How did the Southern Baptists who instituted, maintained and perpetuated slavery in the American South keep a clear conscience as Christians? And mind you, from 1882 to 1968 they were lynching on Saturday night and praising God on Sunday morning? Really? Yes, really.
Eph 6:5 Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear and sincerity of heart, just as you would show to Christ.
Col 3:22 Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.
Col 4:1 Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.
Exodus 21 “When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.
1 Peter 2:18 Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust.
Titus 2:9-10 Slaves are to be submissive to their own masters in everything; they are to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.
Yes, I know they have officially apologized. But during that time, were the consciences seared??
Is this a good example of how using the inerrant, infallible, God inspired holy scriptures can be used to justify evil devices, agendas, manifestos?
Should we be checking our conscience against scripture or the other way around?
lit·er·al·ism
ˈlidərəlizəm,ˈlitrəˌlizəm/
noun
the interpretation of words in their usual or most basic sense.
"biblical literalism"
The Bible Told Me So
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SeaPriestess
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Post #11
I'm not even going to try and break down what exactly was happening at that time the NT was written, regarding slaves. But there sure are lots of verses pertaining to it. It was a huge part of the culture. That is an entirely new discussion. I just know that a large group of people, so-called Christians, since the birth of the Western European establishment on the North American Continent have done terrible things in God's name. The United States was built on the blood, sweat, tears and mistreatment of Africans. Let's not forget all the actions towards the Native peoples as well, all in God's name. But again, my point is, biblical literalism is what is operating here, in my opinion. Yeah, they somehow created some story around Noah's son Ham and the Philistines etc...to build a foundation upon which to base their actions and attitudes towards Africans. But also, using literalism to further justify their use and treatment of slaves. I guess we would have to break down all those slave related verses to try and reconcile the verses that state how all scripture is God-breathed used for teaching etc..etc...
Maybe we need to get a clearer perspective on how we are to approach using the bible. Just because it's God-breathed doesn't mean it's a free for all to use it in any way you can to make it fit what you want it to say. I personally do not have any "method" or approach other than using my conscience and God-given common sense. Love, of course, being the highest law by which to measure or judge any and everything. But that's just me. I know it sounds crazy.
Maybe we need to get a clearer perspective on how we are to approach using the bible. Just because it's God-breathed doesn't mean it's a free for all to use it in any way you can to make it fit what you want it to say. I personally do not have any "method" or approach other than using my conscience and God-given common sense. Love, of course, being the highest law by which to measure or judge any and everything. But that's just me. I know it sounds crazy.
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Divine Insight
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Re: The Bible Told Me So
Post #12Doomed in what way?SeaPriestess wrote: [Replying to post 4 by Divine Insight]
But what if we never had a bible? Would we be doomed now and later? Or is maybe God able to lead us by our conscience and God given common sense?
According to this religion it's this God that is going to damn us.
Shouldn't a God who's threatening to damn us at least give us crystal clear and unambiguous instructions?
The bible doesn't say anywhere that your conscious can save you from the wrath of this insane God.
[center]
Spiritual Growth - A person's continual assessment
of how well they believe they are doing
relative to what they believe a personal God expects of them.
[/center]
Spiritual Growth - A person's continual assessment
of how well they believe they are doing
relative to what they believe a personal God expects of them.
[/center]
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SeaPriestess
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Re: The Bible Told Me So
Post #13[Replying to post 12 by Divine Insight]
good points! haha
Well, I don't believe in endless torment either way but I'm not going to debate it using scripture. It's one of those things, sometimes you just know, even when you have no proof.
good points! haha
Well, I don't believe in endless torment either way but I'm not going to debate it using scripture. It's one of those things, sometimes you just know, even when you have no proof.
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Divine Insight
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Post #14
SeaPriestess,
I have some things to share about conscience.
I was born and raised into Christianity. I believed it like every good little child does. After all, when your parents, elders, and pastors are all telling you that it's true you're not going to be questioning their knowledge.
I accepted Christ as my savior like a good little boy. And my acceptance of Christ was as sincere as it could be. In fact, it was so sincere that I decided to give myself over to "God's Purpose", which according to Jesus was to spread the "Good News" of Jesus having come to offer us salvation.
