What is with you and telling people what they think? I never said I thought all Christians think of themselves as perfect, or anything remotely to that effect.
That second paragraph was just plain gibberish
Planned Murder ...I mean Parenthood
- Thread starter bleeduncblue
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What is with you and telling people what they think? I never said I thought all Christians think of themselves as perfect, or anything remotely to that effect.
That second paragraph was just plain gibberish
Actually I said I thought it was funny that there is an inverse relationship between biblical sexual morality and teenage pregnancies. Christians thinking their perfect isn't in anyway relevant to that. It's just ironic that this so called morality seems to have the opposite of the intended impact.
This study found that religiosity was a strong predictor of teenage pregnancies, regardless of their socioeconomic conditions. No wonder why the Bible belt is so fired up about abortion, this is where their the most needed lol
http://www.reproductive-health-journal.com/content/6/1/14
This study found that religiosity was a strong predictor of teenage pregnancies, regardless of their socioeconomic conditions. No wonder why the Bible belt is so fired up about abortion, this is where their the most needed lol
http://www.reproductive-health-journal.com/content/6/1/14
You used the wrong "their" (they're) twice. I'm usually not a grammar police kind of guy and I would have let one go, but two in such a short post? You needed to be reprimanded.
I didn't click the link so forgive me, but can you tell me the demographic breakdown of it.
"Birth pangs?" Why do religious zealots of EVERY generation seem bent on insisting, and act as if, THEIR generation is the final act of the human saga?
Nuk, I hate to tell ya, but times have been a HELLUVA lot worse than this. I imagine people living in the Dust Bowl and seeing black blizzards and locusts completely devouring the land had far more reason to cite a Biblical prophecy being at hand in THEIR generation, not to mention the destruction and death of WWII. I remember my grandfather telling me that HIS grandfather's generation (the one that experienced and survived the Civil War) was absolutely certain that the end had come. My great-great grandfather was a private in the Army of Northern Va. There was absolutely unprecedented death and poverty all around. And, that generation was steeped in Providence being at hand.
Abortion, while it is an issue of controversy and is a very horrible choice and procedure in a non-discretionary way, is hardly enough to file under "Here comes the Curtain Call, folks!"
I know you will refuse to accept it, but the Bible is not meant to be literal in a present-day context. It is more conceptual and allegorical. The text can, and does, fit into ANY contemporary scene or situation if you need it to, or want it to.
I don't think Christians think they are perfect, even though it could be understood or perceived that way. I think most people who are immersed in religion and their church exhibit a sense of superiority, not perfection. They will insist that their way is the only way, and therefore the "best way" to know God, or understand a higher consciousness/power.
I think you are ill-equipped to make such a claim. However, as folks like you gain increasing influence our society is devolving rapidly into its primitive base state. Birth pangs are getting more rapid...
Wow...I agree with this more than anything you've ever said. You sure you don't want to make some condescending remark to ruin it?
What you say has some truth, but you are deceptive and dismissive. The big difference TODAY is that Israel has been reconstituted. Jesus said that the generation that saw Israel re-established in the Land would see prophecy fulfilled. I happen to believe Him...
Fine... whatever.
When I think of these stories being handed down for centuries before they were ever written down, and then I have to consider that those people, each time, were convinced it was the final bell. Then, if they were somehow not thinking that, then they had to presume it could be, or would be, another 2000 years before any of it actually went down. That doesn't give you much incentive to be adherent to the religion, does it? You don't feel like you're as involved in the outcome if you're that far removed from the finale.
In the scope of "time" it's subjective anyway. Time is another human concept and human invention. It's a human filter entirely. But, "Israel" is also an allegorical reference. And, even if it is literal, it could just as easily be another 2000 MORE years!
I guess it's instinctive to want to believe that we're the special ones that get to see the final act be played-out. Every generation does it and every generation will continue to do it. That's why the religions stay around. "You might get to see the End Times!" Hey, if you take it literal and the Final Act is coming, you should be having a ball. The abortions means it's almost over. That's what's bothersome to me. People who have their own ironic personal conflict. They seem to hate or denounce these acts, but they also welcome them because it means their Paradise is just a few ticks away.
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I believe that, in some ways, when you remove the myths from the culture, it does resort to more of a primitive state. When there is no hope or understanding of God, what's the use of being civil? You no longer have the compulsion to please or appease your God. The structure or presence of God was used, and is used, to maintain order in society. Ideally, people evolve to get beyond the idea of some super-natural deity floating int he sky and realize that God is merely a higher consciousness and is in every one of us and always has been. We are eternal, that is for sure. "We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden."
A good example is the Native American tribes of North America. Their "God", quite literally, was the Buffalo! The white man took their God from them. Look at what that culture has devolved into. Their God is gone.
