal salvation is a prime tenet)–nonetheless not only supports most traditional doctrines, it offers even stronger evidence of the supernatural orchestration of the Bible than literalism can claim, and I find those claims reasonably impressive.

Point: interpreting the Bible differently than the traditional literalist way, if that interpretation is able to account for entire themes (like the hell passages for instance) is not “ignoring half the bible”. The Cor. 15 passage noted is not cherry picking when hell as a “refining” process has been factored in.

I can’t seem to wrap my mind around the myth that some demiurge created the World. The ethics of Gnostic Christianity sound reasonable and good. Why obscure that fact with an alternative creation mythology?

And yet on the other side of the issue there are those who find notion of a designer perfectly reasonable. What I am most interested in is what account can be given for the motives that form the beliefs on each side–more accurately, what are the parameters by which those motives come into being? But am leaving the topic of the op so I’ll defer the explanation for another thread another time.

An appropriate post. Whose motives would you like to hear about? The believers’ or what is believed to be the Gods’? Why can’t the designer be natural, not supernatural? Is a motive of the creator to chastise that which was created?

If your reading concludes with you recognizing that Yahweh is a prick, you have read it right.

If not. Read it again for the first time.

The bible has us doomed by design.

Regards
DL

I would not say that we forgot. I would say that the insane literalist reading of their myth has them thinking stupidly and immorally.

Regards
DL

:smiley: :smiley:

On the contrary. We embrace our biases, both positive and negative.

Our negative bias goes against those who discriminate without a just cause. Those include the misogynous and homophobic.

For evil to grow and all that.

Regards
DL

Baby! ??

Are you talking about my retaining the genocidal and infanticidal baby prick named Yahweh?

Do you read him as a good god?

Regards
DL

Refining??

The product refined is always refined to be purified and kept.

The product of souls, according to scriptures, is to be it’s destruction and not refined and retained.

Regards
DL

Myths have to be fought with myths.

We do not care about how we got here. Who cares?

It is our morals and ethics while here that is important to us.

What do you hold as most important?

Regards
DL

Historian Bart Ehrman on five things you didn’t know about Heaven and Hell:
youtube.com/watch?v=L0-tFah … 2vGAhV%3A6

He makes some good points, but I would just point out that the concept of a soul predates Plato. We see this idea of a soul hinted at in Homer’s “The Odyssey”. In it, Odysseus visits Hades and gets these apparitions of old acquaintances. We know these apparitions are not meant to represent the reanimated remains of Odysseus’ old friends, for one of the apparitions, a recently killed crew member, complains to Odysseus that they had left his body unburied. So not only do we get the beginnings of this idea of a soul, but also the idea of the soul and body being intimately linked, even after death. This soul body linkage is something that has survived, even into modern day Christianity, with its supposed emphasis on the soul. Of course, The Odyssey is a work of fiction, and was never meant to be taken literally; nevertheless, we can see this concept of a soul forming as early as 8th century BC, in Greek theology.

That Hell is an even later invention meant to scare people into converting should be obvious to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Judaism, upon which Christianity is based. It is also apparent in “Gone with the Wind”, or as I like to call it, the “real Bible” for those understand its deeper meaning:

youtube.com/watch?v=STyAFwX5M-U

A good find.

The carrot stick thinking is ancient in man. Cause and effect.
We are learning scientifically that when we use corporeal force on our children, we do not reap the best end.
Punishment, to be worthy, should target the mind and change it before other means are attempted.
You would not want me to punish your body. You would harbor deep resentment. So do our children when we beat them.

Regards
DL