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God talked to me... does that make me crazy?


HtownWxBoy

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I have too much work to do today to play high school debate team pendant with you.

Can we play Hungry Hungry Hippos?

Uh, I don't know who that is, but that's not my god.

That's Alanis Morissette from "Dogma". She played God (along with Bud Cort).

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If you believed that God told you to go stick your head in a pig, then I might think you're off your meds. If God told you that you should be nicer to other people, I wouldn't make the same assumption. If God told you to build an ark, I'd want more information.

I think the answer to a lot of the hypothetical questions you posed above is, "nothing." It's your money, go build yourself an ark, as long as you're not hurting anyone, who cares?

Do you know what Rainbows are? "Rainbows are a reminder of God's promise not to flood the earth again".

So hopefully, if that's true, then if someone were to say they were told to build an arc, we could call them crazy :).

Yes.. there are wackos.. and yes there are persecutions. I'm not sure how tied in the Spring incident was the Leviticus passage. I don't remember reading in the stories the "Remember Leviticus" war cry as they charged that poor guy. We don't know what the root of their anger towards gays was.. or even if they held enough anger already towards this guy for other reasons and the gay aspect was just the tipping point. So I'm not sure how much religious persecution this one incident was.

Regardless.. the maybe-persecution happened... and it was properly found revolting by all, Christians included.

That passage doesn't have anything to do with what happened. Neither party was gay. The David that did the beating (and his friend) were white supremesists... not super christians.

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Was that a preemptive warning or are we actually all that off topic? I mean, it isn't like we're discussing the comparative merits of Houston vs. Dallas rap music in a thread about a new retail center or anything.

Did I start that? And what thread was this?

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That passage doesn't have anything to do with what happened. Neither party was gay. The David that did the beating (and his friend) were white supremesists... not super christians.

Ok.. i didn't originally bring up the example, Niche did... I didn't remember the details of what happened.

But it's kinda besides the point... it was an example of what could happen in the name of Leviticus....

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Yes (and this is fertile territory, so think about it), no, no, and no.

New Testament God is very different from Old Testament God. And the very fact of the New Testament (never mind the apocryphal texts) is evidence of inconsistency by way of adding or taking away from the Bible.

The bible is not an exhaustive written history on Christianity and the words God said. Just because a certain set of characterstics was written about doesn't mean the other ones did not exist. If someone only wrote about a father disciplining his children, that doesn't mean the father had no love for him at different times of his life (That is only an example that happens to be similar to our discussion, I am not suggesting this was the case). Here's an example: John 21:25 - Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

Just as history books usually only have what's important, so does the bible. It does not mean the other things did not happen.

Also, what does the Bible teach is the penalty for disobeying the creator/God? The fact that anyone was still alive in the first place was a testament to his grace, mercy and patience. Secondly, God promised Adam and Eve that a seed would come and redeem them. And God also wanted his people (Israel) to be holy (set apart, different) from the rest of the world. If he allows that to go on, then they are neither set apart and the redemption seed never reaches Mary.

The bible teaches that God is just. He cannot let the sinful go unpunished, or he would not be a just God. Just like a judge would not be a good judge if he let all the bad guys go free.

And God will come back to judge those who do not repent. The book of Revelation is full of the righteous wrath that God has been holding back in patience. The OT teaches plenty of love and forgiveness as well.

I don't know. I know a lot of them say the Bible is the literal word of God and they are obliged to obey it. It seems inconsistent for them not to kill gay people on a regular basis.

Are there any Christians out there who can tell us what is stopping you?

The bible teaches to love even your enemies. Christians are redeemed sinners too. Plus, there is no commandment to do that.

Any commandment of that nature named in Leviticus was for Israel alone. When Jesus came, he fullfilled the law.

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And God will come back to judge those who do not repent. Revelation is full of the righteous wrath that God has been holding back in patience. The OT teaches plenty of love and forgiveness as well.
The bible teaches to love even your enemies. Christians are redeemed sinners too. Plus, there is no commandment to do that.