I might add here also that I was quite innocent and naive at the time. None the less, I was prepared to teach the "Good News" of the Gospels. Although in truth I wasn't actually "prepared" at all. By that I mean that I hadn't actually read the Bible myself in detail at that time. All I had learned up to that point was whatever they taught me in Sunday school or what I had gleaned from Sunday sermons. But I still had many questions that hadn't yet been clarified.
I don't want to make this post too long, but I should include the fact that several of my uncles were Christian Pastors. Some of them were also atheists, or at least "non-believers". "Atheist" wasn't a term that was used back then so much.
In any case, since my goal was to understand the Bible with total clarity so I could teach God's Word to others, I obviously had to learn all the details myself. So I had ample opportunity to ask questions of many pastors (not just my uncles, but of their pastor friends as well). In fact, they would often have guest pastors over for dinner so I got to watch all the after-dinner chats and ask my question there.
One thing that struck me immediately was that when I asked a question in a room full of pastors, this would cause them to launch into a "very polite" conversation about how they all basically disagreed on what the answers should be. (ha ha)
So it quickly became apparent to me that I would need to actually read the Bible myself if I wanted to find the correct answers. I had actually been taught by my church, and by my mother that the Bible has answers to all our questions. This actually turnd out to be dead wrong. The more I read the Bible the more questions I had. The Bible caused me to have far more questions and basically offered little to no answers.
I also found many obvious contradictions in the Bible. And when I bought these up to the pastors they could not resolve them. They would often resort to the old cliche, "God works in mysterious ways", or "We just need to have faith that God has a rational answer for this", in other words, the pastors clearly did not.
Over the course of several years I finally realized that the Bible cannot possibly be true as it is written. Over that same period of time I also became vividly aware that there were many denominations of Christianity that believed things that were far beyond what our denomination believed.
I then realized that Judaism and Islam aren't faring any better. I finally concluded that the Old Testament cannot be true and that Yahweh cannot be a correct description of God. I also quickly realized that Gospels rumors about Jesus cannot be true either, at least not in their claims that he was the virgin-born Son of Yahweh, etc.
~~~~
Let me take a moment here to explain that I haven't gotten off track. I'm still working toward sharing conscience with you.
~~~~
When I finally realized that the Bible cannot be true as it is written and that Jesus is not the Son of God I didn't instantly become an atheist. To the contrary I still believed in the existence of a God or some form of Higher Being.
I don't want to get into this here, but I'll just quickly say that as a very young child, (before I knew anything about religions) I had experienced that caused me to believe that a higher being was watching over me, in a GOOD way, not a threatening or judgemental way.
This was totally an intuitive feeling. So I was convinced that there is a higher "God" so-to-speak. So this is why I didn't suddenly become an atheist. I continued to believe in the existence of a "God", and all that had happened is that I discovered that Christianity (and all the Abrahamic religions) were apparently nothing more than very poorly written mythologies. They basically described a God that was as disgusting as the people who invented him.
So at this point I discarded Christianity as being clearly false.
And this is where my conscience becomes important. I did not feel that there was anything wrong at all with having discovered that Christianity is a false religion. To the contrary the God I felt existed was as pleased with me as ever.
As far as I'm concerned this is actually additional proof that Christianity cannot be true, because if it was wrong to reject Christianity and its "Christ" then surely I should have felt that I was doing something wrong when I realized Christianity was false. But that never happened. I didn't even think about this at the time, but in hindsight it speaks volumes to the truth of my discovery.
~~~~~~~~
I was happy with having discarded Christianity as an obviously false mythology and I still felt very close to a God who was just as pleased with me as ever before. So I had no problems and could have just gone through the rest of my life in that exact state. (i.e. simply not knowing anything more about "God")
However, I did become curious to see if there were any other religions out there in the world that described a God like the one I actually KNEW.
Not that I would need to then become a follower of that religion, but to simply see if other people know the same God that I know. So I started studying other religions. It took me many years but I finally found several versions of Buddhism that view God in the same way as the God I had experienced as a child. So it was comforting to know that there are other people out there who experience God the same way I do.
These versions of Buddhism do not require that a person even acknowledge the existence of a God, much less claim that their God is commanding anyone to do anything. They do offer idea of "karma" and teach that to live in harmony with God a person would naturally do good things. And then they go on to teach in a suggestive way of what they believe would be good behavior versus bad behavior. Not intended as "rules", but rather just as enlightenment for those who might like to live in harmony with God.
