All-Purpose Religion Thread

[Brumerican]

The difference being - if there is no creator, then the whole Universe has no purpose. I can't accept that at all. I can't accept that IT just came about end of.

In just the same manner my brain hurts as I said before when I dismiss a creator out of the equation and just think well what existed before the Universe that had No purpose, no intelligence behind it?

Yet you can accept that your God just came about ?

Hypocritical no ?

[Kiwivillan]

I would like to know if Julie and friends believe "Man" has only been around for 6000ish years because of the Ussher chronology from the 17th century. Adam begat begat begat begat baguette etc.

Please tell me that's not what you underpin your beliefs on...

[norton65ca]

Julie, here is the link you were looking for:

http://tinyurl.com/cpwbnye

Please read this, Julie, I am posting it for your enlightenment...

First things first, The Bible isn't something one can stand on and use as evidence to support one's view of history, because it is not only factually unreliable, but it's a monumental fraud! This is what killed my faith Julie, the very foundational document from which EVERYTHING stems and upon which EVERYTHING builds on, is a crock! I had problems with it over the years, but now I am convinced that the entire thing, ironically, is nothing more than a house built on sand.

[norton65ca]

Kiwi, from the same source:

http://tinyurl.com/cnsp2df

How come we're using a genealogy that isn't connected to Jesus? By that I mean if the genealogy in Matthew terminates in Joseph, then none of it can be used as a genealogical ancestry of Jesus (IF the scriptures represent him as GODS SON) because Joseph had nothing to do with Jesus conception!!!!!!!! If Jesus is the Son of God, then he emphatically isn't the Son of Joseph, isn't the Root of Jesse isn't descended from David, Abraham, Issac etc, and the genealogy in Matthew is absolutely irrelevant!

Please someone explain this OBVIOUS lunacy to me! Biblical family trees always descend through the male line, father to son.

My explanation? That when the Matthew gospel was written, the theology of Jesus being God's Son hadn't been developed yet, in other words, it was invented later and added. At the time of the writing of Matthew, Jesus was seen as a Messiah, not the Son of God as distinct from all saintly persons being "sons of god" metaphorically. This theological distinction and doctrine came about quite a bit later and was added. Jesus is NOT in the line of David.

[norton65ca]

Julie, I wish to stress at this point that personally, I am still myself examining first causes and the concept of a deity doesn't necessarily offend me, but my argument is with the "revealed" god of scripture. I no longer accept "Bible god" to be real and I no longer believe that god, if indeed he/she/it does exist, has revealed anything regarding his/her/its nature to man. I MIGHT be able to accept deism, but theism? no way.

My principle objection to your worldview and theology is your insistence on relying on the Bible as a foundation for your belief system, rather than the existence of a creative force behind observable phenomena. I can no longer take seriously those who use scripture as a starting point for debate, you have to prove that scripture is an acceptable authority, and this can only be done through the use of circular logic.

[snowychap]

However the probabilities are so enormous of making the correct chains of amino acids to form the building blocks of DNA that they go beyond where maths quantifies a nil probability...

What is this supposed to mean and where did you get this from?

[norton65ca]

http://tinyurl.com/7hgnphd

... a few more nails for the coffin...

[Sie]

However the probabilities are so enormous of making the correct chains of amino acids to form the building blocks of DNA that they go beyond where maths quantifies a nil probability...

What is this supposed to mean and where did you get this from?

I do not understand it and/or cannot comprehend it, therefore it can't be true. Only what my mind can comprehend is truth.

And "Magic Sky Wizard did it all" is about as comprehensive as it gets. Not to mention incredibly arrogant. Stone Age thinking people, making obviously made up bullshit that much easier to swallow!

The difference being - if there is no creator, then the whole Universe has no purpose. I can't accept that at all. I can't accept that IT just came about end of.

What you can accept has no bearing on reality. It's quite tragic you see no purpose in the universe beyond worshipping and being subservient to its imagined, despicable creator.

