SoulPancake

@pennylg

I agree with most of what you said as well.

I do agree that was reminding people to worship the true God, which is a statement hinting that there is a true God of Israel (and the world). There were several other religions at the time in the area, including the worship of Caesar.

I don't think that would negate what Jesus said about nobody coming to the true God of Israel except through him.

I have only ready the last ten or so responses, so pardon me if I am being redundant. Tolerancy is a trickey issue when it comes to religious belief. I consider myself an agnostic, but only for the reason that I don't feel I can capital K, know, without the tiniest room for error that there is not a god. Still, when I hear any friends, my very Christian family, etc.chalk other religions up to mere absurdity (Scientology is a popular one, for example), because they don't match their own arguably absurd ideas, I just have to laugh.
Personally, I just don't think there's compelling evidence, or, to be candid, any real, solid evidence at all (enter condescension here). Aside from organized religion, I'm just not convinced of the existence of a god, goddess, or deity of any kind. It sounds like mythology to me. Cosmological, Teleological, and Ontological arguments for the existence of God just fail to Prove anything.
So, moving to the question at hand, I'll be honest. I guess I'm not very tolerant of others. I won't raise a fuss, I'll even proclaim, 'to each their own!', but as you're spouting your religious certainty to me, my respect is slowly draining. In my head I'm thinking (if it's a person I like/respect, which, to be having a conversation with, it generally is), "Aw, what a shame, they're so logical about everything else, why don't they see it like I do?"
Because truthfully, if you believe something with conviction, then you really do reduce the differing opinions of others to nonsense, or ill-informed beliefs at best.

@pennylg In response to your reply to my post... Absolutely! That's the beauty of it, if we're wrong, we can correct ourselves by continuing to observe, test, record, and otherwise add to what we know. If any scientist thought for a second that they'd actually found all the answers why would they continue to study in their chosen field? Would you consider someone that accepted Jesus as savior and immediately stopped going to church as spiritually enlightened?

What I was getting at wasn't the possibility of error (because that always exists) but the human tendency to deny evidence. As we study and find out more about the universe (and ourselves) we often come across new evidence or information that disproves the mental model we've constructed for ourselves. The difference is that I don't neccesarily deny outright any evidence that contradicts my pre-constructed mental model of the universe. To use your example, I didn't jail anyone for heresy when I found out the Earth orbits the sun (of course, to be totally fair neither did you).

Hopefully you get my drift, though. With the capacity for human error firmly in mind; a theory is defined as "The best explanation available for a given natural phenomenon based on empirical evidence," and that empirical evidence remains fact unless proven otherwise. I'd encourage you to question the facts, but I'd appreciate it if folks would stop acting like disbelief will prove the facts false.

Which brings me to yet another quandry:

Let's say some lab somewhere actually finds a way to replicate life from non-living compounds, or that the LHC manages to replicate the Big Bang on a small scale. Would you actually believe it? If a primate eugenics lab got permission from the ethics board to begin a chimpanzee breeding program that would theoretically replicate human evolution from their (again, theoritically) closest living simian ancestors and actually SUCCEDED, would you believe it then? Something tells me that folks DON'T want to find out. After all, there's folks that don't believe we've been to the moon...

That said, if god showed up tomorrow and said, "NOW do you believe me?!" he'd have to present some seriously compelling evidence that there wasn't a man behind the curtain I'm not supposed to pay attention to (or a video of Morena Baccarin floating on a couple thousand plasma tv's hovering in mid-air, hehe)

@pennylg Thank you for your patience as well. And yes, we do each have the responsibility to find truth out, to knock on those doors that will be opened for us. If we forget that we have a need to understand God, beyond our duties but to the very core of our existence that must be sustained by God, we lose direction. The key then is which God we follow.

By that I want to explain part of my argument. When I say God, I refer to the God of the Bible. My argument is that Scripture describes God (not in his entirety, simply because there aren't enough pages in the world to do that). Fundamentally the description of God in the Bible is different from other holy writings, in that in Scripture God is Triune, Holy, Judge, Creator, Savior, and many other things. While yes, for example Islam would agree God is judge and everything that is good, yet Muslims reject the trinity as verging on or completely polytheistic. Hinduism would understand the idea of the trinity from Vishnu, Shiva and the other one (Krishna?), yet in a completely different mindset than Biblical scripture. I say this to point out that while several world religions get some of the characteristics of God correct, they do not recognize these through Christ, who had the very nature of God within his being (Hebrews 1). I agree that Christ was a messenger of God, a prophet in every respect, except he was more. The thing left out by other religions (to the best of my knowledge) is sin that cannot be reconciled by human action. Christ was a mediator, a propitiation for our sins that we could not muster ourselves. If this is left out one misses the very nature of Christ coming to earth. He didn't come just to teach us good things, he came to offer us eternal life.