So it was encouraging to see that other humans on planet earth know the same God that I had experienced as a very young child.
So there was never a time when I felt bad, or guilty about rejection Christianity as being an obvious false and quite brutal religion. I view Christianity today as one of the world's greatest insults to the very concept of "God".
~~~~~
Just because I like to type and there is no limit to the length of posts here I'd like to ramble on a bit further.
I didn't only study the Bible and other world religions, but I also studied science to an extreme degree. Science became both my most passionate personal hobby, as well as my core studies in college and my core occupation in life. So I am very familiar with science and scientific thinking.
I have since learned many of the secular arguments for the possibility that there may not be any "God" at all. And I must confess that these arguments are quite strong, if not "Iron-Clad".
I still consider myself to be "agnostic" rather than "atheist" in general terms (I'm obviously quite a strong atheist when it comes to the Biblical God). I think this is because I'm a romantic at heart and continue to hold out the hope for a mystical magical essence to reality.
None the less, my agnosticism is leaning heavily toward secular atheism simply because the arguments for a secular world are clearly the best arguments to be had. They simply make the most sense.
But now "Back to My Conscience":
I'm almost a total atheist. In fact, from a practical intellectual perspective it would probably be fair to say that I actually am an "Intellectual Atheist". (i.e. A secular worldview actually makes the most intellectual sense to me.)
My agnosticism remains as pure hopeful romanticism. I just can't quite give it up emotionally. So you can say that I'm an "Emotional Agnostic".
So I continue to hope for the impossible mystical magical reality, even though this appears to be as silly as hoping that Santa Claus will appear at my house on Christmas Day.
But what about my conscience? Shouldn't I be feeling guilty about questioning the existence of a God, or a mystical magical reality? I don't feel the least bit guilty or bad about my views on reality.
And I hold the following out as the most likely reasons why:
If there were a decent benevolent God who stands for all that is righteous, then surely this God would value TRUTH over all else.
And the TRUTH is that I cannot say with certainly whether any God might exist or not. Therefore it would be a LIE for me to be anything other than agnostic.
It is also TRUTH that I have studied the Bible and found it to be extremely self-contradictory describing a "God" who has the worse moral character of many world religions. The Bible has its God behaving in a way that I would expect to see from an uneducated barroom drunkard. It's just not a compelling picture of a God.
Surely if there actually exists a decent benevolent God who values TRUTH that God would not want me to pretend that the Bible could be a respectable picture of a God.
Finally, the TRUTH is that I can't even imagine why a God would give a hoot about having humans constantly "worship" it when it hasn't even shown itself to be real.
These are all "TRUTHS". Surely if there exists a decent benevolent God that God would at least appreciate the fact that I live by TRUTH.
~~~~~~~
As a final quick word, I would just like to say that even though I'm quite agnostic I still actually practice a religion. I worship the "gods" thought Wicca rituals.
Why do I do this? Simply because it's fun, I enjoy it, and it has romantic psychological value in pretending that gods might exist. I certainly don't do it as an attempt to appease any angry jealous Gods.
But even though I practice these romantic rituals, I still tend to believe that the secularists are right. But the fact is that even if I KNEW for a FACT that the world is indeed secular, I would probably still practice the Wicca rituals simply because they are FUN!
May as well have fun even in a secular world, right?
I have some things to share about conscience.
I was born and raised into Christianity. I believed it like every good little child does. After all, when your parents, elders, and pastors are all telling you that it's true you're not going to be questioning their knowledge.
I accepted Christ as my savior like a good little boy. And my acceptance of Christ was as sincere as it could be. In fact, it was so sincere that I decided to give myself over to "God's Purpose", which according to Jesus was to spread the "Good News" of Jesus having come to offer us salvation.
I might add here also that I was quite innocent and naive at the time. None the less, I was prepared to teach the "Good News" of the Gospels. Although in truth I wasn't actually "prepared" at all. By that I mean that I hadn't actually read the Bible myself in detail at that time. All I had learned up to that point was whatever they taught me in Sunday school or what I had gleaned from Sunday sermons. But I still had many questions that hadn't yet been clarified.
