Re: the stupidest Bible story -- "God's nature" -- THE CHAIR

"Weatherwax" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...

> The existence of opposites does not indicate opposing beings.
> There are also opposites in high and low, hot and cold, day and
> night, black and white.   It has been argued that good could not
> exist without evil.   That would lead to the conclusion that God
> could not exist without the devil, or that the two are mere
> different extremes of the same phenomenon.

The existences of opposites indicates causes.  High and low, depending
on the context, could depend on a person's genetic code, a building's
plan, tectonic plates for mountain or plain.  HOt and cold depend on a
heat source basically, since in teh absence of energy things grow
"cold".  Day and night depend on teh earth's rotation about it's axis,
black and white depend on the nature of the reflecting material or the
absence of light.

In short there is a cause for all these differences. The thing we need
to decide for ourselves is what is the reason for good and evil, which
also need a cause, by virtue of being opposites.

> You avoided the question.  Your statement was that God "intended
> Man to land on the moon."  I am asked you did he intend World War
> II?  Did he intend for Hitler?  Did he intend for millions of
> Jews to die?

I think His plan included those things - yes.  That we were WILLING to
do those things is also important.  Nobody forced Hitler to do what he
did.

The point is that according to Christian doctrine, His plan also
includes judgement, and provision for eternal blessing or damnation,
based on the results of our own choices.

If Christian doctrine is correct, Adolf Hitler and most of those who
did his bidding are now in Hell, paying for it eternally.  However the
simple fact of being a victim of Hitler does not mean he or she is in
heaven either.  Ernst Roehm, the leader of the Brown Shirts, the
precursor of the SS, was murdered during a purge.  As far as I am
concerned he also is in Hell.  He probably spends eternity screaming
at Hitler, between his own torments.

> 
> This gets back to Libertarius' statement that if God knew in
> advance that if he created Adam and Eve that they would fail,
> and if he placed that tree and that snake with them in the
> Garden,
> the earthlings would disobey his warning. So, by going ahead and
> making them, he created them to fail.  That is he intended for
> them to fail.

Darn right.  He did indeed, as I quoted in my previous text, "How
terrible for the world that such things MUST happen."

Christ also made it clear that such things were hidden from the wise
and learned, and revealed to the simple, again by God, who wanted to
leave Man no room to boast.

> >
> > No, I don't.  I've had spiritual experiences myself, and I
> > also know taht a great many of them have been deceptive,
> > and therefore demonic in origin.  There have been a few I
> > believe are angelic or divine.  For a start if the spiritual
>  world
> > is real, as Christianity states, then there are bound to be
> > instances of commmunication between this world and the
> > spiritual.
> 
> The way I read your answer, you are dismissing the religious
> experience claims of others.  You are catagorizing them as
> deceptive and demonic in origin.  That response opens the
> possiblity that you are the one being deceived.

At times I have been deceived.  I have no doubt about that.  I know of
a certain deception which I received which in another man's case
almost destroyed a ministry he was involved in (I had nothing to do
with that I might add).  Some time before I heard this man speak and
his face appeared demonic, unfortunately.

I don't dismiss the religious experience of others.  If I were of a
different faith, and had the same experiences I have had myself, I
would tend to think they confirmed what I already believed, except in
the case of Buddhism, since some of the experiences indicated that an
outside source clearly knew what I was thinking, and was thus
personal.


> 
> > But an experience does not mean we understand the method,
> > nor does it mean that our explanation of the cause is
> > necessarily correct.
> 
> I prefer the explanation in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol":
> 
>      "Why do you doubt your senses?"
> 
>      "Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them.
>       A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats.
>       You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of
>       mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an
>       underdone potato.  There's more of gravy than of
>       grave about you, whatever you are!"
> 
The great mystics, whether Christian or Buddhist, Sufi or Shaman,
would tell you the depths of their spiritual experience is not
sensual.