Also, Christ didn't call himself part of the truth or one truth, he called himself the truth, as in the only one. He wasn't part of the revelation, or the revelation to the Jews as Muhammad said he was the prophet to the Arabs. Jesus was the revelation of truth to all of humanity. Christ is first and foremost, he called himself the beginning and the end; Paul said that everything was created by him and sustained in him, that by Jesus' will we are all still breathing and the universe is still working. I just can't look at that and see Christ as just a piece of the puzzle. He's everything.

Going back to your first post I wanted to mention the "sheep of another fold." In that verse Jesus is talking specifically to Jews, cause later on he said he was one with God and the Jews picked up stones to stone him for blasphemy. If he was talking to Jews and saying he had sheep of another flock, I believe he was talking about the Gentiles that would be believe in him later on.

And to explain myself, in saving that Christ's teachings are irrelevant I meant that if Christ's teachings were purely cultural, directed to the Jews for Jews in the time of Jews, then as Gentiles in the 21st century they don't apply. For example many people argue that the teachings of the Bible on women being pastors or wives submitting to their husbands are entirely cultural based on the patriarchal institutions of that time period, and in this era they don't necessarily need to be applied any more (sorry for a touchy subject, but that is the most prevalent example I know of). In saying one of Christ's teachings is cultural you must say all of them are. I mean to say that one can't treat Christ's teachings as a buffet; one must take the whole of his teachings or none of it. Sorry I wasn't clear, I think I got ahead of myself and forgot to explain my statement.

@chrsthand I appreciate your respect for my opinion, and assure you that I have the same for yours. I'm not interested in changing your mind. I just enjoy the debate, and hope that you do too. That being said...

I invite you to consider the idea that there's nothing at all special about consciousness, self awareness, thoughts, or feelings. All of these processes evolved as a way to ensure survival of the species. The cavemen that didn't think that their own particular lives were meaningful and important didn't live long enough to breed. Stretch that out over a few million years.

When a christian tells me that what really happened was that a magic invisible omnipotent entity created life with magic, it sounds silly to me. It just does. If you jumped into a time machine, and took your iPod back to 1978, it would look like magic to people that you showed it to. The consensus would definitely be that what you showed them was scientifically impossible, and you might get burned at the stake. The fact is, though, that the iPod (while really cool) isn't and wouldn't be magical at all. Magic is just the story that people would use to explain science that they didn't understand. Just like some other people longer ago wrote the bible story of creation. They used the idea of magic as a way to explain what they didn't understand.

Stories written 500 years ago just don't hold much water for me. More to the point, stories that require me to ignore scientific fact and embrace magic don't work for me. I don't want to single out christians, because if a scientologist tried arguing the point of view that consciousness had to do with space psychologists and volcanoes and thetans, I'd be quick to dismiss that too.

@Ephraim Hello again...I ran out of space to finish what I was wanting to say. Here's the rest of it:

“There can be no doubt whatever that the peoples of the world, of whatever race or religion, derive their inspiration from one heavenly Source, and are the subjects of one God. The difference between the ordinances under which they abide should be attributed to the varying requirements and exigencies of the age in which they were revealed. All of them, except a few which are the outcome of human perversity, were ordained of God, and are a reflection of His Will and Purpose.” - Baha’u’llah

Thank you for your patience, Ephraim. As I said earlier, I don’t expect to change your beliefs, nor would I want to since I believe that no one should either abandon or cling to any particular belief just because someone else tells them to. We each have the right and the responsibility to investigate the truth for ourselves.

@Ephraim Hi, Ephraim…welcome to the discussion. I don’t expect we will reach agreement on this point, but I do want to present other possible ways of looking at things. Christ’s teaching about worshipping the one true God is indeed eternal, but as far as I can tell, He did not specifically reject or even name any of what I believe to be other true religions, such as Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, etc. The denial of these other religions was added on by later Christians as they began to come in contact with these “new” and “foreign” faiths.

