(June 6, 2015 at 5:44 pm)whateverist Wrote:(June 6, 2015 at 9:11 am)Randy Carson Wrote: So, in the context of sacred scripture, when the text refers to God and Jesus as the "First as the Last" and that the "First and the Last" died, we can know that the text is equating Jesus with God.
I'd go even further and concede that you can always know what you like. You are on a mission to understand the world on your own (i.e., the bible's) terms. Nothing can deter you as your stubbornness is indeed strong. Sadly you are entirely lacking in faith and so permanently estranged from anything which could be god. But don't mind me. Go on, enlighten us some more on just how flexible your knowing can be.
I believe that religious people on the whole have a faith that almost equates to credulity. I am including JW's as well. However, I do believe that the bible had a sort of singular message and belief system. It was compiled from writers of like mind in religious matters. Now I know that there are very valid arguments for why we can't trust the "harmony" among the writers, but they had the same basis for a lot of their writings. Faith in god in the OT and faith in Jesus in the NT. I think that it is very easy to discern from the NT writings that Jesus was viewed has a divine figure, but he was not the Almighty. Sure, people can cherry pick a scripture here and there but there is no difference between that and quote mining. I demonstrated this with Rhythms where I copy and pasted a single quote from Stephen Hawking that would imply that he is a theist. But he is not. So does my cherry picking prove my point? Of course not, it proves that anything or anyone can be taken out of context easily