http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13...1811332,00.html

Wow, parts of the bible not true? That can't be!

How on earth did they determine what is and isn't true? Sounds like a joke to me. Surely if parts of it aren't true, it has no credibility?

This quote sickened me:



There is no greater crime in the cosmos than to deliberately indoctrinate young trusting minds with false teachings for selfish ends. From this one heinous crime stems all crime. The perpetrators of this evil deed will pay a terrible price in mental remorse when they pass from this world.

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity.

And why/how is that?

Because there is scientific proof for life after death, which is being supressed by the church.

What you quoted was directed to those who are aware of this, not those who are themselves victims, and believe they are doing gods work, by spreading the word of christ.

Has there ever been a theory on the internet that you haven't believed?

err I have not been able to find this on cnn nor bbc...... which makes me skipital a little bit more then I would normaly be.

More than i believe, I can assure you

But obviously I only post that which I believe...



The Times would be considered extremely credible by most.

Cool! Where?

We can't tell you cause then the nuns will come and kick our ass.

roflol

http://www.cfpf.org.uk/articles/background...ificproof1.html
http://www.cfpf.org.uk/articles/background...ificproof2.html
http://www.cfpf.org.uk/articles/background...ificproof3.html
http://www.cfpf.org.uk/articles/background...ificproof4.html

OMG it must be true it's on th' tinternet.

First....
The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

These are bishops making the statement, this is not the same as the Vatican. I am not a Catholic, but a few bishops is a far cry from the Vatican.

Second,
There is nothing new here. The bible uses both literalism and symbolism to deliever the message. Therefore, of course a symbolic reference should not be consider a factual event, it is used to deliver an idea or concept. Writers do this ever day.

Sounding a little zealous your self there. Religion merely refers to the structure of beliefs on metaphysics. If you beleive there isn't a God or higher being, that's a religion too. It's not an organized religion, but it is a religion. Agnostics and Athiests are actually religiously defined as agnostics and athiests. I can see an agnostic perhaps arguing that they should be define as having a religion, since by and large they're claiming they really don't have any kind of belief, and the absense of beliefs would therefore negate the framwork that depends on those beliefs.

You, on the other hand, sound firmly convinced in something, which would lead me to believe you have a religion of some sort.

1. If you're referring to one specific church, it should probably be "The Church"
   
2. There are other churches. Are they all evil too?
   
3. What about eastern religions that practice personal forms of divinity?
   
4. what church argues life ends with death? Nearly every church I've ever seen argues life continues on.
   
5. what about your religion (or Mike Roll's, as the case may be) that proves life after death?

I'll let Mike himself further your arguments:


Welcome to the Hypocrite club.

First of all, this debate will never win those who believe one way or the other very strongly.

Second... none of the Bible is 100% true. The events predate ink and paper. These are stories passed down from generation to generation, as all stories were in those days. Hundreds, even thousands of years later, after Christ was crucified, someone took selected stories (think of how many gospels about Christ were written, surely more than four... they're not all in the Bible) and made a religion out of it. That's all. That doesn't invalidate the teachings, or make them wrong, but it is wrong when people base their whole life around that, and then try to force their beliefs on others.

I believe we all have to find our own way. For most people, following an established religion is the best way. Still, it's best to seek your own answers, even within that establishment. Some, like myself, choose no religion at all, and that's fine, too.

Until there's concrete proof, until a God shows himself and proves his existence to the whole world beyond any doubt, the world is going to be divided between the faithful and the faithless. Those who have faith need not explain it to those who don't, and those who don't simply don't need it to begin with, nuff said.

There is no truth - even the simple "fact" that we are living is a probability not a certainty.

Um... No theres not... You provide me a link from any scientific site saying there's life after death and I can give you thousands that say otherwise.

And

'The Church' is supposed to believe in life after death.. Heaven and Hell anyone?

Additionally, even if God walked the face of this planet right now, there would still be those that refuse to believe.

You are right, we each must find our own way through life and hopefully do it without harming our fellow man in the process.

Thanks Jay.

why and how do they find it that way? i think its goodthat i dont based all my beliefs in the book. i think that was brains made for

I think you're trying to fill my mind with false teachings.

The Bible and religion is mans way of coping with the inability to struggle over the question of why we are here in the first place.

The inability can be resolved in a very simple way - we are here because we are here - and there is no inherent reason why, and unless we make one, we might as not well be here.

Very true, I personally can not believe in anything godlike it is purely a myth in my eyes but everyone is entitled to believe what they want. Just don't ram it down peoples throats like some like to do.

Once worked with a born again christian who constantly berated people for their lifestyles and try to get converts himself.

Man isn't inable to struggle over the question of why we are here. We struggle over it all the time.

I don't really agree with everything being said here, but that's life. I personally don't see how we can't be made from a divine being such as God himself. Look at everything around you. It's impossible for me to fathom how a big bang or evolution created all of this around me. lol I have gotten a lot of crap on some irc channels for what I believe in, maybe I'll get some here but I just like to make people really think about this. I am looking at my hat right now, I am thinking with a brain right now that has currents going through it sending messages to my fingers to type on this keyboard onto this computer. Just to many things that have been done that have made me to the point of where I can't see my life without God.

Thants not really that unreasonable. Science has acknowledged the extreme un-liklyhood of life creating and evolving on its own. That's where things like the multiverse hyphothesis come from.

And I think you are a fool.