Caveat - I don't mean any offense to anyone or lockmat (and he's the one of the only ones so far that has come out and stated his religiousness to a greater degree than others).

I have an incredibly difficult time grasping all of this. Yeah, it's mostly because I wasn't enculturated in to it growing up, but still. No part of my being can look at religion and understand it or its followers in any logical, rational way. Do I need to toss out the logical and rational?

As a help, I've started reading the Bible (so many versions!) with some annotations. I can't honestly say I trust the translations or annotations fully, though.

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Ok, no, God didn't really talk to me, at least not today. But I was watching the movie Evan Almighty today while I was home... I have seen it before and it's a really cute movie. In it Steve Carell plays Evan who is told by God, played by Morgan Freeman, that he needs to build an arc because a flood is coming. So anyways, after some convincing he begins building the arc and everyone in town calls him crazy even though he tells them that God told him to do this.

We live in a Nation where many people consider themselves "Christians" and they believe in God and they pray to God and believe all that stuff... yadda, yadda, yadda. If I were to say tomorrow that God spoke to me and he wants me to build a big boat and I start building it... a lot of people, many of them "Christians", would probably think I should be locked up in an institution. Why is that? What if I went on TV tomorrow and claimed that God came to me in my dream and wanted me to deliver the message that some people being born gay is normal and part of his divine plan and that gays should be allowed to get married... would gay marriage have to automatically be made legal... b/c God said so? How would people know for sure whether or not God did talk to me... why would most automatically think it's not true even though many believe in God and believe you can pray to God and that God hears your prayers and all that stuff...?

Long night at work... I have some downtime... just something I was thinking about. ^_^

No, you have nothing to worry about because YOU have no REAL power. Now if someone like Obama or Bush (when he was President) came out and said that GOD commanded him to build an Ark and yadda yadda yadda, I am sure alot of their minions would bow down and say "It must be true."

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Caveat - I don't mean any offense to anyone or lockmat (and he's the one of the only ones so far that has come out and stated his religiousness to a greater degree than others).

I have an incredibly difficult time grasping all of this. Yeah, it's mostly because I wasn't enculturated in to it growing up, but still. No part of my being can look at religion and understand it or its followers in any logical, rational way. Do I need to toss out the logical and rational?

As a help, I've started reading the Bible (so many versions!) with some annotations. I can't honestly say I trust the translations or annotations fully, though.

Don't sweat it. You will never fully understand the Bible. Nobody will. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who devote their entire lives to studying, researching, and understanding just small portions of it. Entire universities have been founded around this.

In spite of what some TV preachers may tell you, the Bible is hard and no one "gets" the whole thing.

But you bring up a very good point -- that there are many versions of the Bible, and many interpretations of even the primary source material (the letters and such). And parts of the Christian Bible also appear in the Jewish Torah and the Koran (not sure what the correct spelling of that is these days, but spell check seems happy with that).

Organizations like the Vatican are constantly reviewing these interpretations to make sure they're as close to accurate as possible and as new information becomes available things are changed.

In fact, a couple of the basic prayers that Roman Catholics use in church are going to change ever so slightly because of errors made when they were translated from Greek to English. All of the other languages in the world have already updated their texts to reflect the original meaning, but the English version is still being worked on. From what I'm told it should be in the next two years. I wish I could remember the prayers. The changes aren't catastrophic, just slight and not hard to remember.

Unfortunately, not everyone takes the time to understand the words they've read in the Bible. It's easy for some Internet Tough Guy to pull a line or two out of context and then label the entire 1,000+ page book as something horrible. But at the same time he doesn't understand what he's quoting.

A good example is the whole "eye for an eye" thing. A version of the text I found online has it thusly:

If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

Today, people who think they're smarter than they really are decry this as barbarism. But when taken in context, it's actually fascinating.