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You believe the Word of God is a myth? The Book you've admitted you never bothered to read?!?!?!
I read Scripture often. I use "myth" in a different context. Not myth as in "fairy tale", but Myth as in allegorical story. I don't take it or apply it in the absolute literal sense that you always do.You believe the Word of God is a myth? The Book you've admitted you never bothered to read?!?!?!
17,436,739 babies have been beheaded since 1973. 1788 babies have been killed in the US TODAY as of two minutes ago... There is an abortion conducted in this country every minute of the day. There will be a reckoning for this genocide.
That's contrary to your previous claims, but... OK. What lessons have you drawn from your readings of these "allegorical stories" regarding abortion?
The same reckoning for Christians killing millions of people who are born and drawing breath, too?
God doesn't punish. People bring their own punishment upon themselves by going against their better nature. God is not a Man In The Sky. God is a higher consciousness, an eternal spirit of balance. People try to humanize God on a regular basis. The churches and religions play a role, but the churches and religions are mostly people and people are fallible.
God is not "Christian" or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Jewish, or Shintoist, or Taoist, or Mormon, or Jehovah's Witness, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Episcopalian, or Lutheran.
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I don't approve of abortion. I don't approve of executions or murder of any kind... ever.
I would never consent to having one (I can't have one personally). I would always tell a woman to consider adoption. I do know that there are medical situations where abortions save the life of the mother, and so, that needs to be considered in a legality sense. I know the legality of it will probably allow for a more pervasive use of it as birth control, but those people who do that are accountable for themselves and will justify it, just like people who execute full-grown human beings justify those murders. I don't find any direct, literal reference to abortion in the Bible.
Every time you post a thread about God, you have it completely wrong, thereby proving your ignorance of what is in the Word of God. You are either lying about reading Scripture, incapable of comprehending the material, or willfully disregarding its contents. Amazing.
Israel is the key:
Acts 4:25New International Version (NIV)
25 You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
“‘Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
26The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord
and against his anointed one.[b]’[c]
Jeremiah 19:5
They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.
So that you don't think I'm taking this out of context, the entire chapter is provided below. Judah was about to be judged severely for what it had done in turning away from the Lord, and there would there be consequences for rejecting God's commands, engaging in idolatry, and murdering their innocent children on the altars of Baal:
Jeremiah 19
19 This is what the Lord says: “Go and buy a clay jar from a potter. Take along some of the elders of the people and of the priests 2 and go out to the Valley of Ben Hinnom, near the entrance of the Potsherd Gate. There proclaim the words I tell you,3 and say, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, you kings of Judah and people of Jerusalem. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Listen! I am going to bring a disaster on this place that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle.4 For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned incense in it to gods that neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. 5 They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind. 6 So beware, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when people will no longer call this place Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.
7 “‘In this place I will ruin[a] the plans of Judah and Jerusalem. I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, at the hands of those who want to kill them, and I will give their carcasses as food to the birds and the wild animals. 8 I will devastate this city and make it an object of horror and scorn; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds. 9 I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh because their enemies will press the siege so hard against them to destroy them.’
10 “Then break the jar while those who go with you are watching, 11 and say to them, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired. They will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room. 12 This is what I will do to this place and to those who live here, declares the Lord. I will make this city like Topheth. 13 The houses in Jerusalem and those of the kings of Judah will be defiled like this place, Topheth—all the houses where they burned incense on the roofs to all the starry hosts and poured out drink offerings to other gods.’”
14 Jeremiah then returned from Topheth, where the Lord had sent him to prophesy, and stood in the court of the Lord’s temple and said to all the people, 15 “This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: ‘Listen! I am going to bring on this city and all the villages around it every disaster I pronounced against them, because they were stiff-necked and would not listen to my words.’”
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So if God punishes then does he reward?
For instance, one of my best friend's father was killed in a horrific plain crash. He was a good man and a Christian. What about the other 131 passengers on the plane? Why were they all punished?
What makes you so certain that God punishes?
Why are you sad? Because it doesn't sync-up with your version or understanding? I'm not sad. I don't want you to be sad. Truth be told, you're not sad at all.
I'm just not living by the indoctrination of church and religion. I'm sorry of that goes against your understanding. The people in the religions, over the centuries, are responsible for adding and "tinkering" with faith and spirituality. They do it to try and assist us in finding and knowing God. And, they also do it in order to control people. It's human instinct! In some cases, maybe it was necessary. However, the control factor is real, and it insists that the people who subscribe to the religion should approach it from a basis of fear. "If you don't do this like we tell you to do it, you'll go to a place where you'll suffer for eternity." That's sad. that's very sad. God created a horrible place of misery in case we don't live up to the expectations God has for us? That sounds like a human concept. Reward and punishment is a human construct.