I don't want to make this post too long, but I should include the fact that several of my uncles were Christian Pastors. Some of them were also atheists, or at least "non-believers". "Atheist" wasn't a term that was used back then so much.
In any case, since my goal was to understand the Bible with total clarity so I could teach God's Word to others, I obviously had to learn all the details myself. So I had ample opportunity to ask questions of many pastors (not just my uncles, but of their pastor friends as well). In fact, they would often have guest pastors over for dinner so I got to watch all the after-dinner chats and ask my question there.
One thing that struck me immediately was that when I asked a question in a room full of pastors, this would cause them to launch into a "very polite" conversation about how they all basically disagreed on what the answers should be. (ha ha)
So it quickly became apparent to me that I would need to actually read the Bible myself if I wanted to find the correct answers. I had actually been taught by my church, and by my mother that the Bible has answers to all our questions. This actually turnd out to be dead wrong. The more I read the Bible the more questions I had. The Bible caused me to have far more questions and basically offered little to no answers.
I also found many obvious contradictions in the Bible. And when I bought these up to the pastors they could not resolve them. They would often resort to the old cliche, "God works in mysterious ways", or "We just need to have faith that God has a rational answer for this", in other words, the pastors clearly did not.
Over the course of several years I finally realized that the Bible cannot possibly be true as it is written. Over that same period of time I also became vividly aware that there were many denominations of Christianity that believed things that were far beyond what our denomination believed.
I then realized that Judaism and Islam aren't faring any better. I finally concluded that the Old Testament cannot be true and that Yahweh cannot be a correct description of God. I also quickly realized that Gospels rumors about Jesus cannot be true either, at least not in their claims that he was the virgin-born Son of Yahweh, etc.
~~~~
Let me take a moment here to explain that I haven't gotten off track. I'm still working toward sharing conscience with you.
~~~~
When I finally realized that the Bible cannot be true as it is written and that Jesus is not the Son of God I didn't instantly become an atheist. To the contrary I still believed in the existence of a God or some form of Higher Being.
I don't want to get into this here, but I'll just quickly say that as a very young child, (before I knew anything about religions) I had experienced that caused me to believe that a higher being was watching over me, in a GOOD way, not a threatening or judgemental way.
This was totally an intuitive feeling. So I was convinced that there is a higher "God" so-to-speak. So this is why I didn't suddenly become an atheist. I continued to believe in the existence of a "God", and all that had happened is that I discovered that Christianity (and all the Abrahamic religions) were apparently nothing more than very poorly written mythologies. They basically described a God that was as disgusting as the people who invented him.
So at this point I discarded Christianity as being clearly false.
And this is where my conscience becomes important. I did not feel that there was anything wrong at all with having discovered that Christianity is a false religion. To the contrary the God I felt existed was as pleased with me as ever.
As far as I'm concerned this is actually additional proof that Christianity cannot be true, because if it was wrong to reject Christianity and its "Christ" then surely I should have felt that I was doing something wrong when I realized Christianity was false. But that never happened. I didn't even think about this at the time, but in hindsight it speaks volumes to the truth of my discovery.
~~~~~~~~
I was happy with having discarded Christianity as an obviously false mythology and I still felt very close to a God who was just as pleased with me as ever before. So I had no problems and could have just gone through the rest of my life in that exact state. (i.e. simply not knowing anything more about "God")
However, I did become curious to see if there were any other religions out there in the world that described a God like the one I actually KNEW.
Not that I would need to then become a follower of that religion, but to simply see if other people know the same God that I know. So I started studying other religions. It took me many years but I finally found several versions of Buddhism that view God in the same way as the God I had experienced as a child. So it was comforting to know that there are other people out there who experience God the same way I do.
These versions of Buddhism do not require that a person even acknowledge the existence of a God, much less claim that their God is commanding anyone to do anything. They do offer idea of "karma" and teach that to live in harmony with God a person would naturally do good things. And then they go on to teach in a suggestive way of what they believe would be good behavior versus bad behavior. Not intended as "rules", but rather just as enlightenment for those who might like to live in harmony with God.
So it was encouraging to see that other humans on planet earth know the same God that I had experienced as a very young child.
So there was never a time when I felt bad, or guilty about rejection Christianity as being an obvious false and quite brutal religion. I view Christianity today as one of the world's greatest insults to the very concept of "God".