Parts of the Bible lay down the basic code of law for the time; and "eye for an eye" means "let the punishment fit the crime." At the time, the general rule in the world wasn't "eye for an eye" it was "life for an eye" and "your wife's life for a leg" and "your children's lives for an ox." When the Jews in Babylon found out that killing everyone wasn't working out, they came up with "let the punishment fit the crime" and spelled it out above in a way that people of the time could understand. It's a notion that permeates our laws today as the notion of "cruel and unusual punishment." When "eye for an eye" was written, it was absolutely revolutionary and helped turn a warring people (though they continued to fight) into a people of rules and laws.

Another poster brought up the whole he/she thing when it comes to God. This was another revolutionary notion that comes from religion. Jesus didn't refer to God as "Father" simply because he lived in a patriarchal society. He did it deliberately because during Roman rule, fathers were cruel horrible people. A man could come home and if he had a bad day, kill his wife and nothing would be done about it. His wife and children were his property and were routinely treated horribly. Then Jesus comes along and starts talking about a LOVING "Father" who wants to take care of all people, including women and children and people were like "whaaaaaat?" Again, at the time it was a scandalous notion to say that a father would love his children and not just kill them off for fun. Today we look at the things Jesus said and think, "well, duh!" But back then things were very different than they are now.

Again, I'm no biblical scholar. I haven't read a Bible in 20 years and didn't even own one until six months ago (given as a gift that I still haven't opened). But I'd wager I've had a few more theology classes than the average bear. Still, I don't pretend that I'm an expert on either of the two passages above, or anything else in the Bible.

Anyway -- don't worry about learning or understanding the entire Bible. No one ever does, no matter what they say. Just understand it enough to make yourself comfortable. There are tons of books out there to help. If I ever find a good one, I'll recommend it to you. I've heard there are "teaching Bibles" with notes in the margins to make things clearer. Hopefully I'll run across one of these.

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Caveat - I don't mean any offense to anyone or lockmat (and he's the one of the only ones so far that has come out and stated his religiousness to a greater degree than others).

I have an incredibly difficult time grasping all of this. Yeah, it's mostly because I wasn't enculturated in to it growing up, but still. No part of my being can look at religion and understand it or its followers in any logical, rational way. Do I need to toss out the logical and rational?

As a help, I've started reading the Bible (so many versions!) with some annotations. I can't honestly say I trust the translations or annotations fully, though.

I think a major help to understanding the bible is first understanding God's character. Understanding man's relationship to God because of sin would also be very helpful. I agree that without a proper understanding, the Christian teachings might be very difficult to understand and accept.

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I think a major help to understanding the bible is first understanding God's character. Understanding man's relationship to God because of sin would also be very helpful. I agree that without a proper understanding, the Christian teachings might be very difficult to understand and accept.

It's also hard because "Christian" teachings aren't the same from one denomination to another. You could spend months learning what Baptists think of the eucharist and then find out that the Greek Orthodox people believe something else.

Alas, there are no simple answers.

(As a point of interest, I just booked tickets to the Vatican Museum. It turns out that God will take anyone's prayers, but He won't take American Express.)

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It's also hard because "Christian" teachings aren't the same from one denomination to another. You could spend months learning what Baptists think of the eucharist and then find out that the Greek Orthodox people believe something else.

Alas, there are no simple answers.

(As a point of interest, I just booked tickets to the Vatican Museum. It turns out that God will take anyone's prayers, but He won't take American Express.)

True that there are some differences out there, some more liberal interpretations than others. But if God cannot lie and the Bible is God-breathed (written by God, through man) then there are no flaws and there is only one true interpretation. The problem comes when people interpret it to fit their own lifestyle and when they take it out of context.

But there are some main principles that should be agreed upon or Christianity itself crumbles and it ceases to be Christianity, and it becomes some other gospel.

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True that there are some differences out there, some more liberal interpretations than others. But if God cannot lie and the Bible is God-breathed (written by God, through man) then there are no flaws and there is only one true interpretation. The problem comes when people interpret it to fit their own lifestyle and when they take it out of context.

But not every sector of Christianity believes it was written by God. Some believe it was the Holy Spirit. Some believe it was inspired by God and delivered through the Holy Spirit. Some are a combination of all of the above and some other things.