[norton65ca]

roflmao, just noticed this forum's unique transposition of the words "m*ssiah" with O'Neill in my post. Hilarious!

[limpid]

look at Judas Iscariot - he betrayed Jesus.

If you believe that Jesus was sent by god to save mankind, then Judas should be your hero. He was the one who caused god's will to come to pass.

However John and Matthew tell us that Jesus knew Judas was going to do it, so the betrayal was of no consequence.

[regular_john]

As a general point - why would any all-knowing, all-powerful God communicate his messages by inspiring ignorant, desert dwelling peasants to write about it in a book full of logical inconsistencies, factual errors and self contradictions? Why didn't he just wait another 2000 years and shoot us all an e-mail?

It might seem like a silly question but I'm serious. A massive percentage of people currently alive have access to wonderful, rapid forms of communication - if there is a God why doesn't he just pop something in my gmail inbox and let me know which of the hundreds of different religions is the right one? Surely it would be much more effective than letting a huge proportion of the global population follow the wrong religion.

[Sie]

I'll answer that one for you John.

Email is not part of God's greater plan for us all. He works in mysterious ways and has is reasons. I hope this answer is satisfactory.

(Hey, this is easier than I thought!)

[regular_john]

SMS then?

[bickster]

Seem's I've offended a rock legend this week with my anti religious thoughts. A sort of proud moment I guess...

I only pointed out that religion was basically about control and money

[regular_john]

Seem's I've offended a rock legend this week with my anti religious thoughts. A sort of proud moment I guess...

I only pointed out that religion was basically about control and money

?

[limpid]

Did (s)he have an argument against that fact?

[norton65ca]

God (if it exists at all) doesn't speak with men. There a number of competing books claiming to be revelations from the divine, and all of them (Torah, New Testament, Koran, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Book of Mormon, JW bible etc) have holes so large one could drive a Gresley A4 4-6-2 steam locomotive through them.

If god (if it exists) did speak with men, I would hope that he would have communicated a more comprehensively intelligible message than the one in the various books extant.

I'll leave it at the golden rule, a universal moral directive which turns up in all religions, and in cultures where there isn't one. Do as you would be done by. Everything else is pure bronze age barbarism, superstition and fear mongering.

[bickster]

Did (s)he have an argument against that fact?

No not really. I was told to go and read a book. Not THE book but a book, quite a baffling slap in the face. I've read plenty obviously but being as he's an American Christian I guess he equates the ability to read as a sign of high intelligence or something and non believers must be a bit dim. Oh well hes only a drummer ;-)

[JulieB]

Julie, here is the link you were looking for:

http://tinyurl.com/cpwbnye

Please read this, Julie, I am posting it for your enlightenment...

First things first, The Bible isn't something one can stand on and use as evidence to support one's view of history, because it is not only factually unreliable, but it's a monumental fraud! This is what killed my faith Julie, the very foundational document from which EVERYTHING stems and upon which EVERYTHING builds on, is a crock! I had problems with it over the years, but now I am convinced that the entire thing, ironically, is nothing more than a house built on sand.

I've just been reading this essay, thanks for re-posting this link.

Firstly dealing with the Babylonian/Sumerian writings being the basis of t- The first 5 books of the Bible written by Moses, which they are claiming wasn't written around 1513 BCE but about 500 years later.

If these scholars are going to claim that the Bible was based on earlier writings from Sumeria, then why aren't they claiming that the Bible is based on other Flood legends?

Putting aside whether the Flood happened or not, there are many such legends from every continent & islands around the globe.

Our knowledge of the epic of Gilgamesh is based mainly on a cuneiform text that came from the library of Ashurbanipal, who reigned 668-627 B.C.E., in ancient Nineveh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh like other flood legends gives no reasonable dimensions of the vessel involved which the Bible does and what's more the Epic states that the storm lasted six days and six nights, whereas the Bible says that “the downpour upon the earth went on for forty days and forty nights”—a continuing heavy rain that finally covered the entire globe with water.

the fundamental difference is that Gilgamesh died - the Bible account states that Noah and his immediate family survived.