~~~~~
Just because I like to type and there is no limit to the length of posts here I'd like to ramble on a bit further.
I didn't only study the Bible and other world religions, but I also studied science to an extreme degree. Science became both my most passionate personal hobby, as well as my core studies in college and my core occupation in life. So I am very familiar with science and scientific thinking.
I have since learned many of the secular arguments for the possibility that there may not be any "God" at all. And I must confess that these arguments are quite strong, if not "Iron-Clad".
I still consider myself to be "agnostic" rather than "atheist" in general terms (I'm obviously quite a strong atheist when it comes to the Biblical God). I think this is because I'm a romantic at heart and continue to hold out the hope for a mystical magical essence to reality.
None the less, my agnosticism is leaning heavily toward secular atheism simply because the arguments for a secular world are clearly the best arguments to be had. They simply make the most sense.
But now "Back to My Conscience":
I'm almost a total atheist. In fact, from a practical intellectual perspective it would probably be fair to say that I actually am an "Intellectual Atheist". (i.e. A secular worldview actually makes the most intellectual sense to me.)
My agnosticism remains as pure hopeful romanticism. I just can't quite give it up emotionally. So you can say that I'm an "Emotional Agnostic".
So I continue to hope for the impossible mystical magical reality, even though this appears to be as silly as hoping that Santa Claus will appear at my house on Christmas Day.
But what about my conscience? Shouldn't I be feeling guilty about questioning the existence of a God, or a mystical magical reality? I don't feel the least bit guilty or bad about my views on reality.
And I hold the following out as the most likely reasons why:
If there were a decent benevolent God who stands for all that is righteous, then surely this God would value TRUTH over all else.
And the TRUTH is that I cannot say with certainly whether any God might exist or not. Therefore it would be a LIE for me to be anything other than agnostic.
It is also TRUTH that I have studied the Bible and found it to be extremely self-contradictory describing a "God" who has the worse moral character of many world religions. The Bible has its God behaving in a way that I would expect to see from an uneducated barroom drunkard. It's just not a compelling picture of a God.
Surely if there actually exists a decent benevolent God who values TRUTH that God would not want me to pretend that the Bible could be a respectable picture of a God.
Finally, the TRUTH is that I can't even imagine why a God would give a hoot about having humans constantly "worship" it when it hasn't even shown itself to be real.
These are all "TRUTHS". Surely if there exists a decent benevolent God that God would at least appreciate the fact that I live by TRUTH.
~~~~~~~
As a final quick word, I would just like to say that even though I'm quite agnostic I still actually practice a religion. I worship the "gods" thought Wicca rituals.
Why do I do this? Simply because it's fun, I enjoy it, and it has romantic psychological value in pretending that gods might exist. I certainly don't do it as an attempt to appease any angry jealous Gods.
But even though I practice these romantic rituals, I still tend to believe that the secularists are right. But the fact is that even if I KNEW for a FACT that the world is indeed secular, I would probably still practice the Wicca rituals simply because they are FUN!
May as well have fun even in a secular world, right?
[center]
Spiritual Growth - A person's continual assessment
of how well they believe they are doing
relative to what they believe a personal God expects of them.
[/center]
Spiritual Growth - A person's continual assessment
of how well they believe they are doing
relative to what they believe a personal God expects of them.
[/center]
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JehovahsWitness
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Re: The Bible Told Me So
Post #15SeaPriestess wrote: [Replying to post 5 by JehovahsWitness]
Thank you but my point is "Is this a good example of how using the inerrant, infallible, God inspired holy scriptures can be used to justify evil devices, agendas, manifestos?" Yes or No?
Anything can be used to do anything at all by the evil and the ignorant. So? Should we stop teaching what is good and righteous because it can be twisted by perverts to justify their wickedness? Satan can qoute scripture, this doesnt mean scripture is Satanic, only there is no nothing he (or those like him) wont try.
The bible is inerrant, infallible and cannot justifiably be used to support the cruelty of the slave trade, if perverted minds have misused it in this way, discriminating minds that are concerned with truth can avoid being mislead if their hearts are right.To illustrate: A scaple can be used to operate on a child to save its life but can this instrument not be stolen and used to slash an innocent victim or kill a person? Does that misuse mean its not in acuatlity an instrument for good? It can be used to harm and kill but can it justifiably used in such a way? Of course not!