Human beings wrote the Bible. They wrote it down centuries after it was passed down verbally, generation to generation. They wrote it, rewrote it, and rewrote it some more, and reinterpreted it, and translated it, time after time. and, only a handful of clerics/clergy and scribes were even literate. Everyone else just took their word for it. Human beings wrote the Torah and the Talmud. Humans wrote the Qur'an. Humans wrote the Book of Mormon. Human beings decided to remove a huge chunk of the Old Testament when they assembled the Protestant Bible from the original Catholic Bible (now known collectively as The Apocrypha). Human beings decided to leave out the Gospels of Philip, Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Judas from the New Testament. Human beings added rites, rituals, incantations, behaviors, and other details to their respective religions all the time, throughout history. Human beings are responsible for most of the shame, guilt, fear, hatred, and every other imbalance and aversion to bliss that mankind ever experiences. "God" is a higher consciousness that we all have within our grasp, and, I believe, we all find it. We are all part of the same consciousness. We're all one body, essentially.
It's not sad for me. I feel more peace and balance all the time from my acceptance of God and the higher consciousness of what came before, and will come after, my bodily vehicle expires.
I don't worship or praise the church and the religion. I seek to know God. And, I seek to know God from every available conduit. The notion that God has restricted or confined the understanding and recognition of God's power and eternal being to merely one door is nonsensical to me. Look at all of the cultures and societies that have come and gone on our planet alone in just the past 5-10,000 years. God was here before the Hebrews. The notion that God is only recognizable, or obtainable, through the Jewish/Christian religion sounds like something a human being would come up with... not God.
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It's a shame you don't exhibit this kind of sympathy and compassion for people that get bombs dropped on them for being in the wrong country or subscribing to the wrong religion, or both.
I think this concept of God as this great punisher is a bit misguided as well. I am not saying God never acts but in general the 'punishments' are inherent and because of your nature or the fall or whatever. I find the concept of God handing out punishments inconsistent with the new covenant. If we do things that distance ourselves from God and ignore what we should do we may be punished, but it is more indirect and because of what the world has become. I don't think God looks at us sinning and works us over. Grace took care of that sort of thing. There were some things that changed with Jesus. That was one of them IMO. A Christians who recognizes us all as sinners and believes in the Bible literally that all sin is equal to God in a way can't also justify God randomly picking out people to punish. It is more a Christian's way of justifying their own sin while disparaging the sins they personally find more repulsive.
Correct as I see it. The punishment lies in that sinning distances you from the love of God, but it's not like He grounds you or takes the car keys for a week or anything. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. I don't think these things have anything to do with some sort of punishment from God.
My interpretation of the Bible CLEARLY states that God will often allow punishment to come to those who do not obey Him (some examples): Adam and Eve; Abraham; David; the Israelite's time and time again; Pharaoh; Sodom and Gomorrah; Ananias and Sapphira; Peter; Judas; and most important his own son Jesus Christ who died an agonizing death as an atonement for the sins of all mankind. And yes, God still allows punishment today. I don't understand why seemingly "good people" go through horrific tragedies while seemingly "bad people" cruise through life on easy street --- but it's not for me to understand. I simply live to honor the Lord, trust in Him through all of the up's and down's and look forward to eternity in Heaven.
I most certainly do not believe that every instance of bad is a result of Godly punishment - no different than every instance of good is God's blessing ... we have free will and often times those choices lead to tragedies or extremely good fortune. Our day of death is already marked and known ... the one person who dies in a plane crash while others lived, pretty simple ... his time was up. Pain, sickness, tragedy .. they're all part of the fall of man that is spelled out clearly in the Word of God.
The attitude that "God doesn't punish" causes me sadness because I hate to see anyone knowingly ignore the life that Christ offers through the Gospel. But honestly, the fact that folks laugh at me for my faith in the Lord only reinforces the truth that I'm honoring Him. If it was easy, everyone would do it. "Easy" is living like Jesus does not exist.
I most certainly do not believe that every instance of bad is a result of Godly punishment - no different than every instance of good is God's blessing ... we have free will and often times those choices lead to tragedies or extremely good fortune. Our day of death is already marked and known ... the one person who dies in a plane crash while others lived, pretty simple ... his time was up. Pain, sickness, tragedy .. they're all part of the fall of man that is spelled out clearly in the Word of God.
The attitude that "God doesn't punish" causes me sadness because I hate to see anyone knowingly ignore the life that Christ offers through the Gospel. But honestly, the fact that folks laugh at me for my faith in the Lord only reinforces the truth that I'm honoring Him. If it was easy, everyone would do it. "Easy" is living like Jesus does not exist.