Do you always think people are trying to 'convert' you, when they express THEIR OWN OPINIONS?

I believe in God basically as someone to "talk to" during the good times and the bad. Do I believe that there is a literal physical presence of God? Hard to say.

What I don't believe in (and this is just MY opinion) is/are religion(s)*. I don't need folks preaching to me of what their God is and how great He is, etc. I've been at the end of my (life) rope a number of times throughout my life, but by simply talking to God (whether real or imagined) has helped me through those rough roads. Perhaps it was simply the idea of getting things off my chest, but when I couldn't bring myself to talk to a "human being", God was there listening.

*Just because I don't particularly believe in religion(s) doesn't mean that I berate/belittle anyone's religion. We all need what we need to get through life.

What do you think about the thought that God is not one particular thing, but everything?

Honestly, I don't put that much thought into it. Admittedly I'm a selfish person (don't know why). At 43 years of age, I'm still trying to find myself and my purpose on this earth. As much as I believe in God, I believe even more that it is up to me and me alone to figure my purpose out.

I understand. Boy is it hard trying to find yourself. This whole "being human / human being" thing is quite hard work. Good luck with it!

Thanks. Thought I had it all figured out during my 20+ years with the Navy, but then that ended and it seems I'm back to square one again. Had a great job ( ) that I loved "post-Navy" but again, that ended.

If only we could have all been born in A.D. 2,000,000 instead, higher tech, better IPB

Sadly.. We just can't know for sure weather God is real or not...

Just so you know, the text of the New Testament was most definitely decided within around three hundred years, but the books we now have today were the ones being used pretty much since they were written in the first century. Archaeologically we can pinpoint the writings accurately to within sixty years of Christ, and the stories of Jesus' life such as the Gospel of Thomas (in other words, the ones not in the Bible today) were rejected by Christians as inaccurate (and were written at least a hundred years later anyway). That's the secular historical view - the Christian view only adds that the books were "God-breathed" (2 Tim 3:16). Wikipedia has some good stuff.

I am living proof there is life after death.

Bushy the squirrel, so guard your nuts xxx

Well, some of the things in the Bible aren't supposed to be taken literally.

Why do you have a mason avatar?

Agreed, some of it has to be taken into context and others are symbolic stories.

I watched a show on the discovery channel last night (about a completely different subject) where a neuropsychologist came on to explain how we interpret things. It was quite interesting, and tied in with my personal views on life/religion a bit.

Your eyes don't see anything. Your eyes are merely recepticals that bring in a very SMALL amount of data that is fed to your brain. HALF of your brain is actually devoted to interpreting the data that your eyes bring in.

This makes it sooo much easier to understand the concepts of being colorblind. If my eyes see something and bring it to my brain and I interpret it as a brown rectangle, it's completely logical why someone else might see it as a green rectangle. It's just a cross synapsis. So who is right? No one really, because it's still the same object or whatever, it's all just in how you interpret it.

This begs the thought then, in an argument about something that someone saw, who is right? The show was about the Loch Ness Monster, and this particular segment was about how it is easy for people to misinterpret something when they are LOOKING for something to appear/happen. It's because your mind plays tricks on you in this manner. Your brain gets preconceived notions about what is and isn't, so you can see something that really isn't there without trying.

Personally, my beliefs are a little non-standard. I don't play much part in organized religion, mostly because over time the churches have come to a point where money is more and more important, and it shouldn't be. Anyone see that movie, think it was called Crucifix or something, can't remember. There was a 13th gospel, written by Christ that read something like "I cannot be found in a church or building. Look behind a tree, you will see me. Lift a rock, you will find me." While I'm not extremely strong on the Christianity front, this ties in strongly with my beliefs in that you do not need to go to a special building on a special day to believe in God.

Who's interpretation of God is right? Every interpretation is someone's personal view of how things happened or what they saw. 2000 BC, people were not as educated as they are now. Flight was probably seen as an act of God, because there was no scientific explanation for how it occurred.

In my eyes, God is more like a state of mind, than a physical being. If you believe in God, it's an interpretation, a way of thinking about how things work and why you are here. You don't physically see God, but your brain tells you his real, and that things that happen are because of his power. Those who don't believe in God, have a different interpretation of those same events. Whether you believe in God or not, however, those events still happened. The only difference is in your belief of how/why they happened.

I like to hear different views from different religions on the same events. For someone like me who hasn't fully developed their beliefs about the world (I'm only 22, so I have much to learn/see/understand about life still), sometimes you may find that while you more comform to a Christian belief structure, Buddhists may have an interpretation of events that makes more sense to you. I see no reason why you can't be part of mutiple belief systems, to form your own set of reasons and conclusions.

Is the Bible made up? It probably IS the best novel ever written. It probably IS at least partially only symbolic made up of interpretations of events that happened at the time and had no explanation according to the CURRENT scientific understanding of the world at the time. But who's to say what was REAL and what was NOT REAL. By my belief standards, reality is a conceived understanding of what happens, so it WAS real to those who saw the events and interpreted those events in the manner described in the Bible. It's just too bad we don't have writtings from alternative perspectives of the same events from that time frame to be able to form our own understanding of what happened 2000 years ago.

And the next question is - who cares if it is real or not? We are, and that should in theory be the end of it

Because he's in cahootz with the Illuminati. Isn't that obvious? Stop asking questions before they sick the scientologists on us.



You're thinking of Stigmata

Was that meant to be funny? I was generally wondering.