“You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve” is a commandment for all people (not just Christians) and for all time. All true religions teach their followers to worship God, although in some cases, the existence and nature of God is only alluded to indirectly. I believe that the Founders of these other great religions were also one with God and one with Christ, and that God has sent His Divine Messengers to people in all parts of the world at various times in history. In the past, humanity has seen these “different” religions as separate and in competition with each other. The great spiritual Teachers who founded them were not able to explain their essential unity because mankind had not yet developed enough to understand that concept (“I have many things to tell you, but ye cannot bear them now.”). Jesus did, however, allude to this truth when He said: “Other sheep have I which are not of this fold.” To me, “this fold” refers to the Christians and the “other sheep” refers to followers of other true God-based faiths. The disciples of Christ, even while in His very Presence, still struggled to grasp the meaning of His parables and often tried to interpret them literally rather than understanding their greater spiritual significance. Is it any wonder that we continue to struggle with this, considering the two centuries of time that separates our world from theirs?

The Founders of every great religion have always brought two kinds of teachings: eternal and temporal. The first kind are the great spiritual teachings that never change and that are common to all true religions, such as love, truth, justice. The second kind is specific to the needs and understanding of the people who receive them. These teachings are temporary and are usually modified by future spiritual Messengers, just as Jesus abrogated some of the old Mosaic laws.

As to the teachings of Christ being irrelevant if they are not understood according to the traditional Christian interpretation, this is something I have never been able to understand. I would be grateful if you could clarify your position about how the whole of His teachings could “matter nothing now.” How can His teachings ever not matter, when He taught His followers to love their enemies as themselves? Imagine how different the world would be if even only the Christians actually followed this one great teaching!

One final point….when Jesus said “No one comes to the Father except through me,” I believe He was referring to His divine station as the Manifestation of God on earth, and not to His individual human identity. Just as many different paths can lead to the same destination, so can the Founders of the different religions lead their followers to the same God. The main thing is to stop wandering aimlessly in the wilderness of our own imaginings, give up the gods of our own making (there are still many false gods that people worship today, such as fame, power, money) and get onto a path that actually leads somewhere. And as we all journey towards the same God, I believe we will ultimately see that we are not as far apart as we once thought we were.

I enjoy reading the scriptures of all the world’s religions, and in all of them I find the same fundamental wisdom and the same Voice of God. It is a refreshing change from the confusion and conflict that so often impedes and disappoints their human followers.

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@monkeyhaiku We’re going to have to part ways on that one. I respect your opinion, it’s an opinion I used to have. I would submit to you however, that the only reason it seems normal to you that a pile of dirt and water is able to develop consciousness and form its own thoughts, is because you see it everyday, and so you (we all) take it for granted.

If you took a very large rock and threw it out into space. And then visited it a billion years later, you would still find a large rock.
The rock would not magically develop an atmosphere, and the molecules would not suddenly begin organizing themselves on their own into ordered systems, and they would not develop consciousness and awareness.

This is the law of entropy. The natural state of the universe is dis-order. Things at rest stay at rest. Unless a colossal amount of energy is applied to a system to cause it to be in Order. That is physics.

Until you can explain the source of gravity (which creates trillions of tons of BRAND NEW ENERGY every second) at the core of the Sun , to produce nuclear fusion reactions which allow life for the whole planet, and until you can SCIENTIFICALLY explain how dirt can form thoughts, you should allow others to fill in the gap with their own hypothesis.

@chrsthand No my friend, (and I really do enjoy our debates BTW) you're missing the point. Thoughts and feelings are just chemical reactions. That's all. There's nothing magical about thoughts and feelings. There's nothing mystical, significant, or important about them. They're just some of the tools that we've evolved. Thoughts and feelings aren't even an accurate interpreter of reality. Thoughts, feelings, self awareness...just chemicals. Nothing else. You, me, TV's Hugh Laurie, President Obama, the pope, every one of us are just machines. Machines that have evolved complex moving parts over a long long time, but machines nonetheless. I invite you to consider that the universe might be beautiful and awe inspiring enough on its own, and might not benefit at all from our trying to impose magic or fantasy or meaning upon it.

@monkeyhaiku You’re missing my point. Im not asking whether a pile of dirt is a narcissist or whether the pile of dirt has a bigger view of the universe,
Im asking - How is $70 worth of dirt and water able to form any thoughts at all?
Potassium and nitrogen and carbon can produce energy, and it can produce electrical currents, I understand. And it can produce chemical reactions - I understand that as well.

But how is it able to form consciousness and awareness?

If you believe that $70 of chemicals and water is capable of developing self awareness, like Frosty the Snowman,
then I would have to ask you, who is living in the world of fantasy?

If you think its possible, please duplicate this outside of the birthing process.
Take a pile of nitrogen, carbon, potassium, etc., and several gallons of water, and
Cause it to form thoughts.