Allowing punishment is the same thing as saying our consequences, whether directly or indirectly, are the causes. It is different than saying God punishes. I really have no idea what the first sentence in your last paragraph means. God most certainly punished people before Jesus. Anyone who believes the Bible understands that. I certainly don't ignore the life that Christ offers and I do not think God goes around punishing people. Our sins, and the fact that this is a fallen world, naturally allows for crappy ('punishments') things to happen. There are consequences. Most of the time those are our fault. In the more generic sense, they are always our fault. It isn't God knowing we have sinned and smiting us though.
What folks are laughing at you? I think it's great that you have a strengthened spiritual awareness through your path of choice.
I don't mean to go off topic on this but what do you guys think God is? Serious question. Is he a highly advanced being, someone who is so far advanced from us that we can't even understand what he is? Are we like an anthill on the side of an interstate highway? An ant has no way of knowing what is going on around him and you can't explain it to him, are we like that? Are there beings so far advanced from us that we are not even able to tell that they are around us? (like ant ant)?
Sorry for going off topic...
Sorry for going off topic...
I provided just one example of the God Almighty, the Lord of Lord, and Host of Hosts proclaiming judgment and punishment for the nation of Israel for falling away from His commands. I don't know how to make it any clearer. A people and a nation that turns away from God's commands will have disaster visited upon it. Period. End of story.
America has lived under the grace of God for centuries because in large part it adhered to the precepts of the Word of God as embodied in colonial, then state/federal statutes, and local laws and regulations. That grace provided this nation protection during many a calamitous times; and His love and faithfulness covered the USA, despite its many flaws. But, He also chastised the USA for slavery by visiting a Civil War upon us; He visited social unrest and riots because of the racial injustice of Jim Crow, segregation, and the Vietnam War. We as a nation and a people suffered through these punishments, but God was faithful to restore us because we repented and in large measure changed our ways; and, through it all, He continued to protect us.
That protection is in grave danger of being lifted. We spit in God's face by deliberately annihilating over 17 million babies since 1973. We spit in God's face by legalizing the abomination of gay marriage. We spit in God's face by accepting as a society the travesty of wide-spread divorce. We spit in God's face by substituting the commands of God for the opinion of nine men and women. We spit in God's face by allowing those men and women to overturn the will of the people to follow God's commands. We spit in God's face by basically becoming a lawless nation in His sight. If we as a nation continue down this path, we will meet the same kind of a disaster that Israel suffered, as the prophecy provided by Jeremiah predicted.
We need a large scale revival in this nation and a return to Godly principles.
America has lived under the grace of God for centuries because in large part it adhered to the precepts of the Word of God as embodied in colonial, then state/federal statutes, and local laws and regulations. That grace provided this nation protection during many a calamitous times; and His love and faithfulness covered the USA, despite its many flaws. But, He also chastised the USA for slavery by visiting a Civil War upon us; He visited social unrest and riots because of the racial injustice of Jim Crow, segregation, and the Vietnam War. We as a nation and a people suffered through these punishments, but God was faithful to restore us because we repented and in large measure changed our ways; and, through it all, He continued to protect us.
That protection is in grave danger of being lifted. We spit in God's face by deliberately annihilating over 17 million babies since 1973. We spit in God's face by legalizing the abomination of gay marriage. We spit in God's face by accepting as a society the travesty of wide-spread divorce. We spit in God's face by substituting the commands of God for the opinion of nine men and women. We spit in God's face by allowing those men and women to overturn the will of the people to follow God's commands. We spit in God's face by basically becoming a lawless nation in His sight. If we as a nation continue down this path, we will meet the same kind of a disaster that Israel suffered, as the prophecy provided by Jeremiah predicted.
We need a large scale revival in this nation and a return to Godly principles.
"God most certainly punished people before Jesus. Anyone who believes the Bible understands that. I certainly don't ignore the life that Christ offers and I do not think God goes around punishing people."
He punished Israel roughly 70 years after Jesus' execution - the Romans leveled the
Temple, massacred the Jews, waged a savage war against the remnants of Israel until they were defeated at Masada, then scattered the remaining Jews throughout the Roman Empire. I would say that is punishment. 2000 years in exile, shamed and persecuted and nearly annihilated.
I think we have had this discussion before and I provided Biblical principles that justify the actions of the government and those representing the government in a just cause. But, since you reject the Bible...
I don't "reject the Bible" at all. I simply interpret it much differently than you. I certainly don't look for ways to justify murdering people. Not babies, not fetuses, not children, not full grown adults or any humans who might worship differently than me and live in a location that some group of human beings in some man-made capitol decided were enemies. They aren't MY enemies.
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