@suzianne saidOT. No other.
@moonbus
Let's take some verses from John, then I will ask my question.
All these quotes are from the KJV.
1. John 2:22 -- "When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them; and they believed the scripture, and the word which Jesus had said."
2. John 7:38 -- "He that believeth on me, as the [b]scripture[/ ...[text shortened]... uld know the reference, were speaking of some common source for Jewish dogma. What was this source?
The NT was formulated so as to re-interpret everything in the OT as one long omen pointing to the coming of a Messiah, and that this Messiah was Jesus. The Jews do not interpret it this way. And why should they; after all, it's their Testament.
Imagine Muslims claiming that the NT is one long omen pointing to the coming of Mohammed. You wouldn't have that, now would you?
One of the purposes of the Council of Nicea was to graft the NT onto the OT to make it appear that Christianity was not a new, invented, religion (only fools would have believed it, as today only fools believe invented religions, such as Scientology), but rather to present it as the continuation of an old religion.
@divegeester
- where is the tree of life now?
- where did Jesus go when he ascended?
- why is Jesus said to be in hell personally overseeing the burning alive of billions of people?
- “all scripture is good for teaching” well the bible didn’t exist when that was said and written!
- why do the big churches have a huge hierarchy?
- why is there so much money in corporate Christianity?
These questions are all premised on the most gross, most materialistic, least spiritual, reading of the text. All of these questions disappear if you read the text as an allegory, referring to a state of being (a change of heart), not a matter of anything in the material universe at all. Jesus is teaching something on the immaterial plane, the spiritual plane, nothing to do with gross matter at all. (If only KJ could see that and stop taking everything literally-materially-factually-historically-geologically.)
My chief objection against Christianity is that it preaches a doctrine its namesake did not preach. The Church preaches that you have to believe all sorts of stuff: about a miraculous virgin birth, about a miraculous bodily resurrection, that Jesus's death was atonement for original sin, that the NT is inerrant, that a lake of fire waits for those who don't believe all that stuff.
Here is what Jesus taught: follow the Mosaic law (i.e., the Ten Commandments), and whatever you do, do it from love: love of God, love of your neighbour -- metaphorically speaking, including Roman soldiers who were by law entitled to command you to carry their armour for them, so confound them with love and offer to carry it an extra mile! -- and love of yourself. Now, you cannot love yourself if you think you're a damned wretch going to a lake of fire in a hand basket, now can you? Moreover, you cannot love anyone else either, if you think everyone is a damned wretch going to a lake of fire in a handbasket. There's nothing in Jesus's life about believing stuff; it's all about doing things with love in your heart, even unto forgiving those who mock and torment and torture you. "Forgive them for they know not what they do." Churchianity has completely twisted the meaning of what Jesus taught and turned it into ... well, a religion (a messy mass of abstruse doctrines). Whereas what Jesus embodied was a state of being.
@suzianne said👍
@moonbus
Let's take some verses from John, then I will ask my question.
All these quotes are from the KJV.
1. John 2:22 -- "When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them; and they believed the scripture, and the word which Jesus had said."
2. John 7:38 -- "He that believeth on me, as the [b]scripture[/ ...[text shortened]... uld know the reference, were speaking of some common source for Jewish dogma. What was this source?
-Removed-Powerful images they be. But that is all, just images. They are not to be taken literally, because they were not meant literally. They point to a spiritual transformation, but they do not themselves have any power to work this transformation.
It speaks volumes that certain people, even today (in Afghanistan, the Taliban, for example), are prepared to kill people for believing something they disagree with or can't understand. Killing people for believing something, or for refusing to believe something, is not what Jesus taught.
"I am the truth" "I am the way" "I am the light" are not meant in the sense of propositions you are supposed to believe. These are not statements about the world, these are not statements about the speaker, which have a literal truth-value on paar with "I'm the rightful president" or "there was no massive fraud, the election was not stolen" --those are truths one can either believe or refuse to believe. "I am the truth" means something like: I embody a state of being, I live the 'great secret'; and the state of being, the 'great secret', is: being able to view everything that happens in the world and every torment and indignity that is done to my body as irrelevant to the spiritual life. Embodying the spiritual life meant, for him: to love God, to love himself, and to love his 'neighbors' (i.e., all of mankind), to treat everyone as an image of God, deserving of love and respect, even an accused adulteress, a whore, a tax-collector, a leper, a common illiterate workman, a thief on a cross. If you can do this, and he declared that there were some among his listeners who had understood it and 'would not taste death', then you are living in that blessed state, here and now, not later (after death), not somewhere else (on the other side of the sky). Read the Gospel of Thomas (which the Roman bishops banned, because it did not fit their agenda); it's all spelled out so clearly there. "The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out upon the Earth, yet people do not see it," means it is here now, in this life, for those who understand "I am the truth" not as a proposition to be believed (some sort of cognitive trick, getting oneself to believe in impossibilities like virgin births or walking on water or that every species of animal alive today was somehow gotten onto a boat in a months-long world-wide flood, whatever), but as a state of being, a state of the heart not of the mind.
@moonbus saidWhen Jesus said He was the Way, Truth, and Life He was most certainly talking about Himself as being the exclusive way to God and there being no other.
Powerful images they be. But that is all, just images. They are not to be taken literally, because they were not meant literally. They point to a spiritual transformation, but they do not themselves have any power to work this transformation.
It speaks volumes that certain people, even today (in Afghanistan, the Taliban, for example), are prepared to kill people for believ ...[text shortened]... ths-long world-wide flood, whatever), but as a state of being, a state of the heart not of the mind.
@divegeester
Have you heard of Pastor Kenneth Copeland? Give this a look; he's a scream, literally and figuratively:
Is this a man filled with love? for God? for his fellow man? For himself? He has a huge following, you know.
