End up where? And for what?

(December 26, 2013 at 2:13 pm)Stimbo Wrote: End up where? And for what?

hell, the unpardonable sin.

(December 26, 2013 at 9:19 pm)snowtracks Wrote:

(December 26, 2013 at 2:13 pm)Stimbo Wrote: End up where? And for what?

hell, the unpardonable sin.

There is no evidence for the existence of an afterlife, heaven, hell, gods, or sin.

These are all just ideas running around your mostly ignorant mind.

(October 3, 2013 at 4:18 am)Godschild Wrote: You're giving advice that you haven't practiced, no where does scripture claim the earth is just 6000 years old.

This is a statement that I'm not really going to touch very much. The easiest reading of the Bible is the one used by Young Earth Creationists, but arguments regarding that are really just arguments against strict literalism. You can easily interpret the days of Genesis as analogical, or metaphorical. Seeing them as time periods rather than days doesn't really solve any problems (since the events are still out of order), but the school of thought that looks at Genesis as a literary framework doesn't have that problem.

I will just say that those interpretations are very debatable, and there's no particular reason to believe that they were the intention of the author. Then again, there's no particular reason to believe that they weren't. It's a literary question.

Quote:You have no proof against Joshua, nor can you prove the rest of the OT is myth.

Actually, there is a lot of proof that the story of the Battle of Jericho and the conquest of Canaan could not have happened as it is detailed in the Book of Joshua. Depending on the date assumed for Joshua's conquest, archaeology suggests that Canaan may still have been an Egyptian outpost at the time (if you go with the earlier dates, which are the most likely from a Biblical standpoint). Some of the cities involved were abandoned at any of the theoretical times for the invasion. While some cities appear to have been destroyed in war, they were destroyed at the wrong time, and in times stretching across a pretty significant period.

All available evidence suggests that the earliest Jews lived in the hill country of Canaan at around 1200 B.C.E. Their communities were barely distinguishable from those of the surrounding Canaanites, and the chief evidence of a Jewish settlement is the lack of pig remains. The archaeological record seems strongly to suggest a population who gradually emerged out of a native Canaanite group and then grew to predominance, rather than a foreign invader who supplanted the native population.

Other parts of the Old Testament also present significant problems. For the Exodus to have occurred and for Egypt to have no record of it seems highly unlikely. Beyond that, the 40 years spent wandering the desert would have been expected to leave some evidence, regardless of the accepted size of the Israelite party (by any interpretation, it was large). No archaeological evidence for a group of such a significant size exists in the region. Solomon's reign is also recorded as occurring during a time when the archaeological record indicates that the eastern Mediterranean was abnormally impoverished. Whether Jerusalem was large enough to have actually functioned as a national capital during the time of King David is also very questionable.

The Old Testament from the time of the restoration of Israel by Persia is fairly reliable for historical information (as much as many other ancient sources; very few would meet modern standards of objective, secular record keeping).

Quote:There are fossilized trees standing vertically through tens of thousands of years of sedimentary layers, how is that possible, it ain't.

GC

Others have already posted responses to this, so I'll let them take it on. I don't know enough about this particular case to speak knowledgeably about it.

(December 26, 2013 at 9:19 pm)snowtracks Wrote:

(December 26, 2013 at 2:13 pm)Stimbo Wrote: End up where? And for what?

hell, the unpardonable sin.

Two-part question:

1) What is hell? (Place of eternal torture, separation from "God", something else?)

2) Assuming I and other nonbelievers end up being sent there, would you be ok with that as an outcome?

(October 3, 2013 at 4:18 am)Godschild Wrote: There are fossilized trees standing vertically through tens of thousands of years of sedimentary layers, how is that possible, it ain't.

GC

Polystrate trees

Apparently there have been trees discovered that were frozen in an upright position.

(On mobile device atm but will strive to find the source information at a later date)

Mostly it is being conscripted to the fast climate change ideology.