> > I think it was Tolstoy who pointed out the different reactions
> > of certain groups of people to seeing a steam train.  They
> > ranged from an engineer who understood the principles, to a
> > townsman who thought the fire and smoke made it run, to a
> > peasant who thought the devil ran it.  But the sight and
> > experience of the steam train passing would have
> > been much the same for all.
> 
> Your explanations are close to that of the peasant.  You
> attribute what you cannot explain to a supernatural cause.

You seem to have missed the point.  I'm simply saying that our
pre-existing knowledge and beliefs determine our interpretation of
things, spiritual or otherwise.

> 
> > God reveals Himself to those who look for Him.  I believe that
> > God as Christ is the closest we will get to seeing Him this
>  side
> > of life.  And the Gospels mentions the the Incarnation was
> > announced by an angel (a spiritual being), warning given in a
> > dream (Joseph to flee to Egypt), that the Holy Spirit appeared
> > as a dove during Christ's baptism, followed by the Father's
> > voice.
> 
> Have you noticed that it is Luke which relies upon the
> appearances of angels.  In Matthew, it is through dreams.  This
> is more indicative of the viewpoints of the authors than of what
> really happened.

As someone who has had "visions" I can tell you it is very hard to
determine what is real and what is not.  For example if you saw
someone dressed as Santa Claus in front of you, and the image was
somehow imprinted onto your sight / memory cells for five minutes,
while the real Santa walked away, you would to all intents and
purposes still believe that Santa was standing right there until the
five minutes was up.

I personally think a lot of the supernatural messages are delivered
through our minds.  God is spirit, and He is also intelligence.  It
does not make any difference whether we "saw" an angel, or whether an
angel manipulated our mind so that we "thought" we "saw" an angel. 
Secondly I also suspect angels, who are probably best described as
pure intelligence, manipulate our minds to give us a human
representation of their appearance in order to allow us to feel some
sense of familiarity.

CS Lewis, whom I suspect of having spiritual experiences of his own,
once described in one of his works of fiction, that the "Eldila"
dropped their "creaturely" appearance and became a series of almost
mathematical symbols (circles within circles, etc.).  Now it was only
a story, but I strongly suspect he based it on something he had
himself experienced.


> > Demons were driven out on numerous occasions, miracles
> > took place, many were healed.  At His death a supernatural
> > darkness occurred, an earthquake which did more than just
> > shake the ground took place.  An angel rolled the stone away,
> > an angel told the onlookers Christ had gone to heaven.  IN
> > short the Gospels are replete with spiritual beings.
> 
> Scientist no longer attribute illnesses to the presence of
> demons.  That is an old superstition.  Such stories as Mary
> Magdalene being possessed of seven demons ( Luke 8:2) would be
> laughed at today, as would the story of Jesus driving demons out
> of a mad man and sending them into a herd of pigs (Luke 8:26-39.)
> These stories were written at a time before we had an
> understanding of desease and mental illness.

Demons still occur.  We had a murder in this part of the world a few
years ago, where a group of young women almost cut off a man's head,
and then drank some of his blood (I think).  It got the nickname "the
Vampire murder".  The ringleader had been heavily involved in
witchcraft.

During an interview with a psychiatrist, her voice suddenly dropped to
a deep basso profundo, and said "I'm Big Tracey".  The psychiatrist, a
secular person I believe, found himself almost thrown out of his
chair.  Now she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but I have
suspicions about the totality of that opinion.

> It is interesting how a young man Mark 16, becomes an angel in
> Matthew, and two angels in Luke.  Finally in John there is little
> similarity with Mark's original version of the events.

Angels usually appear as men, as far as I know.  The winged version of
artists is probably traditional rather than real.  See my comments
above about the way our minds can be manipulated.

> > But today Christianity in the West has become doctrine.
> 
> It has become dogma.

Doctrine and dogma are indentical when they are strongly believed. 
Communists had doctrinal dogma, Moslems have doctrinal dogma,
Humanists have doctrinal dogam ("Man is the captain of his fate").

So what?

But the real point I was making when I said it had become doctrine was
that it had become dry and dull, with very little supernatural
evidence for most believers.

Bob Crowley.