JW
Last edited by JehovahsWitness on Sun Aug 26, 2018 5:04 am, edited 5 times in total.
INDEX: More bible based ANSWERS
http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 81#p826681
"For if we live, we live to Jehovah, and if we die, we die to Jehovah. So both if we live and if we die, we belong to Jehovah" - Romans 14:8
http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 81#p826681
"For if we live, we live to Jehovah, and if we die, we die to Jehovah. So both if we live and if we die, we belong to Jehovah" - Romans 14:8
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Tcg
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Re: The Bible Told Me So
Post #16Yes it can because it does. Your denial doesn't change this fact.JehovahsWitness wrote:
The bible cannot justifiably be used to support the cruelty of the slave trade...
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SeaPriestess
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Post #17
[Replying to post 14 by Divine Insight]
WOW, I wonder how many people there are just like us!!??!!
))
Everything you said totally resonates with me. I'm at the place where I can acknowledge the "disgusting" God as you called him, but also acknowledge the Jesus that was the direct catalyst for a very real, subjective experience I had/have. Wouldn't the bible be a good candidate for a Yin/Yang religious framework?
"So I continue to hope for the impossible mystical magical reality, even though this appears to be as silly as hoping that Santa Claus will appear at my house on Christmas Day."
It's not silly. Think about it.....Here's what's silly: We are speeding through an expanding universe on a rock and have no idea why. We can understand it through math and elemental composition only. At this rate, anything can happen. I say this IS the mystical, magical reality. Have you ever looked at tiny toy Saturn through a telescope? That's what it looks like through a telescope
Sometimes I "feel" that my experience with Jesus, all the good feels and many "ah-ha" moments in my "heart" and brain is really something more than just what's confined within a biblical framework. That is why I too embrace other religions, as long as they do not impose anything "dogmatic" outside of universal truth. I think Jesus clearly made this point when he said the 2 greatest commandments: Love God, love your neighbor. Not that they are always easy! Like you have said - truth is truth - no matter where it comes from. There is no harm having fun in how you express a truth whether it's through Buddhism thought and philosophy or Wiccan rituals. Those things can be beautiful expressions. It's all about where it comes from within your heart. If you are doing a Wiccan ritual so you can overtake a person's will or do some evil thing, then it's no good, just as praying to the biblical God "God, strike them down for not doing such and such". Same concept.
So, back to the bible...The writer's left this large body of work to contend with. I don't think it clearly conveys what THEIR assumptions were. They did not communicate those things. The writings only hint at ideas we can understand based on culture, time, context. Language is a HUGE barrier. Most Christians, like we have seen in our horrible world history, have just used the bible as a means to an evil end, never questioning the intentions of the writers. They found verses that said "ALL scripture is used for teaching etc..etc.." and then to hell in a hand basket we go!
I will make a separate post of a little history and commentary snippet that I found enlightening.
WOW, I wonder how many people there are just like us!!??!!
))Everything you said totally resonates with me. I'm at the place where I can acknowledge the "disgusting" God as you called him, but also acknowledge the Jesus that was the direct catalyst for a very real, subjective experience I had/have. Wouldn't the bible be a good candidate for a Yin/Yang religious framework?
"So I continue to hope for the impossible mystical magical reality, even though this appears to be as silly as hoping that Santa Claus will appear at my house on Christmas Day."
It's not silly. Think about it.....Here's what's silly: We are speeding through an expanding universe on a rock and have no idea why. We can understand it through math and elemental composition only. At this rate, anything can happen. I say this IS the mystical, magical reality. Have you ever looked at tiny toy Saturn through a telescope? That's what it looks like through a telescope
Sometimes I "feel" that my experience with Jesus, all the good feels and many "ah-ha" moments in my "heart" and brain is really something more than just what's confined within a biblical framework. That is why I too embrace other religions, as long as they do not impose anything "dogmatic" outside of universal truth. I think Jesus clearly made this point when he said the 2 greatest commandments: Love God, love your neighbor. Not that they are always easy! Like you have said - truth is truth - no matter where it comes from. There is no harm having fun in how you express a truth whether it's through Buddhism thought and philosophy or Wiccan rituals. Those things can be beautiful expressions. It's all about where it comes from within your heart. If you are doing a Wiccan ritual so you can overtake a person's will or do some evil thing, then it's no good, just as praying to the biblical God "God, strike them down for not doing such and such". Same concept.