If these scholars are stating that the Bible is derived from a much older clay tablet found at Nippur, sometimes called the Eridu Genesis, then again there are huge fundamental differences.

From Wiki

Where the tablet picks up, the gods An, Enlil, Enki and Ninhursanga create the black-headed people and create comfortable conditions for the animals to live and procreate. Then kingship descends from heaven and the first cities are founded: Eridu, Bad-tibira, Larsa, Sippar, and Shuruppak.

After a missing section in the tablet, we learn that the gods have decided not to save mankind from an impending flood. Zi-ud-sura, the king and gudug priest, learns of this. In the later Akkadian version, Ea, or Enki in Sumerian, the god of the waters, warns the hero (Atra-hasis in this case) and gives him instructions for the ark. This is missing in the Sumerian fragment, but a mention of Enki taking counsel with himself suggests that this is Enki's role in the Sumerian version as well.

When the tablet resumes it is describing the flood. A terrible storm rocks the huge boat for seven days and seven nights, then Utu (the Sun god) appears and Zi-ud-sura creates an opening in the boat, prostrates himself, and sacrifices oxen and sheep.

After another break the text resumes: the flood is apparently over, the animals disembark and Zi-ud-sura prostrates himself before An (sky-god) and Enlil (chief of the gods), who give him eternal life and take him to dwell in Dilmun for "preserving the animals and the seed of mankind". The remainder of the poem is lost.[3]

Again NO dimensions are given for the vessel like Moses' account in Genesis and again there are fundamental differences in the writings.

As I previously posted Nimrod founded the first human City Babylon - he was a great grandson of Noah according to the Bible. A son of Cush and a son of Semiramis - - who according to other writings eg Josephus - antiquities of the Jews and the writings of the Occult - married his mother after the death of his father and they bore a son Tammuz.

Nimrod was killed so Josephus & the Occult writings claim by Shem - a son of Noah - because after the flood the Bible states that the land was apportioned to the family lines eminating from Anatolia into Mesopatamia and further afield. Nimrod described "as a mighy hunter in opposition to Jehovah" in the Bible..... according to other ancient writings - went on a mission to flood over and grab back other lands and he killed some of his distant relatives. Hence Shem in the end slayed him.

The You Tube link "Tracing Your Ancestors through History"- that I posted originally in response to your posts of the works of Paul James Griffiths who has been researching for the past 22 years the subject of the historical spread of mankind since the days of Nimrod and Noah from the area of Anatolia. His research directly counteracts what is written in that essay about the Bible accounts being borrowed from earlier Sumerian writings, because he attaches the importance of the geneological lineages listed in the whole chapter 10 of Genesis.

Also for the two scholars who are quoted in that Essay others take the opposite perspective -

In his book, P. J. Wiseman points out that, when the Babylonian creation tablets were first discovered, some scholars expected further discovery and research to show that there was a correspondency between them and the Genesis account of creation. Some thought that it would become apparent that the Genesis account was borrowed from the Babylonian. However, further discovery and research have merely made apparent the great gulf between the two accounts. They do not parallel each other. Wiseman quotes The Babylonian Legends of the Creation and the Fight Between Bel and the Dragon, issued by the Trustees of the British Museum, who hold that “the fundamental conceptions of the Babylonian and Hebrew accounts are essentially different.” He himself observes: “It is more than a pity that many theologians, instead of keeping abreast of modern archaeological research, continue to repeat the now disproved theory of Hebrew ‘borrowings’ from Babylonian sources.”—Creation Revealed in Six Days, London,