(December 28, 2013 at 1:18 am)Stimbo Wrote:

(December 26, 2013 at 9:19 pm)snowtracks Wrote: hell, the unpardonable sin.

Two-part question:

1) What is hell? (Place of eternal torture, separation from "God", something else?)

2) Assuming I and other nonbelievers end up being sent there, would you be ok with that as an outcome?

eternal separation from God not because of an intellectual problem with believing in the existence of God but because of a deliberate willful rejections of God's plan of salvation which is that Christ has borne on himself the divine judgment to the full satisfaction of God. only one thing that is required of an individual to complete the transaction to enter into God's plan of salvation: to believe that it was done for them. the reason it's so simple is that salvation is God's work and thus man can't added anything to it.
the Third Person of the Trinity (Holy Spirit) is the one that makes it clear to the person that this is truth. Christ was the one who said all sins can be forgiven except one: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (known as the unpardonable sin) which is a rejection through a person's free will of the salvation message and it takes affect the moment a person dies, that person's is said to be cut off and without remedy.
the word 'torment' is an archaic translation which connotes sadistic cruelty. the word 'restaint' is a more accurate word to describe what is meant by 'torment'. God doesn't torment that would be a violation of His divine nature. hell's inhabitants depending on their demonstrated propensity for evil will have various level of restraint placed on them to protect the other inhabitants. but, that aside, hell is not describe as pleasant place for no other reason then it's inhabitants, spiritual darkness, and duration.
how do i feel is about this is the question - 1. to those living: nothing matters as much as this issue. no person alive has totally missed hearing God's call. ignorance of God and His offer comes from distorting and defying the truth He makes available to each person. for some the torment of hell is better than eternal fellowship with God, so some choose rejection. 2. those who have passed on and have rejected God's gift of eternal life with him: they will have been treated with the utmost fairness and goodness and God will continue to show his love to them by restraining the individual inhabitants.

Found it

Full Atricle here

Quote:The Arctic was once warmer, covered by trees
The Arctic wasn’t always frozen tundra. About 3.6 million years ago, the far north was blanketed in boreal forests, and summers were 8 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today, geologists report May 9 in Science.
ARCTIC SUMMER Sediments from Lake El'gygytgyn in northeastern Russia reveal that 3.6 million years ago the Arctic's summers were 8 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today.
COURTESY J. BRIGHAM-GRETTE/UNIV. OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Researchers pieced together that picture from sediments buried beneath Lake El’gygytgyn (pronounced EL-gih-git-gin), about 100 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in northeastern Russia (SN: 11/20/10, p. 13). The sediments preserve the most complete history of Arctic climate on land over the last 3.6 million years.

(December 29, 2013 at 12:21 am)snowtracks Wrote: Christ was the one who said all sins can be forgiven except one: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (known as the unpardonable sin) which is a rejection through a person's free will of the salvation message and it takes affect the moment a person dies, that person's is said to be cut off and without remedy.

I know that this is a common interpretation of the concept of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, but I really don't think that it's what the author (or Jesus, if the words were originally his, which seems fairly likely) had in mind. The Greek term blasphameo is a combination of two terms that literally translates to "injurious speech". In the time period when the New Testament was written, it didn't refer exclusively to religiously offensive language. It was also used in a way that could be translated to our word "slander".

In context, the phrase probably means slander against God. The concepts of a Holy Spirit in the Christian sense or of the Divinity of Christ were likely alien to the author, and so it's likely that the statement meant that any deliberate and knowing blasphemy would be unforgivable.

Most Christian denominations accept that the only unforgivable sin is final impenitence (it's pretty much a logical requirement for the oldest and most historically grounded Christian traditions, like Catholicism and Eastern/Oriental Orthodox, where the ability to forgive all sins is believed to be vested in the Church). If final impenitence is the only unforgivable sin, then logically a sin mentioned as unforgivable in the Bible must be that, but the text doesn't support that interpretation.