So, back to the bible...The writer's left this large body of work to contend with. I don't think it clearly conveys what THEIR assumptions were. They did not communicate those things. The writings only hint at ideas we can understand based on culture, time, context. Language is a HUGE barrier. Most Christians, like we have seen in our horrible world history, have just used the bible as a means to an evil end, never questioning the intentions of the writers. They found verses that said "ALL scripture is used for teaching etc..etc.." and then to hell in a hand basket we go!
I will make a separate post of a little history and commentary snippet that I found enlightening.
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Divine Insight
- Savant
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Post #19
Well of course you do. However, the truth is that you could do this with any imaginary friend. Seriously. Back when I was a believer Jesus walked with me and talked with me. Because I believed he was real. Today I do the exact same thing with the Moon Goddess. And I can even do it as an intellectual atheist, because I allow myself to do it as an emotional romantic.SeaPriestess wrote: Sometimes I "feel" that my experience with Jesus, all the good feels and many "ah-ha" moments in my "heart" and brain is really something more than just what's confined within a biblical framework.
The bottom line is the our "experience" with Jesus is of our own creation. This is why ever individual Christian has their own personal Jesus. We can actually associate these very same experiences with any imaginary characters we so desire. Some people will claim that they can't do this, that only their favorite God can work because he or she is "real". But that's only because they have convinced themselves that this is true. In fact, we can know this for certain because when we look around we see that people who were raised to believe in specific particular gods feel exactly the same way about their gods.
So yes, of course your going to have experiences that you associate with "Jesus" because that's the focal point of what you imagine to exist.
Had you been brought up in a society that believed in a Moon Goddess and you never heard of "Jesus" then that's exactly how you would feel about the Moon Goddess because she would then be the imagined deity in which you place your faith, hope, and dreams. That's how it works.
[center]
Spiritual Growth - A person's continual assessment
of how well they believe they are doing
relative to what they believe a personal God expects of them.
[/center]
Spiritual Growth - A person's continual assessment
of how well they believe they are doing
relative to what they believe a personal God expects of them.
[/center]
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SeaPriestess
- Student
- Posts: 89
- Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:08 am
Post #20
[Replying to post 19 by Divine Insight]
Yes, I don't try and tell people who their "higher power" should be. It is what it is. If they grew up Hindu, Jesus is going to have zero meaning or significance to them. Being an American, I grew up "christian" as part of my culture. But, Jesus never really had any significance to me until I had this "perfect storm" experience as a young adult. It was like the stars aligned. I don't mean that in a romantic way but in a way where all these things occurred at once that made the whole thing uncanny. It was just too many things, coincidences, complete weirdness quite frankly and it was very very clear in a most painful way. It was the ONLY thing that made sense and actually "worked" to solve the problem I had. It was radical and I can never forget it. So, to me now, Jesus will always be significant. How that plays out in daily life or life philosophy isn't necessarily static and doesn't need to be. Everyone changes, grows and evolves. But the emotional romantic in me always has a soft spot for Jesus, although I can embrace and enjoy other religious expressions too. What I actually do, in practice, is make Jesus my center but because I want to, there is real connection there for me.
Yes, I don't try and tell people who their "higher power" should be. It is what it is. If they grew up Hindu, Jesus is going to have zero meaning or significance to them. Being an American, I grew up "christian" as part of my culture. But, Jesus never really had any significance to me until I had this "perfect storm" experience as a young adult. It was like the stars aligned. I don't mean that in a romantic way but in a way where all these things occurred at once that made the whole thing uncanny. It was just too many things, coincidences, complete weirdness quite frankly and it was very very clear in a most painful way. It was the ONLY thing that made sense and actually "worked" to solve the problem I had. It was radical and I can never forget it. So, to me now, Jesus will always be significant. How that plays out in daily life or life philosophy isn't necessarily static and doesn't need to be. Everyone changes, grows and evolves. But the emotional romantic in me always has a soft spot for Jesus, although I can embrace and enjoy other religious expressions too. What I actually do, in practice, is make Jesus my center but because I want to, there is real connection there for me.
