Great bible teachings!

[tackattack]

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Watson wrote: "He is only doing a 'piss poor job' of it where He is ignored; this is a Christian standpoint. The Holy Spirit gives guidance, and man has the choice whether to follow or not to follow."

My dear Watson, you certainly are good at the art of sticking your foot in your own mouth. The above quote states that only those that ignore the spirit end up getting misguided in the faith. But this makes no sense, because I am pretty sure that all of those seekers of the biblical god and his so called truths do so with all their hearts. But you in essence are saying that they are all ignoring the spirit when in fact many of them are fervently seeking the spirit and its guidance.

So, the will to follow the spirit is there and just brings this discussion back to where it started. If that is the case then the holy spirit is doing a piss poor job of guiding the church.

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I know this wasn't directed at me, but if no one minds my opinion: seeking the spirit and hearing the spirit are two completely separate things. It's apparent by scripture that the spirit can leave you due to disobedience, or willfully ignoring God's plan. I seek 1 million dolars, but that doesn't mean I have it, or if I did that I could keep it. The scripture also tells us to test the spirits, and not just accept them blindly. Perhaps they were seeking the spirit so badly, they made up their own answers and "forgot" to test the spirit's validity.


I thought I already wrote a response to this one.. guess my internet got jacked up

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John, no we can't prove that. In fact you could burn every holy book ever made and every written account of any God and it wouldn't make a bit of difference to God, or me for that matter. I think it's a usefull tool in the history of understanding more about God. True understanding comes from experience though, regardless of the subject. In the case of religion; without it at least people would have no one to blame but each other.

How can you seperate god from the bible? As soon as you start saying that the bible may be wrong about some things you have to admit that based on the lack of evidence to support pretty well anything in the bible that it could very well be wrong about everything. You can't say in one sentence that, "you could burn every holy book ever made and every written account of any God and it wouldn't make a bit of difference to God" and then say you "think it's a usefull tool in the history of understanding more about God." Why not? Because the god you worship is the god in the bible. Without the bible you would not believe in YHWH. I can imagine you believing in 'a god'. I'm sure you'd acredit him with creating everything, being loving and looking out for you, but you certainly wouldn't acredit to him even half the stuff that goes on in the bible.

If you tell me that you believe in god or a god, but not the christian god, I'm totally kewl with that, I mean, who's going to prove you wrong? They can't. But, you start telling me about YHWH from the Holy Bible and it's like, wait a minute, now that I have an issue with because the god from the holy bible is a dipshit and his book is full of contradictions and genocide.

Yes, experience is understanding. It's a common, well known thing called 'Wisdom'. It doesn't require belief in gods or sacred books. In some cases, wisdom is a very personal thing and varies greatly from person to person.

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True, without the Bible I would have no knowledge of Jesus, and therefore wouldn't be a Christian. I see different Holy books, as different ways to explain man's view of God. Just like 5 witness all tell differering accounts of an accident scene. Some aren't even close, some are similar. I think vengance and contradiction are man made concepts and reading in context and seeing truth in the Bible, requires attempting to factor out the human-like variables that seem out of place and not picking out one verse here and one verse there. It's about comprehensive reading, like we did in literature class in HS.

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As far as not knowing about a God without religion .. the Bible covers that too...Romans 2:14-15 (New Living Translation) 14 Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. 15 They demonstrate that God’s law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right.

The problem with that is that people do a lot of things instinctly and I don't see how instinct or mental programming proves god. Yes, many people do unto others as they would want done to them, but that's called 'Empathy'. There's nothing spiritual about empathy. It appears that humans didn't have a whole lot of empathy a few thousand years ago. But, for the sake of sustaining the speices, empathy started to flourish.

What humans like to poetically call, 'following their heart', is actually a matter of following their brains and genetic makeup. If you construct some one without empathy you have a psychopath. A psychopath doesn't have remorse for doing bad things. Poetically speaking, his heart tells him to kill people and he likes that. Some people are born perfectly normal, but their enviroment conditions them to become sociopaths in which case they've learned to become apathic for the sake of survival, because pity and empathy are weaknesses in an enviorment full of people without it who're trying to exploit you at every turn.

It's not like I'm making up hypothetical stuff. This people are real. Rapists usually enjoy raping, serial killers often enjoy killing and kleptomaniacs enjoy stealing. Who am I to tell these people that they're on the path to moral decay when they've either been conditioned or born with unorthodox desires? I don't even understand how these people could exist if the biblical god was real. Course, I'm not saying we shouldn't lock these people up. They're infringing on people's happiness and the majority of people don't want killers and rapists running around. Regardless, as far as I'm concerned these people are proof that there's no such thing as 'inner morality' or a 'core knowledge of right and wrong'. These people have a completely different take on ethics all together.

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Relax I believe you. I didn't say that empathy did prove God's existence. I'm aware of some research into mental disorders. Even in the most Schizophrenic delusional state, I've not seen a study where someone without want or need of social morality wasn't doing what they thought was right at the time, as opposed to what would be wrong for them. It is the our assigned values and the duality of causation that produces the right and wrong we use daily. A sociopath may not feel what we think is wrong has any bearing on them, but inwardly how can you even make a choice unless there are options which you value one more than others.


Sorry if I was interrupting anyone's conversation. [/end nose sticking]