While some have pointed to what seemed to them to have been similarities between the Babylonian epic and the Genesis account of creation, it is readily apparent from the preceding consideration of the Biblical creation narrative and the foregoing epitome of the Babylonian myth that they are not really similar. Therefore, a detailed analysis of them side by side is unnecessary. However, in considering seeming similarities and differences (such as the order of events) in these accounts, Professor George A. Barton observed: “A more important difference lies in the religious conceptions of the two. The Babylonian poem is mythological and polytheistic. Its conception of deity is by no means exalted. Its gods love and hate, they scheme and plot, fight and destroy. Marduk, the champion, conquers only after a fierce struggle, which taxes his powers to the utmost. Genesis, on the other hand, reflects the most exalted monotheism. God is so thoroughly the master of all the elements of the universe, that they obey his slightest word. He controls all without effort. He speaks and it is done. Granting, as most scholars do, that there is a connection between the two narratives, there is no better measure of the inspiration of the Biblical account than to put it side by side with the Babylonian. As we read the chapter in Genesis today, it still reveals to us the majesty and power of the one God, and creates in the modern man, as it did in the ancient Hebrew, a worshipful attitude toward the Creator.”—Archaeology and the Bible, pp. 297, 298.

In his book The New Bible Dictionary, edited by J. Douglas, 1985, p. 247.

he states....

Regarding ancient creation myths in general, it has been stated: “No myth has yet been found which explicitly refers to the creation of the universe, and those concerned with the organization of the universe and its cultural processes, the creation of man and the establishment of civilization are marked by polytheism and the struggles of deities for supremacy in marked contrast to the Heb. monotheism of Gn. 1-2.”—

If we are going to state that Sumerian writings formed the basis of the Bible then this also creates a problem with how the Earth and the Universe are described in this culture as opposed to the Hebrew writings.

The Geographical Meaning of "Earth" and "Seas" in Genesis 1:10 Paul H. Seely Published in Westminster Theological Journal 59 (1997) 231-55

In ancient Sumer, according to Kramer and Lambert, the earth was conceived of as a "flat disc." Kramer seems to reach this conclusion partly on the basis of the fact that the Sumerians conceived the sky to be a vault coming down to the earth (or surrounding ocean) on all sides. Lambert seems to reach this conclusion on the basis that the Sumerians would think of the earth as flat because that is self-evident and limited in extent because they saw the sun go down on one side of the earth and rise on the other. Both scholars also show awareness that the Babylonian view of the universe which thought of the earth as a disc was probably inherited from Sumer.

Also, Heidel notes that in an early version of creation in the An-Antum list of gods (which are Sumerian) "Sky and earth are apparently to be viewed as two enormous discs..."14 In Babylonia one of the clearest indications that the earth was conceived of as flat is found in Tablet V of Enuma elish, where half the body of Tiamat, having been split in two by Marduk, is laid out as a base for mountains (lines 53, 57). Tiamat's half-body is laid out over the deep from whence the Tigris and Euphrates flow out

from her eyes (lines 54, 55). Livingstone translates line 62 "Half of her [Tiamat] he made flat and firm, the earth.''15 The circularity of the earth in Babylonian thought is possibly mentioned in several ancient texts and is seen directly in a sixth century BC clay map of the world, which most scholars believe is derived from much earlier models since the extent of

the world known to the Babylonians of the sixth century BC was considerably larger than the world represented on the clay map. Clifford says the world in this map is conceived of "as a disk."16 The circular shape of the earth in Babylonian thought is also evidenced by a

report in Diodorus Siculus (II:31:7) that the Babylonians told him the earth is "shaped like a boat and hollow." The boat is undoubtedly a coracle, used into modern times by natives on the Euphrates. The coracle is circular, rounded at the edges like the yolk of an egg, but, of course, hollow.17 Lambert while discussing the astronomy of the Babylonians noted that they were "without any understanding of a round [spherical] earth." He then went on to describe the Babylonian universe as several levels of discs, one above the other.

In complete contrast to Sumerian teachings the Bible describes the spherical nature of the Earth and the fact that it hangs upon nothing.

Apologies for the length of this post, but this is a pretty important subject

[Chindie]

It's astounding that so much effort is wasted on such patent nonsense that masquerades as factual.