But none of this helps the original poster.

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One would think that after thousand years of confusion, god would finally realize that "shoot, I better go down and tell them myself, maybe do some real in-your-face miracles, so they believe me and wouldn't get it wrong". But no, he wants to go through the message through dreams thingy again, so we end up with even more more denominations, hooray.

Based on this, one should already conclude that either there is no god, the christian version anyway, or this dude is really bad at communicating, or errr, god works in really mysterious ways.

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One would think that after thousand years of confusion, god would finally realize that "shoot, I better go down and tell them myself, maybe do some real in-your-face miracles, so they believe me and wouldn't get it wrong". But no, he wants to go through the message through dreams thingy again, so we end up with even more more denominations, hooray.

Some people believe that miracles happen every day. The Roman Catholic church has documented what it believes are many God-produced miracles, including a bunch in our own time. Heck, some just a few years ago. They're more along the lines of people being cured of incurable diseases and other such intervention, rather than a big cartoon hand reaching out of a cloud and pointing at someone and a booming voice saying, "YOU, JOE LUNCHPAIL ARE A SINNER!"

Based on this, one should already conclude that either there is no god, the christian version anyway, or this dude is really bad at communicating, or errr, god works in really mysterious ways.

When I was a kid it was explained to me thusly: If we have proof that God exists, then we don't need faith. Without faith, there is no religion.

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I just talked with god, and she said she'd take it from here, and if these guys don't behave, she'll just wrath this thread up.

...and...

The bible teaches that God is just. He cannot let the sinful go unpunished, or he would not be a just God. Just like a judge would not be a good judge if he let all the bad guys go free.

...hmmm... so which is it? him? her? I find it strange that we are so sure in what God looks like, down to his/her gender... Any being (or off-spring of said being) that can create the universe, create man, and knows-all, in my book, cannot possibly be ~6 feet tall, have long hair down to their waist, wear sandals, and walk on water. Any being, if one does exist, is beyond what was written by man, beyond any human form we could possibly understand, beyond any human reasoning, logic, or moral system.

I am weary of anyone who says "God made me do it." For good deeds, or bad deeds.

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...hmmm... so which is it? him? her? I find it strange that we are so sure in what God looks like, down to his/her gender.

"We" who? Speak for yourself.

My religion teaches that God is genderless, though humans were created in his image. My language's rules require the use of the masculine form for unknown or undetermined genders. It has nothing to do with religion.

I am weary of anyone who says "God made me do it." For good deeds, or bad deeds.

A wise notion. Most (all?) Christian religions teach that God doesn't make anyone do anything. We are given free will.

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A wise notion. Most (all?) Christian religions teach that God doesn't make anyone do anything. We are given free will.

Of course, it is entirely possible that a God who triggered the big bang instantaneously set into motion the entire future of the cosmos, down to the smallest microcosmic detail...including the development of religions (plural)...and the very keystrokes that I make right now. This God knows all, including the past, present, and future, and so my earlier proclamation that I am my own god is part of this God's plan. It is necessary, by design.

Perhaps God is just a galactic novelist. Not all literature turns out with a happy ending, and certainly there must be some level of conflict for people to retain interest; that doesn't mean the content of the novel isn't thoughtful, perhaps to God's friends. Or perhaps he takes some kind of personal pleasure out of seeing what he can come up with, not unlike myself playing Sim City or drawing novel things (even if inherently flawed) on SketchUp.

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...and...

...hmmm... so which is it? him? her? I find it strange that we are so sure in what God looks like, down to his/her gender... Any being (or off-spring of said being) that can create the universe, create man, and knows-all, in my book, cannot possibly be ~6 feet tall, have long hair down to their waist, wear sandals, and walk on water. Any being, if one does exist, is beyond what was written by man, beyond any human form we could possibly understand, beyond any human reasoning, logic, or moral system.

I am weary of anyone who says "God made me do it." For good deeds, or bad deeds.

Bryan, you NEED to stay out of this one. You can't even figure out the REAL reason why certain "genders" weren't being let into a bar. :rolleyes:

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One would think that after thousand years of confusion, god would finally realize that "shoot, I better go down and tell them myself, maybe do some real in-your-face miracles, so they believe me and wouldn't get it wrong". But no, he wants to go through the message through dreams thingy again, so we end up with even more more denominations, hooray.

Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and he himself was raised from the dead after being dead three days. He made himself known to thousands of people after this and people still didn't believe.

He made the deaf hear, the blind see and the lame walk.

I've never heard or met anyone else could do that.

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Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and he himself was raised from the dead after being dead three days. He made himself known to thousands of people after this and people still didn't believe.

He made the deaf hear, the blind see and the lame walk.

I've never heard or met anyone else could do that.

Your evidence is hearsay. And...

I've never heard or met anyone else could do that.

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One would think that after thousand years of confusion, god would finally realize that "shoot, I better go down and tell them myself, maybe do some real in-your-face miracles, so they believe me and wouldn't get it wrong".

Umm...he already did. <_<

jesus-christ-toast-virgin-mary-grilled-cheese-photo1.jpg

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One would think that after thousand years of confusion, god would finally realize that "shoot, I better go down and tell them myself, maybe do some real in-your-face miracles, so they believe me and wouldn't get it wrong".

he had a theory too

he said that god takes care of himself

he said that god takes care of himself

and you of you

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If it was the God of the Bible, would he tell you to do something inconsistent with his commandments/teachings?

The bible is full of contradictions.

This is a very good website that lists all of the contradictions in the bible in an annotated form.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/by_name.html

It also does the same thing for the Quaran and Book of Mormon.

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Is the rest of world history hearsay? Why or why not?

When George Washington writes a document from the battlefield to one of his generals and that document is preserved, that is not hearsay; it is a primary source, one of many. It can be traced backwards from the possession of one person to the next, can be corroborated by other unrelated historical evidence, and thereby can be reasonably verified as authentic. When an historian utilizes the primary source among others to piece together a complete history of some set of events, their work is a secondary source. If the secondary source cites its evidence then it becomes possible for the veracity of the secondary source to be independently verified by a researcher.

The Bible has lots of problems as a historical document. First and foremost, nobody can prove who wrote the various gospels, and although scholars have dated the writings to within a reasonable range, by the time that they are written, many decades have passed since the authors (whoever they actually were) might have borne witnesses to miracles; they would have been old men. Any lawyer can tell you that peoples' memory for details are bad enough just hours after an event in question has occurred; decades later, memory is utterly pitiful, corroborating witnesses are hard to come by and unreliable, and all too often, such people have become more prone to mental illnesses such as dementia. It is especially difficult to grant it the benefit of the doubt when unprecedented events occur that cannot be duplicated by anybody else. If water is turned to wine in this one case, for instance, the sources are unverifiable, nobody can corroborate the event, nobody can duplicate the event, it hasn't happened by random chance either before or after, and the events have been translated multiple times by independent authors...that frankly doesn't have a lot of credibility as a source. Give me a good reason why I should believe it.

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Quite a bit of history is hearsay because we hear it the way the historians say it happened, which is not always 100% accurate. Just look at recent history. Politicians will do and say one thing, and then a few years later, they are telling a different version of what happened. Which version is history?

I know of countless instances where doctors have revived the dead, made the deaf hear, and even made the blind see. That

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Quite a bit of history is hearsay because we hear it the way the historians say it happened, which is not always 100% accurate. Just look at recent history. Politicians will do and say one thing, and then a few years later, they are telling a different version of what happened. Which version is history?

I know of countless instances where doctors have revived the dead, made the deaf hear, and even made the blind see. That's not a miracle; that's science and technology.

Did they do it simply by speaking as Jesus did? Were the dead people raised back to life dead for three days and were they dead for so long like Lazirus that his body actually smelled bad?

Jesus didn't do it with science and technology.

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